Existential Psychologist Rollo May on Freedom

and the Significance of the Pause

Freedom is the capacity to pause in the face of stimuli from many
directions at once and, in this pause, to throw ones weight toward this
response rather than that one.

BY MARIA POPOVA

Everything can be taken from a man, the great Austrian

psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote in his timeless treatise on the
human search for meaning, but one thing: the last of the human freedoms to choose ones
attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose ones own way. A generation later, James
Baldwin examined how we imprison ourselves and asserted: Freedom is not something that
anybody can be given; freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be.

These are discomfiting sentiments, for they annihilate the protective possibility for self-
victimization and place the responsibility for freedom squarely on our own shoulders a
responsibility whose first demand is that we learn to want to be free.

How to do that is what the existential psychologist Rollo May (April 21, 1909October 22,
1994) explores in his 1981 book Freedom and Destiny (public library) the source of his
insight into the constructive side of despair and the psychology of joy.

Rollo May

In his definition of freedom, May outlines the single most important internal discipline by
which we attain self-liberation:

Freedom is the capacity to pause in the face of stimuli from many directions at once
and, in this pause, to throw ones weight toward this response rather than that one.
Decades later, the English psychoanalyst Adam Phillips would complement this notion
with his kindred case for the paradoxical value of our unlived lives, suggesting that
contentment which is a supreme species of freedom lies largely in the acceptance of
missing out, of tuning out most of the stimuli with which life bombards us. May considers
this existential aspect of the pause beyond its practical utility in the immediacy of the
moment:

The pause is especially important for the freedom of being, what I have called
essential freedom. For it is in the pause that we experience the context out of which
freedom comes. In the pause we wonder, reflect, sense awe, and conceive of eternity.
The pause is when we open ourselves for the moment to the concepts of both freedom
and destiny.

One of Antoine de Saint-Exuprys original watercolors for The

Little Prince

Complement Freedom and Destiny with Simone de Beauvoir on what freedom really means
and the great Buddhist teacher D.T. Suzuki on the Zen path to freedom, then revisit May on
how to move through times of radical transition.

Published October 4, 2017

https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/10/04/rollo-may-freedom-destiny-pause/

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