Rollo May
Man’s Search for Himself, Rollo May, 1953.
“They generally can talk fluently about what they should want—to complete their college degrees successfully, to get a job, to tall in love and marry and raise a family—but it is soon evident, even to them, that they are describing what other, parents, professors, employers, expect them to rather than what they themselves want. Two decades ago such external goals could be taken seriously; but now the person realizes, even as he talks, that actually his parents and society do not make all these requirements of him… As one person put it, “I’m just a collection of mirrors, reflecting what everyone else expects of me.”” (p.15)
“Consciousness of self gives is the power to stand outside the rigid claim of stimulus and response, to pause, and by this pause to throw some weight on either side, to cast some decision about the response will be.” (p.161)
The Discovery of being
“The full meaning of the term human being will be clearer if the reader will keep in mind that being is a particle, a verb from implying that someone is in the process of being something. It is unfortunate that, when used as a general noun in English, the term being connotes a static substance, and when used as a particular noun such as a being, it is usually assumed to refer to an entity, say such as a soldier to be counted as a general noun, to mean potentia, the source of potentiality; being is the potentiality by which the acorn becomes the oak or each of us becomes what he truly is… We can understand another human being only as we see what he is moving toward, what he is becoming; and we can know ourselves only as we “project our potentia in action.” The significant tense for human beings is thus the future—that is to say, the critical question is what I am pointing toward, what I will be in immediate future.” (p.97)
“The acceptance by another person, such as the therapist, shows the patient that he no longer needs to fight his main battle on the front of whether anyone else, or the world, can accept him; the acceptance frees him to experience his own being… The crucial question is what the individual himself, in his own awareness of and responsibility for his existence, does with the fact that he can be accepted.” (p.101-102)
