Quotes from Rollo May

Kitab? Poetry and Experience'ta (?iir ve Deneyim) Archibald Mac-Leish, kar??la?man?n iki kutbu için olas? olan en evrensel terimleri kullan?r: "Varl?k ve Yokluk." Çinli bir ?airden al?nt? yapar: "Biz ?airlerin yoklukla mücadelesi, onu varl??? ortaya ç?kartmaya zorlamak içindir. Sessizli?i bir müzik yan?t? almak için t?klat?r?z.

If you wish to understand the psychological and spiritual temper of any historical period, you can do no better than to look long and searchingly at its art. For in the art the underlying spiritual meaning of the period is expressed directly in symbols.

People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage.

It is extremely interesting that when people become ill in organic ways, anxiety tends to disappear.

the chief argument of this book is that the unique powers and initiative of each individual must be rediscovered, and used as a basis for work which contributes to the good of the community, rather than melted down in the collectivist pot of conformity.

Anxiety is not an affect among other affects, such as pleasure or sadness. It is rather an ontological characteristic of man, rooted in his very existence as such.

The individual's striving for his own gain, in fine, without an equal emphasis on social welfare, no longer automatically brings good to the community.

A sick toss'd vessel, dashing on each thing . . . My God, I mean myself.

He had a good dream, to come out number one." But the other son accurately sees the contradiction which such an upheaval of values leads to, "He never knew who he was."*

When I was eighteen, Germany was eighteen," said Goethe,

Again, we find in modern art and modern music a language which does not communicate.

what is significant about rejection, as a source of neurotic anxiety, is how it is interpreted by the child. In impact upon the child, there is radical difference between rejection as an objective experience (which does not necessarily result in subjective conflict for the child), and rejection as a subjective experience. The important question psychologically is whether the child felt himself or herself rejected.

When a nation, rather, is prey to insupportable economic want and is psychologically and spiritually empty, totalitarianism comes in to fill the vacuum; and the people sell their freedom as a necessity for getting rid of the anxiety which is too great for them to bear any longer.

Fear ordinarily does not lead to illness if the organism can flee successfully . If the individual cannot flee, but is forced to remain in a conflict situation which cannot be resolved, fear may turn into anxiety and psychosomatic changes may then accompany e anxiety.

Kafka was a master at the gruesome task of picturing people who do not use their potentialities and therefore lose their sense of being persons. The chief character in The Trial and in The Castle has no name—he is identified only by an initial, a mute symbol of one's lack of identity in one's own right.

When an individual suffers anxiety continuously over a period of time, he lays his body open to psychosomatic illness. When a group suffers continuous anxiety, with no agreed-on constructive steps to take, its members sooner or later turn against each other. Just so, when our nation is in confusion and bewilderment, we lay ourselves open to such poison as the character assassinations of McCarthyism, witch hunts, and the ubiquitous pressures to make every man suspicious of his neighbor.

When we look below the surface of our individual anxiety, we find that it also comes from something more profound than the threat of war and economic uncertainty. We are anxious because we do not know what roles to pursue, what principles for action to believe in. Our individual anxiety, somewhat like that of the nation, is a basic confusion and bewilderment about where we are going.

Every human being gets much of his sense of his own reality out of what others say to him and think about him.

Figuratively speaking, it is the specter of death they are trying to appease—death as the symbol of ultimate separation, aloneness, isolation from other human beings.

in this type of anxiety neurosis the anxious attitude is so intimately a part of the individual's method of evaluating stimuli, of orienting herself or himself to every experience, that he or she cannot separate him-or herself enough from anxiety to comprehend the goal of avoidance of, or freedom from, anxiety. What Nancy sought was to be able to step cautiously from rock to rock without falling; the idea or possibility of not being on a precipice at all did not occur to her.

But the difference in our day is that the fear of loneliness is much more extensive, and the defenses against it—diversions, social rounds, and "being liked"—are more rigid and compulsive.

Apathy and lack of feeling are also defenses against anxiety. When a person continually faces dangers he is powerless to overcome, his final line of defense is at last to avoid even feeling the dangers.

adolescents have very little to look forward to except the army and unsettled economic conditions, and are without positive, constructive goals. The human being cannot live in a condition of emptiness for very long: if he is not growing toward something, he does not merely stagnate; the pent-up potentialities turn into morbidity and despair, and eventually into destructive activities.

So we shed no tears for the demise of the gyroscope man. One might place on his tombstone the epitaph, "Like the dinosaur, he had power without the ability to change, strength without the capacity to learn.