The Meaning of Anxiety Quotes

“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. Hence refusal to actualize one’s possibilities brings guilt toward one’s self. But creating also means destroying the status quo of one’s environment, breaking the old forms; it means producing something new and original in human relations as well as in cultural forms (e.g., the creativity of the artist). Thus every experience of creativity has its potentiality of aggression or denial toward other persons in one’s environment or established patterns within one’s self. To put the matter figuratively, in every experience of creativity something in the past is killed that something new in the present may be born. Hence, for Kierkegaard, guilt feeling is always a concomitant of anxiety: both are aspects of experiencing and actualizing possibility. The more creative the person, he held, the more anxiety and guilt are potentially present.”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“Anxiety has a purpose. Originally the purpose was to protect the existence of the caveman from wild beasts and savage neighbors. Nowadays the ocassions for anxiety are very different - we are afraid of losing out in the competition, feeling unwanted, isolated, and ostracized. But the purpose of anxiety is still to protect us from dangers that threaten the same things: our existence or values that we identify with our existence. This normal anxiety of life cannot be avoided except at the price of apathy or the numbing of one's sensibilities and imagination.”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“One has to remain detached in order to triumph over others”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“But in neurotic anxiety, two conditions are necessary: (1) the threat must be to a vital value; and (2) the threat must be present in juxtaposition with another threat so that the individual cannot avoid one threat without being confronted by another. In patterns of neurotic anxiety, the values held essential to the individual's existence as a personality are in contradiction with each other.”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“A fear is a reaction to a specific danger, to which the individual can make a specific adjustment. But what characterizes anxiety is the feeling of diffuseness and uncertainty and the experience of helplessness toward the threat.”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“Since the values of the market were the highest criteria, persons also became valued as commodities which could be bought and sold. A person's worth is then his salable market value, whether it is skill or 'personality' that is up for sale. [...]
The market value, then, becomes the individual's valuation of himself, so that self-confidence and 'self-feeling' (ones experience of identity with one's self) are largely reflections of what others think of one, in this case the 'others' being those who represent the market. Thus contemporary economic processes have contributed not only to an alienation of man from man, but likewise to 'self-alienation' - an alienation of the individual from himself. As Fromm very well summarizes the point:

Since modern man experiences himself both as the seller and as the commodity to be sold on the market, his self-esteem depends on conditions beyond his control. If he is 'successful,' he is valuable; if he is not, he is worthless. The degree of insecurity which results from this orientation can hardly be overestimated. If one feels that one's own value is not constituted primarily by the human qualities one possesses, but by one's succes on a competitive market with ever-changing conditions, one's self-esteem is bound to be shaky and in constant need of confirmation by others. [Erich Fromm, Man for himself]

