Background

Rollo Reece May was born on April 21, 1909, in Ada, Ohio, United States, the second of six children of Earl Tittle May and Matie Boughton. His father, a field secretary for the Young Men's Christian Association, moved the family to Michigan when May was still a child. May experienced a difficult childhood, with his parents divorcing and his sister suffering a psychotic breakdown.

Education

Although initially Rollo May was a reticent student, at Michigan State College of Agriculture and Applied Science (now Michigan State University) in East Lansing, he co-founded a magazine that was critical of the state legislature. The flap that followed caused him to transfer to Oberlin College, a small liberal arts school in Ohio. An English major, with a minor in Greek literature and history, May graduated in 1930 and spent the next three years teaching English in Salonika, Greece. During that period, he attended seminars in Vienna, Austria, with the famous individual psychologist Alfred Adler.

In 1933 May entered the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. His studies were interrupted for two years when his parents divorced. He returned to Michigan to help with his younger siblings and worked as a student adviser at Michigan State. In 1938, he got his divinity degree from Union, studying with the existentialist theologian Paul Tillich.

In 1942, May was stricken with tuberculosis. After eighteen months in a sanitarium in upstate New York, he decided that his attitudes and his personal will were more important to his recovery than the treatments. He entered the graduate psychology program at Columbia University in New York City, receiving his doctorate in clinical psychology in 1949 with the highest honors. In the decades that followed, May's dissertation, The Meaning of Anxiety, published in 1950, and revised in 1977, had a major influence on the development of humanistic psychology. He argued that culture was in an "age of anxiety" and, furthermore, that channeling his own high anxiety was a major factor in overcoming his tuberculosis.

Career

After two years as a minister at a Congregational Church in New Jersey, May decided that his true interests lay in psychology. In 1939, he published The Art of Counseling: How to Gain and Give Mental Health, and two years later his second book, Springs of Creative Living: A Study of Human Nature and God, was published. By 1948, May had become an assistant professor of psychiatry at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology in New York City. In 1958, he became the training and supervisory psychoanalyst there. He remained at the Institute until his retirement in 1974. He also served as an adjunct professor of clinical psychology at New York University and as a lecturer in psychotherapy at the New School for Social Research from 1955 until 1976. May held visiting professorships at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale Universities, and at Brooklyn College. In 1973, he became a Regents' Professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz. May maintained a private psychoanalysis practice in New York City and, following his retirement from academia, in Tiburon, California.

May was a prolific and influential author whose books often were aimed at the general reader. His major works included Existential Psychology in 1961, Psychology and the Human Dilemma in 1967, The Courage to Create in 1975, Freedom and Destiny in 1981, and The Cry for Myth in 1991. Love and Will, published in 1969, won the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award of Phi Beta Kappa and became a guidebook for political and social activists. In 1972, Power and Innocence: A Search for the Sources of Violence won the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Award from the New York Society of Clinical Psychologists. In May's later writings, the "age of anxiety" became the "age of despair." To reach a larger audience, May made a number of sound recordings.

Achievements

• Rollo May was one of the founding sponsors of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, and a genuine pioneer in the field of clinical psychology. May is considered by many to be one of the most important figures in existential psychology, and, without question, one of the most important American existential psychologists in the history of the discipline. He is often called "the father of existential psychotherapy," an amazing accomplishment since existential philosophy originated in Europe and, for the most part, was met with hostility and contempt in the United States. May can be credited as the editor, along with Ernest Angel and Henri F. Ellenberger, of the first American book on existential psychology, Existence, which highly influenced the emergence of American humanistic psychologists (such as Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow).
  
  Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center and its Rollo May Center for Humanistic Studies celebrate the advancement of the humanistic tradition in psychology and human science by presenting The Rollo May Award. As one of Saybrook's founders, Rollo May exhibited an unflinching trust in the transformative power of love, choice, and creative action. The Rollo May Award recognizes an individual whose life's work demonstrates his faith in human possibility.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Courage to Create

    (What if imagination and art are not, as many of us might ...)

    1975
  • My Quest for Beauty

    (The noted psychotherapist draws upon his long career and ...)

    1985
  • Psychology and the Human Dilemma

    (Here Rollo May discusses the loss of our personal identit...)

    1967
  • Freedom and Destiny

    (The popular psychoanalyst examines the continuing tension...)

    1918
  • The Meaning of Anxiety

    (In this revised edition of his classic work - the first m...)

    1950
  • Love & Will

    (The heart of man's dilemma, according to Rollo May, is th...)

