Freedom and Psychological suicide: How To Choose One's Self
In our previous article entitled Human Consciousness and Freedom: The Antidote to a Constricted Life. We explained how humans have been gifted the *Highest Gift of Evolution*; Self-Consciousness and with it comes the power of imagination which grant us the ability to project into the future and to envisage almost limitless possibilities. It is the gift of psychological freedom. It shows us what we could be and tells us that we can participate in the act of creation, it shows us that the creation of our destiny is at least partly in our hands, if we can move forward into the realm of the limitless possibilities despites all the doubts and anxieties.
**Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.**
*Erich Fromm, Man for Himself*
Through his power to survey his life, man can transcend the immediate events which constrict him. Whether he has cancer or is a slave like the Roman philosopher Epictetus or a prisoner condemned to death, he can still in his freedom choose how he will relate to these facts. And how he relates to a merciless realistic fact like death can be more important for him than the fact of death itself. Freedom is most dramatically illustrated in the “heroic” actions, like Socrates’ decision to drink the hemlock (poison) rather than compromising or renouncing his values and principles; but even more significant is the undramatic, steady day-to-day exercise of freedom on the part of any person developing toward psychological integration and wholeness in a conformist society like ours which is plagued by insecurities and mental illnesses.
**Freedom is not just the matter of saying “Yes” or “No” to a specific decision: it is the power to mold and create ourselves. Freedom is the capacity, to use Nietzsche’s phrase, “to become what we truly are.**
*Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself*
Freedom does not come automatically; it is achieved. And it is not gained at a single bound; it must be achieved each day. As Goethe forcefully expresses the ultimate lesson learned by Faust:
**Yes! to this thought I hold with firm persistence;**
**The last result of wisdom stamps it true:**
**He only earns his freedom and existence**
**Who daily conquers them anew.**
*Johann Von Goethe, Faust*
The basic step in achieving inward freedom is “choosing one’s self.” This strange-sounding phrase of Kierkegaard’s means to affirm one’s responsibility for one’s self and one’s existence, or as Rollo May explains.
**It is the attitude which is opposite to blind momentum or routine existence; it is an attitude of aliveness and decisiveness; it means that one recognizes that he exists in his particular spot in the universe, and he accepts the responsibility for this existence. This is what Nietzsche meant by the “will to live”—not simply the instinct for self-preservation, but the will to accept the fact that one is one’s self, and to accept responsibility for fulfilling one’s own destiny, which in turn implies accepting the fact that one must make his basic choices himself.**
*Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself*
We can see more clearly what choosing one’s self and one’s existence means by looking at the opposite—choosing not to exist, that is to commit suicide.
**To decide whether life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy. Everything else…is child’s play; we must first of all answer the question.**
*Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus*
The significance of suicide lies not in the fact that people actually kill themselves. It is indeed a rare occurrence except among psychotics. But psychologically, the thought of suicide has a much wider meaning. There is such a thing as psychological suicide in which one does not take his own life by a given act, but dies because he has chosen—perhaps without being entirely aware of it—not to live. The psychologist Viktor Frankl who spent time in a Nazi concentration camp echoes the same observations. Frankl went so far as to say that for him and his fellow prisoners, this choice was the difference between life and death. Without a purpose or a “future goal” to look forward to, prisoners found it very difficult to endure the uncertainty and brutal conditions of camp life. Frankl notes that many purposeless individuals surrendered to what he called “give-up-itis”. One morning, they simply refused to get up, and as he wrote:
**“At that moment we knew that for the next forty-eight hours or so we would watch them dying.”**
*Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning*
Of course we do not know the inner psychological processes in the fact that a person, apparently with some strength left, seems to give up and die; but it is a fair guess that absence of meaning, of purpose or some inner tendency not to choose to live is in operation.
These ways of choosing not to live show how crucial it can be to choose to live. It is doubtful whether anyone really begins to live, that is, to affirm and choose his own existence, until he has frankly confronted the terrifying fact that he could wipe out his existence but chooses not to.
Since one is free to die, he is free also to live. He no longer exists as an accidental result of his parents having conceived him, of his growing up and living as an infinitesimal item on the treadmill of cause-and-effect, marrying, having children, growing old and dying.
