Rollo May: Trending quotes (page 4)

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“Communication leads to community”

Rollo May

that is, to understanding, intimacy, and the mutual valuing that was previously lacking.
Community can be defined simply as a group in which free conversation can take place. Community is where I can share my innermost thoughts, bring out the depths of my own feelings, and know they will be understood.
Source: Power and Innocence (1972), Ch. 12 : Toward New Community

Communication

“Civilization gets its first flower from the rebel.”

Rollo May

Source: Power and Innocence (1972), Ch. 11 : The Humanity of the Rebel
Context: The function of the rebel is to shake the fixated mores of the rigid order of civilization; and this shaking, though painful, is necessary if the society is to be saved from boredom and apathy. Obviously I do not refer to everyone who calls himself a rebel, but only to the authentic rebel. Civilization gets its first flower from the rebel.

Flowers

“Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conventional, they always push on to newer worlds.”

Rollo May

Source: The Courage to Create (1975), Ch. 1 : The Courage to Create, p. 32
Context: Artists are generally soft-spoken persons who are concerned with their inner visions and images. But that is precisely what makes them feared by any coercive society. For they are the bearers of the human being's age old capacity to be insurgent. They love to immerse themselves in chaos in order to put it into form, just as God created form out of chaos in Genesis. Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conventional, they always push on to newer worlds.

World

“A dynamic struggle goes on within a person between what he or she consciously thinks on the one hand and, on the other, some insight, some perspective that is struggling to be born.”

Rollo May

Ch 3 : Creativity and the Unconcious, p. 59
The Courage to Create (1975)
Context: A dynamic struggle goes on within a person between what he or she consciously thinks on the one hand and, on the other, some insight, some perspective that is struggling to be born. The insight is then born with anxiety, guilt, and the joy and gratification that is inseparable from the actualizing of a new idea or vision.

Thinking , Personality

“Dogmatists of all kinds — scientific, economic, moral, as well as political — are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and inevitably so.”

Rollo May

Ch 3 : Creativity and the Unconcious, p. 76
The Courage to Create (1975)
Context: Dogmatists of all kinds — scientific, economic, moral, as well as political — are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and inevitably so. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists together with creative persons of all sorts, are the possible destroyers of our nicely ordered systems. For the creative impulse is the speaking of the voice and the expressing of the forms of the preconscious and unconscious; and this is, by its very nature, a threat to rationality and external control.

Freedom

“Power is required for communication.”

Rollo May

Source: Power and Innocence (1972), Ch. 12 : Toward New Community
Context: Power is required for communication. To stand before an indifferent or hostile group and have one's say, or to speak honestly to a friend truths that go deep and hurt — these require self-affirmation, self-assertion, and even at times aggression. … My experience in psychotherapy convinces me that the act which requires the most courage is the simple communication, unpropelled by rage or anger, of one's deepest thoughts to another.

Communication

“We must rediscover the daimonic in a new form which will be adequate to our own predicament and fructifying for our own day. And this will not be a rediscovery alone but a recreation of the reality of the daimonic.”

Rollo May book Love and Will

Source: Love and Will (1969), p. 126
Context: We must rediscover the daimonic in a new form which will be adequate to our own predicament and fructifying for our own day. And this will not be a rediscovery alone but a recreation of the reality of the daimonic.
The daimonic needs to be directed and channeled. Here is where human consciousness becomes so important. We initially experience the daimonic as a blind push. It is impersonal in the sense that it makes us nature's tool. … consciousness can integrate the daimonic, make it personal.

Reality

“Both artists and neurotics speak and live from the subconscious and unconscious depths of their society. The artist does this positively, communicating what he experiences to his fellow men. The neurotic does this negatively.”

Rollo May book Love and Will

Source: Love and Will (1969), Ch. 1 : Introduction : Our Schizoid World, p. 21

Men , Communication

“Neither Kierkegaard nor Nietzsche had the slightest interest in starting a movement – or a new system, a thought which would indeed have offended them. Both proclaimed, in Nietzsche’s phrase, “Follow not me, but you!””

Rollo May

Source: The Discovery of Being (1983), p. 76

“Depression is the inability to construct a future.”

