— Robert Abzug

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April / MaY 2003

ROLLO MAY
Philosopher as Therapist
— Robert Abzug

Rollo May once described his mentor, the theologian Paul Tillich, as “in that line of sensitive personalities who through the ages have sought to understand what it means to be a human being” ( The Springs of Creative Living : A Study of Human Nature and God, Nashville: Abington-Cokesbury Press, 1940). May’s words echoed his own aspirations and his special place among the cohort of those who founded humanistic psychology. Ontology, exploring the nature of being itself, was his passion. It was the common thread of his intellectual, artistic, and professional pursuits. Whether as therapist, professional activist, writer, or psychological innovator, he searched for the proper vision of humankind on which to ground psychology, and for that matter, the conduct of life.

May shared this quest with most of those who helped to found humanistic psychology at Old Saybrook in 1964 (David Elkins, “Old Saybrook I and II: The Visioning and Revisioning of Humanistic Psychology, Journal of Humanistic Psychology 40, 2, 2000), but each participant brought a unique background and sensibility to the inquiry. Unlike many of those at the meeting, May never held a regular university position and had no interest in obtaining one. Nor did he ever wish to create a professional following devoted to his theories. Rather, May excelled as a visionary and critic, as a philosopher, always aware of the power of human creativity for good and evil, and conscious of the inevitable ambiguities and finitude that defined even the richest life astragic. Early in his professional life, in his first career as a Protestant minister deeply interested in counseling, he sought to bring together psychotherapy and a Christian vision of human life. After his turn away from formal Christianity and toward psychotherapy as a career, he found Existentialism the most compelling philosophical expression of the human condition. Especially in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he made it his mission to introduce Existentialism’s vision to the psychotherapeutic community and to expand upon its meaning in his own work. Whether as minister or psychotherapist or popular philosopher, his central mission was clear: to promote an active process of self-understanding that allowed the individual to find his or her own peculiar genius, and to live a more rich and creative life.

ROLLO’S SENSE OF SOCIAL MISSION Yet, it would be wrong to emphasize May’s interest in the “self” at the expense of his strong sense of social mission, for he had a deep commitment to social responsibility. In fact, one of the most interesting themes in his work and life was his ever-changing sense of the relationship of self to society. May “lived” this issue from an early age in small towns of the Midwest, where he was born in 1909. His parents named him for the hero of a nineteenth-century American Christian children’s book series. These were the Rollo books by Jacob Abbott, in which one follows the hero from childhood to young adulthood as he learns to bea good boy. (In later years, May was happy to find a statue of the Viking hero of the same name in Fargo, North Dakota!) They imbued in him a passion for spiritual selfsearching that remained even after he spiraled far beyond the religious formulas of his youth.

His father was a devoted and successful field secretary for the YMCA, who planted the ideas of service to others at the root of Rollo’s upbringing. This Christian selflessness sometimes worked in harmony and sometimes in dissonance with the more pietistic sense of specialness imparted by his mother, a devout Methodist, who passed along her own brand of somewhat tortured self-scrutiny.

The intertwined themes of piety and social responsibility began to shape May’s public voice as early as college. At Michigan State (1926– 1928), where only a few Y friends and mentors kept his spirit alive, he created and co-edited a crusading weekly news sheet, The Student, in which he excoriated his fellow students for conformity and celebrated men who defied convention in the cause of Truth. An example of May’s prose was this celebration of Jesus: “Society called him a radical, a fanatic, and heaped abuses on His back. Had He not had the power to be an individual, you and I would not be here today!” When his fellow editor accused the state Agricultural Commissioner of financial improprieties and the Michigan State administration punished the crusading editors, Rollo transferred to Oberlin College (1928– 1930), a center of humane education and Christian social commitment. He awakened to art, philosophy, and literature, and to the culture of classical antiquity. His studies deepened the search for an authentic Christian life and provided a standard against which he could judge the religion practiced around him. Even when he later moved away from Christianity proper, the search for authenticity and spiritual and intellectual engagement remained. Indeed, he framed much of his mature work in the spirit of thinkers, poets, and philosophers who first set his mind ablaze at Oberlin: the Greek philosophers and playwrights, Nietzsche, the Victorian poets, and others.

CHRISTIAN SOCIALISM May graduated Oberlin in 1930, firmly committed to a future in “religious work” and to Christian socialism. In the fall of that year, he began three years of teaching at Anatolia College, a Protestant missionary school in Thessaloniki, Greece. In Europe, he endured a systemic shock that sent his plans and visionsS in directions undreamt of in his college years. Many of his students were poor Greek and Armenian refugees whose families had only recently been expelled from Turkey. Europe’s long and often tragic history, personified by the students he taught, mocked his American and Christian innocence. Every day he learned new lessons from them about life even as he increasingly feared that he had little of substance to teach them. He began to question the whole missionary enterprise and his own motives in becoming part of it. In the spring of 1932, he experienced a “personality breakdown,” which he later described as happening “when the meaning by which a person has been living is discovered to be false or inadequate” ( The Springs of Creative Living: A Study of Human Nature and God, 13).