**Since one could have chosen to die but chose not to, every act thereafter has to some extent been made possible because of that choice. Every act then has its special element of freedom.**
*Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself*
People often actually go through the experience of committing psychological suicide in some sector of their lives. We shall present two illustrations which we hope will make the basic point clear.
A woman believes she cannot live unless a certain man loves her. When he abandon her or choose someone else, she contemplates suicide. In the course of her meditating on the idea for some days, she fantasies, “Well, assume I did do it.” But then she suddenly thinks, “After I’ve done it, it would still be good to be alive in other ways—the sun still shines, water is still cool to the body, food still delicious, one can still make things, one has many new things to try, to do, to see ” and the suggestion creeps in that there may still be other people to love. So she decides to live. Assuming the decision is made for positive reasons rather than just the fear of dying or inertia, the conflict may actually have given her some new freedom. It is as though the part of her which clung to the man did commit suicide, and as a result she can begin life anew.
Or a young man feels he can never be happy unless he gains some fame. He begins to realize that he is competent and valuable, let us say as an assistant professor; but the higher he gets on the ladder the clearer he sees that there are always persons above him, that *“many are called but few are chosen,”* that very few people gain fame anyway, and that he may end up just a good and competent teacher. He might then feel that he would be as insignificant as a grain of sand, his life meaningless, and he might as well not be alive. The idea of suicide creeps into his mind in his most low-spirited moods. Sooner or later he, too, thinks, “All right, assume I’ve done it—what then?” And it suddenly dawns on him that, if he came back after the suicide, there would be a lot left in life even if one were not famous. He then chooses to go on living, as it were, without the demand for fame. It is as though the part of him which could not live without fame does commit suicide.
And in killing the demand for fame, he may also realize as a byproduct that the things which yield lasting joy and inner security have very little to do with the external and fickle standards of public opinion anyway. And finally, as a result of the partial suicide, he may clarify his own goals and arrive at more of a feeling for the joy which comes from fulfilling his own potentialities, from finding and teaching the truth as he sees it and adding his own unique contribution arising from his own integrity rather than the servitude to fame.
The actual process of these partial psychological suicides is much more complex than these illustrations imply. Actually some people—perhaps most people—move in the opposite direction when they have to renounce a demand: they retreat, constrict their lives and become less free, but there is a positive aspect to partial suicide, and that the dying of one attitude or need may be the other side of the birth of something new (which is a law of growth in nature not at all limited to human beings). One can choose to kill a neurotic strategy, a dependency, a clinging, and then find that he can choose to live as a freer self. The woman in our example would no doubt find with clearer insight that her so-called love for the man for whom she would have committed suicide was really not love at all, but clinging parasitism, fear of the unknown, of being alone balanced by desire to have power and control over the man (make the future predictable). A “dying” to part of one’s self is often followed by a heightened awareness of life, a heightened sense of possibility.
When one has consciously chosen to live, two other things happen. First, his ***responsibility*** for himself takes on a new meaning. He accepts responsibility for his own life, not as something which he has been forced to carry, a burden forced upon him: but as a something he has chosen himself. For this person, himself, now exists as a result of a decision he himself has made. To be sure, any thinking person realizes in theory that freedom and responsibility go together: if one is not free, one is an automaton and there is obviously no such thing as responsibility, and if one cannot be responsible for himself, he can’t be trusted with freedom. But when one has “chosen himself,” this partnership of freedom and responsibility becomes more than a nice idea: he experiences it on his own pulse; in his choosing himself, he becomes aware that he has chosen personal freedom and responsibility for himself and not for sake of anything exterior.
The other thing which happens is that discipline from the outside is changed into ***self-discipline.*** He accepts discipline not because it is commanded—for who can command someone who has been free to take his own life?—but because he has chosen with greater freedom what he wants to do with his own life, and discipline is necessary for the sake of the values he wishes to achieve. This self discipline can be given fancy names—Nietzsche called it “loving one’s fate” and Spinoza spoke of obedience to the laws of life. it is a lesson everyone progressively learns in his struggle toward maturity and autonomy.
