Rollo May

Rollo May — Psychology, Existentialism and the Search for Meaning

Rollo May speaking at the University of San Diego, between 1976 and 1977.

Rollo May (April 21, 1909 – October 22, 1994) was one of the most important American existential psychologists and an influential figure in humanistic psychology. His work explored some of the fundamental questions of human existence: anxiety, freedom, responsibility, love, courage, creativity and the search for meaning. Rather than seeing psychology simply as the study and treatment of symptoms, May believed that it should also help us understand what it means to be human.

May was strongly influenced by European existential philosophy, but he developed these ideas in a distinctly American psychological context. European thinkers such as Søren Kierkegaard had examined anxiety, freedom, despair and the uncertainty of existence. May brought these questions into psychology and psychotherapy, asking how people could confront the unavoidable difficulties of life while still developing their potential and creating meaning.

Beginnings

Rollo Reese May was born in Ada, Ohio, and grew up in Michigan. His early academic career already revealed something of his independent character. He studied at Michigan State College but left after becoming involved with a student magazine regarded as politically radical. He subsequently continued his education at Oberlin College in Ohio, graduating in 1930.

After college, May travelled to Europe and spent several years teaching English at Anatolia College in Greece. During this period he pursued his interest in art and encountered the ideas of the Austrian psychiatrist Alfred Adler. Living abroad also gave him the opportunity to explore European philosophy and culture at a time when his own intellectual direction was still developing.

Paul Tillich and Existential Thought

After returning to the United States, May entered Union Theological Seminary in New York, where one of his most important teachers was the theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich. Tillich became both a major intellectual influence and a lifelong friend. His exploration of courage, anxiety, freedom and meaning helped shape May’s later understanding of human psychology.

May graduated from Union Theological Seminary in 1938, but eventually moved away from the ministry towards psychology and psychotherapy. The questions that had attracted him to theology, however, never disappeared. They became central to his psychological work: How do we deal with uncertainty? What gives life meaning? What does freedom demand of us? And how do we find the courage to live authentically when suffering and death are unavoidable parts of existence?

Illness and a Confrontation with Mortality

A decisive event in May’s life occurred when he contracted tuberculosis in his thirties and spent an extended period recovering in a sanatorium. At that time tuberculosis could still be fatal, and May found himself confronting the possibility of his own death. The experience profoundly influenced both his personal outlook and his later psychological thinking.

During his illness he read extensively, particularly the works of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard’s writings on anxiety helped May recognise that anxiety was not necessarily an illness to be eliminated. It could also be an inevitable consequence of being alive, making choices and recognising our own freedom and mortality. This insight became one of the foundations of May’s later work.

The Meaning of Anxiety

May’s influential book The Meaning of Anxiety, published in 1950, developed this idea further. He distinguished between normal anxiety, which arises naturally when we face uncertainty, change or important decisions, and neurotic anxiety, which becomes disproportionate and prevents us from living freely. The goal of psychology, in his view, should not be to remove all anxiety from life — an impossible task — but to help people confront it constructively.

This was an important departure from approaches that regarded anxiety primarily as a symptom. For May, a certain amount of anxiety accompanies every meaningful life. Love involves the possibility of loss, freedom involves responsibility, creativity involves uncertainty, and every important choice closes off other possibilities. To live fully therefore requires not the absence of anxiety, but the courage to live with it.

Existential Psychology

May became one of the leading figures in introducing existential psychology to an American audience. He shared important ideas with humanistic psychologists such as Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, particularly their emphasis on human potential and personal development. But May’s vision was somewhat less optimistic. He insisted that a complete psychology must recognise not only growth and fulfilment, but also conflict, suffering, isolation, aggression and death.

Human beings, in May’s view, are neither completely determined by their past nor completely free from circumstance. We inherit biological limitations, personal histories and social environments that we did not choose. Yet within those limitations we retain a capacity to respond, choose and create meaning. Freedom therefore brings responsibility: we participate, at least partly, in determining what we become.

The Daimonic

One of May’s more distinctive concepts was what he called the daimonic. By this he meant any natural human drive or power that has the potential to take possession of the whole personality. Sex, anger, ambition, the desire for power and even creativity can become daimonic when one part of ourselves overwhelms everything else.

May did not regard the daimonic as inherently evil. These forces can be destructive, but they are also sources of vitality, passion and creativity. The psychological challenge is therefore not simply to suppress them, but to recognise and integrate them into the personality. A life without passion would hardly be fully human; a life completely controlled by passion can become destructive.

Innocence, Rebellion and Creativity

May also described several broad stages or modes of human development: innocence, rebellion, the ordinary mode and the creative mode. Unlike Freud’s developmental stages, these were not rigidly linked to particular ages. A person could display characteristics of several modes at different moments in life.

Innocence describes the relatively unselfconscious existence of early life. Rebellion emerges when the individual begins to assert independence and freedom. The ordinary person accepts responsibility but may also seek security in conformity and conventional values. In the creative mode, the individual confronts life more fully, accepts freedom and uncertainty, and actively participates in creating meaning.

Love and Will

Another central theme in May’s work was the relationship between love and will, explored most famously in his 1969 book Love and Will. He believed that modern society had increasingly separated these two fundamental dimensions of human existence. Love without will could become passive and sentimental, while will without love could become manipulative and empty.

A mature human life requires both: the capacity to care deeply about another person or purpose and the ability to act deliberately upon that commitment. For May, will was not simply stubborn determination. It was our capacity to organise ourselves towards something we value — to transform intention into meaningful action.

The Courage to Create

Creativity occupied a special place in May’s philosophy. In The Courage to Create he argued that genuine creativity requires courage because creating something new always involves uncertainty. The artist facing an empty canvas, the writer facing a blank page or anyone attempting to shape a different future must venture beyond what is already known.

Creativity in this sense is not restricted to artists. It is part of the way human beings participate in shaping their own existence. We cannot control everything that happens to us, but we can influence what we make of it. Every serious decision contains an element of creation because it helps determine the person we are becoming.

Freedom, Responsibility and Meaning

At the centre of May’s psychology lies a demanding but ultimately hopeful idea: human beings are participants in their own lives, not merely spectators. We are constrained by circumstances, by our histories and ultimately by mortality, but within those boundaries there remains room for choice. With that freedom comes responsibility for the way we respond to life.

May therefore did not promise a life without anxiety, conflict or suffering. He regarded such a promise as unrealistic. Instead, he asked how we can face those realities without allowing them to determine everything we are. Anxiety can accompany courage, limitation can stimulate creativity, and awareness of mortality can make the time available to us more meaningful.

A Psychology of Being Human

Rollo May’s lasting contribution was to bring psychology into conversation with some of philosophy’s oldest questions. Rather than reducing human beings to symptoms, instincts or conditioned behaviour, he insisted upon looking at the whole person — someone who loves, fears, chooses, creates, suffers, hopes and searches for meaning.

Perhaps that is why his work remains interesting beyond the field of psychology itself. May reminds us that a meaningful life is not necessarily a life from which uncertainty and difficulty have been removed. It is a life in which we continue to choose, to care and to create despite them.

We cannot always choose what life brings us — but we retain some freedom in choosing what we make of it.