Rollo May

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Existential Psychology Expert

Rollo May Quick Facts

Main Areas: Existential Psychology
Best Sellers: “Love and Will”
Career Focus: Author; Psychologist

s an itinerant artist.

When May returned to the United States, he entered Union Theological Seminary and became friends with one of his teachers, Paul Tillich, an existentialist theologian, who would have a profound effect on his thinking. May’s existential psychology examines reality as created by man himself. Man is ultimately responsible for the quality of his own existence, which takes precedence over simply living in the world.

May’s life changed when he contracted tuberculosis and had to spend three years in a sanatorium. In 1949, he received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Columbia University, and in 1958, he edited the book, Existence, which introduced existential psychology to the United States. May’s many other writings include The Courage to Create and Love and Will.

Other Programs & Highlights

While in the sanatorium, May filled the hours and solitude by reading and theorizing about man’s ultimate responsibility for his own existence. Among the literature he read were the writings of Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish religious writer who inspired much of the existential movement. After receiving his doctorate, May went on to teach at a variety of top schools.

Favorite Quotes & Thoughts from Rollo May

• Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.

• Creativity is not merely the innocent spontaneity of our youth and childhood; it must also be married to the passion of the adult human being, which is a passion to live beyond one’s death.

• Courage is not a virtue of value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundation that underlies and gives reality to all other virtues and personal values. Without courage our love pales into mere dependency. Without courage our fidelity becomes conformism.

• Freedom is man’s capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves.

• If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.

Getting Started With Rollo May

The best way to get started with Rollo May is to read The Courage to Create. May, throughout his books, writes from the perspective of an existential psychologist. In order to appreciate what he has done for Self Improvement, it helps to have a base understanding of existential psychology. Spark Notes from Barnes and Nobles provides some insight:

Why are existential psychology and philosophy called “existential?” The reason is that they focus on existence in the here and now. At each moment, a person is free to choose what he or she will do and be. The most important aspect of a person is not what she has genetically inherited, or how her parents treated her when she was an infant, but how she interprets and responds to the world around her at each given instant, and the kinds of choices she makes about what to do next. Thus, existential and humanistic psychologies reject Freud’s claim that the most important factor in understanding a person is early life experience. It also rejects the idea that biological or inherited factors are the most important aspect of a person (though only the most radical and misguided existentialist would claim that such factors have no influence on behavior). Furthermore, conscious choice and responsibility are central to existential psychology, and the unconscious is given little or no role to play.

In The Courage to Create, May shows us how we can break out of old patterns in our lives. He offers a way to help deal with our fears enabling us to become our fully realized selves. He also explains that existential philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus, and Sartre all concurred that courage didn’t mean the absence of despair; rather it meant “the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.”

In his book, May asks, “What if imagination and art are not frosting at all but the fountainhead of human experience? What if our logic and science derive from art forms and are fundamentally dependent on them rather than art being merely a decoration for our work when science and logic have produced it?”

Throughout The Courage to Create, Rollo May helps us find those creative impulses that offer new possibilities for achievement.