Rollo MayRecensioni

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It was really interesting at first but got bogged down in jargon towards the end.

A pretty good book which analyses the creative process from a psychological point of view. The notion of art as a relation is especially crucial to understand how an enhanced experience of the world is at the core of every artistic practice.

Eros é o centro de vitalidade de uma cultura - seu coração e sua alma. E quando um alívio de tensão substitui o eros criativo está garantida e queda da civilização. Eros é um demônio. O demoníaco0 pode ser construtivo ou destrutivo, e em geral é ambas as coisas.

I forced myself through this up until this point, because it was a recommendation. The whole thing is shallow and inane, he makes some very silly unfalsifiable claims, but when he does say something falsifiable he doesn't seem to think there's any value in actually finding out whether it's true (so just like Eric Fromm, who he quotes repeatedly). But when he got to the point of saying homosexuality is a "confusion" and gave a case where he said it was caused by bad parenting I just flung it across the room. I wouldn't even curse a second hand book shop with this crap. And don't tell me he's a child of his time, there were plenty of contemporary dissenting voices, including Carl Rogers.

Utter crap that I can't believe people are still falling for in 2019.

Originally written as a series of lectures this volume explores creativity, its many facets and gives examples from art.

Although it was written in the last century it is still very useful in pondering the need to create, the artist's encounter with his world, and the nature of creativity.

Librería 5. Estante 3

Librería 5. Estante 1.

One: Our Predicament
1. Loneliness and Anxiety of Modern Man
2. Roots of Malady
Two: Rediscovering Selfhood
3. Becoming a Person
4. Struggle to Be
Three: Goals of Integration
5. Freedom and inner strength
6. Creative Conscience
7. Courage and Virtue of Maturity
8. Man, Transcender of Time

Non si puo' dire di un libro di studio che sia bello, o brutto. Questo è' lieve ed educato, ma fermo. Istruisce sul senso del counseling, con abbordi sulla religiosita' che non pensavo appartenessero alla disciplina - o meglio, all'Uomo inteso come normalita'. Chiarifica, illustra, incuriosisce. Diciamo che è per cultori della materia, o per chi potrebbe diventarlo.
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Riletto per interesse 'professionale', stavolta sottolineato, lascia tuttavia un poco di stucco per come parla della religione e della sua importanza per lo sviluppo di una psiche ben orientata. Dire che il counselor migliore e' la persona devota fa un po' sorridere. Lettura utile, a parte gli ultimi due capitoli dove scatta la predica.

A good companion for a couple of days, as I'm living the struggle of "what do I like/want to do in life" it made me feel at least that it's not so strange not to know the answer as we seldom experience and assert ourselves.

This is another of those "classics" that have long been on my list of things-to-read. A few months ago, it fell into my hands and declared its time had come. Maybe it's because it's only been around for 39 years, or maybe it's because I'm a woman of a certain age, but I found May's insights as timely today as they were when the book was written. Perhaps May's words in his Foreword best describe the theme: "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. But this is only possible, in an inner sense, if one opens oneself at the same time to the influence of the other. And will without love becomes manipulation—of which the age just preceding the First World War is replete with examples. Love without will in our own day becomes sentimental and experimental." I didn't find one superfluous word in May's 300+ pages. Possibly because his ideas complemented so well the reading I'd been doing on the Law of Attraction, the notion that we attract people and things and circumstances into our lives with our thoughts, emotions, and yearnings. I'm in love with this book!

May begins by identifying the common threads of modern men who possess attitudes of passivity, apathy, and boredom. These “hollow men” who are strangers to themselves, feel largely insignificant, harbor resentment towards the monotonous treadmills of life, fear abandon and isolation, suffer from directionless and despondency, and have little to look forward to. At the core is a loneliness and a floating, ubiquitous anxiety whose sources appear nebulous. But with psychological acumen, May attempts to shed light on these sources. An individual may be bereft of adequate stability, the progeny of worried parents, or the victim of cruel life events. But often individual difficulties are symptomatic of epidemics at large. May points out that we are in a transition age. In the twilight of religion, we inherit our values from long anonymous men while the vitality of their traditions is lost to us. The products of an industrial age, we lead vacuous lives of routine, while competitive rewards are few and far between and emptiness springs from powerlessness in a world at scale. And while the latter-day influence of science and reason is both momentous and pervasive, in expelling such “absurdities” as witchcraft, we also expelled our connection with imagination, wonder, and mystery, throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Still more discomforting is our tendency to combat such problems with maladaptive strategies: buttressing ourselves with authoritarian institutions that cater to our desires to be led by the absolutes of “authority and miracle” but only perpetuate our problem of dependence; averting inner confrontation with campaigns of busyness, self-pity, or intellectualization; and suspending our attentions from illuminating revelations to concerns of immediacy. We are raised to control our “uncivilized” emotions, to suppress our unconscious desires as bestial and barbaric, and to puritanically compartmentalize our now taboo sexual lives. In our Cartesian dichotomy of mind and body, we are understandably detached from our feelings. But under Freudian influence we realize the ego is less in control than we’d like to admit and possess occasional contempt for a consciousness regarded as weak but demanding with its many thou-shalt’s and thou-shalt-not’s.

While this does paint a bleak diagnosis, it does not imply a bleak prognosis. Anxiety implies conflict, and conflict (which in this age is often between Self and Society, or between different internalizations) can be harmonized. At present, our task is to learn how to live vibrantly, to learn how to embrace the “pregnant moment” by living each one with freedom, honesty, and responsibility. The starting place is self-awareness. In genuinely understanding and honoring our inward motives, we achieve a greater integrity of self, which is needed to move from dependence towards integration and freedom. Consciousness can help be our guide here, tapping into the deeper wisdoms of the self and the past. Learning how to attune to the unconscious is equally important. Inevitably, a leap is required. As we attempt to develop a deeper intimacy with ourselves, replacing dependency with individual values and choices is required, but naturally comes with doubt, imperfect acuity, and sometimes regret. Meeting anxiety with courage is the “will to live”.

If it is any consolation, an unsettled world is a world in which man will certainly be forced to confront himself. Loss of innocence can be seen as the birth of spiritual man (see Adam and Prometheus) as opposed to a bitter end, loneliness or illness can be opportunities to cultivate inner resources and centers of strength (which we may have neglected to develop), anxiety can be perceived as a signal of conflict calling one’s attention rather than a burden to bear, and fear of moving ahead into the unknown can be grounds for wonder, friendship, and love. In this era, the Socratic decree to “know thyself” becomes the most difficult task of all, but also the most important. This creative (and daily) process of transcendence demonstrates, to quote Miller, the “indestructible will of man to achieve his humanity”.½

Not a book to read if its storytelling performance you want but it helps to make clear what stories work and why

In this revised edition, Rollo May expounds the theory that much of human behaviour is motivated by a profound underlying sense of anxiety. He challenges the idea that mental health means living without anxiety.

quoting the Chicago Theological Seminary Register: "A well-written, enlightened, and practically helpful consideration of the principles and practice of psychotherapy from the special viewpoint of the religious worker."

9/8/22

ESP-204

Psychology

TBR