ROLLO MAY

(1909 – 1994)
Background of Rollo Resse May

Rollo Reese May was born

April 21, 1909, in Ada,
Ohio. His childhood was not
particularly pleasant: His
parents didn’t get along and
eventually divorced, and his
sister had a psychotic
breakdown.
Background of Rollo Resse May
After a brief stint at Michigan State (he was
asked to leave because of his involvement
with a radical student magazine), he
attended Oberlin College in Ohio, where he
received his bachelors degree.
After graduation, he went to Greece,
where he taught English at Anatolia College
for three years. During this period, he also
spent time as an itinerant artist and even
studied briefly with Alfred Adler.
Background of Rollo Resse May

When he returned to the US, he entered Union

Theological Seminary and became friends with
one of his teachers, Paul Tillich, the
existentialist theologian, who would have a
profound effect on his thinking. May received
his Bachelor Degree in 1938.
May suffered from tuberculosis, and had to
spend three years in a sanatorium. This was
probably the turning point of his life. While he
faced the possibility of death, he also filled his
empty hours with reading.
Background of Rollo Resse May

Among the literature he read were the writings

of Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish religious writer
who inspired much of the existential movement,
and provided the inspiration for May’s theory.
He went on to study psychoanalysis at White
Institute, where he met people such as Harry
Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm. And finally, he
went to Columbia University in New York, where
in 1949 he received the first PhD in clinical
psychology that institution ever awarded.
Background of Rollo Resse May
After receiving his PhD, he went
on to teach at a variety of top
schools. In 1958, he edited, with
Ernest Angel and Henri
Ellenberger, the book Existence,
which introduced existential
psychology to the US. He spent
the last years of his life in
Tiburon, California, until he died
in October of 1994.
Influences and psychological background
Rollo May is the best known American
existential psychologist. Much of his
thinking can be understood by reading
about existentialism in general, and the
overlap between his ideas and the ideas of
Ludwig Binswanger is
great. Nevertheless, he is a little off of the
mainstream in that he was more
influenced by American humanism than
the Europeans, and more interested in
reconciling existential psychology with
other approaches, especially Freud’s.
BASIC CONCEPT OF ROLLO MAY
BASIC CONCEPT OF ROLLO MAY
Influences and psychological background
May uses some traditional existential terms
slightly differently than others, and invents
new words for some of existentialism’s old
ideas. Destiny, for example, is roughly the
same as thrownness combined with
fallenness. It is that part of our lives that is
determined for us, our raw materials, if you
like, for the project of creating our
lives. Another example is the word courage,
which he uses more often than the traditional
term "authenticity" to mean facing one’s
anxiety and rising above it.
 Concept of his theory
Rollo May combined psychoanalytic traditions of
psychology and the existentialist movement to
explain his view of psychology.
WHAT IS THE EXISTENTIALIST VIEW?
The Existentialists philosophy
emphasizes "existence" rather than "essence". It
suggests that there is no truth or reality except as we
participate in it. Knowledge is an act of doing.
The Latin word "exsistere", which means "to
standout or "to emerge", and the existential approach
focuses upon the human being as he or she is
emerging and becoming.
 Concept of his theory

Ontology
the study of being, the essence of
people in general, human nature

Dasein
Being in the world; the emphasis is on
an individual's existence at a certain
time under certain circumstances
 Concept of his theory

Modes of existence
1. umwelt
objective aspects of the internal
and external environment
(nature); what the physical and
biological sciences study
 Concept of his theory

