Rollo May

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. By that I mean not only that many people do not know what they want; they often do not have any clear idea of what they feel.

This barometer should be taken seriously, for it is one of the best indexes of the disruptions and problems which have not yet, but may soon, break out widely in the society

Before World War I, says Riesman, the typical American individual was “inner-directed.” He had taken over the standards he was taught, was moralistic in the late Victorian sense, and had strong motives and ambitions, derived from the outside though they were. He lived as though he were given stability by an inner gyroscope. This was the type which fits the early psychoanalytic description of the emotionally repressed person who is directed by a strong superego.

But the present typical American character, Riesman goes on to say, is “outer-directed.” He seeks not to be outstanding but to “fit in”; he lives as though he were directed by a radar set fastened to his head perpetually telling him what other people expect of him. This radar type gets his motives and directions from others; like the man who described himself as a set of mirrors, he is able to respond but not to choose; he has no effective center of motivation of his own.

Apathy and lack of feeling are also defenses against anxiety. When a person continually faces dangers he is powerless to overcome, his final line of defense is at last to avoid even feeling the dangers.

Sensitive students of our time have seen these developments coming. Erich Fromm has pointed out that people today no longer live under the authority of church or moral laws, but under “anonymous authorities” like public opinion.

Many people suffer from “the fear of finding oneself alone,” remarks André Gide, “and so they don’t find themselves at all.”

Pascal in the seventeenth century observed the great efforts people make to divert themselves, and he opined that the purpose of the bulk of these diversions was to enable people to avoid thoughts of themselves.

Social acceptance, “being liked,” has so much power because it holds the feelings of loneliness at bay. A person is surrounded with comfortable warmth; he is merged in the group. He is reabsorbed—as though, in the extreme psychoanalytic symbol, he were to go back into the womb. He temporarily loses his loneliness; but it is at the price of giving up his existence as an identity in his own right. And he renounces the one thing which would get him constructively over the loneliness in the long run, namely the developing of his own inner resources, strength and sense of direction, and using this as a basis for meaningful relations with others. The “stuffed men” are bound to become more lonely no matter how much they “lean together”; for hollow people do not have a base from which to learn to love.

When we look below the surface of our individual anxiety, we find that it also comes from something more profound than the threat of war and economic uncertainty. We are anxious because we do not know what roles to pursue, what principles for action to believe in

Anxiety strikes us at the very “core” of ourselves: it is what we feel when our existence as selves is threatened