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Feist−Feist: Theories of Personality, Seventh Edition

III. Humanistic/Existential Theories

12. May: Existential Psychology

© The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2009

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CHAPTER 12

May: Existential Psychology B Overview of Existential Psychology B Biography of Rollo May B Background of Existentialism

What Is Existentialism? Basic Concepts B The Case of Philip B Anxiety

Normal Anxiety Neurotic Anxiety B Guilt B Intentionality

May

B Care, Love, and Will

Union of Love and Will Forms of Love B Freedom and Destiny

Freedom Defined Forms of Freedom What Is Destiny? Philip’s Destiny B The Power of Myth

B Psychotherapy B Related Research

Mortality Salience and Denial of Our Animal Nature Fitness as a Defense Against Mortality Awareness B Critique of May B Concept of Humanity B Key Terms and Concepts

B Psychopathology

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III. Humanistic/Existential Theories

Part III

12. May: Existential Psychology

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Humanistic/Existential Theories

wice married, twice divorced, Philip was struggling through yet another difficult relationship—this time with Nicole, a writer in her mid-40s. Philip could offer Nicole both love and financial security, but their relationship did not seem to be working. Six months after Philip met Nicole, the two spent an idyllic summer together at his retreat. Nicole’s two small sons were with their father and Philip’s three children were by then young adults who could care for themselves. At the beginning of the summer, Nicole talked about the possibility of marriage, but Philip replied that he was against it, citing his two previous unsuccessful marriages as his reason. Aside from this brief disagreement, the time they spent together that summer was completely pleasurable. Their intellectual discussions were gratifying to Philip and their lovemaking was the most satisfying he had ever experienced, often bordering on ecstasy. At the end of this romantic summer, Nicole returned home alone to put her children in school. The day after she arrived home, Philip telephoned her, but somehow her voice seemed strange. The next morning he called again and got the feeling that someone else was with Nicole. That afternoon he called several more times but kept getting a busy signal. When he finally got through, he asked her if someone had been with her that morning. Without hesitation, Nicole reported that Craig, an old friend from her college days, was staying with her and that she had fallen in love with him. Moreover, she planned to marry Craig at the end of the month and move to another part of the country. Philip was devastated. He felt betrayed and abandoned. He lost weight, resumed smoking, and suffered from insomnia. When he saw Nicole again, he expressed his anger at her “crazy” plan. This outburst of rage was rare for Philip. He seldom showed anger, perhaps for fear of losing the one he loved. To complicate matters, Nicole said she still loved Philip, and she continued to see him whenever Craig was not available. Eventually, Nicole lost her infatuation with Craig and told Philip that, as he well knew, she could never leave him. This comment confused Philip because he knew no such thing.

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Overview of Existential Psychology We return to Philip’s story at several points in this chapter. But first, we present a brief overview of existential psychology. Shortly after World War II, a new psychology—existential psychology—began to spread from Europe to the United States. Existential psychology is rooted in the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and other European philosophers. The first existential psychologists and psychiatrists were also Europeans, and these included Ludwig Binswanger, Medard Boss, Victor Frankl, and others. For nearly 50 years, the foremost spokesperson for existential psychology in the United States was Rollo May. During his years as a psychotherapist, May evolved a new way of looking at human beings. His approach was not based on any controlled scientific research but rather on clinical experience. He saw people as living in the world of present experiences and ultimately being responsible for who they

Feist−Feist: Theories of Personality, Seventh Edition

III. Humanistic/Existential Theories

12. May: Existential Psychology

Chapter 12

© The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2009

May: Existential Psychology

become. May’s penetrating insights and profound analyses of the human condition made him a popular writer among laypeople as well as professional psychologists. Many people, May believed, lack the courage to face their destiny, and in the process of fleeing from it, they give up much of their freedom. Having negated their freedom, they likewise run away from their responsibility. Not being willing to make choices, they lose sight of who they are and develop a sense of insignificance and alienation. In contrast, healthy people challenge their destiny, cherish their freedom, and live authentically with other people and with themselves. They recognize the inevitability of death and have the courage to live life in the present.

