Umwelt, Mitwelt, Eigenwelt
In 1958 Rollo May, Ernest Angel and Henri Ellenberger edited Existence, the book that introduced the European existential analysts to American readers. May wrote the second chapter himself, "Contributions of Existential Psychotherapy". Its fourth section is called "The Three Modes of World". The three German words in it now turn up on flashcards for personality theory exams.
The terms come from the existential analysts around Ludwig Binswanger. May's section is short, and most of it is about the second term.
The three terms
Umwelt means "world around". It is the biological world: needs, drives, sleep and waking, being born and dying. May calls it the "thrown world", the one each of us must in some way adjust to. Every organism has an Umwelt.
Mitwelt means "with-world". May defines it as the world of interrelationships with human beings.
Eigenwelt means "own world": a person's relationship to themselves. May says psychology had understood it least of the three.
The three are not levels or separate compartments of life. May calls them always interrelated. A person lives in all three at every moment.
That much fits on a card. What does not fit is the argument about the second term, which turns on one word.
Adjustment belongs to the weather
In the Umwelt, May writes, the categories of "adjustment" and "adaptation" are entirely accurate. I adapt to the cold, and I adjust to my body's need for sleep. The weather is not changed by my adjusting to it. Adjustment, he says, happens between two objects, or between a person and an object. One side bends and the other stays as it was.
Then he draws a contrast between animals and people. He borrows it from Howard Liddell, who studied sheep. For a sheep, the herd instinct consists of keeping the environment constant. Collie dogs and children, Liddell found, will do as well for the sheep as other sheep, provided the surroundings stay the same.
In a group of human beings, May goes on, something far more complex is going on. The meaning of the others in the group depends partly on how I relate to them. The meaning of the group for me depends in part on how I put myself into it. So Mitwelt is not "the influence of the group upon the individual", and it is not a collective mind. May puts it in one line: animals have an environment, human beings have a world.
Where the word changes
Here the section makes its move:
"But in Mitwelt, the categories of adjustment and adaptation are not accurate; the term 'relationship' offers the right category."
— Rollo May, "Contributions of Existential Psychotherapy", section IV, "The Three Modes of World", in Rollo May, Ernest Angel and Henri F. Ellenberger (eds.), Existence (New York: Basic Books, 1958), p. 62
The next sentence explains why. If I insist that another person adjust to me, May writes, I am not taking them as a person. I am taking them as an instrumentality. Adjustment turns the other into part of my environment. It makes them something I keep constant, the way the sheep keeps its surroundings constant.
Relationship works differently. May says it always involves mutual awareness. Two people who are aware of each other are already being changed by the meeting. Neither of them is the fixed point. Both sides move.
He carries the same logic one step further. Even if I adjust to myself, he says, I am using myself as an object. That sentence is the bridge to the Eigenwelt, the third mode.
The other direction
May's example looks at one direction: a person who demands that others adjust. The sentence can also be read the other way. That reading is an extension of the text, not May's own claim.
Some people spend years adjusting to someone close to them. They learn a partner's moods the way one learns a climate, and move around a parent's temper the way one moves around a wall. In the categories of this section, that is Umwelt vocabulary applied to Mitwelt. The other person is treated as weather, something given that does not respond. The one who adjusts is not in a relationship with them either. They are managing conditions.
That is why one word carries so much weight. "Adjustment" sounds reasonable. In the Umwelt it is. Moved into the world of other people, it quietly changes what those people are: someone you adjust to has become a condition.
The distinction also explains why May insists the three modes cannot be separated. Love, he writes, cannot be understood on a purely biological level. It depends on personal decision and commitment to the other person. A body in the Umwelt, another person in the Mitwelt and a self in the Eigenwelt all take part in the same act.
What the card leaves out
A flashcard that reads "Mitwelt: the social world" is not wrong. But it leaves out what May was arguing against. For him, reading Mitwelt as the group acting on the individual was already the mistake, because it treats other people as surroundings. The section exists to say that the world with others has its own category, and that the category is relationship.
May's earlier book on anxiety is covered on a separate page, The Meaning of Anxiety.
The section leaves a question that applies to anyone's life. Among the people closest to me, which ones do I adjust to, and which ones am I actually in a relationship with?
Epimelea is an app built around the existential school. The conversation carries over from one meeting to the next. The archive is encrypted on the device and belongs to the person who wrote it.
About the app: an AI therapist for long-term therapy
This page is about a school of psychotherapy. It is not medical advice and not emergency help. If you are in danger right now, contact your local emergency number, or find a helpline in your country at findahelpline.com.