Modes of existence

2. Mitwelt
Social relationships,
interpersonal relationships
 Concept of his theory

Modes of existence

3. Eigenwelt
self-awareness, the
subjective world of the self
 OUR PREDICAMENT
Rollo points out that the central problem
that we face is a feeling of
"powerlessness", a "pervasive conviction
that the individual cannot do anything
effective in the face of enormous cultural,
social, and economic problems". Our
feelings of powerlessness are
compounded by anxiety and the loss of
traditional values.
POWERLESSNESS
In the early 1950s, May observed many
patients who came to see him were suffering
from inner feelings of emptiness. May
predicted that these experiences of emptiness
and powerlessness would in time increase
and of course it did.
The 1970s saw considerable talk
about human potentialities, yet, very little
confidence on the part of the individual to
make a difference. This feeling of
powerlessness continued throughout the
1980s and even into the 1990s. ".
Example:
The Vietnam War, unrest in the Middle
East, the threat of nuclear War
With our increase in technology, power
has become impersonal, an autonomous
force acting on its own behalf. No one
person or group feels capable of
exercising significant power.
Our feeling of powerlessness
subsequently leads to "Anxiety".
Anxiety is a major focus of Rollo May
and is the subject of his work "The
Meaning of Anxiety". He defines it as
"the apprehension cued off by a
threat to some value which the
individual holds essential to his
existence as a self" (1967, p. 72). He
also quotes Kierkegaard: "Anxiety is
the dizziness of freedom".
May's interest in isolation and anxiety
developed strongly after his time in the
sanatorium when he had tuberculosis. His
own feelings of depersonalization and
isolation as well as watching others deal
with fear and anxiety gave him important
insight into the subject. He concluded that
anxiety is essential to an individual's growth
and in fact contributes to what it means to
be human. This is a way that humans enact
their freedom to live a life of dignity.
He is unwavering in the importance of anxiety,
feelings of threat and powerlessness because it gives
humans the freedom to act courageously as
opposed to conforming to be comfortable This
struggle gives humans the opportunity to live life to
the fullest (Friedman). One way in which Rollo
proposes to fight anxiety is by displacing anxiety to
fear as he believes that “anxiety seeks to become
fear”.[7]He claims that by shifting anxiety to a fear,
one can therefore discover incentives to either avoid
the feared object or find the means to remove this
fear of it.
STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT
REDISCOVERING SELFHOOD
Rediscovering selfhood involves rediscovering our
own feelings and desires and fighting against those
things that prevent us from feeling and wanting.
May suggests four stages of consciousness of
self:
1. Innocence --is before consciousness of self is
born, the pre-egoic, pre-self-conscious stage of the
infant. The innocent is premoral, i.e. is neither bad
nor good. Like a wild animal who kills to eat, the
innocent is only doing what he or she must do. But
an innocent does have a degree of will in the sense of
a drive to fulfil their needs!
2. Rebellion -- the childhood and adolescent
stage of developing one’s ego or self-
consciousness by means of contrast with adults,
from the “no” of the two year old to the “no way”
of the teenager. The rebellious person wants
freedom, but has as yet no full understanding of
the responsibility that goes with it. The teenager
may want to spend their allowance in any way
they choose -- yet they still expect the parent to
provide the money, and will complain about
unfairness if they don't get it!
 Decision: a transitional stage during
which a teenager or young adult makes
decisions about his or her life, while
seeking further independence from her
parents.
3. Ordinary consciousness of self-- the
normal adult ego, conventional and a
little boring, perhaps. They have
learned responsibility, but find it too
demanding, and so seek refuge in
conformity and traditional values.
4. Creative consciousness of self --
the authentic adult, the existential stage,
beyond ego and self-actualizing. This is
the person who, accepting destiny,
faces anxiety with courage!
Not everyone achieves each level of
consciousness. The fourth stage, is
achieved only rarely, and it is
somewhat analogous to Maslows self
actualization stage.
THE GOALS OF INTEGRATION
1. Integrating the daimonic
2. Experiencing our power
3. Rediscovering care
4. Facing intentionality
5. Freedom and Destiny
6. Courage and creativity
7. Developing a new myth
Love and Will
Many of May’s unique ideas can be
found in the book , Love and
Will. In his efforts at reconciling
Freud and the existentialists, he
turns his attention
to motivation. His basic
motivational construct is the
daimonic.
Love and Will
The daimonic is the entire system of
motives, different for each individual. It is
composed of a collection of specific motives
called daimons.
The word daimon is from the Greek, and
means little god. It comes to us as demon,
with a very negative connotation. But
originally, a daimon could be bad or
good. Daimons include lower needs, such
as food and sex, as well as higher needs,
such as love.
Basically, he says, a daimon is anything
that can take over the person, a
situation he refers to as daimonic
possession. It is then, when the
balance among daimons is disrupted,
that they should be considered “evil” --
as the phrase implies! This idea is
similar to Binswanger's idea of themes,
or Horney's idea of coping strategies.
For May, one of the most important daimons
is eros. Eros is love (not sex), and in Greek
mythology was a minor god pictured as a young
man. Later, Eros would be transformed into that
annoying little pest, Cupid. May understood love
as the need we have to “become one” with another
person, and refers to an ancient Greek story by
Aristophanes: People were originally four-legged,
four-armed, two-headed creatures. When we
became a little too prideful, the gods split us in two,
male and female, and cursed us with the never-
ending desire to recover our missing half! like any
daimon, eros is a good thing until it takes over the
personality, until we become obsessed with it.
Another important concept for May is will:
The ability to organize oneself in order to
achieve one’s goals. This makes will roughly
synonymous with ego and reality-testing, but
with its own store of energy, as in ego
psychology. May hints that will, too, is a
daimon that can potentially take over the
person.
Another definition of will is “the ability to
make wishes come true.” Wishes are “playful
imaginings of possibilities,” and are
manifestations of our daimons. Many wishes,
of course, come from eros. But they require
will to make them happen!
May has three “personality types” coming
out of our relative supply,, .of our wishes
for love and the will to realize them. .