**Freedom is shown in according one’s life with realities—realities as simple as the needs for rest and food, or as ultimate as death. Freedom is involved when we accept the realities not by blind necessity but by choice. This means that the acceptance of limitations need not at all be a “giving up,” but can and should be a constructive act of freedom; and it may well be that such a choice will have more creative results for the person than if he had not had to struggle.**
*Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself*
It is usually assumed that freedom is intrinsically desirable, but quite frequently individuals are apprehensive about freedom, and in the words of Erich Fromm, can even develop a “fear of freedom”.
**Can freedom become a burden, too heavy for man to bear, something he tries to escape from?**
*Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom*
If psychological freedom entails the ability to envisage constructive ways to change our life and to then, act upon these possibilities, why should we fear this? In our next article we shall address this question and try to understand why so many people, especially in our times, seems more than happy to give away their freedom, what are the psychological processes and the mechanisms behind such an act.
Human Consciousness and Freedom: The Antidote to a Constricted Life
**Freedom is…the air we cannot do without, that we breathe without even noticing it until the time comes when, deprived of it, we feel that we are dying.**
*Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death*
It is a startling fact that throughout history freedom has been considered so precious that some individuals have preferred death to a life in which it is absent.
**Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery…give me liberty or give me death!**
*Patrick Henry*
Rollo May, the father of existential psychology noted that, just like Plans grow toward the sun, human beings grow toward freedom:
**Human being’s development is a continuum of differentiation from the “mass” toward freedom as an individual.**
*Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself*
Here Rollo was referring to the fact that a person is originally a unity with the mother as a foetus in the womb, where it is fed automatically through the umbilical cord without any choice by mother or baby. When it is born and the physical umbilical cord is cut, it has become a physical individual, and feeding after that involves some conscious choice on the part of both parties—the infant can raise a howl in demand for food, and the mother can say Yes or No. But the infant still is almost completely dependent on the parents, particularly the mother, who nurses him. His becoming an individual continues through an infinite number of steps—the emergence of consciousness of self with the ability to self-differentiate from the others , the movement out from the parental house when he goes to school, the maturation into a sexual individual at puberty, the struggles of going out on his own to college and in making vocational choices, the assuming of responsibility for a new family in marriage, and so on. All through life a person is engaged in this continuum of differentiation of himself from the whole, followed by steps toward new integration. or as Rollo explains:
***Indeed, all evolution can be described as the process of differentiation of the part from the whole, the individual from the mass, with the parts then relating to each other on a higher level. Strictly speaking, the process of being born from the womb, cutting free from the mass, replacing dependency with choice, is involved in every decision of one’s life, and even is the issue facing one on his deathbed. For what is the capacity to die courageously except the ultimate step in the continuum of learning to be on one’s own, to leave the whole? Thus every person’s life could be portrayed by a graph of differentiation—how far has he freed himself from automatic dependencies, become an individual, able then to relate to his fellows on the new level of self-chosen love, responsibility and creative work?***
*Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself*
In this 2-part article we will provide an overview of on freedom, more precisely the psychological one . In this first article we are going to explore what freedom is to a person and what happen if it is taken away from him. In part 2 we will discuss how Rollo proposed choosing one's self as a basic step in achieving freedom and a fulfilled life.
1. Hatred and Resentment as the Price of Denied Freedom
WHAT would happen to a person if his freedom were entirely and literally taken away? Often the person who has had to surrender much of his freedom, usually in his childhood when he could do nothing about it, and to give up some of his right and room to exist as a human being, may seem on the surface to have accepted the situation and “adjusted to” the surrender. But we do not need to penetrate far under the surface to discover that something else has come in to fill the vacuum—namely hatred and resentment of those who have forced him to give up his freedom. And usually this burning hatred is in direct proportion to the degree in which the person’s right to exist as a human being has been taken away from him. To be sure the hatred is repressed; for the slave is not permitted to express hating thoughts toward the masters; but it is there nonetheless, and may come out.
**Indeed it is not possible for a human being to give up his freedom without something coming in to restore the inner balance—something arising from inner freedom when his outer freedom is denied—and this something is hatred for his conqueror.**
*Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself*
Hating or resenting is often the person’s only way to keep from committing psychological or spiritual suicide. It has the function of preserving some dignity, some feeling of his own identity, as though the person—or persons, in the case of nations—were to be saying silently to their conquerors, “You have conquered me, but I reserve the right to hate you.”
