Humans have an innate desire to seek pleasure, but they also have an equally strong aversion to pain. Freudian psychoanalysts describe this as the primary motivation behind human behavior. Yet Existentialists such as Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche argued that the pleasure/pain dichotomy was too simplistic and that reality is far greater than the simple choice between pleasure and pain. They instead focused on the individual choice between various actions that lead to either pleasure or pain.
One of the earliest to apply the principles of Existentialism to Psychoanalysis was the American psychologist Robert May, who was also greatly influenced by Abraham Maslow’s Humanistic Psychology. Anxiety, May suggested, is a normal part of life; so too are other forms of suffering, such as feeling misunderstood, experiencing loss, and being afraid. It is repressing these difficult emotions and experiences that lead to psychological problems, so we need not consider them abnormal, nor avoid them or wish them away. Rather, we can face them head-on, learn to live with and work through them because they contributed to personal growth. In his book, “The Courage to Create”, Jungian analyst David Shapiro suggests that those who suffer from anxiety might be able to find comfort in an old book called “Climbing the Mountain” by Jean Houston.
