Rollo May

Introduction

Rollo May (21 April 1909 – 22 October 1994) was the psychologist who brought European existentialism into American psychotherapy, and who argued for the unfashionable position that anxiety is not a symptom to be eliminated but a condition of being alive.

His claim in The Meaning of Anxiety (1950) was that anxiety arises when something a person takes as essential to their existence is threatened — and that this is not a malfunction. Drawing on Kierkegaard, he took the view that anxiety appears whenever a new possibility opens up, and that the absence of anxiety in a life is evidence of constriction rather than health.

He spent the rest of his career working out what follows from taking human existence seriously as a subject: that people are not driven by instinct alone, not shaped by environment alone, but are creatures who choose, and who are therefore responsible for what they become. This made him the dark tempered member of the humanistic movement — he thought his colleagues' optimism about human nature was sentimentality that could not account for the century.

Early Life and Education

May was born in Ada, Ohio, in 1909. His father was a YMCA secretary; his parents' marriage failed — separation, then divorce — and his sister suffered a breakdown. He described an unhappy childhood, and it is difficult not to read his later interest in anxiety as partly biographical.

He was expelled from Michigan State for his involvement in a radical student magazine and transferred to Oberlin College, taking a bachelor's degree in 1930. He then taught English for three years at Anatolia College in Greece, spent time as an itinerant artist — he painted well throughout his life — and attended a summer seminar that Alfred Adler ran in the Austrian mountains. Adler's influence on his early thinking about therapy was substantial and is often overlooked.

From 1934 to 1936 he worked as a student counsellor at Michigan State College, then enrolled at Union Theological Seminary in New York to study the existentialist philosophy then arriving from Europe, completing a divinity degree in 1938. There he encountered the theologian Paul Tillich, from whom he first received existential thought, and with whom he formed a lasting friendship. Tillich's influence on his work is not incidental: May's psychology retains a theological structure, and its central concerns — being, finitude, the courage to affirm oneself despite contingency — are Tillich's before they are his.

He then worked as a counsellor at City College of New York and began studying psychoanalysis.

Academic and Professional Career

In 1946 he entered private practice and began graduate study at Columbia. His life had turned a few years earlier: in 1942 he contracted tuberculosis, then often fatal, and spent three years in a sanatorium. He later described the illness as the turning point of his life.

What he did with the time is the interesting part. Confronted with the possibility of dying, he read systematically — Kierkegaard above all — and worked through what psychoanalysis and existentialism each had to say about anxiety. A man studying anxiety while facing death from it produced the book that defined the subject.

On his release he trained in psychoanalysis at the William Alanson White Institute, where he worked closely with Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm. In 1949 he submitted The Meaning of Anxiety as his dissertation and became the first person awarded a doctorate in clinical psychology by Columbia. It was published in 1950.

He remained at the William Alanson White Institute as a training and supervising analyst, held a fellowship at the New School for Social Research, and taught as a visiting professor at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. He received the American Psychological Association's award for distinguished professional contribution to clinical psychology and the American Psychological Foundation's Gold Medal for lifetime achievement.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The meaning of anxiety

May defined anxiety as the apprehension aroused when a value a person takes as essential to their existence is threatened. The definition does the work: anxiety is distinguished from fear by having no object, and it is distinguished from illness by being proportionate to the threat.

His argument against the psychiatric consensus of the time was that the goal could not be the elimination of anxiety. A person who feels no anxiety has either narrowed their life to the point where nothing they value is at stake, or is defending against it in ways that are more damaging than the anxiety itself. He cited Kierkegaard's remark that anxiety is our best teacher, and his own formulation — that anxiety appears whenever new possibility appears — made it a condition of growth rather than a symptom.

He also insisted that anxiety is not the same as fear and that the two had been conflated in the clinical literature, with the result that normal existential anxiety was being treated as pathology.

Love and Will

Love and Will (1969) was his best-known book and came out of a specific observation: that American culture in the 1960s had separated sex from eros to the detriment of both. He distinguished four kinds of love — libido (sexual), eros (the drive toward union and creation), philia (friendship), and agape (care for the other as such) — and held that genuine love involves all four and collapses if reduced to any one.

