Existential Psychology Quotes

“We in our age are faced with a strange paradox. Never before have we had so much information in bits and pieces flooded upon us by radio and television and satellite, yet never before have we had so little inner certainty about our own being. The more objective truth increases, the more our inner certitude decreases. Our fantastically increased technical power, and each forward step in technology is experienced by many as a new push toward our possible annihilation. Nietzsche was strangely prophetic when he said,

“We live in a period of atomic chaos…the terrible apparition…the Nation State…and the hunt for happiness will never be greater than when it must be caught between today and tomorrow; because the day after tomorrow all hunting time may have come to an end altogether.”

Sensing this, and despairing of ever finding meaning in life, people these days seize on the many ways of dulling their awareness by apathy, by psychic numbing, or by hedonism. Others, especially young people, elect in alarming and increasing numbers to escape their own being by suicide.”
― Rollo May, The Discovery of Being: Writings in Existential Psychology

“Anxiety (loneliness or “abandonment anxiety” being its most painful form) overcomes the person to the extent that he loses orientation in the objective world. To lose the world is to lose one's self, and vice versa; self and world are correlates. The function of anxiety is to destroy the self-world relationship, i.e., to disorient the victim in space and time and, so long as this disorientation lasts, the person remains in the state of anxiety. Anxiety overwhelms the person precisely because of the preservation of this disorientation. Now if the person can reorient himself—as happens, one hopes, in psychotherapy—and again relate himself to the world directly, experientially, with his senses alive, he overcomes the anxiety. My slightly anthropomorphic terminology comes out of my work as a therapist and is not out of place here. Though the patient and I are entirely aware of the symbolic nature of this (anxiety doesn’t do anything, just as libido or sex drives don’t), it is often helpful for the patient to see himself as struggling against an “adversary.” For then, instead of waiting forever for the therapy to analyze away the anxiety, he can help in his own treatment by taking practical steps when he experiences anxiety such as stopping and asking just what it was that occurred in reality or in his fantasies that preceded the disorientation which cued off the anxiety. He is not only opening the doors of his closet where the ghosts hide, but he often can also then take steps to reorient himself in his practical life by making new human relationships and finding new work which interests him.”
― Rollo May, Love and Will

“Our patients predict the culture by living out consciously what the masses of people are able to keep unconscious for the time being. The neurotic is cast by destiny into a Cassandra role. In vain does Cassandra, sitting on the steps of the palace at Mycenae when Agamemnon brings her back from Troy, cry, “Oh for the nightingale’s pure song and a fate like hers!” She knows, in her ill-starred life, that “the pain flooding the song of sorrow is [hers] alone,” and that she must predict the doom she sees will occur there. The Mycenaeans speak of her as mad, but they also believe she does speak the truth, and that she has a special power to anticipate events. Today, the person with psychological problems bears the burdens of the conflicts of the times in his blood, and is fated to predict in his actions and struggles the issues which will later erupt on all sides in the society.

The first and clearest demonstration of this thesis is seen in the sexual problems which Freud found in his Victorian patients in the two decades before World War I. These sexual topics‒even down to the words‒were entirely denied and repressed by the accepted society at the time. But the problems burst violently forth into endemic form two decades later after World War II. In the 1920's, everybody was preoccupied with sex and its functions. Not by the furthest stretch of the imagination can anyone argue that Freud "caused" this emergence. He rather reflected and interpreted, through the data revealed by his patients, the underlying conflicts of the society, which the “normal” members could and did succeed in repressing for the time being. Neurotic problems are the language of the unconscious emerging into social awareness.

A second, more minor example is seen in the great amount of hostility which was found in patients in the 1930's. This was written about by Horney, among others, and it emerged more broadly and openly as a conscious phenomenon in our society a decade later.

A third major example may be seen in the problem of anxiety. In the late 1930's and early 1940's, some therapists, including myself, were impressed by the fact that in many of our patients anxiety was appearing not merely as a symptom of repression or pathology, but as a generalized character state. My research on anxiety, and that of Hobart Mowrer and others, began in the early 1940's. In those days very little concern had been shown in this country for anxiety other than as a symptom of pathology. I recall arguing in the late 1940's, in my doctoral orals, for the concept of normal anxiety, and my professors heard me with respectful silence but with considerable frowning.

