Introduction

The theme of motivation is one of the basic notions of the psychology of personality: it is very important to human behavior in general, but especially when it is a question of human beings choosing a way of life.

We are well aware that conflicts of psychological and moral order arise and affect people in today’s society. They often produce in people a lack of psychological balance and an obstacle to adapting to circumstances and situations. Young generations, bombarded as they are continually by all sorts of proposals, look for answers to every stimulus that they receive especially from the media.

We in the Consolata Missionaries want to form mature and serene men who will have the capacity of becoming points of reference for today’s world. Consequently, every missionary priest and brother must be a balanced person, a person sufficiently integrated who possesses motivations that are strong enough to offer to others the religious and moral values that society often discards or at least questions.

A priestly and religious vocation is a supernatural gift. As such, it cannot be the object of any psychological examination. But, at the same time, it manifests itself through certain signs, such as the good intention and the good talents of the individual – which are gifts from God. These gifts can be the object of human research. When considered in their supernatural dimension, human actions are realities that cannot be examined in their totality, but they can be studied by looking at the ways they manifest themselves.

Many people in our days flee from the vocational commitments that they had assumed. At the root of such attitudes we can discover a disease of motivational character. Their lack of ease in the vocation springs from the weakness of the motivations that should give deep meaning to their choice.

The Church, as well as our Institute, worry about the candidates that knock at their doors; they want them to become transparent, especially in the area of their motivations. Present times are considered “weak thinking times” on account of the present social and cultural conditions , and in a special way because of the psychological fragility of the younger generations. Consequently, the motivations of the candidates to priestly and religious life must be studied in a competent and attentive way.

The examination of a vocation cannot be based only on the bliss of, or the attraction to, religious life or the priesthood, but on the real capacity the individual has of accepting the obligations that are inherent to such states of life without sudden deviations. Quite some time ago, Fr. A. Plé called attention to the following sad situation: An erroneous or insufficient discernment of a vocation can produce victims that are condemned to live a difficult and tragic life, a life without any exit for people in the priesthood. The individual who discovers only too late that he is psychologically incapable of being a priest or a religious, will find his life intollerable – for himself and in his ministry; he will also be a weight to the community that will have to tolerate him. He will also send his superiors into despair.

Such disastrous situations could have been avoided, at least in part, if all the psychological components of the vocation of the candidates had been seriously examined before he entered the seminary or during his novitiate. Such motivations must be examined seriously and exhaustively.

But which motivations can produce well-being, fulfilment and good fruits for those who choose the priestly and/or the religious vocation? Which motivations are authentic and which ones are fake, or are simply a mask of wishes and projects sought after, albeit in an unconscious way? We will take a look at these motivations so as to enlighten the candidates to priestly and religious life, and to help their educators or formators, those who must accompany them in discerning their vocation, and also their superiors who, in our Institute or in the Church, must perform such a function.

1 MOTIVATIONS WITHIN THE HUMAN AND VOCATIONAL PHENOMENON

From a behavioral and psychological standpoint, there are so many and diverse theories on motivation that it would be tiring to make a study of them all. Author Ronco gives us some sort of synthesis in this field: “We will understand what is proper to motivation if we consider the behavior of a psycho-physical organism in its environment: such an organism has a proper structure (physiological, psychic, social, existential). This structure aims at taking care of and developing itself as it makes contact with its own environment. The exigencies of such a structure, which the individual experiences and feels in his own life, constitute motivation”. When we say motive we mean every internal factor that effects, directs and sustains in time the search for the satisfaction of some requirement by the organism, and selectively sensitizes the objects relative to such a pleasure.”

The word motivation “contains a series of other words found in the common parlance: intention, desire, purpose, choice, preference… All these words show that the behavior follows a direction which it received before its manifestation. Motivation is what has the power to motivate the subjet to act. It points to a number of motives and expectations that lead to action (…) Motivation is a cumulative word: every form of behavior is produced by a plurality of motives more or less conscious and central.” Motivation also considers the emotional and rational motives that accompany the individual every moment he has to make a decision and act.


Homeostatic and anti-homeostatic motivation
Psychologists who study human behavior have proposed many and diverse theories on motivation, depending on each one’s own idea of man. Two of them stand out: homeostatic motivations, and anti-homeostatic motivations.

In the homeostatic theories, man is considered a closed system whose greatest interest is to maintain and stabilize his interior balance. Basically, man is passive, but he reacts to stimuli that he receives from the environment or from impersonal psychological forces. Physiological motives, impulsive motives and motives of defense which favor the preservation of the psychophysiology of the individual, are considered primary motives. All other motives, such as the ones which lead man to search for information, or to contact other individuals, or to search for values, etc., all these are considered derived motives: They are used to satisfy man’s primary needs. In this sense, there is the conviction that the only mechanism that is truly efficient to motivate is the elimination of a deficient organic state. According to this theory, men possess from birth certain basic impulses, or biological instincts, that motivate individuals to behave one way or another. According to this theory, the role of the educator-formator would be to help the student in formation to control and direct such impulses. The subject is led in the learning of forms of behavior that give him satisfaction, and is taught to repeat those forms of behavior every time he finds himself in situations of tension. The law of repetition brings about learning. In the last analysis, behavior is always connected in some way to to a primary satisfaction which can be controlled and directed through recompense and external gratification such as prizes, gifts, promises and positive evaluations of the individual. The basic cause for behavior is always outside the person, not interiorly; or, in Freud’s theory, the cause for behavior is found in the unconscious level of man – which is a strong idea in the theory of psychoanalysis. Although the representations remain in the unconscious, they act in the individual. Thus, we must become aware that “a latent or unconscious thought is not necessarily feeble. It also proves that the presence of this thought in the psyche allows access to indirect proofs that can be very convincing, whose persuasive force is nearly as strong as the proof given to us directly by our conscience.” According to this theory, the subconscious constitutes the basis for all motivations: it is the source of dynamic forces that direct, whether directly or indirectly, our behavior and manifest themselves at the level of conscience. In these theories we see an effort to return to the past and to find in the past the cause for present behavior.