Rollo lay bedridden for weeks but after an extraordinary climb to and meditation near the top of Mount Hortiati, in whose shadow Anatolia College lay, he emerged with a deeper vision of genuine Christianity, the rebirth of long dormant artistic impulses, and a hunger for experience. In the summer that followed, through a kind of synchronic luck, he journeyed to Vienna to take Alfred Adler’s summer seminar on psychoanalysis. Psychology instantly became an obsession, and the “short” analysis offered by one of Adler’s associates opened May to another world, the world of women. In that summer of 1932, he lost his virginity and carried on his first great romance, with a woman whom he met while traveling with a group of artists soon after finishing his course with Adler. Those discoveries would have been impossible without his “personality breakdown” and the opening to a new life that it provided. Nor was May’s encounter with Adler simply a matter of release but rather the acquisition of a new vocabulary of self and social understanding. Adlerian psychology taught May that he suffered from a “guiding fiction” that, in part, transformed his feelings of “inferiority” into a fantasy of false moral superiority and necessary, courageous isolation. May had already rejected those aspects of missionary work that reflected such a stance. Now his analyst urged him to see that he must break down the walls of separation from others and live a little. That he did.

Returning to America in 1933, he sought a new vision of “religious work” that incorporated these insights and other psychological perspectives. He found the opportunity at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, whose Christian commitments included a heavy dose of social and political activism under the aegis of Reinhold Niebuhr and others. May put his socialist principles into action in the depths of the Great Depression, trying out different sorts of reform activities as part of his student practicum. In the end, however, he found it difficult to lose self-consciousness in the doing of good, as when he confessed to his diary a certain repulsion at the “sheer mockery” and “utter profanation” of playing trombone in a Salvation Army-like mission band and promoting such a performance “using Jesus’ name.” Once again, he felt unsure of his path to a calling.

A CAREER IN COUNSELING Fate intervened when his father left the family, and May returned to Michigan after Union’s spring term in 1934 to help his mother raise his five brothers and sisters. He found a job at Michigan State that combined counseling with YMCA work, a perfect combination for his career passions. By the end of his two-year term, he had counseled hundreds of students, planned an endless array of group activities, and published several articles on student counseling and the religious state of college life. He returned to Union in 1936, there to fall under the spell of Paul Tillich. He graduated in 1938 even as he continued to write and lecture on counseling. On the basis of three weeks with Adler and two years of unsupervised practice at Michigan State, he lectured widely as an expert counselor and published his talks as a landmark book in the field, The Art of Counseling (Nashville: Abington-Cokesbury Press, 1939), even as he launched a marriage and a ministry in New Jersey.

The book’s success, a second popular book ( The Springs of Creative Living) in 1940, and May’s dislike of the ministry led to his resignation after little more than two years and to his pursuit of a doctorate in psychology at Columbia University’s Teachers College. Tillich introduced him to New York’s intellectual émigrés and suggested that he participate in the New York Psychology Group, a private seminar on psychology, religion, and society whose members included the Tillichs, Erich Fromm, Seward Hiltner (a pioneer in psychologically based pastoral counseling), Ernst Schachtel, Ruth Benedict, and other first-rate minds from a variety of fields.

Questions of philosophy, science, and eternity became immediately relevant between 1942 and 1945 when he struggled with a potentially fatal case of tuberculosis, periodically taking rest cures at various sanitaria, and pondering life’s meaning. May had studied Nietzsche and Kierkegaard with Tillich in the 1930s.

No wonder that he chose anxiety as the topic for his doctoral dissertation, which he completed in 1949 and published a year later as The Meaning of Anxiety (1950). Widely read and impressive in its comprehensive consideration of the various causes, meanings, and uses of anxiety, some have credited the book with focusing and reinvigorating serious study of that central human experience.

ENGAGEMENT WITH EXISTENTIALISM The Meaning of Anxiety also contained the germ of just about every major exploration he would take in the years that followed its publication. A long section on Kierkegaard prefigured May’s engagement with Existentialism. A chapter on the cultural interpretation of anxiety especially emphasized the anomie of modern life, a major theme in May’s broader vision of humankind within society, in Man’s Search for Himself (1953) and Love and Will (1969).

It was a natural step to engage the work of Binswanger, Boss, Frankl, and others. May made it possible for American therapists and the public to become aware of their ideas. He did this in books such as Existence (1958) and a later collection of papers, Existential Psychology (1962), and by helping to found an American existentialist working group and a journal. This interest ultimately fed in to the formation of the Association for Humanistic Psychology.

ORIGINS OF HUMANISTIC PSYCHOLOGY May’s cultural elaborations of Goldstein’s psychobiological theory of anxiety as necessary to an organism’s “self-actualization,” its role in the creative process, contributed ideas that became central to humanistic psychology and to his more focused work on creativity.

In all these works, although May mostly argued for the closer investigation of self and selfactualization as the only way to cope creatively with modernity, he always defined that self in relation to others and to society in general. In the 1950s through much of the 1970s, he emphasized the power of modern society to impress its conformist and de-personalizing nature on the individual. Salvation came from the creativity unleashed in artists, writers, and musicians as they battled the anxiety of the modern condition, and from authentically experienced human encounters.

Still, he retained a vision of the good society that moved beyond a collection of individually creative people. Especially later in his life, May tempered his emphasis on self-actualization with an appreciation of the need for stories and symbols that offered essential truths and mythic paths through life. As important, he remained true to his father’s commitments, those of Reinhold Niebuhr, and others in thinking that genuine freedom required social and economic opportunity and justice. As I was getting to know Rollo May in the late 1980s, even before we had agreed to be biographer and subject, I attended an address by Rollo at the 1988 annual meeting of AHP in Washington, D.C. “We have won the battle for the dignity of the individual in therapy,” he told his audience (as I can remember the phrases), “but we haven’t begun to help in the fight against the destruction of souls by poverty, disease, and injustice.” Those words reflected concerns that remained at the core of Rollo May’s being from his college days to his death in 1994.

ROBERT H. ABZUG is Oliver H. Radkey Regents Professor of History and American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, www.utexas.edu /cola/depts/ams/about/abzug.htm. zug@mail.utexas.edu