Rollo May Quotes

Human dignity is based upon freedom, and freedom upon human dignity. The one presupposes the other.
I believe that the therapist's function should be to help people become free to be aware of and to experience their possibilities.
I have long believed that love and will are interdependent and belong together. Both are conjunctive processes of being - a reaching out to influence others, molding, forming, creating the consciousness of the other.
I make no apologies in admitting that I take very seriously the dehumanizing dangers in our tendency in modern science to make man over into the image of the machine, into the image of the techniques by which we study him.
If we are to achieve freedom, we must do so with a daring and a profundity that refuse to flinch at engaging our destiny.
In the utopian aim of removing all power and aggression from human behavior, we run the risk of removing self-assertion, self-affirmation, and even the power to be.
It is an obvious fact that when an age is torn loose from its moorings and everyone is to some degree thrown on his own, most people can take steps to find and realize themselves.
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.
Loneliness is such an omnipotent and painful threat to many persons that they have little conception of the positive values of solitude and even, at times, are frightened at the prospect of being alone.
Many modern people have gone so far in their dependence on others for their feeling of reality that they are afraid that without it they would lose the sense of their own existence.
Memory depends mainly upon myth. Some even occurs in our minds, in actuality or in fantasy; we form it in memory, molding it like clay day after day - and soon we have made out of that event a myth. We then keep the myth in memory as a guide to future similar situations.
Myths give us our sense of personal identity, answering the question, 'Who am I?'
Our particular problem in America at this point in history is the widespread loss of the sense of individual significance, a loss which is sensed inwardly as impotence.
Political freedom is to be cherished indeed. But there is no political freedom that is not indissolubly bound to the inner personal freedom of the individuals who make up that nation: no liberty of a nation of conformists, no free nation made up of robots.
Problems are the outward signs of unused inner possibilities.
Psychoanalysis - and any good therapy - is a method of increasing one's awareness of destiny in order to increase one's experience of freedom.
Social acceptance, 'being liked,' has so much power because it holds the feelings of loneliness at bay.
The compelling drive to get at the truth is what improves us all as psychologists and is part and parcel of intellectual integrity. But I do urge that we not let the drive for honesty put blinders on us and cut off our range of vision so that we miss the very thing we set out the understand - namely, the living human being.
The cooperative, loving side of existence goes hand in hand with coping and power, but neither the one nor the other can be neglected if life is to be gratifying.
The emergence of the Atomic Age brought the previously inchoate and 'free-floating' anxiety of many people into sharp focus.
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AuthorName
Rollo May
Profession
Psychologist
BirthDate
21 April, 1909
DeathDate
22 October, 1994
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