Part One:
This reading was a very fundamental piece for me. It gave me a great feeling that I what I am doing here at West Georgia and planning on doing as a career are truly may calling and something I was “made for.” I was bit hesitant of the reading at first. I had read “Love and Will” by Rollo May before and found it to be (while very insightful) dry, very long, and quite a difficult read. I did not think that this was the case with “The Discovery of Being.” But that may have been because this course has primed my brain once again to be able to cognitively digest heavy psychological and philosophical readings.
I found myself quite ecstatic and dare say “giddy” in the first two chapters where there were numerous references to Shakespeare and his tragedies. The point May makes of life being an ongoing struggle of being and not being, tragedy and comedy, struggle and recomposure was right to the core of the presentation that I gave.
I thought that May’s explanation of what existentialism is was very concise. This is often a difficult question that can’t be easily answered. May writes on pages 48 and 49 that “Existentialism, rather, is an expression of profound dimensions of the modern emotional and spiritual temper and is shown in almost all aspects of our culture” (48), then; “Existentialism, in short, is the endeavor to understand man by cutting below the cleavage between subject and object which has bedeviled Western thought and science since shortly after the Renaissance” (49). The chapter concludes brilliantly with “Existentialism is not a comprehensive philosophy or way of life, but an endeavor to grasp reality” (59). This is a very good summary of how existentialism posits its focus on our existence, our standing forth, and asking what is happening to us here and now as we are at the present moment?
In general I liked the connections that May made between Freudian thought and existentialism by asserting that they were two directions of action that came from the same study of psychology; or humans as being, a science that begs who are we and why do we do and think the way we do? Freud, then, taking a psycho-analytic approach and the existentialists a metaphysical one. This can be seen on page 77 where May states; “Despair, will, anxiety, guilt, loneliness - these normally refer to psychological conditions, but for Nietzsche they refer to states of being.” That is a brilliant distinction between what drove the different schools of thought to write and believe what they did/do. It is also a great capstone to differentiate between more mainstream psychotherapies (such as cognitive-behavioral or psychoanalytic) and existential therapy which focuses on the person not as having a set of conditions but as a comprehensive entirety of being.
May concludes part two of the book by saying that “...it is possible to have a science of man which does not fragmentize man and destroy his humanity at the same moment”, and later, “...we are here not merely discussing a new method oas over against other methods, to be taken or to be left or to be absorbed into some vague catch-all eclecticism” (88). While the book does not end there, the question begs to be asked; “How, then, is this achieved? Not that humanistic-existential psychology can be applied, but how can it stand alone as a valid school of thought among other disciplines?”
Part Two - Carl Rogers - "On Becoming a Person"
Part Three - Abraham Maslow - "Toward a Psychology of Being"
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