In the anti-homeomostatic theories, man is considered to be a being of the world, radically open to the world. The subject rushes out of himself, in fact overcomes himelf and reaches out to the world, a world full of other individuals with whom he establishes relationships , a world of meanings and values, a world that makes up, in the final analysis, the motives that push man to act . The basic dynamics of man are not the instinctive ones alone, but also those produced by the integration of his “motivational”, cognitive and affective motor operations. In the area of humanistic psychology, the becoming of the person is emphasized. This becoming is supported by the inner forces that direct the individual to the object. This object is defined as the ideal of integration and unification of behavior in a coherent organic structure. According to Allport , the normal state of an individual is not passivity but rather activity, which is automatically and functionally independent from the physiological and impulsive antecedents; the actions of a person are bearers of one own’s motivation, and are autonomous (theory of the changing motives). In this theory, we go towards superior and transcendent motivations. Maslow introduces the concept of “motivational growth”. Motivational behavior might have some need as a reference point. But there exists a hierachy of needs that goes from physiological needs to the needs of self-assertion; the subject develops his own motivations in accordance with that ascending scale. The whole life of the individual is a dynamic process of continual growth. Everyone’s vocation to ‘personal fulfiment’ is strengthened by the confidence in the potentiality of human nature and, likewise, a great deal of optimism.

Motivation is decisive to the realization of the process. Cognitive and emotional aspects, which are intrinsically united with one another, have an important purpose in the area of the motivations (ways of structurizing and organizing an expereince). From this standpoint, motivation is directly influenced by the convictions of the subject as far as his values are concerned, his capacities and patterns of behavior, his objectives, his successful and unsuccessful experiences, and his positive and negative feelings (for example, curiosity, anxiety) which are derived from the self-evaluation process. According to Perls, emotion seems to be the basic force that gives energy to all our activity.

Viktor Frankl goes further: For him, tension cannot be avoided; even more, man needs tension. Man could stop at fulfilling himself and his possibilities without concretizing values: everything would already be orderly and in its place, at least within the formula of his own capacity of realization. However, Frankl continues, “we know that tension between being and meaning is rooted in such a way that it cannot be eliminated from the life of man.” This tension is called by Frankl “the will of meaning”, which is the same kind of will that he experienced in the “Lagers”, the same one that substantially incarnates the existential conditions of man and his elective spiritual need. This need for meaning spurs the individual on to search for, not the homeomastatic balance, but the concretization of meaning. He pays a lot of attention to the‘intentionality’ of human behavior through which the individual finds a direction in life; the basis is the aim to be attained, self-transcendence is its special characteristic. He says that the total man lies not only in the area of the psycho-physical, but also in field of spirituality -- the subconscious being a basic part of this totality. We understand that man is conceived as a free being, free and responsible in his singular and multiform individuality: an open system. As an open system, man feels in his inner self the call to search for and to live superior forms of human motivations.

There always exists in man a dialectic confrontation between superior motives and the so-called inferior ones. Depending on the various contingencies of time and space, superior motivations, which are proper to adults, are disturbed, and even subjugated, by inferior motivations, although the latter’s dynamic seems to be developed by the same archaic principles that regulate motivations during infancy. All this constitutes a solid basis to understand how the human psyche is naturally oriented along the lines of superior principles that invite it to find its full realization in the overcoming of self.

Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations
Human beings are naturally oriented to perform in a conscious, motivated way, a way that has a purpose.

Motivations are called intrinsic when they tend to favor the growth, development and reaching above levels already attained.

Motivation is called extrinsic when it spurs the individual on to perform actions that might bring in a prize, or praise, money, titles of gratitude -- all things that have little or nothing to do with the nature of one’s activities. Extrinsic motivations for human behavior presuppose as their functional support certain forms of control that other persons exercise on the individual. This element of extrinsic motivation could entail potential dangers of which we must be aware, since they could reject all the impulses that emanate from intrisic motivations on the condition that the commitment not cease be a means to attain other ends. The interpretations in ‘motivational’ terms must keep in mind the inner experiences of the individuals, whether they be of the cognitive or the emotional type.

Every form of behavior derives from a motivation: a positive one if it leads the subject to the full assertion of self; or a negative one if the subject lets himself be carried away in a passive way by unconscious motives to the path of his own demise or destruction.

The motivations in the actions
We certainly become aware of the active presence of a motivation when there is an objective to be reached. It is important to underline the fact that motivation is a dynamic human phenomenon that acts as an impulse of human behavior. It is a stimulus, a force that procedes from the external environment or from the inner world of the individual; and it propels the person towards the objective that must be reached and corresponds to the satisfying of a need. The fundamental factor of ‘motivational’ psychology is not the organism that is active in just any way, but the fact that his activity is selectively oriented to a definite end.

Defense orientation. Very few people have the possibility of integrating in a harmonious way all the biological, psychic and and spiritual components of their personality in order to use them, in stable fashion, as an authentic and happy gift of self and in the conquest of values. There often remain certain problems that were not seriously confronted, problems that manifest themselves in a masked way, and which hinder a harmonious growth; in fact, that which is not integrated becomes a source of inner division and provokes defensive reactions. In problematic situations, situations of conflict or of frustrating circumstances, the person will react negatively, leaving the initiative to the situation rather than controlling it: he will limit himself to applying to the case an automatic and blind behavior that has been previously acquired.

Growth orientation. In the theory that humanists call pro-active, the individual is normally led by inner personal forces that are born from cognition, or, at least, from the intuition of a future good towards which we march. In this case, the person is governed by a ‘project’ that generally sets in motion an activity which becomes source of actions. In every moment, the human spirit is active and, at the same time, continually engages in judging, comparing, understanding, loving, desiring, avoiding. Man is an active being, and this is done by inner initiative, following inner principles that allow him to self-determine and self-assert.