Predictive as the artists are, the poet W. H. Auden published his Age of Anxiety in 1947, and just after that Bernstein wrote his symphony on that theme. Camus was then writing (1947) about this “century of fear,” and Kafka already had created powerful vignettes of the coming age of anxiety in his novels, most of them as yet untranslated. The formulations of the scientific establishment, as is normal, lagged behind what our patients were trying to tell us. Thus, at the annual convention of the American Psychopathological Association in 1949 on the theme “Anxiety,” the concept of normal anxiety, presented in a paper by me, was still denied by most of the psychiatrists and psychologists present.

But in the 1950's a radical change became evident; everyone was talking about anxiety and there were conferences on the problem on every hand. Now the concept of "normal" anxiety gradually became accepted in the psychiatric literature. Everybody, normal as well as neurotic, seemed aware that he was living in the “age of anxiety.” What had been presented by the artists and had appeared in our patients in the late 30's and 40's was now endemic in the land.”
― Rollo May, Love and Will

“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 often means with violence.”
― Rollo May, Love and Will

“Man lives in three dimensions: the somatic, the mental, and the spiritual.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy, Revised and Expanded

“A therapist who ignores man's spiritual side, and is thus forced to ignore the will-to-meaning, is giving away one of his most valuable assets. For it is to this will that a psychotherapist should appeal. Again and again we have seen that an appeal to continue life, to survive the most unfavorable conditions, can be made only when such survival appears to have a meaning. That meaning must be specific and personal, a meaning which can be realized by this one person alone. For we must never forget that ever man is unique in the universe.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy, Revised and Expanded

“A therapist who ignores man's spiritual side, and is thus forced to ignore the will-to-meaning, is giving away one of his most valuable assets. For it is to this will that a psychotherapist should appeal. Again and again we have seen that an appeal to continue life, to survive the most unfavorable conditions, can be made only when such survival appears to have a meaning. That meaning must be specific and personal, a meaning which can be realized by this one person alone. For we must never forget that every man is unique in the universe.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy, Revised and Expanded

