ABSTRACT
Western literature and history are full of stories of individuals searching for self-fulfillment. In the 1960s the search for self-fulfillment was largely confined to young Americans on the nation’s campuses, and was masked by the political protests against the war in Southeast Asia. The life experiments of self-fulfillment seekers often collide violently with traditional rules, creating a national battle of moral norms. When the values they cherish are challenged, people react passionately. Some Americans have come to hate the new morality associated with the search for self-fulfillment. Seekers of self-fulfillment invest the best of their creativity in inventing expressive styles of living. The predicaments of self-fulfillment seekers arise from the defective strategies they deploy to achieve the ambitious goals. Cross-section studies of Americans show unmistakably that the search for self-fulfillment is instead an outpouring of popular sentiment and experimentation, an authentic grass-roots phenomenon involving, in one way or another, perhaps as many as 80 percent of all adult Americans.
