Free The Cry for Myth by Rollo May

sorts. This perpetual joining, I propose, is a reaction-formation, a device for covering up the competitiveness and the loneliness underneath .
    Some people come for therapy simply because they are unbearably lonely. We therapists are now seeing more and more patients who seek help because they are driven to find someone who will listen to them with no stake in it except to wish them well. Again like Deborah in Chapter 1 , in our day of instantaneous communication by electronics and satellites, more patients than ever have never experienced anyone who would genuinely listen with only his or her welfare in mind. One joins Lennon and McCartney in their Beatles’ song: “All the lonely people—where do they all come from?”
    The loneliness goes deeply into our American mythology. On the turnpikes in New York or Houston or Los Angeles, many drivers look as though pursued by an inner loneliness hurrying some place but never knowing where that place is. Their expressions have a forlorn quality as though they had lostsomething—or rather as though they were lost. Or they act as though they were pursued by guilt, or by what memories of violence, or by what frantic hope? What is lacking in people’s attitude in our day is a sense of peace—quiet, deep, relaxed peace.
    The loneliness is one expression of our rootlessness. * Many people in our day, separated from tradition and often cast out by society, are alone with no myths to guide them, no unquestioned rites to welcome them into community, no sacraments to initiate them into the holy—and so there is rarely anything holy. The loneliness of mythlessness is the deepest and least assuageable of all . Unrelated to the past, unconnected with the future, we hang as if in mid-air. We are like the shades Odysseus meets in the underworld, crying for news about the people up in the world but unable themselves to feel anything.
    Part of the cause of this loneliness is our lack of historical roots in America and our continual moving, so that we rarely give ourselves time to put down roots. When we are pressed, we pack up and take the plane or car or train to some other place. De Tocqueville records his surprise that the American, on building a house in which one naturally expects him to live and to enjoy, no sooner gets the roof on it than he puts it up for sale and is off to some new place.
    We lack the sense of history that Europeans feel. On walking out of doors, a French villager immediately sees a cathedral which connects him with history of centuries ago; his rooted ness is obvious in his eyes and mood, and it is a real assuagement of loneliness. Whether he ever goes to the church orbelieves what its representatives teach is irrelevant, the great edifice stands there connecting him with myths of centuries of the past. But in America we pride ourselves on building skyscrapers to tear down in a hundred years or less. While the European moves mostly in time , the American moves mainly in space .
    VIOLENCE AND LONELINESS
    The loneliness is expressed in our being a violent people at the same time as we are very democratic. The violence in America, even in our twentieth century, is easy to see but hard to admit and explain. With our “Saturday night specials” we murder fifty times as many of our fellow countrymen as the Swedes or the British; indeed, our homicide rate is much greater than any civilized nation outside of Central America. We “nice” Americans regularly identify with the pioneers who massacred Indians according to the will of God under a new name, manifest destiny.
    We make heroes out of gangsters. In the movies we identify with the criminal; during Prohibition, Dillinger, public enemy number one, was a kind of hero, and other gangsters are heroic now as they are played by Clint Eastwood. The overwhelming violence on the television screen has become hackneyed, but whether or not it breeds violence in young viewers, it certainly ministers to the feeling that we can