We can say that motivation derives from certain dynamic factors of the personality, which directs an action towards the objective: the latter is perceived as a value that aids the individual to grow in all its dimensions, to grow especially in those dimensions that give to life a superior meaning. Man feels the need to give meaning to his own existence, the need to unify the many objectives to which are directed the particular forms of behavior, so as to orient them to a unified objective.

Classification and effects of satisfaction or insatisfaction of needs.
According to Goya , needs can be divided into fundamental, or basic, and superior, or growth-producing.
Physiological needs (the preservation of one’s own ego and of one’s species).
Psychological needs (knowledge, justified self-esteem, security…).
Social needs (satisfying interpersonal relations, possessions, friendship, power…).
Superior needs, or growth needs (self-fulfilment, high level of personal achievement, the meaning of life…).

Positive effects of satisfying needs. Maslow enumerates many of these. Here are some in synthesis: Feelings of physical fulfilment; and its sub-products:
welfare, health, energy, euphoria, feeling of security, serenity, peace, protection, self-esteem, self-confidence, confidence in one’s capacities; feelings of love and of participation in a group; feelings of acceptance within a group; feeling of acceptatance of self; a better vision of the problems of the world – which makes us more open and sincere, less violent against self and others; tolerance towards individual differences; approval of individual differences in a greater sense of brotherhood, respect and love for others; a movement towards a higher spiritual life, with great hope and interest in the future; higher frequency of ecstasies, of strong experiences, of intense emotions, or of mystical experiences.

Negative effects produced by the insatisfaction of needs. Maslow enumerates many of these. The human being is capable of resisting for a long time in adverse situations during which the satisfaction of one or more neeeds is denied or postponed indefinitely. But when this situation is denied for a long time, one cannot maintain normality and takes refuge in neurotic and compensatory attitudes in which one is temporarily incapable of facing one’s own anxieties and conflicts. The person then flounders into situations whose symptoms look like the following: Lack of tranquility, malaise, tension, irritability, a state of general irritability especially when he encounters a certain obstacle that prevents him from reaching gratification; reduction of the quality and regularity of efficiency and, consequently, difficulty in concentrating. Depending on the temperament of the subject, this produces ‘activism’ or ‘depression’, lack of will power and desire to run away from everything; artificial and urgent intensity of other needs. The subject reacts by: lowering his level of production, or by looking for immediate and negative compensations and satisfactions, abusive intake of food, abusive sexual or affective activity -- as persons incapable of controlling themselves generally behave. On the other hand, mature persons resort to constructive forms of behavior, such as hobbies, walks, reading, encountering themselves in silent activities.

The authentic answer to all this lies naturally in becoming conscious of one’s own situation, and in going back to the gratification of human and Christian authentic needs.

Motivations of the Christian and of those called to a special vocation
Motivation penetrates all the dimensions of man’s life, including the transcendent and religious dimension. In the religious realm, man searches for the way to salvation, a way to concretize that which he is called to. He embarks on an existential pilgrimage in which he engages himself with the conviction that such an enterprise will help him reach the final objective of his own life.

The human psyche is naturally oriented towards superior values that invite it to always search for its own fulfilment and to fully rise above itself. With this principle in mind, we see how the discourse on spiritual and supernatural values, on the final end of man and on the meaning of religiosity as encounter with God, can be developed without much difficulty. That is how the study on the motivation relative to consecrated and priestly vocations has its roots in the depths of the human psyche, in which God placed the strong desire of orienting oneself towards the eternal.

When we think about the religious personality of a human being, we think about a ‘virtuous’ life that, in the full sense of the word, can only be concretized on a ground that is psychologically healthy and unified. The ‘basic, positive attitudes’ of trust, autonomy, initiative, etc., constitute the foundation of the development of the ‘natural virtues’, the basis of any possibility of interpersonal creative relationships, and of the capacity of giving oneself to the others and to God. These human inclinations of the subject are the most adequate ground for the integration of religion. To possess a religious personality means to be able to assume, more and more, a conscious attitude towards God, to participate more and more in His Life, to live in Him through all things and beyond all things.

From psychic motivations to religious motivations. To what extent is a young man who wishes to enter religious life conscious, free and decided to embrace religious virtue? This usually happens when an individual transits from a conversion of life to a vocational decision. This process begins with the intellectual conversion and passes through the moral and religious conversion: it recognizes in the latter the foundation of a vital decision made by a transcendental motivation. A fundamental condition is the passage from a ‘psychic’ stage to a truly spiritual stage, because religious and priestly life, in which we engage ourselves through a priestly or religious conversion, cannot be relegated to a psychological level only, it must pass on to the transcendental level.

As a conclusion of this section, we could say that motivation occupies a place of high importance in the life of a young person. For, from the onset of the decision to follow the divine invitation to its final objective, it initiates, canalizes and sustains the engagement at every moment.


2 THE QUALITY OF MOTIVATIONS

No psychologist can diagnose the presence or the absence of a divine call in an individual. However, using the tools of his office, he can prove how much freedom the candidate has when making his choice; he can understand the quality and the authenticity of his priestly motivations (validity, insufficiency, lack of capacity), and find out what are the main interests of the candidate; he can come to know the individual’s aptitude, his psychological, affective and social maturity; he can learn whether the candidate possesses a hierarchy of values in which religious and social values are preeminent; he can find out whether the candidate has any pathological elements or tendencies. A diagnosis of the personality of the subject can offer to the candidate certain elements that will help him understand himself better, as well as aid him to discover, in an active way, what could be an obstacle to the concretization of his call.