Another proof of the fact that if people surrender their freedom they must hate is seen in fact that totalitarian governments must provide for their people some object for the hatred which is generated by the government’s having taken away their freedom. The Jews were made the scapegoat in Hitler’s Germany, Stalinism had to turn the hate existing among the Russian people against the “warmongering” Western countries. Western countries had to divert the resentment of its citizens toward “communists”, “China” and innocent people labeled as “terrorists” because they have different set of beliefs.
As shown so vividly in the novel 1984, if a government sets out to take away people’s freedom, it must channel their hatred and direct it toward outside groups— otherwise the people would revolt, or go into a collective psychosis, or become psychologically “dead” and inert, no good as people or as a working force.
However in conventional circles in our day one is not supposed to admit one’s hatred, just as decades ago sexual impulses were not to be admitted. These emotions, while they could be overlooked as occasional lapses, did not fit the ideal picture of the civilized, self-controlled, well behaved, well adjusted modern citizen.
As a consequence, hatred and resentment were generally repressed. Now it is a well-known psychological tendency that when we repress one attitude or emotion, we often counterbalance it by acting or assuming an attitude on the surface which is just the opposite. You may, for example, often find yourself acting especially politely toward the person you dislike. If you are relatively free from anxiety But if you are a less secure person who has had to confront more difficult problems in early development, you may try to persuade yourself that you “love” this very person you hate.
**It is not unusual that a person who is excessively dependent upon a dominating mother or father or other authority, for example, will act toward the other as though he “loved” them to cover up his hatred, but one does not get rid of hatred and resentment this way; one generally masks and displaces the emotions on other people, or turns them inward in self-hate**.
*Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself*
Of course hatred or resentment in themselves are not good things, and the mark of the healthy person is not how much he hates. Nor that the goal of development is that everyone hate his parents or those in authority. Hatred and resentment are destructive emotions, and the *mark of maturity is to transform them into constructive emotions*. But the fact that the human being will destroy something—generally in the long run himself—rather than surrender his freedom proves how important freedom is to him.
Furthermore, if we do not confront our hatred and resentment openly, they will tend sooner or later to turn into the one affect which never does anyone any good, namely self-pity. Self-pity is the “preserved” form of hatred and resentment. One can then “nurse” his hatred, and retain his psychological balance by means of feeling sorry for himself, comforting himself with the thought of what a tough life has been his, how much he has had to suffer—and refrain from doing anything about it.
Hatred and resentment should be used as motivations to re-establish one’s genuine freedom: one will not transform those destructive emotions into constructive ones until he does this. And the first step is to know whom or what one hates. To take, for an example, people under dictatorial government, the first step in their revolt to regain freedom would be their shifting back their hatred to the dictatorial powers themselves.
Hatred and resentment temporarily preserve the person’s inner freedom, but sooner or later he must use the hatred to establish his freedom and dignity in reality, else his hatred will destroy himself. The aim, as one person put it in a poem, is “To hate in order to win the new.”
2. What Freedom Is Not
We can understand more clearly what freedom is if we first look at what it is not. Freedom is not rebellion. Rebellion is a normal move toward freedom: it occurs to some extent when the little child is trying to exercise his muscles of independence through the power to say “No”; it occurs more clearly when the adolescent is trying to become independent of parents. In adolescence (as possibly in other stages too) the strength of the rebelliousness against what the parents stand for is often excessive because the young person is fighting his own anxiety at stepping out into the world. When parents say “Don’t” he often must scream defiance at them, because that “don’t” is exactly what he feels the lower side of himself is saying, the side of himself which is tempted to take refuge behind the walls of parental protection.
***Rebellion is often confused with freedom itself. It becomes a false replacement because it gives the rebel a delusive sense of being really independent. The rebel forgets that rebellion always presupposes an outside structure—of rules, laws, expectations—against which one is rebelling; and one’s security, sense of freedom and strength are dependent actually on this external structure.***
*Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself*
AS Rollo mentioned this sense of freedom is “borrowed” and can be taken away, like when parents say “YES” and suddenly there are no set standards to rebel against, one gets no power from rebelling but one is not free yet for he/she still dependent on parents.
