If we are to achieve freedom, we must do so with daring and profundity that refuse to flinch at engaging our destiny.
— Rollo May
“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind,” Virginia Woolf once wrote in her book, A Room of One’s Own. And it’s this sense of psychological freedom that Woolf illustrates, freedom of being, which is becoming increasingly elusive in our fast-paced and fragmented world.
In his remarkable work Freedom and Destiny (1981), renowned existential psychologist Rollo May argues that freedom is in crisis in the modern world due mainly to our complete disregard for destiny, which he defines as the inevitable and unchangeable aspects of existence that shape and limit our lives—including death.
As Otto Rank once remarked: “...every human being is equally unfree, that is, we... create out of freedom, a prison.”
May argues that freedom, not in the political sense but rather the possibility of self-realization based on personal choice, consists of how we confront our “limits” and engage our “destiny in day-to-day living.”