The main factors that are directly connected with the dynamics of motivation are the needs and the values.
The needs can be desctibed as inate tendencies that constitute the roots of motivation: they are the same for all men.
The values are the ideas to which the individual tends. They are objective realities, not dependent on human thought. They relate to the individual’s present behavior as well as to his final objective. When accepted actively, they become subjective values and direct all thoughts and actions of the person, and become a powerful and dynamic source in the individual. They give to the person an inner attraction strong enough to liberate, canalize and integrate his impulsive and passional energies.

It is not enough for the value to be lived and experienced at the cognitive or rational level only, in order for it to become an efficient source of motivation: it must also take hold of the affective areas of the individual. This way, and only this way, do the “objects-value” (cognitive level) transform themselves into “goods-value” that invade the totality of the person and guide it in the conquest of the ideal -- the ideal that becomes a personal good (affective level). The vocational values (which are transcendent), when accepted and asssumed by the subject, give a special dimension to the way of seeing all realities; they constitute an impulse that leads the individual to overcome his selfish tendencies; they make man see beyond; and they translate themselves into an ever more mature disposition that leads him in the concretization of his definitive choice. It is in this definitive choice that the candidate effects his own perfectioning: this he does through the concretization of the values that are proper to religious life. In this sense, we can conclude that self-realization in Christ is not sought in view of a cult of personality (that could contain a hidden sense of selfishness), nor to simply satisfy one’s needs. Self-realization is an effect, a consequence of self-tanscendence, a consequence of the accomplishment of a meaning in the concretization of values that go beyond the egocentric ‘I’ in order to follow the invitation of the transcendent “I”. The God who calls out of love renders man free so that he can answer and self-transcend. The man who welcomes and answers the call exercises his freedom of expression and his love for God, and accomplishes his own realization by transcending himself. The highest point of the realization of human freedom is to become enamoured of God: The only one able to do this is the one who is capable of self-transcendence, a transcendence that is received from God Himself as a gift, the one who renounces everything that is below that high level (elments that can attract or distract).

As seen above, there are, basically, three groups of motivations: biological, social, and value motivations. The religious choice is founded on value motivations: all beings feel a deep need of transcendence. God’s gift presupposes first of all that it be accepted through faith, since it is really the first motivation because it lays down the foundations of a man’s attachment to God, and can transform his whole life.

The first step in evaluating a vocation is to examine its motivations. During the last decades, we have gone from a psychodiagnostic stage (that tried to find positive indications and anti-indications relative to the personality of the candidates, such as attitudes, interests, psychic balance, etc.) to a psychodynamic and social stage in which psychologists search in a deeper way for the motives and their respective conditions -- which gives a better chance of evaluating the dimensions of a vocation.


3 DISCERNING THE MOTIVATIONS

We know that most of the time, motivations are not simple. Every meaningful behavioral act originates in a plurality of motives more or less conscious and central. Conscious motivations might cover up hidden tendencies that are innermost and unknown. Natural motivations are inevitably mixed with faith motivations. Even so, the most important is that the dominant motivations be supernatural. The more the supernatural motivations are predominant, the more the person will feel sure of God’s call.

The objective of this discernment is to find out whether there exists in the vocation a fundamental motivation, or dominant value, which is the Person of Christ. In the cases where unconscious motivations are dominant, the individual may have very serious difficulties. We must take seriously what Rulla says in this case: “We cannot accept just the values that the candidates give us the moment they enter into religious life; we must also weigh their unconscious motivations” , because a life dedicated to others may be sustained by a spirit of donation of self, but also by the need of search for self; the gift of self may come from a love that is mature and oblational, or it may arise from the incapacity of living a love that is truly human; the readiness to sacrifice oneself for the others might be the expression of a great love, or it might be produced by a masochistic attitude.

In the question of discernment, we must seriously consider certain signs or criteria that may ascertain the authenticity of a vocational answer and confirm its presence: 1) a true sense of freedom on the part of the candidate, that makes him go ahead without pressure from the outside: this is the first thing to bear in mind. Only afterwards will we examine his interior freedom (that is, the psychological authenticity of his motivations) and the real motivations of his vocation. 2) right intention. 3) Aptitude.

We need to discover whether the candidate’s motivation presents itself as an internal energy that spurs the individual on, or is simply a force coming from the environment. It is essential to ascertain whether an encounter is taking place between the individual and Christ: this is a fundamental experience of any vocation; and seeing whether there is an interior attraction to the Lord, a desire to follow Christ in an absolute way. Several other signs may manifest the authenticity of the motivations, signs that will give solidity to the experience made by the candidate of his encounter with Christ: love for the Lord Jesus, relationship with God the Father, his nearness to the poor, readiness to walk the same ways of the Lord, such as poverty, detachment, joy, love, sacrifice and availability; identification with Christ’s evangelizing work, etc. The ecclesial experience of the candidates must also be ascertained in order to see what kind of communitary vocation they have, and whether they have an openness towards the mystery and the mediation of the Church as the one that continues the life and the mission of Christ. It is important to see what the candidates think of human life, of the world and its problems, and how they envisage themselves as people who help build a new kind of humanity.

It is important to transcend the actions and the immediate results in order to discover the fundamental attitudes, that which is essential in the structure of the personality: the capacity to overcome the sensitive level of immediate satisfaction so as to converge on the potentiality of the entity and of the spiritual and religious values, and the dominant direction of the strong desire for achievement of the subject, aspirations which can oscillate between two poles: egocentrism -- and the tension of a total availability to God through unselfish donation to others; anxiety, stubborness and activism – and self-giving to God and to his will through a creative and fruitful activity; atttachment to what is material, tangible, literal, immediately successful – and spirituality, affective detachment, oblational love; running away from reality and spirituality – and effective, real and serene commitment in performing the duties and responsibilities of every day, while always remaining rooted in an intense life of prayer.

