On a gray morning in the mid-1960s, a middle-aged man sits on the edge of a hospital cot in a psychiatric research unit at the University of Pennsylvania. His shoulders are slumped, his bathrobe hangs loosely from his frame, and his eyes are fixed on the floor as if reading something written there that no one else can see. The psychiatrist across from him, a quiet, neatly dressed man with rimless glasses, asks a simple question: “What went through your mind just then?” The patient hesitates. He is used to doctors asking about his childhood, about his parents, about long-buried memories. No one has ever seemed much interested in the words running through his mind in the present moment.

Niklas S Osterman BHPRN, BSN, MA

Song: Nowhere else to be. Apple Music

In a small office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late 1950s, chalk dust hangs in the air like a thin fog. The blackboard that dominates one wall is layered with symbols and arrows, phrases crossed out and rewritten in a neat but relentless hand. A young professor, slight and dark-haired, stands back from the board and squints for a moment, taking in the forest of diagrams he has just drawn.

Niklas S Osterman BHPRN, BSN, MA

Song: Nowhere else to be. Apple Music

Vienna, late autumn 1945. In a city still smelling faintly of smoke and rubble, a thin man in a dark suit stands at the front of a small lecture hall. The windows behind him are patched with cardboard; outside, tramlines rattle past buildings with their insides exposed. Inside the room, students and war-weary adults sit shoulder to shoulder on mismatched chairs, coats still on, breath faint in the cold air. They have come to hear a psychiatrist who has just returned from the camps. His name is Viktor Emil Frankl. His cheeks are hollow, his hair close-cropped, his eyes too old for his forty years, but there is a steadiness in the way he grips the lectern, a stubborn vitality that contradicts the devastation etched into his face. He clears his throat, glances at the notes he has scrawled on yellowing paper, and begins to speak about something almost scandalous in the ruins of Europe: the possibility that life, even life marked by horror, can still be meaningful.

Anxiety, Freedom, and the Work of Being Human

New York City, late 1960s. On an upper floor of a modest Manhattan office building, a man in his late fifties sits across from a young advertising executive who cannot stop shaking his leg. Traffic murmurs far below; steam hisses in the radiators; the office is quiet enough that the ticking of a clock punctuates every silence. The patient has just finished describing a familiar, hollow ritual: wake before dawn, skim headlines, catch the train, sell images of products he doesn’t believe in, drink too much in the evening, lie awake wondering why he is so afraid when “nothing is really wrong.”

The therapist—broad-shouldered, with a heavy brow and searching eyes—does not immediately ask about childhood traumas or offer a diagnosis. Instead he leans forward and asks, almost conversationally, “What is it, exactly, that you are afraid will happen if you stop?” The question is simple, but the air changes. The young man hesitates. He is afraid, he realizes, of discovering that beneath the motion there is nothing solid, that without his job and the busyness and the noise he will be exposed as a fraud. The fear is not of losing money or status; it is of finding no answer to the question, “Who am I?” That, the therapist suggests, is not a problem to be medicated away. It is an existential anxiety—a signal that something essential in his way of living has become false.

This is the terrain in which Rollo

Niklas Osterman BHPRN, MA

Chicago, 1953. A cramped second-floor counseling room on Drexel Avenue, half a block from the University of Chicago campus, has become a sanctuary of quiet amid the bustling city. The afternoon sun filters through a narrow window, illuminating motes of dust that hang in the still air. Two people sit facing each other in plain wooden chairs – no couch, no desk between them, nothing to distract from the human encounter. On one chair, a young man in his twenties leans forward, elbows on his knees, head bowed. He struggles to find words, his voice low and taut with shame. He’s a war veteran turned student, and life off the battlefield has been bewildering; nights bring nightmares, days bring a sense of disconnection from everyone around him. On the other chair sits Carl Rogers, quietly attentive. Rogers’s posture is relaxed yet engaged, his hands loosely folded in his lap, his gaze warm and steady behind steel-rimmed glasses.

New York City, late 1941. Afternoon light slants across a nearly empty avenue as a small patriotic parade marches by. A handful of Boy Scouts in ill-fitting uniforms carry a faded American flag; behind them a few veterans step in time. A lone flute plays a tune, slightly off-key, its thin notes echoing between brick apartment buildings. On the sidewalk stands a man in a rumpled suit, motionless among the sparse onlookers. Abraham Maslow has stopped on his drive home, compelled by curiosity or perhaps by something deeper. He can hear the distant sound of a radio broadcasting news of troop movements and victory gardens – reminders of the global conflict that has touched every life.

Niklas Osterman BHPRN, MA

Minneapolis, 1943. In the dim light of a basement laboratory, eight wooden boxes line the wall, each with a single restless pigeon inside. In one box, a white-feathered pigeon turns a slow circle to the left, again and again, its head bobbing in a curious dance. In another, a bird keeps pecking at the empty air, as if an invisible seed floats just out of reach. The room is hushed except for the whir of a fan and the occasional metallic click of a feeder mechanism. Every fifteen seconds, click—a hopper swings out in one of the boxes, delivering a few grains of food. The pigeon that had been turning in circles rushes to the hopper and gobbles the reward.

Niklas Osterman BHPRN, MA

Identity, crisis, and the lifelong journey of becoming.

A fair-haired boy of about ten stands outside his school in Karlsruhe, Germany, clutching his satchel and fighting back tears. It is the early 1910s, and young Erik Homburger – not yet Erik Erikson – has just endured another confusing day of taunts. At his Jewish temple school, his classmates sneered that he looked too Aryan, calling him goy, an outsider, because of his blue eyes and blond hair. But in the neighborhood streets, other children chased and mocked him with anti-Semitic slurs, seeing only that he was being raised in a Jewish household. Erik doesn’t know where he belongs; he feels he doesn’t fully fit in either world. That evening, after dinner, he screws up the courage to ask the question that has been haunting him: “Mother, why am I so different?” His mother, Karla, pauses, then takes a deep breath. It is time to tell the truth she has hidden for so long.

Selenius Media & Niklas S Osterman