    1969
  • Power and Innocence: A Search for the Sources of Violence

    (Stressing the positive, creative aspects of power and inn...)

    2015
  • The Psychology of Existence: An Integrative, Clinical Perspective

    (A prestigious, original title co-authored by Rollo May, o...)

    1994
  • Man's Search for Himself

    (Loneliness, boredom, emptiness: These are the complaints ...)

    1953
  • The Art of Counseling - How to Gain and Give Mental Health

    (A perfect book for anybody interested in mental health is...)

    1965
  • The Discovery of Being

    (The brilliant psychologist Rollo May was a major force in...)

    1983
  • The Cry for Myth

    (Here are case studies in which myths have helped Dr. May'...)

    1991
  • The Springs of Creative Living 1940
  • Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology 1956

Religion

In his book, The Art of Counseling, May explored the relationship between mental health and religion. He agreed with Freud that dogmatic religion appeals to humanity's neurotic tendencies but diverges from this viewpoint by explaining that true religion, the fundamental affirmation of the meaning of life, is "something without which no human being can be healthy in personality." He noted that what Freud was attacking was the abuse of religion as it is used by some to escape from their life challenges.

May agreed with Carl Jung that most people over 35 would have their problems resolved by finding a religious outlook on life. Jung believed that those patients actually fell ill because they had lost the sense of meaning which living religions of every age have given to their followers, and only those who regained a religious outlook were healed. May believed this is true for people of all ages, not just those over 35; that all people ultimately need to find meaning and purpose, which true religion can provide. He claimed that every genuine atheist with whom he had dealt had exhibited unmistakable neurotic tendencies.

Politics

May wasn't widely public about his political views.

Views

May was interested in reconciling existential psychology with other approaches, especially Freudian psychoanalysis. Perhaps the central issue that draws existential thinkers together is their emphasis upon the primacy of existence in philosophical questioning and the importance of responsible human action in the face of uncertainty. With complete freedom to decide and be responsible for the outcome of their decisions comes anxiety about the choices humans make. Anxiety's importance in existentialism makes it a popular topic in psychotherapy.

Therapists often use existential philosophy to explain the patient's anxiety. May did not speak of anxiety as a symptom to be removed, but rather as a gateway for exploration into the meaning of life. Existential psychotherapists employ an existential approach by encouraging their patients to harness their anxiety and use it constructively. Instead of suppressing anxiety, patients are advised to use it as grounds for the change. By embracing anxiety as inevitable, a person can use it to achieve his or her full potential in life.

May was not a mainstream existentialist in that he was more interested in reconciling existential psychology with other approaches, especially Freud's. May used some traditional existential terms in a slightly different fashion than others, and he invented new words for traditional existentialist concepts. Destiny, for example, could be "thrownness" combined with "fallenness" - the part of life that is already determined, for the purpose of creating lives. He also used the word "courage" to signify authenticity in facing one’s anxiety and rising above it.

May perceived the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the commercialization of sex and pornography, as having influenced society, planting the idea in the minds of adults that love and sex are no longer directly associated. According to May, emotion became separated from reason, making it socially acceptable to seek sexual relationships and avoid the natural drive to relate to another person and create new life. May believed the awakening of sexual freedoms can lead modern society to dodge awakenings at higher levels. May suggested that the only way to turn around the cynical ideas that characterized his generation is to rediscover the importance of caring for another, which May describes as the opposite of apathy. For May, the choice to love is one of will and intentionality, unlike the base, instinctive, drive for sexual pleasure. He wrote in Love and Will that instead of surrendering to such impulses, real human existence demanded thought and consideration. To be free would not be to embrace the oxymoron "free love" and the associated hedonism, but to rise above such notions and realize that love demands effort.

Personality

May attributed his interest in psychology to his troubled family life and the discordant relationship of his parents.

Interests

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Otto Rank

Connections

May married Florence De Frees in 1938, and eventually, they had a son and twin daughters: Robert Rollo, Allegra Anne, and Carolyn Jane. May and his first wife were divorced in 1969 and in 1971 he married Ingrid Schöll. That marriage ended in 1978. In 1989, May married Georgia Lee Miller Johnson.

Father:

Earl Tittle May

Mother:

Matie Boughton

ex-wife:

Florence De Frees

Son:

Robert Rollo May

Daughter:

Allegra Anne May

Daughter:

Carolyn Jane May

ex-wife:

Ingrid Schöll

Wife:

Georgia Lee Miller Johnson

Acquaintance:

Alfred Adler

References

• Psyche and Soul in America: The Spiritual Odyssey of Rollo May
  1921