Rollo May Quotes

In the individual who is characterized by independence without corresponding relatedness, there will develop hostility toward those whom he believes to be the occasion of his isolation. In the individual who is symbiotically dependent there will develop hostility toward those whom he regards as instrumental in the suppression of his capacities and freedom.

And did not Spinoza's refusing to flee from excommunication by his church and community mean the same inner battle of integrity, the same struggle for the power not to be afraid of aloneness, without which the noble Ethics, certainly one of the great works of all time, could not have been written?

Intense fatigue or illness may also weaken the control of the cortex. Hence we find tired or sick persons responding to threats with a greater degree of undifferentiated anxiety. In psychoanalytic terms, we would speak of this as regression.

On the contrary, as Miller also notes, “Tragedy implies more optimism in its author than does comedy, and . . . its final result ought to be the reinforcement of the onlooker’s brightest opinions of the human animal.” For the tragic view indicates that we take seriously man’s freedom and his need to realize himself; it demonstrates our belief in the “indestructible will of man to achieve his humanity.

It would seem that the affects, biological needs, and forms of behavior most repressed in a given culture are the ones most likely to give rise to symptoms . [...]
in our culture it is considered much more acceptable to have an organic illness than an emotional or mental disorder; this would influence the fact that anxiety and other emotional stresses in our culture so often take a somatic form. In short, the culture conditions the way a person tries to resolve his anxiety, and specifically what symptoms he may employ.

In Kafka’s novel The Castle,{9} the chief character devotes his life to a frantic and desperate endeavor to communicate with the authorities in the castle who control all aspects of the life of the village, and who have the power to tell him his vocation and give some meaning to his life. Kafka’s hero is driven “by a need for the most primitive requisites of life, the need to be rooted in a home and a calling, and to become a member of a community.” {10} But the authorities in the castle remain inscrutable and inaccessible,

The dispersion of the daimonic by means of impersonality has serious and destructive effects. In New York City, it is not regarded as strange that the anonymous human beings secluded in single-room occupancies are so often connected with violent crime and drug addiction. Not that the anonymous individual in New York is alone: he sees thousands of other people every day, and he knows all the famous personalities as they come, via TV, into his single room. He knows their names, their smiles, their idiosyncrasies; they bandy about in a “we're-all-friends-together” mood on the screen which invites him to join them and subtly assumes that he does join them. He knows them all. But he himself is never known. His smile is unseen; his idiosyncrasies are important to no-body; his name is unknown. He remains a foreigner pushed on and off the subway by tens of thousands of other anonymous foreigners. There is a deeply depersonalizing tragedy involved in this. The most severe punishment Yahweh could inflict on his people was to blot out their name. “Their names,” Yahweh proclaims, “shall be wiped out of the book of the living.”

This anonymous man's never being known, this aloneness, is transformed into loneliness, which may then become daimonic possession. For his self-doubts — “I don't really exist since I can't affect anyone” — eat away at his innards; he lives and breathes and walks in a loneliness which is subtle and insidious. It is not surprising that he gets a gun and trains it on some passer-by — also anonymous to him. And it is not surprising that the young men in the streets, who are only anonymous digits in their society, should gang together in violent attacks to make sure their assertion is felt.

Loneliness and its stepchild, alienation, can become forms of demon possession. Surrendering ourselves to the impersonal daimonic pushes us into an anonymity which is also impersonal; we serve nature’s gross purposes on the lowest common denominator, which o

"Thus it may be said that the symptoms are often ways of containing the anxiety; they are the anxiety in structuralized form. Freud rightly remarks about psychological symptoms: "The symptom is bound anxiety," or, in other words, anxiety which has been crystallized into an ulcer or heart palpitations or some other symptom."

Countless times a week, furthermore, he receives proof in his consulting work that when men at last accept the fact that they cannot successfully lie to themselves, and at last learn to take themselves seriously, they discover previously unknown and often remarkable recuperative powers within themselves.

Bir kimsenin ancak sorumlu olduğu ölçüde özgür olabileceği paradoksu özgürlüğün her noktasında merkezdedir. Fakat aksi de doğrudur. Bir kimse ancak özgür olduğunda sorumlu olabilir.

"... günümüzde radyo programlarının kapanışında sarf edilen tuhaf bir cümle var: "Dinlediğiniz için teşekkürler"... Alkışı kabul etmek ayrı, fakat dinleyiciye sizi dinleyip eğlenme lütfunu bahşettiği için teşekkür etmek bambaşka bir şey. Bu durum verilen hizmete atfedilecek değer yahut değersizliğin tüketici veya alıcının keyfine kaldığı anlamına geliyor... birçok insan davranışlarının değerini davranışın kendisiyle değil de bu davranışın nasıl kabul gördüğüyle ölçüyor. (S. 59-60)

Modern esere altında yatan ezoterik şifreyi bilmeden bakan çoğu insan, hatta zeki olanlar dahi hiçbir şey anlayamaz. [Mondrian, Pollock]... yetenekli sanatçıların kendilerini ancak bu denli sınırlı bir dille ifade edebilmeleri toplumumuza ilişkin çok önemli bir ipucu vermiyor mu? (S. 65)

"Hayat aynı anda hem kendini yinelemekle hem de aşmaya çalışmakla meşguldür." diye ifade eder Simone de Beauvoir etik üzerine kaleme aldığı kitabında; "tek yaptığı kendini idame ettirmekse eğer, yaşamak ölmenin bir çeşididir ve insanın varlığı tuhaf bir bitki örtüsünden farksızlaşır..." (S. 135)

[Kafese Kapatılan Adam hikayesi] (S. 139-141)"

Thus, constriction and impoverishment of personality make it possible to avoid subjective conflict and concomitant anxiety. But the person's freedom, originality, capacity for independent love, as well as his other possibilities for expansion and development as an autonomous personality are renounced in the same process. By accepting impoverishment of personality, one can buy temporary freedom from anxiety, to be sure. But the price for this 'bargain' is the loss of those unique and most precious characteristics of the human self.

The cultural past is rigidly deterministic to the extent that the individual is unaware of it. An analogy, of course, is found in any psychoanalytic treatment: the patient is rigidly determined by past experiences and previously developed patterns to the extent that he is unaware of these experiences and patterns.

Now there are times when a whole generation is caught...between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standards, no security, no simple acquiescence.” — Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf.

This book is not a substitute for psychotherapy. Nor is it a self-help book in the sense that it promises cheap and easy cures overnight. But in another worthy and profound sense every good book is a self-help book — it helps the reader, through seeing himself and his own experiences reflected in the book, to gain new light on his own problems of personal integration.