1. “neo-Puritan,” who is all will, but no

love. They have amazing self-discipline,
and can “make things happen”... but they
have no wishes to act upon. So they
become “anal” and perfectionistic, but empty
and “dried-up.”
2. The second type he refers to as
“infantile.” They are all wishes but no
will. Filled with dreams and desires, they don’t
have the self-discipline to make anything of
their dreams and desires, and so become
dependent and conformist. They love, but
their love means little. Perhaps Homer
Simpson is the clearest example!
3. The last type is the "creative" type. May
recommends, wisely, that we should cultivate
a balance of these two aspects of our
personalities. He said “Man’s task is to unite
love and will.”
Love
May's thoughts on love are documented
mainly by Love and Will, which focuses
on love and sex in human behavior and
in which he specifies five particular
types of love. He believes that they
should not be separate, but that society
has separated love and sex into two
different ideologies.
•Sex : Lust, tension release;
•Eros : Procreative love, savoring,
experiential;
•Philia : Brotherly love, liking;
•Agape : Unselfish love, devotion
to the welfare of others;
Authentic love : Incorporates all
other types of love
May particularly investigated and
criticized the "Sexual Revolution" in the
1960s, in which many individuals were
exploring their sexuality. "Free sex" was
replacing the ideology of free love. May
explains that love is intentionally willed
by an individual, whereas sexual desire is
the complete opposite. Love is real
human instinct reflected upon
deliberation and consideration..
May then shows that to give in to these impulses
does not actually make one free, but to resist
these impulses is the meaning of being free. May
perceived the Hippie subculture and sexual mores
of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as
commercialization of sex and pornography, as
having influenced society such that people
believed that love and sex are no longer associated
directly. According to May, emotion has become
separated from reason, making it acceptable
socially to seek sexual relationships and avoid the
natural drive to relate to another person and
create new life
May believed that sexual freedom
can cause modern society to neglect
more important psychological
developments. May suggests that
the only way to remedy the cynical
ideas that characterize our times is
to rediscover the importance of
caring for another, which May
describes as the opposite of apathy.
Myths
May’s last book was The Cry for Myth. He
pointed out that a big problem in the
twentieth century was our loss of
values. All the different values around us
lead us to doubt all values. May says we
have to create our own values, each of us
individually. This, of course, is difficult to
say the least. So we need help, not forced
on us, but “offered up” for us to use as our
will.
Enter myths, stories that help us to
“make sense” out of our lives,
“guiding narratives.” They resemble
to some extent Jung’s archetypes,
but they can be conscious and
unconscious, collective and
personal. A good example is how
many people live their lives based
on stories from the Bible.
Criticism of modern psychotherapy[
May believed that psychotherapists in the late
1900s had fractured away from the Jungian,
Freudian and other influencing psychoanalytic
thought and started creating their own
'gimmicks' causing a crisis within the world of
psychotherapy. These gimmicks were said to
put too much stock into the self where the real
focus needed to be looking at 'man in the
world'. To accomplish this, May pushed for the
use of existential therapy over individually
created techniques for psychotherapy .
Mays theory is not a scientific theory of
personality giving us a series of
hypotheses that may be tested by an
empirical procedure. Instead he
suggested a philosophical picture of
human nature that is coherent,
relevant, comprehensive, and
compelling.
The therapeutic process of the
existentialists seeks to understand the
patients mode of being in the world. It's the
context that distinguishes the existential
approach rather than any specific
technique. Much of the psychotherapeutic
devices of both Freud and gestalt
psychotherapists have been used.
May criticized contemporary psychological
research for being impressed with data and
uninterested in theory.