Discussion

In his paper Dr. De Rosis makes a significant contribution to our further understanding Being. He documents and describes the all important exchange between the individual and his environment. This vital transaction is most delicate and is invariably laden with enriching harmonious themes and depleting chaotic cacophony. People create culture and culture creates people. Horney recognized the constriction and impoverishment inherent in any unidimensional biological approach to understanding human existence. She knew that man and culture are inseparable and that all cultures and environments contain both destructive and constructive elements. But man struggles to make culture and through this struggle he defines himself as part of the human matrix. He struggles to absorb from culture, and through this struggle his potential for individuality is activated and becomes kinetic. This struggle is Being and this struggle is the human process. The process is the product. It can never be defined. It can only be described. But it can only be described incompletely, because it is ever evolving and changing. Yes, man changes and is ever capable of changing. Through his paper, Dr. De Rosis exemplifies a most creative aspect of the struggle: the process of observing, investigating and describing. Indeed, the act of describing is itself human struggle, in some of its most frustrating, exhilarating, painful, frightening, courageous and satisfying moments. If we want to understand further, we must struggle to be respectful and accepting of all aspects of struggle. Moral equivication and judgment, rigid adherence to bases of fixed rationale and logic will surely destroy our abilities to observe and yet, these too are also part of the struggle. The desire for non-struggle is a desire for utter stultification, utter solution and death.

Dr. De Rosis conceives of the “invented self” — the invented self is a protective device people use to buffer environments antithetical to their well bein