Rollo May, who dared to live

A XNUMX% American from the Midwest, May taught English in Greece after college while traveling around Europe, educating himself and looking into clinical psychology. Back in the US, he produced the country’s first (and still one of the best) guide to psychological counseling. And in parallel he graduated from the seminary and became a practicing clergyman.

He tried to “pair” these two sides of his personality in the 1940 book “The Origins of Creative Life”, dedicated to the relationship between psychotherapy and religion, with an epigraph from Berdyaev: “… To talk about a person means to talk about God at the same time …” The book was a success, but May soon bought up the rest of the print run and forbade it to be mentioned or republished. “I realized that I didn’t believe what I wrote.” The next turning point was the deadly tuberculosis in those years, which put him to bed for a year and a half. Recovery was facilitated by the realization that death threatens, first of all, those who are ready to give in to it in advance or are enchanted to meet it. “Looking death in the face was a valuable experience,” May said, “it taught me to look life in the face.” After recovering, May broke with religion, finding in psychology a more effective means of reducing suffering. However, the main thing for him was not consulting, but writing books. Almost all of his works are addressed to a wide audience; they brought him not only scientific, but also literary awards.

Rollo May became the main promoter of the ideas of European existentialism in the United States, one of the founders and leaders of humanistic psychology. The existential view allowed him to see in a person not what is given by genes and the environment, but, first of all, what he creates from himself, making certain choices.

Keys to Understanding

The choice of fate

Each of us is given the opportunity to manage our own development – this is our freedom. With freedom and self-awareness, we can break the chain of stimuli and reactions and act consciously, therefore freedom is associated with flexibility, openness, readiness for change. At the same time, it is related to the inevitable givens of our life – in other words, to fate. May distinguishes its levels: cosmic, genetic, cultural destiny and specific circumstances. And although each of these levels predetermines a lot, we still have the freedom to cooperate with fate, to accept it, to challenge it. The price of freedom is the inevitability of evil. If I am free to choose, no one can guarantee that I will choose good. All the great saints considered themselves great sinners, being extremely sensitive to both good and evil, and thus to the consequences of their actions. Freedom, while expanding the potential for good, simultaneously expands the possibilities for evil. And only the person himself is responsible for what he chooses.

The formation of man

The main dilemma of our life is the fundamental ability inherent only in man to perceive himself as both an active subject and a passive object. In the space between these two poles, our consciousness fluctuates, choosing the way of our existence. Identity, the feeling of “I” is the starting point of our life. Everything we do is aimed at maintaining this inner center, even our neuroses serve this purpose. The formation of a personality is the development of a sense of “I”, a feeling of being an active subject that influences events. This process is associated with the liberation from various kinds of unconscious dependencies and the transition to freely chosen actions and relationships.

The value of anxiety

Anxiety is a natural and constructive feeling. It is caused by the unpredictability of the future and is associated with a sense of threat to something significant: personal values ​​or life itself. May translated the philosophical ideas of Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Tillich about existential anxiety as an unavoidable condition of our existence into the language of psychological concepts. Painful is only anxiety disproportionate to the occasion. It occurs when we, not wanting to put up with our experiences, try to completely expel anxiety from life, which, on the contrary, leads to its intensification. The task of the psychotherapist is not to eliminate anxiety in general, but to help accept it, preventing its pathological growth.