Biography of Rollo May Rollo Reese May was born April 21, 1909, in Ada, Ohio, the first son of the six children born to Earl Tittle May and Matie Boughton May. Neither parent was very well educated, and May’s early intellectual climate was virtually nonexistent. In fact, when his older sister had a psychotic breakdown some years later, May’s father attributed it to too much education (Bilmes, 1978)! At an early age, May moved with his family to Marine City, Michigan, where he spent most of his childhood. As a young boy, May was not particularly close to either of his parents, who frequently argued with each other and eventually separated. May’s father, a secretary for the Young Men’s Christian Association, moved frequently during May’s youth. May’s mother often left the children to care for themselves and, according to May’s description, was a “bitch-kitty on wheels” (Rabinowitz, Good, & Cozad, 1989, p. 437). May attributed his own two failed marriages to his mother’s unpredictable behavior and to his older sister’s psychotic episode. During his childhood, May found solitude and relief from family strife by playing on the shores of the St. Clair River. The river became his friend, a serene place to swim during the summer and to ice skate during the winter. He claimed to have learned more from the river than from the school he attended in Marine City (Rabinowitz et al., 1989). As a youth, he acquired an interest in art and literature, interests that never left him. He first attended college at Michigan State University, where he majored in English. However, he was asked to leave school soon after he became editor of a radical student magazine. May then transferred to Oberlin College in Ohio, from which he received a bachelor’s degree in 1930. For the next 3 years, May followed a course very similar to the one traveled by Erik Erikson some 10 years earlier (see Chapter 9). He roamed throughout eastern and southern Europe as an artist, painting pictures and studying native art (Harris, 1969). Actually, the nominal purpose for May’s trip was to tutor English at Anatolia College in Saloniki, Greece. This job provided him time to work as an itinerant artist in Turkey, Poland, Austria, and other countries. However, 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. Finally in the spring of that second year I had what is called, euphemistically, a nervous breakdown. Which meant simply that the rules, principles, values, by which I used to work and live simply did not suffice anymore. I got so completely fatigued that I had to go to bed for two weeks to get enough energy to continue my teaching. I had learned enough psychology at college to know that these

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symptoms meant that something was wrong with my whole way of life. I had to find some new goals and purposes for my living and to relinquish my moralistic, somewhat rigid way of existence. (May, 1985, p. 8)

From that point on, May began to listen to his inner voice, the one that spoke to him of beauty. “It seems it had taken a collapse of my whole former way of life for this voice to make itself heard” (p. 13). A second experience in Europe also left a lasting impression on him, namely, his attendance at Alfred Adler’s 1932 summer seminars at a resort in the mountains above Vienna. May greatly admired Adler and learned much about human behavior and about himself during that time (Rabinowitz et al., 1989). After May returned to the United States in 1933, he enrolled at Union Theological Seminary in New York, the same seminary Carl Rogers had attended 10 years earlier. Unlike Rogers, however, May did not enter the seminary to become a minister but rather to ask the ultimate questions concerning the nature of human beings (Harris, 1969). While at the Union Theological Seminary, he met the renowned existential theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich, then a recent refugee from Germany and a faculty member at the seminary. May learned much of his philosophy from Tillich, and the two men remained friends for more than 30 years. Although May had not gone to the seminary to be a preacher, he was ordained as a Congregational minister in 1938 after receiving a Master of Divinity degree. He then 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. At about this time, he met Harry Stack Sullivan (see Chapter 8), president and cofounder of the William Alanson White Institute. May was impressed with Sullivan’s notion that the therapist is a participant observer and that therapy is a human adventure capable of enhancing the life of both patient and therapist. He also met and was influenced by Erich Fromm (see Chapter 7), who at that time was a faculty member at the William Alanson White Institute. In 1946, May opened his own private practice and, 2 years later, joined the faculty of the William Alanson White Institute. In 1949, at the relatively advanced age of 40, he earned a PhD in clinical psychology from Columbia University. He continued to serve as assistant professor of psychiatry at the William Alanson White Institute until 1974. Prior to receiving his doctorate, May underwent the most profound experience of his life. While still in his early thirties, he contracted tuberculosis and spent 3 years at the Saranac Sanitarium in upstate New York. At that time, no medication for tuberculosis was available, and for a year and a half, May did not know whether he would live or die. He felt helpless and had little to do except wait for the monthly X-ray that would tell whether the cavity in his lung was getting larger or smaller (May, 1972). At that point, he began to develop some insight into the nature of his illness. He realized that the disease was taking advantage of his helpless and passive attitude. He saw that the patients around him who accepted their illness were the very ones who tended to die, whereas those who fought against their condition tended to survive. “Not until I developed some ‘fight,’ some sense of personal responsibility for

