In his early thirties, Rollo May was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Antibiotics were then just discovered. The disease could be fatal.
Three years in a sanatorium, fear of death, regular x-rays that could mean a sentence, observation of the behavior of other patients — all this prompted May to explore anxiety with all the seriousness that a practicing psychologist and former pastor is capable of. He was particularly impressed by the philosophical concept of Soren Kierkegaard, who considered anxiety as a struggle against non-existence hidden from consciousness. But psychology in the middle of the 1950th century (as well as Western culture as a whole) tended to reject the irrational: “… the experience of fear is something definite and concrete, we can give them “logical” explanations and study them with mathematical methods; but anxiety is usually experienced by a person as a deeply irrational phenomenon. Rollo May’s book was written in XNUMX and seemed groundbreaking. Today it has become a classic.
INSTITUTE OF GENERAL HUMANITARIAN STUDIES, 416 p.