Authentic motivations
Motivations are authentic when the ‘motivational’ values are looked upon, perceived and recognized by the individual who experiences them and acts in a consequential manner: he thus shows the maturity of his psychic structures. In psychological terms we call those motivations authentic because they reveal themselves for what they really are. Not all authentic motivations are valid for a religious or priestly vocation. Motivations that are psychologically authentic, which are at the basis of a true vocation, have a supernatural content, and are founded on the consciousness of a divine call and on the desire to give oneself exclusively to love in the service of God and neighbor.

It is certain that there is a positive relation between conscious, authentic and pro-active motivations and growth in the choice and the effectiveness of consecrated and priestly life. These are the motivations that are adequate to religious and priestly life. Spurred on by adequate motivations, the individual is conscious of his own donation and is capable of loving the other in a realistic way -- as he is.

There also are motivations that are authentic but insufficient for a religious and priestly life: they are the ones that set the personal advantages of the individual before all else. These are not bad motives in themselves. But we cannot have religious or priestly life become a sort of promotion of the individual: whoever acts this way inverts the true order of things, and puts God at his own service. We find these motivations especially in individuals who complain about religious life, or life in the seminary, and who accuse the others of having a lack of good ideas, insufficient formation, little brotherly union. These individuals search for sentimental support, they wish to cultivate their own ways of acting as well as a certain sense of intellectual status, etc. In individuals who end up abandoning religious life we see a dominant presence of insufficient motivations of the egocentric type, such as need for affection, need of security, need to feel fulfilled, need for personal assertion. In them, the infant ego is dominant, and so is the superiority of emotion and of self-centeredness. There exist motivations that are insufficient, that did not mature sufficiently in certain temperamental individuals who need several kinds of compensations that epitomize anti-indications for religious and priestly life.

Finally, there are inadequate motivations that are invalid because they hide other reasons, albeit in an unconscious manner. Here it is question of religious motives that are per se valid. But they are faulty because they are invoked for the wrong reasons, since they are out of line with the main objective; for example, the case of someone who wants to become a priest to obtain the conversion of his father.

Here are some signs that help in individuating the active presence of authentic motivations: A wholesome personality; a vocational consciousness; aptitude; charity; altruism; gratitude; orientation towards values; capacity to accept oneself and to feel fulfilled; awareness of being capable of self-determination; capacity of bonding together the ideal of one’s self and the values of religious and priestly life; the virtue of humility; a pro-active attitude in facing life; the possibility of living serenely and in human plenitude one’s choice in diverse ways and rythms; the capacity of having stable and serene relationships.

The effects produced by such motivations in the individual who has been called are: balance and integration of interests; conveniences and values; authenticity and truth of the motives; transparency and self-knowledge; presence of freedom in the decisions made by the subject.

Non-authentic motivations
There can be in the subject certain motivations based on values that do not correspond to what makes the subject act; they are substitutes (consequently, non-authentic), they are masks of other motives which the subject does not recognize because of a process of unconscious removal. He appears to be animated by motives which are in reality nothing more than the fruit of a defense mechanism which he himself has set in march. The individual is not aware that his inclination and his choice are not fruits of the value that he seeks, but simply the result of a need to solve a conflict, or to overcome a frustration previously evicted from the conscious level.

Usually, when unconscious, non-authentic and reactive motivations cause the choice to be made, there is a stagnation in the process of growth. When these kinds of motivational structures are present, which are based on self-defense, then incongruences and a lack of authenticity appear as well. Incongruence exists when there is dissonance between values, vocational attitudes and personal needs.

Often, immature motivations intercept the authentic answer in the vocational path. That is why these immature motivations are not authentic: because they promote the stagnation of the emotional development – which leads the subject back to an infantile state. These motivations are usually of the egocentric type, and they are connected with a sense of emotional vindication or with the unconscious need to dominate someone else. At this point, reality is not seen in its intrinsic value, but as a source of compensation for one’s frustrations and for one’s unconscious intrinsic problems that have not yet been solved.

Individuals who are pushed to pursue religious or priestly life by unconscious motivations usually look for affection, power, acts of vindication, gratification, and identification because these give them security. Their choices are unconsciously masked by motives that will satisfy their instincts – motives that are socially acceptable perhaps; they look for security, for the satisfaction of the need to be recognized and fulfilled; they seek dependence; they feel agressivity, they fear sexuality; they look for compensations, material advantages; they search for saving results; they sprawl in fantasies, practice dependence on their mothers, etc.

Individuals that are moved by non-authentic motivations usually present the following characteristics: continuous postponement of the solution of problems, since they do not find a stable way of solving the conflicts that come up in the daily life of a normal person: they find it difficult to make a decision calmly and serenely; they show perplexity even when faced with a choice that they have already made in the distant past; they feel interested in affective gratifications; they are afraid of solitude, of their own limitations, of the limitations of the others. On the one hand, they have a low level of self-esteem, which could be attributed to the unconscious impulses or to repressions received in the educational environment they experienced; and on the other hand they search for self-realization. The subjective dominates over the objective. Other characteristics that may be present are: interior division, a sense of guilt, fear, rigidity, criticism.

Psychological authenticity of a motivation for religious and priestly life
Authenticity exists when there is congruence between the motivations that are consciously professed and practiced, and the tasks and objectives of consecrated and/or priestly life, such as selfless devotion, love, contemplation, service. In this sense, the motivation that is vocationally “authentic” is that motivation which aims at the objective that is proper to priestly and/or religious life, and not at the purposes of “psychological cover.” Such authenticity supposes that the foundation of vocation is total love and exclusive service of God and, consequently, love of neighbor in God. This is the essence of an authentic vocational motivation: the deep desire, although ever imperfect as it may be, of belonging totally to God.

The fundamental criterium for the test of a vocational authenticity is the degree of freedom of choice of the candidate, his psychological balance and the quality of his motivations.

