Question

Many of his colleagues considered Rollo May the father of American existential psychology. What are the key similarities and differences that you discern between May and the European humanistic perspectives about the individual and connection to others and what makes these significant?

Answer 1

Many of the philosophers and researchers have spent endless hours on working on certain existential questions. These comprise of why we are born and what is the purpose of being here and the meaning of life as such. Those were essentially the type of questions that laid foundation to the work of Rollo May. He was in fact an influential American psychologist at the time and he helped in establishing a separate branch within the psychology discipline, named existential psychology. Existentialism was indeed the branch of psychology that tended to focus on the meaning and purpose of life. The search for self and these philosophical themes struck to him after a personal struggle that he underwent. He was initially a professor of English, during which he suffered severe bacterial infection- tuberculosis. During this period he battled for life and pondered over these philosophical questions relating to the meaning and purpose of life. This further led him to study clinical psychology and he was the first student to have procured a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Columbia University. His work essentially has its roots embedded in humanistic psychology which focuses on the capacity of growth, development and achievement for human beings, aiming at reaching a self actualised potential through the constant process of improvisation and self reflection/self discovery. He also explored the controversial theme of anxiety provoked in human beings and finally established through his work that anxiety was a culmination of the human fear of death, uncertainty and ambiguity or fear of the unknown. He also proposed that human beings tend to fear death because we have incapacity to comprehend our own death or rather lack of existence. In fact these feelings were bound to surmount an individual if they were to truly find the meaning of life and confront these themes in order to truly explore them in comprehensive detail. He spoke of freedom and the power to navigate one’s life by making most choices and exerting control over the direction in which one wants to be headed. Love and togetherness were certain other themes that he explored as crucial elements to this journey of negotiating life challenges. For Rogers, evil was the result of cultural influences, the human being is essentially constructive in their fundamental nature, but damaged by their experience." In contrast, May proposes that the evil in our culture is the reflection of evil in ourselves, as well as vice versa. The individual's autonomy is achieved not by avoiding evil, but by directly confronting it. The human being is an organized set of potentialities, which are the source both of our constructive (i.e. good) and our destructive (i.e. evil) impulses. He therefore aimed at combining both existentialistic and humanistic ideas which no other psychologist had done at the time.