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Existential Psychology
Rollo Reese May
Born April 21, 1909 in Ada, Ohio.
First son of the six children born to Earl Tittle May and Matie Boughton
May.
During his childhood, May found solitude and relief from family strife
by playing on the Shores of the St. Clair River.
As a youth, he acquired an interest in art and literature.
He first attended college at Michigan State University, where he
majored in English.
May then transferred to Oberlin College in Ohio.
He roamed throughout eastern and southern Europe as an artist,
painting pictures, and studying native art.
By his second year, May was beginning to become lonely.
As a consequence, he poured himself into his work as a teacher, but
the harder he worked, the less effective he became.
May began to listen to his inner voice, the one that spoke to him of
beauty.
"It seems it has taken a collapse of my whole former way of life for this
voice to make itself heard".
He attended Alfred Adler's 1932 summer seminars at a resort in the
mountains of Vienna.
After May returned to the US in 1933, he enrolled at Union Theological
Seminary in New York.
He was ordained as a Congregational minister in 1938 after receiving
a Master of Divinity degree.
He served as a pastor for 2 years, but finding parish work meaningless,
he quit to pursue his interest in psychology.
He studied psychoanalysis at the William Alanson White Institute of
Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology while working as a
counselor to male students at City College of New York.
In 1949, he earned a PhD in clinical psychology from Columbia
University.
In his early thirties, he contracted tuberculosis, and spent 3 years at
the Saranac Sanitarium in upstate New York.
The Meaning of Anxiety (1950), Man's Search for Himself (1953), Love
and Will (1969b).
May was a visiting professor at both Harvard and Princeton - He was
an adjunct professor at New York University,
Chairman for the Council for the Association of Existential Psychology
and Psychiatry
President of the New York Psychological Association
Member of the Board of Trustees of the American Foundation for
Mental Health
In 1969, May and his first wife, Florence DeFrees, were divorced after
30 years of marriage.
He later married Ingrid Kepler Scholl, but that marriage too ended in
divorce.
He was survived by his third wife, Georgia Lee Miller Johnson; son,
Robert; and twin daughters, Allegra and Carolyn.
May died in Tiburon, California, October 22, 1994.
What is Existentialism?
Existence takes precedence over essence.
Existentialism opposes the split between subject and
object.
People search for some meaning to their lives.
Existentialists hold that ultimately each of us is responsible
for who we are and what we become.
Existentialists are basically anti theoretical.
Basic Concepts
Being-in-the-World
– The basic unity of person and environment is expressed in the
German word Dasein, meaning to exist there.
Alienation manifests itself in three areas:
• separation from nature;
• lack of meaningful of interpersonal relations;
• alienation from one's authentic self.
Thus, people experience three simultaneous modes in their being-in-
the-world:
• Umwelt, or the environment around us;
• Mitwelt, or our relations with other people;
• Eigenwelt, or our relationship with our self.
Nonbeing
Normal Anxiety
– "which is proportionate to the threat, does not involve repression,
and can be confronted constructively on the conscious level".
Neurotic Anxiety
– "a reaction which is disproportionate to the threat, involves
repression and other forms of intrapsychic conflict, and is managed by
various kinds of blocking-off of activity and awareness".
Guilt
both anxiety and guilt are onthological.
they refer to the nature of being and not to feelings
arising from specific situations or transgressions.
3 Forms of Onthological Guilt
May believe that our modern society has lost sight of the
true nature of love and will, equating love with sex and
will with will power.
Forms of Love
Sex is a biological function that can be satisfied through
sexual intercourse or some other release of sexual tension.
Eros is psychological desire that seeks procreation or creation
through enduring union with a loved one. Eros is built on care
and tenderness.
Philia is an intimate nonsexual friendship between two
people. Philia cannot be rushed; it takes time to grow, to
develop, to sink its roots.
Agape is the esteem for the other, the concern for the other’s
welfare beyond any gain that one can get out of it;
disinterested love, typically, the love of God for man. Agape
is altruistic love.
Freedom
Freedom is the individual’s capacity to know that he is
the determined one.