Here are some general criteria that prove and help in discerning, as best as possible, the authenticity of the vocational motivations for priestly and religious life: the fundamental motivation is the person of Jesus Christ considered as main motive; having rectitude of intention, aptitude; possessing the structure of a religious personality; being able to have authentic religious experiences; having the basic psychological contitions for an authentic religiosity; having a wholesome, upright and well-functioning personality; possessing psychological freedom; being conscious of one’s motivations, approving them and integrating them into one’s system of values; arriving at full human maturity in which faith and consecration must advance hand in hand; possessing basic attitudes that are positive, such as confidence, autonomy, initiative, creative interpersonal relations, capacity of giving of self to the others and to God; ability to move on from the conversion of life to the vocational decision; having the capacity of making the choice of a definitive engagement of one’s life; possessing a reflective judgment that allows the individual to act in self-determination; showing affectivity; (capacity of) living in community; having adequate motivations; etc.

Anti-indications in the ‘motivational’ plan for religious and priestly life
As we saw above, these anti-indications are the insufficient motivations (that show motives of personal advantages of a material kind or other; motives of personal development, of development of one’s qualities, or of refuge and/or running away from the difficulties of life; etc.), and the inadequate motivations (that are derived from religious motives valid in themselves but distorted because they are not in agreement with the objective for which they were assumed).


4 CHANGING VOCATIONAL MOTIVATIONS

The motivations for a vocation can change and evolve: the young adult engages himself objectively in making syntheses between what attracts him and what he desires, and his reflection and his will power.

Growth of the motivations
The psycho-analyst does not believe much in the capacity of taking in hand one’s own life and re-orienting it: in practice, he believes that the unconscious takes the reins of command in the person.

The humanistic line answers the problem of growth in a different way: through the theory of the functional autonomy of motives, motivations can develop and grow, and lead the person to the enjoyment of superior goods, helping him to appreciate new flavors in life, assisting him to positively answer a call, and aiding him to transcend and go beyond his normal ways of being.

Let us concentrate our attention on the normal personality that builds and develops its own vocation and concretizes values: such a personality will help God’s gift to mature in a young person in harmony with personal human demands. By its own intrinsic and radical demands, religious and priestly life needs people who are sufficiently mature, or, at least not too disturbed in their psycho-physical balance.

The young man who enters a religious congregation, even if he already possesses a certain human maturity and a certain amount of religious development, must ‘change’ his life, meaning that, in psychological terms, he has to acquire a new identity, the identity of the religious man, and, specfically, the identity of the Jesuit, the Franciscan, the Consolata Missionary, etc. And, on the other hand, he must not lose his own individual qualities. He must be able to devote himself and he must learn how to love in an authentic and joyful way.

Stickler said: In the case of unconscious and inaccessible motivations, we cannot arrive at a ‘rectification’… But, he continued, when the basic dispositions of an individual are positive, the subject may easily arrive at a reorganization of his own psychic potentiality and, in a gradual integration of values, give to it a specifically religious address.

Motivation must be considered an interior attitude that accompanies the vicissitudes of the dynamic process of the maturation of the personality: the egocentric attitude (First Adolescence), the choice of a model (Second Adolescence), and the oblational attitude (typical during the Youth period of life). A mature person is characterized by the criteria that we may define as criteria of maturity: knowledge and acceptance of self; predominance of the principle of reality and of values; capacity of analyzing reality; realism and flexibility; capacity of loving as a gift and as participation; capacity of tolerating conflicts, frustration, and the ambiguity of situations; capacity of adapting to new situations; capacity of self-control; capacity of accepting one’s past; capacity of giving and receiving; capacity of accepting the sense of culpability; a comprehensive view of life. A mature Christian shows a sense of gradualness, the capacity of mercy, the sense of Catholicity. Maturity is gradual, but not always upwards, the ascending way: there can be moments of ‘slowing down’, sudden stops and even backsliding. What path must one follow in order to achieve maturity? Here are some orientations: first of all, one must keep in mind the primacy of synthesis over analysis, of the objective over the subjective, and the primacy of creative evolution, which is: to grow continually, and to give precedence to motivation over effort. Besides, it is important that we learn how to choose the best of two values; never to be afraid of conflicts, always emphasizing positive forces; always strengthening with success the good goals, ever inducing good sentiments. It is important to feel at ease with oneself, to feel good with others, to give constant meaning and value to one’s feelings, and to love in an authentic and sincere fashion.

In the dynamics of vocational growth, conscious and pro-active motivations must be given priority. Next to the central and authentic motivation there lie other motivations more or less unconscious. It is important that the latter always accompany the conscious ones in a deep intentional way: in the consistency of the decision, in the level of freedom, in the uprightness of desires, in the capacity of hope, in the signs of authenticity, in the capacity of overcoming crises and conflicts, in the free availability of abandoning oneself to the Lord in the service of others.

Growth of individuals that are motivated in reactive fashion
Individuals motivated in reactive fashion are immature in the affective area, and use their defense mechanisms in exagerated fashion so as to maintain their psychic balance. Generally speaking, these forms of immaturity do not necessarily constitute an obstacle to religious life, but they could become one. In the most serious cases, such as insatisfaction of one’s instincts, certain attitudes could constitute negative indications regarding the receiving of an individual into religious or priestly life; here are some of them: nervous depression, manic-depressive psychosis, schizophrenia, persecution complex, inferiority complex and guilt complex, the mania of collecting things, neurotic anxiety, hysteria, psychopathy…

Under the reactive action of the person, one’s motivation is not at all inactive simply because it is hidden and inaccessible to introspection: it could be detected through deduction. In this case, solid efforts and appropriate technics are necessary for it to surface, and it only does so when conscience agrees to it. In any case, motivation can be controlled by freedom. In neurotic persons, motivations that are valid for religious and priestly life are impossible. These individuals say that they possess qualities that they only have potentially, not in fact; they use religion to satisfy, or to silence, the unconscious needs and not the religious (needs).