Rollo May book Love and Will

Source: Love and Will (1969), p. 243

Sad , Future

“The central psychological endeavor of Kierkegaard may be summed up under the heading of the question he pursued relentlessly: How can one become an individual? The individual was being swallowed up on the rational side by Hegel's vast logical "absolute Whole," on the economic side by the increasing objectification of the person, and on the moral and spiritual side by the soft and vapid religion of his day. Europe was ill, and was to become more so, not because knowledge or techniques were lacking but because of the want of passion, commitment. ""Away from Speculation, away from the System," he called, and "back to reality!"”

Rollo May

Source: The Discovery of Being (1983), p. 69

Religion , Question , Knowledge , Reality

“A person can meet anxiety to the extent that his values are stronger than the threat.”

Rollo May

Source: Psychology and the Human Dilemma (1967), p. 51

Personality

“The practical implication is that one's goal is to live each moment with freedom, honesty and responsibility.”

Rollo May

Source: Man’s Search for Himself (1953), p. 235

Freedom

“Anxiety is an even better teacher than reality, for one can temporarily evade reality by avoiding the distasteful situation; but anxiety is a source of education always present because one carries it within.”

Rollo May book The Meaning of Anxiety

The Meaning of Anxiety (1950)

Education , Reality , Teachers

“It may sound surprising when I say, on the basis of my own clinical practice as well as that of my psychological and psychiatric colleagues, that the chief problem of people in the middle decade of the twentieth century is emptiness.”

Rollo May

Source: Man’s Search for Himself (1953), p. 13

People , Problem

“In the following decades “Kierkegaard remained completely unknown, Schelling’s work was contemptuously buried, and Marx and Feuerbach were interpreted as dogmatic materialists. Then a new impetus came in the 1880’s with the work of Dilthey, and particularly with Freidrich Nietzsche, the “philosophy of life” movement, and the work of Berson. The third phase came after the shock of WWI – “Kierkegaard and the early Marxists were rediscovered and the serious challenges to the spiritual and psychological basis of Western society given by Nietzsche could no longer be covered over by Victorian self-satisfied placidity. The specific form of the third phase owes much to the phenomenology of Edmond Husserl, which gave to Heidegger, Jaspers, and the others the tool they needed to undercut the subject object cleavage which had been such a stumbling block to science as well as philosophy.”

Rollo May

Source: The Discovery of Being (1983), p. 54-55

Life , Science

“Increasingly in our time — this is an inevitable result of collectivization — it is the organization man who succeeds. And he is characterized by the fact that he has significance only if he gives up his significance.”

Rollo May

Source: Psychology and the Human Dilemma (1967), p. 37

Time

“Freud describes the neurotic personality of the late nineteenth century as one suffering from fragmentation – that is, from repression of instinctual drives, blocking off of awareness, loss of autonomy, weakness and passivity of the ego, together with the various neurotic symptoms which result from this fragmentation. “Kierkegaard-who wrote the only known book before Freud specifically devoted to the problem of anxiety-analyzes not only anxiety but particularly the depression and despair which result from the individual’s self-estrangement, an estrangement he proceeds to clarify in its different forms and degrees of severity. Nietzsche proclaims ten years before Freud’s first book that the disease of contemporary man is that “his soul had gone stale” he is – he describes how blocked instinctual powers turn within the individual into resentment, self-hatred, hostility and aggression. Freud did not know Kierkegaard’s work, but he regarded Nietzsche as one of the authentically great men of all time.””

Rollo May

Source: The Discovery of Being (1983), p. 60-61

Men , Hostility , Books , Disease

“The upshot is that the values and goals which provided a unifying center for previous centuries in the modern period no longer are cogent. We have not yet found the new center which will enable us to choose our goals constructively, and thus to overcome the painful bewilderment and anxiety of not knowing which way to move. Another root of our malady is our loss of the sense of the worth and dignity of the human being. Nietzsche predicted this when he pointed out that the individual was being swallowed up in the herd, and that we were living by a "slave-morality." Marx also predicted it when he proclaimed that modern man was being "de-humanized," and Kafka showed in his amazing stories how people literally can lose their identify as persons.”

Rollo May

Source: Man’s Search for Himself (1953), p. 49

Pain , People , Way , Sense

“True to the meaning of the rebel as one who renounces authority, he seeks primarily not the substitution of one political system for another. He may favor such a political change, but it is not his chief goal. He rebels for the sake of a vision of life and society which he is convinced is critically important for himself and his fellows. … the rebel fights not only for the relief of his fellow men but also for his personal integrity. For him these are but two sides of the same coin.”

Rollo May

Source: Power and Innocence (1972), Ch. 11 : The Humanity of the Rebel

Life , Men , Change , Fight