Since the rebel gets his sense of direction and vitality from attacking the existing standards, he does not have to develop standards of his own. Rebellion acts as a substitute for the more difficult process of struggling through to one’s own autonomy, to new beliefs, to the state where one can lay new foundations on which to build.
3. Freedom and Self Awareness
Some years ago a psychologist brought a baby chimpanzee, the same age as his infant son. In order to do an experiment, he raised the baby chimp and baby human being in his household together. For the first few months they developed at very much the same speed, playing together and showing very little difference. But after a dozen months or so, a change began to occur in the development of the little human baby, and from then on there was a great difference between him and the chimp. This is what we would expect. For there is very little difference between the human being and any mammal baby the first months their life. But around the age of two, more or less, there appears in the human being the most radical and important emergence so far in evolution, namely his consciousness of himself. He begins to be aware of himself as an “I.” As the foetus in the womb, the infant has been part of the “original we” with its mother, and it continues as part of the psychological “we” in early infancy. But now the little child—for the first time —becomes aware of his freedom. He senses his freedom, within the context of the relationship with his father and mother. He experiences himself as an identity who is separated from his parents and can stand against them if need be. This remarkable emergence is the birth of the human animal into a person.
Freedom is the goal of personality development; The distinctive characteristic of the human being, in contrast to the merely vegetative or the merely animal, lies in the range of human possibility and in our capacity for self-awareness of possibility. Kierkegaard sees man as the creature who is continually attracted by possibility, who conceives of possibility, visualizes it, and by creative activity carries it into reality, this possibility is human freedom.
Freedom therefore is person’s capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves. Freedom is the other side of consciousness of self: if we were not able to be aware of ourselves, we would be pushed along by instinct or the automatic march of history. But by our power to be conscious of ourselves, we can call to mind how we acted yesterday or last month, and by learning from these actions we can influence, even if ever so little, how we act today. And we can imagine some situation tomorrow and by turning over in fantasy different ways of acting, we can pick the one which will do best for us.
***Consciousness of self gives us the power to stand outside the rigid chain of 'trigger and response', to pause, and to cast some decision about what the response will be. That consciousness of self and freedom go together is shown in the fact that the less self-awareness a person has, the more he is unfree. That is to say, the more he is controlled by inhibitions, repressions, childhood conditionings, manipulations —which he isn't conscious of but which still drive him unconsciously— the more he is pushed by forces over which he has no control.***
*Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself*
When persons first go for psychotherapeutic help, for example, they generally complain that they are “driven” in any number of ways: they have sudden anxieties or fears or are blocked in studying or working without any appropriate reason. They are unfree —that is, bound and pushed by unconscious forces.
As the person gains more consciousness of self, his range of choice and his freedom proportionately increase. Freedom is cumulative; one choice made with an element of freedom makes greater freedom possible for the next choice. His emerging self-awareness goes hand in hand with his enlarging power to direct his own life.
We do not mean to imply that there are not an infinite number of deterministic influences in anyone’s life. Our bodies, by our economic situation, by the fact that we happened to be born into the twentieth century in this country or that, tendencies of which we are unconscious and so on, are all ways in which we are determined. But no matter how much one argues for the deterministic viewpoint, he still must grant that there is a margin in which the alive human being can be aware of what is determining him. And even if only in a very minute way to begin with, he can have some say in how he will react to the deterministic factors.
Freedom is thus shown in how we relate to the deterministic realities of life. If you set out to write a book, you run up against all kinds of frustrating realities in the laws of publishing and intellectual property, and in the necessity of language and its correct usage. It is essential that you know your material and accept its limits. But what you say in the book is uniquely yours. The content and the style in which you write your book are products of how you, with an element of freedom, decide to communicate your ideas.
The man who is devoted to freedom does not waste time fighting reality; instead, as Søren Kierkegaard remarked, he “glorifies reality.”
In the next article we will expand on Kierkegaard's idea and talk about the ***psychological suicide*** and how it can be used as a way to be a “Freer Self.”
@Life.Mind.Expanding