Moments of crisis and periods of trial
When both supernatural and natural motivations are consciously or unconsciously present, they make the whole vocational path inevitably complex and ambivalent. The humanistic-existential theory of the person presents man as vulnerable, but also as capable of advancing in the way of perfection through experience and learning. Consequently, there must be a free and responsible adhesion (to the ideal) and a progressive purification of the vocational motivations; also, special attention must be given to the dynamics of decision. Whatever might have been the motivations at the beginning of the vocational voyage, it is necessary to reach the essential motivation of the call of Jesus Christ: this is done through a life of intimacy with him that renders the individual capable of sharing his own preoccupations and his work of salvation. This way, the person becomes psychologically mature because his initial motivation was a valid one.

For those who carry in themselves unconscious conflicts, the experience causes defensive reactions of a different kind: the situation worsens and every type of solution is blocked out. For an individual who is inconsistent in his vocation and psychologically fragile, it is necessary to clarify the situation first, and then cure the eventual psychic unbalance: only thus can it be avoided that the components in conflict dominate the dynamics of the personality.

Trial periods proposed to individuals that find difficulties in the path of their vocation, especially when these difficulties lie in the field of motivations, intend to have the person enter deep down into himself, into the most intimate area of self, for it is there that lie the answers to his expectations. During these periods of trial, it is possible to impart a therapeutic treatment that goes hand in hand with a clear awareness at the vocational level. If measures are not taken during the trial period, the experience might produce negative and disastrous effects. The experiencies of individuals who are open to values and pro-active towards the future to goodness, help those individuals to progress and concretize the objectives of religious and priestly life. If the person has attained a pretty good level of maturity and is animated by consistent motives, the experience will solidify his motivations and favor a greater process of human and vocational maturity. A sign that something ambiguous may be present in the basic decision is the sudden apparition of an almost unsurmountable resistence on the part of the individual at the moment that he must perform his specific duties. In these cases, physical constraint is not helpful, since it would generate an even greater aversion. The best would be to look for what the individual wants most from life: to be able, perhaps for the first time, to become really authentic, to destroy the non-truth of his life, to become a sincere and honest person, not only at the conscious but also at the unconscious level of life.

Therapy
Vocation to religious and priestly life is a call to plenitude, to perfection. To be like Christ means to be perfectly human. In fact, in the Incarnation, Christ assumed humanity in its completeness, he showed us what it means to be man.

It is not infrequent to encounter in people who are engaged in the way of perfection some signs of weakness, lack of trust and some sort of regret for having chosen that vocation. It is important to help the young persons discover the motive of their inclinations. Religion cannot solve all problems. Religion and psychology help one another in some basic attitudes: There are no therapies that can help without love. It is in this realm that the concepts of therapy and redemption fuse into one another. The cure follows the binary of the love that redeems: love that is human, love that is divine. Whoever chooses the ecclesiastical life on the basis of motivations that are not too clear, or that are unconscious, that person lives in a constant conflict even if he is not aware of it. Here are the symptoms presented by such a one: living in a continual state of confusion and insatisfaction which is punctuated by moments of sudden euphoria; when he contacts the values which he renounced, he easily remains disturbed; he is always undecided in front of the commitments he made, and does not take a conscious and clear position in front of the moral challenges that come up during many moments of his formation; he cultivates interiorly an attitude of agression, which is really the result of the tension generated in him by the state of continual frustration about his natural aspirations; because he is bent on himself, he becomes insensitive to the problems of the others; feeling insecure, he worries about his future; because he is rigid in his psychic structure, he cannot adapt to new situations.

In order to diagnose the presence of unconscious dynamics, it is necessary, at least in some cases, to have recourse to personality tests, especially the ones of the projection type: performed in diverse moments of the stages of formation, they indicate its (formation’s) development and direction. When the diagnosis is done, therapy is needed. In this area, the formator-educator that is qualified and sensitive to human problems, can help the young man to become aware of his interior dynamics and to understand and solve the conflict.

From the standpoint of the diagnosis, when we want to analyse the psychological authenticity of a vocation, we must first evaluate the degree of realism, of integration and of openness towards others.

The purpose of psychology is to help the individual live more intensely and to become conscious of the world around him, of the others that live with him. It renders easier a greater variety of choices and a greater understanding of the advantages and disadvantages brought about by every choice. In this way, if the individual so wishes, he can afford to live a life of greater reality, and experience a greater sense of creativity and freedom.

The person chosen to perform the therapy must be a psychologist that has a concept of the human person as a subject that is capable of freedom, of activity; that is open to spiritual values; that has an inclination towards the transcendent; who believes in superior values; who accepts man as a totality in which exist conscious and unconscious dimensions -- of which the former can penetrate the latter and modify them, except in the case of mental illness. Respect for spiritual values is necessary, not only because of our religious preoccupations, but also for the intrinsic experiences of the therapy itself: religious motives can become the strongest energies of a believer.

A good therapist will help the patient attain a greater understanding of himself and a stronger and better discernment of persons and events that are part of his life. He can help the individual to emphasize some basic choices and some possible lines of behavior. He will also help the patient in discerning some consequences of the various alternatives. But, in end, he will let the patient make his own personal decision with a sense of responsibility. Thus, therapy can be a valuable aid to a member of a religious community or a priest, because it can reaffirm his vocation, if it is an authentic one. A serious discernment and a greater elasticity of action strengthen the engagement of the person in relation to his vocation and make his answer to God stronger.

Psychological help does not free the subject from the difficulties and the conflicts, but it helps him to face and assume more coragiously the weariness of the work and of personal responsibility. It helps to assume the rejected overcoming of conflicts and evasion of reality; it aids in discovering the positive meaning of growth through self-renunciation.

