"Psychology and human doubt", a book by a famous American psychologist dr Rolo Table, a representative of the "existentialist" school of psychotherapy, is a book of essays based on human experiences, which the author brought closer to the reader through rhetorical means, thereby facilitating the understanding of the matter in question. First of all, this book broadens our view of the possibility of creative human development, especially in situations that we often consider unfavorable for any real progress of man as an imperfect being. On such occasions, a person even involuntarily reveals his own, sometimes astonishingly strong, striving towards universal creativity. Mej is the author of the well-known, very popular book "Love and Will" in the world of the study of psychology as an important science, which is why, in addition to existentialist philosophy, this author is also associated with humanistic psychology. However, even though Viktor Frankl at one time he was a great proponent of existential psychotherapy, this scientist always denied his belonging to any and every school, not even existentialist, and this was only conditionally said for the sake of easier understanding of the work that Rolo May was engaged in as a prominent psychologist.
The essays in "Psychology and Human Doubt" in this book, although they originate from a great diversity and a great range of different human experiences, are somehow connected by a common theme. This is primarily due to the fact that in them the author, in his own way, indicates the importance of mental elaboration of certain segments of psychological anxiety in which a person often finds himself, whether he likes it or not.
In this book, the word "doubt" does not only refer to skepticism and suspicion of an insufficiently resolved or even difficult-to-solve problem, it does not only refer to anxiety and indecision between two easily predictable or even clearly discernible (im)possibility, but much more widely; so much wider that this question, this concept, is almost impossible to completely cover with an ordinary book definition, no matter how extensive and strong it is, so probably that is why the author himself says that doubt it often results in a person's perception of himself as both an object and a subject. This way of perceiving oneself in a way seems quite irrational, but it should only be so in an extremely subjective sense, when one usually thinks of concepts such as: subjective and objective. However, if one considers that doubt springs from great diversity, that is, as the author observes: from the great range and richness of human experience, whose endless spectrum is manifested, among other things, in man's capacity for astonishing reasonableness on the one hand and the great influence of his irrational behavior on the other, then one can acquire and a completely different impression. This is probably why it is said in this book that it is impossible to claim that someone is both an object and a subject at the same time, because human consciousness oscillates between these two concepts, and it is simply impossible to be one and the other at the same time.
In the context of this problem, it is also stated Dekartovo the well-known, but still very interesting principle that reads: "I think, therefore I exist" by which Descartes, the "father of modern philosophy" as some researchers of this matter call him, presented the individual mind as the basis of the psychological identity of man. Descartes distinguished the mind and the process of thinking from the body, which became the subject of many doubts and doubts in later studies and elaborations of this term. This division implied at the same time the conclusion that the human body can be monitored and regulated using physical, actually mechanical and mathematical principles and laws. One of the important steps in this sense was made by Spinoza in the seventeenth century when he explained his opinion that this feeling, which he viewed as a subjective problem, can be overcome by the correct use of one's own mind. Spinoza's interpretation, that is, his opinion on overcoming fear, for example, was in line with his own understanding that such feelings are not suppressed but replaced by another, opposite and stronger feeling.
Considering the overall social, especially cultural conditions that characterized the era in which Spinoza lived, his faith in the power of individual reason, to a considerable extent, served to solve in a valid way some of the then burning problems in that field of science.
In this book, it is not only about the human doubt of that time, about the anxiety that tired the psychologists and other scientists of that time, but the author elaborates with great understanding other important questions and problems and even those that arise from them and exist that even in a later period they last. So, we also talk about the anxiety of the later era, as well as its relationship with the present and very current problems, because, observed throughout the long history of our civilization, each era had, although similar in nature, yet quite different, specific burdens that people had to deal with. had to fight. The author presents the hypothesis that an individual, when unconscious assumptions about values are generally accepted in society, can face dangers based on these assumptions. That he then reacts to danger with fear, not anxiety.
Role Mej (Rollo Reece May), an influential American psychologist, was born in 1909 in Ohio. As a child, he had a busy and difficult life. After his parents' divorce, his sister was diagnosed with schizophrenia. As he was the eldest of six children, from an early age he felt a great responsibility towards his brothers and sisters, including a sick sister he had to take care of, which is probably why his interest was constantly directed towards the study of psychological problems of man.
As a young man, he first went to Michigan and began to study English there, but because of his involvement in a radical student magazine, he was expelled from the University. However, May eventually graduates from the English language studies she started, albeit at a different faculty. During the later years, he collaborated with the famous Austrian psychologist, Alfredom Adlerom, who was a doctor by training. Although he was much older than May, for almost four decades, these two scientists had a successful scientific collaboration, so they exchanged both ideas and scientific opinions.
Rollo May was a minister for a short time after returning to the United States of America, but soon left that position. He was more interested in studying psychology, in which he later graduated. At the age of thirty-three, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, so he spent eighteen months in the hospital. He spent the last years of his life in San Francisco and died in 1994, not from tuberculosis but from heart failure.
Rolo May is sometimes associated with humanists, such as Abraham Maslov although Mej explores awareness of the serious dimensions of human life somewhat more deeply than Maslov. He had a great influence on Mej Erich Fromm, who, among other things, studied free will and self-expression.
To a considerable extent, May was also a critic of modern psychology because he believed that psychotherapists had moved too far from psychology at the end of the 20th century. Jung, Freud and their psychoanalytic thinking. Instead, they started to create their own methods of treatment, causing a kind of crisis in the world of psychotherapy, because viewed as a whole - psychology is the science of the soul. The science of that almost completely unknown/elusive part of the human being. Although there is a belief that it is she, the soul, that makes the body alive, makes it a man, because a body without a soul is not a man but a corpse, the real truth about the soul of man is hidden by a thick curtain of ignorance. This is why psychotherapy, the healing of the soul, is such an uncertain and complex business. Many researchers believe that the soul is not matter, so the question: to what extent is it possible to treat it with matter - with various drugs and the like, seems quite meaningful.
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