Rollo May

• 1. Introduction

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  Rollo Reece May was born in Ada, Ohio, on the 21st of April, 1909, and he spent the next eight and a half decades asking questions that most people spend their lives avoiding: What is anxiety, really? What does love require of us? And why does freedom feel so terrifying? These were not abstract philosophical puzzles for May. They were questions born from a childhood marked by parental divorce, a sister whose schizophrenia led to repeated hospitalizations, and an expulsion from Michigan State University for involvement in a radical student magazine. They were questions sharpened in a sanatorium in 1942, where May lay ill with tuberculosis for eighteen months and watched fear and isolation break people around him. By the time he earned his PhD in clinical psychology from Teachers College, Columbia University, in 1949, May had lived more of his own theory than most psychologists ever do. His book Love and Will, published in 1969, won the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award and became a best-seller. He died of congestive heart failure on the 22nd of October, 1994, at the age of 85, in Tiburon on San Francisco Bay.

• 2. A Difficult Beginning

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  His mother named him after a fictional boy. Jacob Abbott, a 19th-century author, had written a popular series of children's books featuring a virtuous, well-behaved character called Rollo. May reportedly had an intense dislike for the nickname until he learned about a very different Rollo: Rollo the Conqueror, a tenth-century Norman, whose reputation offered a more tolerable namesake. That small act of reinterpretation, finding dignity in an unwanted inheritance, was something May would later theorize about extensively.

  At Michigan State University he studied English, but was expelled for his involvement in a radical student magazine. He transferred to Oberlin College and completed a bachelor's degree in English there. Rather than move directly into a career, May took a path that would prove formative: he spent three years teaching at Anatolia College in Greece. During that period he studied with Alfred Adler, the doctor and psychotherapist whose theories would share notable similarities with May's own later work.

  Back in the United States, May was ordained as a minister, but left the ministry after several years to pursue psychology. He later attended Union Theological Seminary for a Bachelor of Divinity, an institutional overlap between faith and the study of the mind that would color his intellectual friendships for the rest of his life. It was there that he became close with the philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich, who May would later identify as one of his biggest influences. May named his 1975 book The Courage to Create directly after Tillich's The Courage to Be.

• 3. Anxiety as Teacher

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  Eighteen months in a sanatorium gave May something most researchers never get: prolonged, unmediated contact with extreme fear in himself and in others. He observed that the patients around him exhibited anxiety that seemed deeply connected to depersonalization and isolation, not merely to the threat of physical death. That observation became the cornerstone of The Meaning of Anxiety, published in 1950 and revised in 1977.

  In that book May defined anxiety as "the apprehension cued off by a threat to some value which the individual holds essential to his existence as a self." He reached back to the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard for a complementary formulation, quoting him directly: "Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom." The phrase mattered because it framed anxiety not as a symptom to be eliminated but as an unavoidable feature of being a free person.

  May concluded that anxiety is essential for individual growth. He believed the feelings of threat and powerlessness it generates push people toward courage rather than conformity. He also proposed a specific psychological mechanism: he argued that internalizing anxiety as fear could reduce overall anxiety, because "anxiety seeks to become fear." By converting a diffuse dread into a specific, named fear, a person gains the possibility of either avoiding or confronting that fear directly. Man's Search for Himself, published in 1953, extended this line of thinking, examining recurring problems May encountered in his clinical practice: loneliness, emptiness, and a pervasive sense that life had lost meaning.

• 4. Love, Will, and the Sexual Revolution

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  Love and Will, published in 1969, brought May to a genuinely wide audience. The book sold widely and won the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award for humane scholarship in 1970. Its central argument was that modern Western society had fractured love and sex into two separate ideologies, when May believed they belonged together.

  May identified five distinct types of love. Libido he described as a biological function satisfied through sexual release. Eros he defined as a psychological desire seeking procreation or enduring union. Philia he characterized as intimate non-sexual friendship. Agape he described as disinterested concern for another's welfare, typically the love of God for humanity. Manic love, the fifth type, he described as impulsive and emotionally volatile, oscillating between extremes.

