Free The Cry for Myth by Rollo May Page A

depend upon no one but ourselves. We are surrounded by potential enemies, which makes us feel we ought to consider wearing bulletproof vests and must never relax our guard. Indeed, one reads in the newspaper that a contemporary minister in Texas wears a bullet-proof vest during his sermons since he, standing alone in the pulpit, makes an easy target for an assassin’s bullet.
    Hence loneliness and the denial of it, or the escape from it , are such important myths in America . Children can escape it by watching TV, adolescents cover it up by constant partying and episodic sex, middle-aged people repress it by the marriage-divorce merry-go-round. Hence encounter groups are so important in America; anybody can announce a new “growth” group and persons will flock to it to be taught the new techniques of living and loving spontaneously, unaware of the contradiction in the very phrase “techniques of spontaneity.” For we were all brought up, so goes the myth, on the subconscious equivalents of Paradise at Plymouth Rock and tales of the magic success on the frontier, and we find nothing to take their place except repeating the old shibboleths.
    THE SEDUCTION OF THE NEW
    From the beginning we early Americans pushed westward, always discovering something new. We named our states New York, New Mexico. The myth of the new was always beckoning to us. God must favor us, we believed, for every day new discoveries greeted our hunters and frontiersmen, our trappers and our miners; a lush countryside invited us in every direction. Ore was later to be discovered in the mountains, the forests on the hills kept a steady stream of the riches of lumber pouring upon us—all climaxed by the literal discovery of gold in California in 1849. No wonder in America we love any new technique; one kind of computer is pushed off the market by the invention of a new one; any new brand of aspirin or vitamin is grabbed up with insatiable appetite. The proliferation of cults and gurus, which occurs especially in our west, is the expression of new religions, new ways of life, new heavens, and new techniques for reaching these heavens, all summed up in the phrase “New Age.”
    This helps explain why the different kinds of psychotherapytook off like rockets in this New World in contrast to the merely studied interest they received in Europe, although every early form of therapy—Freudian, Adlerian, Jungian, Rankian, Reichian—had been discovered in Europe. The representatives of new forms of therapy developed by Homey, Fromm, Alexander, Fromm-Reichmann, and others also came literally to these shores as emissaries from Europe. How we lapped up these new approaches to therapy! On all sides, we wanted the new .
    In the field of therapy this became the myth of the changing self: we in America want to find a new self, a new set of expectations. The most important moral implication of this myth is that the typical American does not come to therapy to be “cured” but rather to find a new life, to change into a different way of living.
    Change is a great word in America; we not only believe in it, we worship it. We see it all about us, and we shall see it emblazoned in Gatsby’s complete faith in his capacity to change his accent, his name, indeed to invent himself. De Tocqueville saw this clearly:
    The American has no time to tie himself to anything, he grows accustomed only to change, and ends by regarding it as the natural state of man. He feels the need of it, more, he loves it; for the instability, instead of meaning disaster to him, seems to give birth only to miracles all about him.
    Such change, whether it is judged as Providence or Progress, is always assumed to be good in America. In politics, which is a pattern of myths par excellence, the myth of the new is of great importance— vide the New Deal, the New Frontier, new blood, new visions. No one in this country runs on the platform of preserving the old frontiers. We recall that Kennedy’s