5 FINAL ADVICE

Preventive therapy
Preventive therapy in the field of motivations aims at initiating the process of organizing those motivations in order to help the growth of vocational well-being and efficiency. Its preventive function is to discover the sources of difficulty that every individual will encounter later on in following his vocation: This is done right from the moment the individual enters a house of formation. It is important to intervene right in the beginning so as to reduce the number and the importance of the frustrations: In fact, with the passing of time, it would be extremely difficult to control such frustrations. The psychologist will be able to tell whether in the individual’s psychic structure there exist indications that are negative towards a certain state of life, and even which sectors of the personality must be better developed and harmonized so that the person may face a certain engagement and fulfill himself in total freedom. He will also be able to verify the efficiency of that person’s values, and, consequently, the vocational values that are concretized in the various forms of behavior of the individual. He will also see whether the dominating motivation is the supernatural one.

Psychology tries to integrate, not to change, the present type of formation, its role is that of giving support. Through its techniques, psychology tries: to remedy the educational errors suffered, to eliminate the weight of frustration and to cure neuroses. This it does through its therapeutic function; through its selective function, it endeavors to verify the quality of the candidates’ dispositions, and to help them evaluate their strength vis-à-vis God’s call; through its preventive function, it takes on the task of discovering, right from the beginning of the vocational voyage, the roots of the difficulties that each one will later on encounter during their vocational engagement; through its formative function it helps the individual to know himself profoundly and to channel all his energies towards a constructive realization of the vocational engagements; through its integrative function, it favors in the individual a harmonious growth of his psychological and vocational maturity.

Certain dimensions to keep in mind
Besides the rational aspect, the affective dimension has great weight on human behavior. It influences mental activity in a decisive way sometimes; and it can also impact the process of rational motivations. In order to know the origin of certain acts and choices of life, it is important to understand the affective motivations of the person. It would be wrong to think that a person who is heavily conditioned by unconscious conflicts has the capacity to acquire other motivations that can fight against the unconscious ones – and do all this strictly on the rational level. If an emotional fact pushes an individual to make decisions that he later no longer considers positive because they are harmful to his happiness, he must revisit his initial emotion and relive it in an essential way: only thus can he fully understand the situation and give a new orientation to his choice. This way we can know the need of the person that must enter into contact with himself and with his feelings and emotions in order to develop his affective maturity. We are called to educate the circles of the emotions.

The will: When several possible or eventual tendencies present themselves, the will helps us decide which one to follow rather than others that may excite us. It also helps us to embrace the project that gives full meaning to our existence. It is the duty of the formators to educate those who follow their vocation in such a way that they will develop a prompt, cordial and resolute will.

The truths of faith: From the psycho-dynamic point of view, these truths are special existential motivations that procede from the inner self, and that help the individual to obtain some good for himself; they respond to a deep need of giving a sense of totality to his life. It is a question here of a gradual and slow process of transformation. In it, among other elements, the motivations directed towards the transcendent are elaborated and reorganized: motivations that relate to God and to religious values which are perceived as giving a possibility of entering into intimacy with God and of placing one’s life at the disposal of His will and of the good of others.

It is necessary that all these processes (affective, cognitive and volitive) be organized gradually in unitarian fashion around God and religious values. Identity doesn’t come around in just a moment. It is necessary that God be perceived as the highest value and become the object of the aspirations of the individual and of his affection, that He be preferred to all other values.

The formative project must contribute to the growth of the motivation according to its own evolutionary rhythm. And it must favor the dynamics of its own becoming in the various dimensions, i.e., intellectual, affective, moral, volitive, and also those pertaining to faith.

When proposing to those in formation certain periods of trial, such as strong moments during which the genuineness of the vocational motivations are verified, we must consider the level of maturity already attained by the individuals.

We must always try to articulate the diverse levels of the motivation, because everyone of these levels, although qualitatively distinct and autonomous, is strongly connected with the preceding and the following ones. It is important for the individual to live the affective experience that characterizes everyone of his age level, so that he can move on to the superior level in a non-violent and unperturbed way. It is good to know that most of the motivations of human behavior relative to the first levels are unconscious and, consequently, non-recognizable; furthermore, in a non-fully-integrated adult, unconscious and immature motivations may co-exist with conscious and valid motivations.

For a formation program to be truly efficient, it must place at the disposition of the individuals three instruments that are inter-related: the didactic-spiritual, the experimental, and the psychological. These three must be dealt with at the same time. Without this integration between the human and the spiritual, the proposed ideals might become a source of alienation and frustration, instead of a source of growth.

Model formators-educators who favor the maturity of the motivations
Identification allows a person to assimilate values that it admires in other persons and to organize one’s life in conformity with those values. Through identification, a person becomes another, although always remaining one’s self. Thus, the religious group itself, a community, an Institute have a very important function as they present models of life and transmit values that become part of the structuration of a religious personality and of a vocational choice: this they do by giving valid motivations to others. The model cannot erase the motivations of faith and the originality of the subject; but meeting valid educational values is necessary in the person’s voyage along the way of maturation.

An educator-formator must be authentically motivated, capable of communicating with others, one who perceives the dynamics of the motivations. He must help others perceive the dynamics of their vocational path and of their joy. This tells us how important it is to have formators-educators who are well-prepared and mature. It is not necessary that they have a deep psychological formation, but they must have solved and overcome their own personal problems, and be free from conflicts. They must have a good capacity to understand the problems of the candidates. We expect them to have already integrated in their lives psychic maturity and the supernatural dimension of vocation. We want formators to perform the following functions: to be able to help the candidates become aware of, and confront, their spiritual problems and the difficulties inherent in psychological development; who are able to perceive the presence of pathological traces in the personality of the candidates, and able to read the symptons and the eventual unconscious inconsistencies of their in their vocation; who are able to orient towards a qualified person in psychology those candidates who show signs of psychological or vocational incoinsistency and, eventually, to collaborate with the psychologist in the constructive process of the individual: it would be imprudent and risky for the formator to try to substitute himself for the psychologist in these cases.

It is necessary to possess a deep sense of clarity regarding the demands of religious life. This way, if and when cases will arise, the formators will be able to help the candidates to adhere seriously and actively to their commitment, and will help them give the right direction to the energies of their personality.