  His critique of the sexual revolution of the 1960s followed directly from this framework. May thought that Hippie counterculture and the commercialization of sex and pornography had pushed society toward treating sexual relationships as separable from any drive to connect deeply or create new life. He argued that giving in to sexual impulses did not make a person free: genuine freedom, in his view, came from resisting those impulses through deliberate will. The New York Society of Clinical Psychologists presented May with the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Award in 1972 for his next major work, Power and Innocence, which explored how power holds the potential for both human goodness and human evil.

• 5. A Map of the Self

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  May organized his understanding of human existence around three aspects of the world, terms he borrowed from the European existentialist tradition and made central to his own system. The first, Umwelt, he defined as "the world around us": biological and genetic influences that operate below conscious awareness, the realm of fate and destiny. The second, Mitwelt, he described as "the world" itself: the physical and social environment in which meaning emerges from shifting relationships, a domain that begins shaping children as they learn to influence others and take on responsibility. The third, Eigenwelt, he called "our own world": the psychological interior where self-exploration, self-knowledge, and identity form. This third aspect, unlike the first, is conscious. It is where self-awareness lives.

  May connected these three aspects directly to his account of guilt. He argued that guilt, like anxiety, was ontological: rooted in the nature of being, not merely in situational feelings. Guilt arising from Umwelt came from losing touch with nature as technology advanced. Guilt arising from Mitwelt came from the impossibility of fully understanding another person's needs. Guilt arising from Eigenwelt was universal because no person can completely fulfill their own potentialities.

  May also outlined four stages of development, but he was careful to distinguish them from Freud's strictly sequential psychosexual stages. His four stages, Innocence, Rebellion, Ordinary, and Creative, could each appear in both children and adults at different moments. The Creative stage was the existential ideal: authentic, self-actualizing, and capable of moving beyond simple egocentrism.

• 6. Against Gimmicks

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  In 1961, approximately two years after existential psychology was recognized as a distinct field, May published his critique of the direction he saw it taking. He identified five unconstructive trends, including the anti-scientific tendencies gaining traction alongside what he called America's broader wave of anti-intellectualism, and what he named "wild eclecticism," a sprawling, undisciplined mixing of techniques that he thought would ultimately ruin therapeutic practice.

  May's deeper worry was about what he called gimmicks. He believed that psychotherapists toward the end of the 20th century had drifted away from the foundational thinking of Freud, Jung, Rank, and Adler and were instead treating specific, surface-level symptoms rather than confronting patients' real psychological depths. He speculated that therapists grew bored after two or three years of this kind of work and responded by inventing more gimmicks. He went so far as to assert that gimmicks were designed to destroy modern society, a deliberately stark claim that reflected the seriousness with which he viewed the drift.

  Existential psychotherapy was his preferred alternative because it aligned with the original ambition he attributed to Freud, Jung, Rank, and Adler: bringing the unconscious to the conscious. May considered Otto Rank, whom he described as born in 1884 and dying in 1939, to be the most important precursor of existential therapy. Shortly before his own death, May wrote the foreword to a collected edition of Rank's American lectures, calling Rank "the great unacknowledged genius in Freud's circle." May was also Irvin D. Yalom's therapist, a relationship that placed May directly in the lineage of the next generation of existential practitioners.

• 7. Final Works and Legacy

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  My Quest for Beauty, published in 1985, was the closest May came to a conventional memoir. In it he wrote about his own views on beauty, arguing that it must be both understood and valued in the world. The Cry for Myth, published in 1991, proposed that humans use myths to make sense of their lives; May drew on case studies from his patients to argue that myth-making was especially vital for people seeking direction in a disorienting world.

  Two days before his death, May edited an advanced copy of The Psychology of Existence, co-authored with Kirk Schneider and intended to revitalize existential psychology for a new generation of scholars. The book was published in 1995. The American Psychological Foundation had already recognized the scope of May's career with its Gold Medal Award for Lifetime Contributions to Professional Psychology in 1987. Earlier, in 1971, the American Psychological Association had given him its Distinguished Contribution to Science and Profession of Clinical Psychology award.

  May spent the final years of his life in Tiburon, on San Francisco Bay, not far from the Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center in San Francisco, where he had been a founder and faculty member. Georgia, his wife, was with him when he died. The edited manuscript of The Psychology of Existence that May touched two days before his death stands as the last record of a mind that spent more than five decades insisting that anxiety, guilt, and freedom are not problems to be solved but conditions to be understood.