What if imagination and art are not, as many of us might think, the frosting on life but the fountainhead of human experience? What if our logic and science derive from art forms, rather than the other way around? In this trenchant volume, Rollo May helps all of us find those creative impulses that, once liberated, offer new possibilities for achievement. A renowned therapist and inspiring guide, Dr. May draws on his experience to show how we can break out of old patterns in our lives. His insightful book offers us a way through our fears into a fully realized self.

He pays particular attention to the causes of loneliness and isolation, and to our search for stability in an age of anxiety.

Whether reflecting on war, psychology, or the ideas of existentialist thinkers such as Sartre and Kierkegaard, Dr. May everywhere enlarges our outlook on how people can develop creatively within the human predicament.

Dr. May discusses five levels of power's potential in each of us: the infant's power to be; self-affirmation, the ability to survive with self-esteem; self-assertion, which develops when self-affirmation is blocked; aggression, a reaction to thwarted assertion; and, finally, violence, when reason and persuasion are ineffective.

"May is an existential analyst who deservedly enjoys a reputation among both general and critical readers as an accessible and insightful social and psychological theorist. . . . Freedom's characteristics, fruits, and problems; destiny's reality; death; and therapy's place in the confrontation between freedom and destiny are examined. . . . Poets, social critics, artists, and other thinkers are invoked appropriately to support May's theory of freedom and destiny's interdependence." Library Journal "Especially instructive, even stunning, is Dr. May's willingness to respect mystery. . . .There...

Rollo May, respected therapist and bestselling author of Love and Will, discusses the relationships between myths and the subconscious, showing how myths can provide meaning and structure for those who seek direction in a confused world. Here are case studies in which myths have helped Dr. May's patients make sense out of an often senseless world.

Since its publication, Existence has been regarded as the most important, complete, and lucid account of the existentialist approach to psychology. From the works of the leading spokesmen of the existential analytic movement, the editors have selected classic case histories and other writings to define the approach that seeks to understand mental illness, in the words of Rollo May, ..".not as deviations from the conceptual yardstick of this or that psychiatrist...but as deviations in the structure of the particular patient's existence, the disruptions of his condition humane."

Loneliness, boredom, emptiness: These are the complaints that Rollo May encountered over and over from his patients. In response, he probes the hidden layers of personality to reveal the core of man's integration--a basic and inborn sense of value. Man's Search for Himself is an illuminating view of our predicament in an age of overwhelming anxieties and gives guidance on how to choose, judge, and act during such times.

2011 Reprint of 1950 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Text of original 1950 Edition. This book is the result of several years of exploration, research, and thought on one of the most urgent problems of our day. Clinical experience has proved to psychologists and psychiatrists generally that the central problem in psychotherapy is the nature of anxiety. To the extent that we have been able to solve that problem, we have made a beginning in understanding the causes of integration and disintegration of personality. May's work...