IJSP Number 5, 2023

103 of difficulties or problems life usually so generously puts on our existential path. Consequently, social interest and involvement, although necessary and useful for personal development, is not a goal in itself but just a means to arrive to adulthood and maturity. As adults, let alone psychotherapists, we cannot remain hostages of petty socialisations or in the grips of social media, but we have to realise that those are just forms of a very complicated net of intricate interconnections nurtured by hard to escape dependencies. One should not surrender to such temptations even if they implicitly promise an existential short-cut by eluding our feelings of inferiority. The only mature approach to that existential problem is to confront it as such and not to run away from it in some easy and colourful social paradise. Such an escape is nothing more than an ephemeral surrogate to a very deep-seated human issue. From such a perspective, the inferiority feeling is just another existential and a rather noetic problem which cannot be addressed or resolved with the usual psychological tools. The greatest problem that humans usually have and accuse, is that they always try to solve them in frontal combat. But, as we all should know, we cannot avoid getting into problems because life itself is, per definitionem , problematic. To be, as the existentialists would say, “thrown into life” means to wake up and to co- participate in problematic situations. There are too many of us, too many desires, needs or wants, not to mention conflicting interests, which inevitably collide and get entangled in endless complications – which all are, just by themselves, a source of problems. But to embrace life – in contrast to be thrown into it – means a fully conscious approach, an ego-centred involvement that focuses mainly on getting better today what one has done littler or failed yesterday. By that we mean nothing more than a full focusing on our own development as the humanist psychology already mentioned and stressed out. In the same time, it means to redirect our energies and thoughts towards the future in order to (re)shape one’s own destiny. As Peter Watson stresses in his The Age of Nothing [19], the practical aspects of life are more important than its theoretical understanding or conceptual grounding. In other words, it is more important to live than to have some very sound theories or philosophies or ethical laws coming from some higher source. Given such a context, we could ask ourselves why films like Harry Potter , Star Wars , The Lord of the Rings , or Matrix were such a huge public success? It is true that they were very expensive films to make in the first place, and as a result they were, at least technically, very well realized. But that is only the surface or the outer layer of the fact that they were and still are attracting so many people. What is underneath all those technicalities or millions of dollars invested is one single theme, one that is common to all, namely: the search. Yes! Search, and by that we mean spiritual search or the adventure of self-discovery that propels the hero through a dynamic and fulfilling life. Those films, although they were seen by everyone, young and old, rich or poor, high-class or low-class, white-collar or blue- collar, are in essence anti-establishment – they confront, openly or on the subtler