"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."
"Tenderness emerges from the fact that the two persons, longing, as all
individuals do, to overcome the separateness and isolation to which we
are all heir because we are individuals, can participate in a
relationship that, for the moment, is not of two isolated selves but a
union"
"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."
"To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive
- to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment,
and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before."
the persons who get to the consulting rooms of psychotherapists and
psychoanalysts are not a cross-section of the population. By and large
they are the ones for whom the conventional pretenses and defenses of
the society no longer work. Very often they are the more sensitive and
gifted members of the society; they need to get help, broadly speaking,
because they are less successful at rationalizing than the
“well-adjusted” citizen who is able for the time being to cover up his
underlying conflicts."