Feist−Feist: Theories of Personality, Seventh Edition

III. Humanistic/Existential Theories

12. May: Existential Psychology

Chapter 12

© The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2009

May: Existential Psychology

the fact that it was I who had the tuberculosis, an assertion of my own will to live, did I make lasting progress” (May, 1972, p. 14). As May learned to listen to his body, he discovered that healing is an active, not a passive, process. The person who is sick, be it physiologically or psychologically, must be an active participant in the therapeutic process. May realized this truth for himself as he recovered from tuberculosis, but it was only later that he was able to see that his psychotherapy patients also had to fight against their disturbance in order to get better (May, 1972). During his illness and recovery, May was writing a book on anxiety. To better understand the subject, he read both Freud and Søren Kierkegaard, the great Danish existential philosopher and theologian. He admired Freud, but he was more deeply moved by Kierkegaard’s view of anxiety as a struggle against nonbeing, that is, loss of consciousness (May, 1969a). After May recovered from his illness, he wrote his dissertation on the subject of anxiety and the next year published it under the title The Meaning of Anxiety (May, 1950). Three years later, he wrote Man’s Search for Himself (May, 1953), the book that gained him some recognition not only in professional circles but among other educated people as well. In 1958, he collaborated with Ernest Angel and Henri Ellenberger to publish Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology. This book introduced American psychotherapists to the concepts of existential therapy and continued the popularity of the existential movement. May’s best-known work, Love and Will (1969b), became a national best-seller and won the 1970 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award for humane scholarship. In 1971, May won the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Contribution to the Science and Profession of Clinical Psychology Award. In 1972, the New York Society of Clinical Psychologists presented him with the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Award for his book Power and Innocence (1972), and in 1987, May received the American Psychological Foundation Gold Medal Award for Lifetime Contributions to Professional Psychology. During his career, May was a visiting professor at both Harvard and Princeton and lectured at such institutions as Yale, Dartmouth, Columbia, Vassar, Oberlin, and the New School for Social Research. In addition, 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, and a 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. On October 22, 1994, after 2 years of declining health, May died in Tiburon, California, where he had made his home since 1975. He was survived by his third wife, Georgia Lee Miller Johnson (a Jungian analyst whom he married in 1988); son, Robert; and twin daughters, Allegra and Carolyn. Through his books, articles, and lectures, May was the best-known American representative of the existential movement. Nevertheless, he spoke out against the tendency of some existentialists to slip into an antiscientific or even anti-intellectual posture (May, 1962). He was critical of any attempt to dilute existential psychology into a painless method of reaching self-fulfillment. People can aspire to psychological health only through coming to grips with the unconscious core of their existence.

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Although he was philosophically aligned with Carl Rogers (see Chapter 11), May took issue with what he saw as Rogers’s naive view that evil is a cultural phenomenon. May (1982) regarded human beings as both good and evil and capable of creating cultures that are both good and evil.

Background of Existentialism Modern existential psychology has roots in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), Danish philosopher and theologian. Kierkegaard was concerned with the increasing trend in postindustrial societies toward the dehumanization of people. He opposed any attempt to see people merely as objects, but at the same time, he opposed the view that subjective perceptions are one’s only reality. Instead, Kierkegaard was concerned with both the experiencing person and the person’s experience. He wished to understand people as they exist in the world as thinking, active, and willing beings. As May (1967) put it, “Kierkegaard sought to overcome the dichotomy of reason and emotion by turning [people’s] attentions to the reality of the immediate experience which underlies both subjectivity and objectivity” (p. 67). Kierkegaard, like later existentialists, emphasized a balance between freedom and responsibility. People acquire freedom of action through expanding their selfawareness and then by assuming responsibility for their actions. The acquisition of freedom and responsibility, however, is achieved only at the expense of anxiety. As people realize that, ultimately, they are in charge of their own destiny, they experience the burden of freedom and the pain of responsibility. Kierkegaard’s views had little effect on philosophical thought during his comparatively short lifetime (he died at age 42); but the work of two German philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) and Martin Heidegger (1899–1976), helped popularize existential philosophy during the 20th century. Heidegger exerted considerable influence on two Swiss psychiatrists, Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss. Binswanger and Boss, along with Karl Jaspers, Victor Frankl, and others, adapted the philosophy of existentialism to the practice of psychotherapy. Existentialism also permeated 20th-century literature through the work of the French writer Jean-Paul Sartre and the French-Algerian novelist Albert Camus; religion through the writings of Martin Buber, Paul Tillich, and others; and the world of art through the work of Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso, whose paintings break through the boundaries of realism and demonstrate a freedom of being rather than the freedom of doing (May, 1981). After World War II, European existentialism in its various forms spread to the United States and became even more diversified as it was taken up by an assorted collection of writers, artists, dissidents, college professors and students, playwrights, clergy, and others.

What Is Existentialism? Although philosophers and psychologists interpret existentialism in a variety of ways, some common elements are found among most existential thinkers. First, existence takes precedence over essence. Existence means to emerge or to become; essence implies a static immutable substance. Existence suggests process; essence

Feist−Feist: Theories of Personality, Seventh Edition

III. Humanistic/Existential Theories

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May: Existential Psychology

refers to a product. Existence is associated with growth and change; essence signifies stagnation and finality. Western civilization, and particularly Western science, has traditionally valued essence over existence. It has sought to understand the essential composition of things, including humans. By contrast, existentialists affirm that people’s essen...