A Teacher
Rollo May
The daimonic and the integration of love and will
The transmission
Rollo Reece May (born April 21, 1909, in Ada, Ohio; died October 22, 1994, in Tiburon, California) was the American psychologist most responsible for bringing European existential thought into American psychotherapy.
After studying theology under Paul Tillich, whose friendship shaped his lifelong concern with anxiety, courage, and meaning, May turned to psychology, earning his PhD from Columbia University in 1949. His doctoral work became The Meaning of Anxiety (1950), written partly during a long convalescence from tuberculosis in which he confronted his own mortality and concluded that anxiety, faced rather than suppressed, could be a spur to becoming.
He helped introduce existential psychology to the United States as a co-editor of the landmark volume Existence (1958). May held that modern people suffer less from rigid morality than from emptiness, apathy, and the loss of an inner sense of significance, and that healing requires reclaiming the capacity to will and to care.
His best-known book, Love and Will (1969), which won the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award and became a bestseller, argued that authentic existence depends on reuniting love and will rather than splitting them.
Central to his thought is the daimonic — the natural drive (creativity, anger, eros, the hunger for power) that becomes destructive only when denied or when it possesses the whole self. Alongside Viktor Frankl, May stands as a principal architect of existential psychotherapy.
What they gave
The daimonic: Reframed the dark, driving energies of the psyche as natural forces that turn destructive only when repressed, and integrative when consciously owned and directed.
- Love and will reunited: Argued that the modern split between feeling and intention produces apathy, and that personal agency depends on welding care to deliberate willing.
- Anxiety as opportunity: Recast existential anxiety not as pathology to be eliminated but as the felt edge of freedom and the precondition of courage and growth.
- The recovery of will: Placed intention, choice, and responsibility at the center of psychotherapy, against deterministic models that dissolved the acting self.
In their words
Freedom is man’s capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves.
We can see this point clearly when we realize that consciousness of one’s self is always a unique act—I can never know exactly how you see yourself and you never can know exactly how I relate to myself.
The first thing necessary for a constructive dealing with time is to learn to live in the reality of the present moment. For psychologically speaking, this present moment is all we have.
Joy is the affect which comes when we use our powers. Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings.
The opposite to courage, as one endeavors to understand the problem in our particular age, is automaton conformity.
Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness.
By whatever name one calls it, genuine creativity is characterized by an intensity of awareness, a heightened consciousness.
To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive—to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before.
The line they stand in
Influenced by: Soren Kierkegaard’s analysis of anxiety and the self; the theologian Paul Tillich (The Courage to Be); Alfred Adler, with whom he studied in Vienna; and the broader European existential-phenomenological tradition.
- Influenced: Existential-humanistic psychotherapy in America; Irvin Yalom and James Bugental, who carried the existential approach forward; and the wider human potential movement’s emphasis on meaning, will, and authentic selfhood.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- The Meaning of Anxiety1950
- Love and Will1969
- The Courage to Create1975