His diagnosis was that sexuality had been freed from the meanings that eros carries, with the result that it became mechanical. The separation was not liberation but impoverishment.

The book also introduced his account of the daimonic: any natural function with the power to take over the whole person — sex, eros, anger, the craving for power. The daimonic is neither good nor evil but is the source of both, and the task of life is not to suppress it but to integrate it. Suppress it and it returns in destructive form; surrender to it and it consumes the person.

The most quoted sentence from the period is his: the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. Apathy, he argued, is the defence against the vulnerability that loving requires, and it is the precondition for violence — a person who can no longer feel they matter will find a way to matter.

The courage to create

In The Courage to Create (1975) he treated creativity as the encounter with limitation — the form, the material, the deadline — and argued that the creative act requires the same acceptance of finitude that Tillich called the courage to be. The enemy of creativity is not constraint but the refusal to commit, because commitment forecloses other possibilities.

Existence and the American reception

With Ernest Angel and Henri Ellenberger he edited Existence (1958), the volume that introduced existential analysis to an American clinical audience and supplied the tradition with its English vocabulary. It is the reason existential therapy became a recognisable option in the United States rather than a European curiosity.

Major Publications

The Art of Counseling (1939)
The Meaning of Anxiety (1950) — his dissertation, and the first clinical psychology doctorate from Columbia
Man's Search for Himself (1953)
Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology (1958, edited with Ernest Angel and Henri Ellenberger)
Psychology and the Human Dilemma (1967)
Love and Will (1969)
Power and Innocence: A Search for the Sources of Violence (1972)
The Courage to Create (1975)
Freedom and Destiny (1981)
The Discovery of Being (1983)
The Cry for Myth (1991)

Impact and Legacy

May is the principal reason existential thought entered American psychotherapy, and his influence runs through the parts of clinical practice that take meaning, mortality, and responsibility seriously rather than treating them as epiphenomena. The modern literature on existential anxiety, on meaning-centred therapy, and on the clinical handling of mortality all descend from him. His reframing of anxiety as potentially constructive rather than pathological has become mainstream, in modified form, and his account of the daimonic anticipated later work on the integration of destructive impulses.

Criticism. The central objection is the one usually brought against the tradition: the claims are not testable. "A value essential to one's existence," "the daimonic," "the courage to affirm being" are not constructs that can be operationalised without losing what makes them interesting, and May's work contains no programme of research. It is hermeneutic and clinical, and it has to be judged as such — but judged that way, it competes with other readings rather than being adjudicated by evidence.

His position within humanistic psychology was itself a criticism of it, and it cut the other way too. He thought Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers had produced an account of human nature too sunny to survive contact with the twentieth century — that self-actualisation and unconditional positive regard were fine until one had to explain Auschwitz or Vietnam. That criticism has force. But his alternative never generated a research programme the way theirs did, and the movement's empirical wing has had more lasting influence on the field.

The sexual politics of Love and Will have aged badly in places. He was writing against what he saw as a destructive sexual libertarianism, and his diagnosis — that sex had been severed from meaning — is arguable. But the book's framing of eros and its warnings about the consequences of sexual freedom were read, at the time and since, as conservative moralising from a clinician, and the charge is not wholly unfair. He offered no evidence that the changes he deplored had produced the alienation he attributed to them.

There is also the theological substratum. May's psychology is Tillich's theology with the God removed, and its terms — being, finitude, courage, grace — carry assumptions that do no work in a scientific framework and considerable work in a religious one. Whether that is a limitation depends on whether one takes the project as psychology.

Finally, his work is individualistic in a way that dates it. The unit of analysis is always the person making the choice, and the social and material conditions that constrain which choices are available receive little attention. For the questions he was asking, that is a defensible scope; as a general psychology, it is a narrow one.

Learn More

Sigmund Freud — whose drive theory May reinterpreted in existential terms
Alfred Adler — whose summer seminar first turned May toward therapy
Erich Fromm — his colleague at the William Alanson White Institute
Viktor Frankl — the other major figure in meaning-centred therapy
History of Psychology — the humanistic movement he argued with from inside
Clark Moustakas — who developed heuristic inquiry for experience that resists measurement

References

May, R. (1953). Man's Search for Himself. Norton.