The Meaning of Anxiety QUOTES

41 " characteristics of our times: loneliness, the feeling of not being of value as persons, and the experience of not being able to love and be loved, despite the common need, the common effort, and the common but temporary respite provided by alcohol. The sources of the anxiety are to be found in certain basic trends in our culture, one of which, for Auden, is the pressure toward conformity which occurs in a world where commercial and mechanical values are apotheosized: “We move on As the wheel wills; one revolution Registers all things, the rise and fall In pay and prices....{ "

― Rollo May , The Meaning of Anxiety

43 " what is significant about rejection, as a source of neurotic anxiety, is how it is interpreted by the child. In impact upon the child, there is radical difference between rejection as an objective experience (which does not necessarily result in subjective conflict for the child), and rejection as a subjective experience. The important question psychologically is whether the child felt himself or herself rejected. "

― Rollo May , The Meaning of Anxiety

45 " The threat of nonbeing lies in the psychological and spiritual realms as well, namely the threat of meaninglessness in one’s existence. {32} Generally the threat of meaninglessness is experienced negatively as a threat to the existence of the self (the experience of the “dissolution of the self” in Goldstein’s term). But when this form of anxiety is confronted affirmatively—when the individual both realizes the threat of meaninglessness and takes a stand against the threat—the result is a strengthening of the individual’s feeling of being a self, a strengthening of his perception of himself as distinct from the world of nonbeing, of objects. "

― Rollo May , The Meaning of Anxiety

47 " Because it is possible to create — creating one’s self, willing to be one’s self, as well as creating in all the innumerable daily activities (and these are two phases of the same process) — one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever. Now creating, actualizing one’s possibilities, always involves negative as well as positive aspects. It always involves destroying the status quo, destroying old patterns within oneself, progressively destroying what one has clung to from childhood on, and creating new and original forms and ways of living. If one does not do this, one is refusing to grow, refusing to avail himself of his possibilities; one is shirking his responsibility to himself. "

― Rollo May , The Meaning of Anxiety

49 " the person with neurotic anxiety endeavors to run away from some elements within herself or himself. This can be accomplished only by dissociating these elements, which sets up inner contradictions. "

― Rollo May , The Meaning of Anxiety

51 " Hesse sees Haller’s record “as a document of the times, for Haller’s sickness of the soul, as I now know, is not the eccentricity of a single individual, but the sickness of the times themselves, the neurosis of that generation to which Haller belongs...a sickness which attacks...precisely those who are strongest in spirit and richest in gifts. "

― Rollo May , The Meaning of Anxiety