In such a situation one is driven to strive relentlessly for 'succes'; this is the chief way to validate ones self and to allay anxiety. And any failure in the competitive struggle is a threat to the quasi-esteem for one's self - which, quasi though it be, is all one has in such a situation. This obviously leads to powerful feelings of helplessness and inferiority.
[p.169f]”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“It is very difficult to appreciate from the outside what a person in severe anxiety is experiencing. Brown rightly remarked about his friends 'imploring a drowning man [me] to swim when they don't know that under the water his hands and feet are tied.”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“The line between 'normal' and 'neurotic' begins to appear when any activity becomes compulsive - that is, when the person feels pushed to perform the act because it habitually allays his anxiety rather than because of any intrinsic wish to perform the act.”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“In the problem of anxiety we must, therefore, always ask the question of what vital value is being threatened”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“Everyone belongs to a society, whether he wishes it or not, whether he chooses it or not, whether he contributes constructively to its development or does the reverse. Community, on the contrary, implies one's relating one's self to others affirmatively and responsibly. Community in the economic sense implies an emphasis on the social values and functions of work. Community in the psychological sense involves the individual's relating himself to others in love as well as creativity.”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“Where there is 'freedom from' without corresponding interrelationship, there is the anxiety of the defiant and isolated individual. Where there is dependence without freedom, there is the anxiety of the clinging person who cannot live outside a symbiosis.”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“Intense fatigue or illness may also weaken the control of the cortex. Hence we find tired or sick persons responding to threats with a greater degree of undifferentiated anxiety. In psychoanalytic terms, we would speak of this as regression.”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“One means of allaying anxiety is frantic activity. The anxiety arising out of the dilemma of powerlessness in the face of suprapersonal economic forces on one hand, but theoretical belief in the efficacy of individual effort on the other, was symptomized partly by excessive activism.”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“In the individual who is characterized by independence without corresponding relatedness, there will develop hostility toward those whom he believes to be the occasion of his isolation. In the individual who is symbiotically dependent there will develop hostility toward those whom he regards as instrumental in the suppression of his capacities and freedom.”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“anxiety, with its concomitant feelings of helplessness, isolation, and conflict, is an exceedingly painful experience. One tends to be angry and resentful toward those responsible for placing him in such a situation of pain. Clinical experience yields many examples like the following: A dependent person, finding himself in a situation of responsibility with which he feels he cannot cope, reacts with hostility both toward those who have placed him in the situation and toward those (usually parents) who caused him to be unable to cope with it. Or he feels hostility toward his therapist, whom he believes should bail him out”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“Goldstein's central thesis is that anxiety is the subjective experience of the organism in a catastrophic condition . An organism is thrown into a catastrophic condition when it cannot cope with the demands of its environment and, therefore, feels a threat to its existence or to values it holds essential for its existence.”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“But attempts to evade anxiety are not only doomed to failure. In running from anxiety you lose your most precious opportunities for the emergence of yourself, and for your education as s human being.”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“It would seem that the affects, biological needs, and forms of behavior most repressed in a given culture are the ones most likely to give rise to symptoms . [...]
in our culture it is considered much more acceptable to have an organic illness than an emotional or mental disorder; this would influence the fact that anxiety and other emotional stresses in our culture so often take a somatic form. In short, the culture conditions the way a person tries to resolve his anxiety, and specifically what symptoms he may employ.”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“In neurotic anxiety, the cleavage between expectations and reality is in the form of a contradiction . Expectation and reality cannot be brought together, and since nobody can bear the constant tension of the experience of such a cleavage, the individual engages in a neurotic distortion of reality. Though this distortions is undertaken for the purpose of protecting the individual from neurotic anxiety, in the long run it makes the contradiction between the individual's expectations and reality more rigid and hence sets the stage for greater neurotic anxiety.
In productive activity, on the other hand, the expectations are not in contradiction to reality, but are used as a means of creatively transforming reality. The cleavage is constantly being resolved by the individual's bringing expectations and reality progressively into greater accord. This, as we have endeavored to show at many points throughout this book, is the sound way to overcome neurotic anxiety. Thus our human power to resolve the conflict between expectation and reality - our creative power - is at the same time our power to transcend neurotic anxiety and to live with normal anxiety.”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“It is important to note that the acquisition of wealth, as the accepted standard of succes, does not refer to increasing material goods for sustenance purposes, or even for the purpose of increasing enjoyment. It refers rather to wealth as a sign of individual power, a proof of achievement and self-worth.
Modern economic individualism, though based on belief in the free individual, has resulted in the phenomenon that increasingly large numbers of people have to work on the property (capital) of a few powerful owners. It is not surprising that such a situation should lead to widespread insecurity, for not only is the individual faced with a criterion of succes over which he has only partial control but also his opportunities for a job are in considerable measure out of his control.”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“But are we not at the point where we can no longer make the distinction between normal and neurotic? Do we not all have these conflicts, in greater or lesser degree? And do not all conflicts move into contradiction at some point? When all is said and done, all anxiety arises from conflicts, with its origin in the conflict between being and nonbeing, between one's existence and that which threatens it. All of us, no matter how 'neurotic' or 'normal,' experience the gap between our expectations and reality. This distinction becomes less important, and I believe we must look at all anxiety, preferably without special labels, as part of the human condition.”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“where rejection is present with neurotic anxiety, we found a certain constellation always present: The rejection was never accepted as an objective fact, but was held in juxtaposition with idealized expectations about the parent. The young woman was unable to appraise the parent realistically, but always confused the reality situation with expectations of what the parent should have been or might yet become.”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“The threat, thus, in anxiety is not necessarily more intense than fear. Rather, it attacks us on a deeper level. The threat must be to something in the 'core' or 'essence' of the personality. My self-esteem, my experience of myself as a person, my feeling of being of worth - all of these are imperfect descriptions of what is threatened.”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“Thus it may be said that the symptoms are often ways of containing the anxiety; they are the anxiety in structuralized form. Freud rightly remarks about psychological symptoms: "The symptom is bound anxiety," or, in other words, anxiety which has been crystallized into an ulcer or heart palpitations or some other symptom.”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“But since anxiety attacks the foundation (core, essence) of the personality, the individual cannot 'stand outside' the threat, cannot objectify it. Thereby, one is powerless to take steps to confront it. One cannot fight what one does not know. In common parlance, one feels caught, or if the anxiety is severe, overwhelmed; one is afraid but uncertain of what one is afraid. The fact that anxiety is a threat to the essential, rather than to the peripheral, security of the person has led some authors like Freud and Sullivan to describe it as a 'cosmic' experience. It is 'cosmic' in that it invades us totally, penetrating our whole subjective universe. We cannot stand outside it to objectify it. We cannot see it separately from ourselves, for the very perception with which we look will also be invaded by anxiety.”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“But, as is obvious to any observer, many people are thrown into anxiety by situations which are not objectively threatening either in kind or degree. The person may very often state himself that the occasion of his anxiety is a relatively minor event, that his apprehension is 'silly,' and he may be angry with himself for letting such a minor thing bother him; but he still feels it.”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“Neurotic anxiety, therefore, is that which occurs when the incapacity for coping adequately with threats is not objective but subjective - I.e., is due not to objective weakness but to inner psychological patterns and conflicts which prevent the individual from using his powers.”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“Whether we are 'Freudians' or not, as I am not, we are surely all post-Freudian. He set the tone for vast changes in our culture”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“The weight placed upon the value of competitive succes is so great in our culture and the anxiety occasioned by the possibility of failure to achieve this goal is so prevalent that there is reason for assuming that individual competitive succes is both the dominant goal in our culture and the most pervasive ocassion for anxiety. ”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“In Kafka’s novel The Castle,{9} the chief character devotes his life to a frantic and desperate endeavor to communicate with the authorities in the castle who control all aspects of the life of the village, and who have the power to tell him his vocation and give some meaning to his life. Kafka’s hero is driven “by a need for the most primitive requisites of life, the need to be rooted in a home and a calling, and to become a member of a community.” {10} But the authorities in the castle remain inscrutable and inaccessible,”
― Rollo May Ph.D., The Meaning Of Anxiety