They begin from themselves, and not from others, as a foundation for love, open to what is possible, affirming who they are through their choices, not only in action but in attitude. It is essentially an ‘opening’ attitude — an awareness that there is more to life than one has as yet fathomed, an experience of new vistas in life to be explored as well as new profundities to be plumbed. That is, his development is never automatic but must be to some extent chosen and affirmed by himself.

Backed by years of clinical experience, May continuously cites psychoanalytic literature, parables and personal anecdotes to gradually drive home 'the point' of the chapter.As the fever in our example is a symptom of the battle between the bodily powers and the infecting germs, so anxiety is evidence of a battle between our strength as a self on one side and a danger which threatens to wipe out our existence as a self on the other. According to May, emotion has become separated from reason, making it acceptable socially to seek sexual relationships and avoid the natural drive to relate to another person and create new life.

The challenge for man (the species) is to grow up into maturity beyond the imaginary gods and beasts that he creates to bolster and scare himself.It was written in the 1950's by the great existential psychologist Rollo May and it is still valid in today’s world. To engage in such thinking is a deception that people use to avoid a constructive attitude toward life, in seeing things as they are. Individuals will constantly struggle to discover what they want, how they feel, and what they can do to live fully, because there are many external pressures that will prevent them from being aware.

But the fact that the human being will destroy something — generally in the long run himself — rather than surrender his freedom proves how important freedom is to him. In Ritual, pioneering scientist Dimitris Xygalatas leads an enlightening tour through one of the most shadowy realms of human behaviour. Kitap adından da anlaşılacağı üzere bir insanın benlik inşası ve bulunduğu zamanla ve mekanla bütünleşmesi hakkında yazılmış.

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 identity as persons. Thus the person who can die courageously at thirty—who has attained a degree of freedom and differentiation that he can face courageously the necessity of giving up his life—is more mature than the person who on his deathbed at eighty cringes and begs still to be shielded from reality. I found Rollo May’s theories and analysis fairly easy to follow considering my only exposure to psychology was a general undergrad course 10+ years ago. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. It is as if the “yatata” were a primitive tribal ceremony, a witch dance calculated to appease some god.

One cannot laugh when in an anxiety panic, for then one is swallowed up, one has lost the distinction between himself as subject and the objective world around him. The new outer directed personality takes his cues from the others; he gets his values and rewards from his parents, from his friends, and from society. Shortly before his death, May wrote the foreword to Robert Kramer's edited collection of Rank’s American lectures. Man can never satisfactorily get his cues from the other; that is like walking around taking ones cues from a mirror. The challenge for the individual is to grow up and gain independence from the parents that he was so dependent on in infancy, childhood, and adolescence.The frontier has been conquered; the Victorian morals have been helplessly outdated since the 1920s; the bourgeoisie values no longer provide direction.