2.5. From self-fulfillment to the inferiority complex

The funny, and at the same time sad, thing is that all of this care in seeking one’s self-fulfillment does not reach fulfillment and ends up producing the opposite sensation: that of never being able to acquire definitive certainty of one’s own positivity, like one who will continually drink and has the impression he is dying of thirst.  And so, the tension for one’s self-fulfillment produces or risks producing a sense of inferiority, and an inferiority complex.

A little healthy psychology is enough to understand why: the human being will never find himself by looking for himself too much; nor will he ever satisfy his need for respect by making it his immediate and priority purpose in his actions, much less by duping himself into thinking that it is from the outside, from the results of his service or by promotions received in his work that he’ll find the solution to an interior problem, like that of his identity and its fulfillment. And all the more if the human being in question has chosen to dedicate himself to the God of Jesus Christ, in the image of him who did not seek himself or his glory, but the salvation of people and the Father’s glory, fulfilling both (and fulfilling himself) when he was raised up from the earth on that cross which is the mysterious apex of every genuine self-fulfillment!

Let’s say that the model of self-fulfillment certainly did not  become “extinct” with the period immediately following Vatican II, but is still now in…good health.  And it is important, even, to stress that it has significant power of seductive attraction, supported and promoted as it is by a culture that pushes increasingly in the direction of solipsist subjectivism, as a temptation that spares no one and, like all genuine temptations, is treacherous and misleading, and does not let itself be recognized as such… Are personal talents not perhaps a gift of God to be put to use? In fact, the boundary between the use of personal gifts for God’s reign and a narcissistic appropriation of them is very subtle.  The misunderstanding of self-fulfillment still continues, therefore, to confuse mind and heart of one called to consecrate himself to God, like a road with no exit or an interrupted path. It is fundamental that during the time of initial formation there be a clarification about a sense of identity and the indication of a path that leads to a certainty of a substantially and stably positive identity. ²