Psychologist
Profile: Rollo May
"One
does not become fully human painlessly."
Rollo
May (April 21, 1909 - October 22, 1994) was an American
existential psychologist. He authored the influential book (one of
my personal favorites) entitled, Love and Will in
1969.
Although he is often associated with humanistic psychology, he
differs from other humanistic psychologists such as Abraham Maslow
and Carl Rogers in emphasizing the tragic dimensions of human
existence. Unlike them, he built his thinking around the tenets of
existentialist philosophy.
Much of his thinking can be understood by reading about
existentialism in general. Nevertheless, he is a little off of the
mainstream in that he was more influenced by American humanism than
the Europeans, and more interested in reconciling existential
psychology with other approaches, especially Freud's.
Biography
May was born in
Ada, Ohio in 1909. He experienced a difficult childhood, with his
parents divorcing and his sister suffering a mental breakdown.
His educational career took him to Michigan State College majoring
in English and Oberlin College for a bachelor's degree, teaching
for a time in Greece, to Union Theological Seminary for a BD in
1938, and finally to Teachers College, Columbia University for a
PhD in clinical psychology in 1949.
May's
Work
May uses some
traditional existential terms in a slightly different fashion than
others, and he invents new words for traditional existentialist
concepts.
Destiny, for example, could be "thrownness" combined with
"fallenness" - the part of our lives that is determined
for us, for the purpose of creating our lives.
He also used the word "courage" to signify authenticity in
facing one's anxiety and rising above it.
"Stages"
of Development
Innocence
- the pre-egoic, pre-self-conscious stage of the infant. The
innocent is only doing what he or she must do. However, an innocent
does have a degree of will in the sense of a drive to fulfill
needs.
Rebellion
- the rebellious person wants freedom, but has yet no full
understanding of the responsibility that goes with it.
Decision
- the person is in a transition stage in their life where they need
to break away from their parents and settle into the ordinary
stage. In this stage they must decide what path their life will
take, along with fulfilling rebellious needs from the rebellious
stage.
Ordinary
- the normal adult ego learned responsibility, but finds it too
demanding, and so seeks refuge in conformity and traditional
values.
Creative
- the authentic adult, the existential stage, beyond ego and
self-actualizing. This is the person who, accepting destiny, faces
anxiety with courage.
May on
Modern-Day Love
May
perceived the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as
commercialization of sex and pornography, as having influenced
society and planted the idea in the minds of adults that love and
sex are no longer directly associated.
According to May, emotion has become separated from
reason, making it socially acceptable to seek sexual
relationships and avoid the natural drive to relate to another
person and create new life.
May believed the awakening of sexual freedoms can lead modern
society to dodge awakenings at higher levels. May suggests that the
only way to turn around the cynical ideas that characterize our
generation is to rediscover the importance of caring for another,
which May describes as the opposite of apathy.
Definition
of Anxiety
His first book,
The Meaning of Anxiety, was based on his doctoral
dissertation, which in turn was based on his reading of the 19th
century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard.
His definition of anxiety is "the apprehension cued off by a threat
to some value which the individual holds essential to his existence
as a self" (1967, p. 72).
He also quotes Kierkegaard: "Anxiety is the dizziness of
freedom".
Love and
Will
Many
of May's unique ideas can be found in the book I consider his best,
Love and Will. In his efforts at reconciling Freud and the
existentialists, he turns his attention to motivation. His basic
motivational construct is the daimonic. The
daimonic is the entire system of motives, different for
each individual. It is composed of a collection of specific motives
called daimons.
Basically, he
says, a daimon is anything that can take over the person, a
situation he refers to as daimonic possession. It is then, when the
balance among daimons is disrupted, that they should be considered
"evil".
For
May, one of the most important daimons is eros. Eros is
love (not sex), and in Greek mythology was a minor god
pictured as a young man. Later, Eros would be transformed into that
annoying little pest, Cupid. May understood love as the need we
have to "become one" with another person, and refers to an ancient
Greek story by Aristophanes. When we became a little too prideful,
the gods split us in two, male and female, and cursed us with the
never-ending desire to recover our missing half!
"Like
any daimon, eros is a good thing until it takes over the
personality,
until we become obsessed with it."
Another important
concept for May is will: The ability to organize
oneself in order to achieve one's goals. This makes will roughly
synonymous with ego and reality-testing, but with its own store of
energy, as in ego psychology. May hints that will, too, is a daimon
that can potentially take over the person.
Another
definition of will is "the ability to make wishes come true."
Wishes are "playful imaginings of possibilities," and are
manifestations of our daimons. Many wishes, of course, come from
eros. But they require will to make them happen!
Hence, we can see three "personality types" coming out of our
relative supply, you might say, of our wishes for love and the will
to realize them.
May says we have
to create our own values, each of us individually. This, of course,
is difficult to say the least. So we need help, not forced on us,
but "offered up" for us to use as we will.
Wise words to live by!
Reference / Image
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