“Evo nekih tipičnih ciljeva: ''nametanje svojih ideoloških uvjerenja'', ''dokazivanje da sam (ili sam bio) u pravu'', ''pokazivanje sposobnim'', ''uspinjanje na hijerarhijskoj ljestvici'', ''izbjegavanje odgovornosti'' (ili, brat blizanac toga cilja, ''preuzimanje zasluga za tuđa djela''), ''napredovanje'', ''privlačenje pozornosti'', ''pobrinuti se da me svi vole'', ''ubiranje plodova mučeništva'', ''opravdavanje vlastitoga cinizma'', ''racionaliziranje svojeg antisocijalnog držanja'', ''umanjivanje značenja sukoba koji se upravo odvija'', ''podržavanje svoje naivnosti'', ''prenaglašavanje svoje ranjivosti'', ''prikazivati se svecem'' ili (a ovaj je osobito podmukao) ''pobrinuti se da za sve uvijek bude krivo moje nevoljeno dijete''. Sve su ovo primjeri onoga što je sunarodnjak Sigmunda Freuda, manje poznati austrijski psiholog Alfred Adler nazvao ''životnim lažima''.
Osoba koja živi s nekom životnom laži pokušava manipulirti stvarnošću pomoću percepcije, misli i djelovanja tako što samo usko zadanu i unaprijed određenu rezultatau dopušta postojanje. Kada tako živimo, onda svjesno ili nesvjesno temeljimo svoj život na dvije premise. Prva glasi da je naše trenutno znanje nesumnjivo dovoljno da odredimo što je dobro sve do u daleku vudućnost. Drug glasi da bi stvarnost, kada bi bil prepuštena sama sebi, bila nepodnošljiva. Prva je pretpostavka filozofski neopravdana. Naime, ono čemu trenutno težite možda nije vrijedno postizanja, baš kao što ono što sada radite može biti pogrješno. Druga je premisa još gora. Vrijedi samo ako je stvarnost u sebi nepodnošljiva i istodobno nešto čime možete uspješno manipulirati i izvrtati. Takav govor i razmišljanje zahtijeva aroganciju i uvjerenost koju je engleski pjesnik John Milton genijalno poistovjetio s arogancijom i samouvjerenošću Sotone, najvišega Božjeg anđela koji je tako spektakularno zastranio. Razumska sposobnost opasno naginje oholosti: ''ono što ja znam jest sve što treba znati''. Oholost se zaljubljuje u vlastite tvorevine i nastoji ih apsolutizirati.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“No postoji još jedan temeljni problem sa životnim lažima, osobito ako se zasnivaju na izbjegavanju. Kada griješimo djelom, to znači da smo napravili nešto što znamo da je pogrješno. Grijeh propusta znači da ste dopustili da se dogodi nešto loše, a mogli ste to spriječiti. Pritom se prvi, grijeh djelom, obično smatra težim od potonjega koji je u svojoj biti izbjegavanje. No ja nisam tako siguran u to.
Zamislite osobu koja inzistira na tome da sve u njezinu žibotu bude ispravno. Izbjegava sukobe, smiješi se i radi ono što joj se kaže. Pronađe svoj kutak i tu se sakrije. Ne propituje autoritet, ne iznosi svoje ideje i ne žali se kada se prema njoj loše odnose. Želi biti nevidljiva, kao riba u jatu. No nemir joj potajice izgriza srce. Ona svejedno pati jer život je patnja. Usamljena je, izolirana i neispunjena. No njezina poslušnost i zaborav same sebe oduzimaju sav smisao njezinu životu. Postala je rob, alat koji drugi mogu iskorištavati. Ne dobiva ono što želi ili treba jer bi za to morala reći što misli. Zato u njezinu životu nema ničega vrijednog što bi moglo biti protuteža životnim nevoljama. I od toga joj je mučno.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“Istina, možda će upravo glasni pojedinci koji izazivaju probleme prvi nestati kada institucija kojoj služite upadne u nevolje. Ali oni nevidljivi odmah su sljedeći na toj listi. Netko tko se skriva nije nezamjenjiv. Nezamjenjivost zahtijeva originalan doprinos. Skrivanje neće spasiti konvencionalne konformiste ni od bolesti, ni od psihičke bolesti, ni od smrti, ni od poreza. A skrivati se od drugih znači potiskivati i skrivati vlastite neostvarene potencijale. I u tome je problem.
Ako se ne otkrijete pred drugima, nećete se uspjeti otkriti ni sebi. To ne znači (samo) da potiskujete ono što jeste. To znači i da toliko toga što biste mogli biti nikada neće biti primorano izići na vidjelo. To je biološka i ujedno konceptualna istina. Kada se hrabro upustite u istraživanje i svojevoljno se suočite s nepoznatim, skupljate informacije i od njih gradite novoga, obnovljenog sebe. To je konceptualni element. No znanstvenici su nedavno otkrili da se u središnjemu živčanom sustavu organizma koji se nađe (ili sam sebe dovede) u novoj situaciji aktiviraju novi geni. Ti geni kodiraju nove proteine, a ti su proteini građevni materijal za nove strukture u mozgu. To znači da se velik dio vas još uvijek rađa, u najfizičkijemu mogućem smislu, i da vašom nepokretnošću i statičnošću taj dio vas nikada neće postati stvarnost. Morate reći nešto, otići nekamo i napraviti nešto da se taj proces aktivira. Ako to ne učinite... ostat ćete nepotpuni, a život je pretežak za nepotpune.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“Kada iznevjerite sami sebe, kada govorite neistine i živite laž, slabite svoj karakter. Ako imate slab karakter, nevolje će vas pomesti kada se pojave, a neizbježno je da se pojave. Skrivat ćete se, ali nećete se više imati kamo skriti. A onda ćete se zateći kako radite užasne stvari.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“Another key trait of the authoritarian character is his longing for a belief in historical determination and permanence: [Erich From wrote,] 'It is fate that there are wars and that one part of mankind has to be ruled by another. It is fate that the amount of suffering can never be less than it always has been. ... The authoritarian character worships the past. What has been, will eternally be. To wish or to work for something that has not yet been before is crime or madness. The miracle of creation - and creation is always a miracle - is outside his range of emotional experience.”
― Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

“The new basis for care is shown by the interest of psychologists and philosophers in emphasizing feeling as the basis of human existence. We now need to establish feeling as a legitimate aspect of our way of relating to reality. When William James says, “Feeling is everything,” he means not that there is nothing more than feeling, but that everything starts there. Feeling commits one, ties one to the object, and ensures action. But in the decades after James made this "existentialist" statement, feeling became demoted and was disparaged as merely subjective. Reason or, more accurately, technical reason was the guide to the way issues were to be settled. We said “I feel” as a synonym for “I vaguely believe” when we didn't know—little realizing that we cannot know except as we feel.”
― Rollo May, Love and Will

“Live and let go. We hold on too tightly, forgetting that all will be lost. To live is not to stay in the shallow waters of our fears of ineptitude, of our insecurity. To live is to swim into the deep; alone, but not lonely; afraid, but with courage; content with all that is, marveling at the ambiguous, miraculous wonder of being.”
― Tor Syvrud, Perennial Spring: A Guide to Mental Health and Personal Freedom

“عشق و خنده و ترس و درد، عاطفه های جهانی هستند.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library