Rollo May – Anxiety, Freedom, and the Human Condition
New York City, late 1960s. On an upper floor of a modest Manhattan office building, a man in his late fifties sits across from a young advertising executive who cannot stop shaking his leg. Traffic murmurs far below; steam hisses in the radiators; the office is quiet enough that the ticking of a clock punctuates every silence. The patient has just finished describing a familiar, hollow ritual: wake before dawn, skim headlines, catch the train, sell images of products he doesn’t believe in, drink too much in the evening, lie awake wondering why he is so afraid when “nothing is really wrong.”
The therapist—broad-shouldered, with a heavy brow and searching eyes—does not immediately ask about childhood traumas or offer a diagnosis. Instead he leans forward and asks, almost conversationally, “What is it, exactly, that you are afraid will happen if you stop?” The question is simple, but the air changes. The young man hesitates. He is afraid, he realizes, of discovering that beneath the motion there is nothing solid, that without his job and the busyness and the noise he will be exposed as a fraud. The fear is not of losing money or status; it is of finding no answer to the question, “Who am I?” That, the therapist suggests, is not a problem to be medicated away. It is an existential anxiety—a signal that something essential in his way of living has become false.
This is the terrain in which Rollo Reece May spent his life: not just neuroses and symptoms, but the raw apprehension that comes from being conscious, free, and finite. Widely seen as the most important American voice in existential psychology, May tried to bring into mid-century psychotherapy a vocabulary drawn from philosophy, theology, and his own crises. He insisted that anxiety, rather than being merely a disease to cure, is a clue about what we value and how we are failing to live up to it. He talked about love and will, myth and destiny, as seriously as he discussed diagnostic categories, and he refused to reduce human beings to nothing more than bundles of drives or conditioned responses. In an era when psychology sometimes seemed intent on smoothing people into predictable, efficient units, he argued that there is something unruly and creative at the core of personhood—and that ignoring this costs us our souls.
To understand how a boy from a small town in the American Midwest came to be one of the central interpreters of European existentialism to American psychology, you have to start in Ada, Ohio, and Marine City, Michigan. Born in 1909, May grew up in a family marked by conflict and fragility. His parents’ marriage was troubled; his older sister struggled with severe mental illness and was eventually hospitalized. The children absorbed not just shouted arguments but a pervasive sense that things could fall apart at any time. Rollo himself was sensitive, watchful, and often alone, walking along the river or losing himself in books and drawing. These early experiences would later inform his conviction that anxiety is not some exotic pathology; it is stitched into ordinary life from the beginning.
In the late 1920s, May left the Midwest for Oberlin College in Ohio, a small liberal arts school with a reputation for progressive thought. He studied English and showed a serious interest in art and literature. More important than the curriculum, though, was the sense that ideas mattered—that novels, paintings, and philosophy were not just diversions but ways of grappling with the human condition. After graduating in 1930, instead of settling into a conventional job, he joined a small group of artists and intellectuals traveling to Europe. In Greece, he took a teaching position at the American College of Salonika, using the stability of a faculty role to fund long periods of wandering. He traveled through Greece and across Eastern Europe, absorbing ruins and villages, myths and political tensions.
Something in the Mediterranean landscape and the old stories it carried spoke to him. Here were myths that did not resolve neatly, gods who were neither entirely benevolent nor purely evil, tragedies that ended without consolation. In these narratives, human beings were not simply rewarded for virtue and punished for vice; they were caught in webs of fate, freedom, and character. May would later say that myths are not lies but deep maps—stories we use to orient ourselves in a confusing world. Already, he was drawn to that territory between philosophy and psychology, where questions about destiny and choice bleed into questions about symptoms and sanity.
On his way back to the United States, May paused in Vienna and sought out Alfred Adler, the once-Freudian who had broken with his teacher and built his own school of individual psychology. Adler emphasized feelings of inferiority, the creative self, and the social embeddedness of personality. May sat in Adler’s seminars, watched him work with patients, and saw in his approach something very different from the more deterministic sides of psychoanalysis. Here was a psychologist who took seriously the idea that people shape their lives in response to perceived possibilities and goals, not just in reaction to past traumas. May would later acknowledge Adler as a crucial early influence, even as he moved in his own distinct direction.
Back in the United States in the 1930s, May’s path took an unexpected turn: he entered Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Surrounded by aspiring ministers, theologians, and social activists, he earned a divinity degree rather than a medical one. Union at that time was a hotbed of intellectually serious, socially engaged Protestantism. One of the towering figures there was Paul Tillich, a German émigré philosopher-theologian who spoke of “the courage to be” in the face of anxiety, guilt, and meaninglessness. Tillich’s lectures treated existentialist thinkers like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche not as curiosities, but as guides for understanding modern spiritual crisis. May was captivated. He admired Tillich so deeply that he would later dedicate work to him, and the two men became close friends. It is impossible to read May’s later book The Courage to Create without hearing Tillich’s echo in the title and the underlying theme: the need to affirm one’s being despite the presence of non-being in the form of death, fate, and emptiness.
For a few years, May served as a pastor. He preached sermons, visited parishioners, and tried to speak to their doubts and depressions. Yet he slowly realized that the questions people brought him—about despair, guilt, broken marriages, a sense of unreality—demanded more than traditional theological answers. He was drawn to the intimate, searching conversations that occurred in counseling sessions, where the focus was not on doctrine but on the concrete way a person existed in their world. Eventually, he decided to leave the ministry and pursue psychology more directly. He enrolled at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he would eventually earn one of the first doctorates in clinical psychology that institution awarded.
Then, in 1942, his life was abruptly narrowed to a single room. Diagnosed with tuberculosis, May was sent to a sanatorium and spent more than a year in enforced isolation. The threat of death was no longer abstract; it sat at the foot of his bed. The routines of the sanatorium—temperature checks, coughs, the muffled footsteps of nurses at night—created a suspended world in which ordinary ambitions felt far away. Many patients, confined in their beds, were engulfed by boredom and dread. May himself experienced intense anxiety, not only about his lungs but about the meaning of his life if it were to end there, in a hospital, his projects unfinished.
He used the time as best he could. He read Kierkegaard on the “dizziness of freedom,” Nietzsche on the will, and contemporary psychiatric writings on anxiety. He watched his fellow patients for signs of what made the difference between those who faced their illness with a kind of grim courage and those who collapsed into despair or denial. The idea he had encountered in Tillich’s lectures—that anxiety is an unavoidable dimension of being human when we confront our freedom and finitude—suddenly became viscerally real. When he emerged from the sanatorium, his body weakened but his resolve sharpened, he carried with him the beginnings of the book that would make his name: The Meaning of Anxiety.
In that work, May rejected the temptation to see anxiety only as an enemy. Instead he offered a definition that has since become classic: anxiety, he wrote, is the apprehension triggered by a threat to some value that the individual holds essential to their existence as a self. It is not mere fear of specific dangers; it is what we feel when something central to who we are is at stake. Anxiety, in this view, is not just a symptom to be eradicated but a signal that calls for clarification and decision. Without it, we would drift unthinkingly through life; with it, we are forced to ask what matters enough to risk ourselves for. The task is not to eliminate anxiety, but to distinguish between the paralyzing, “neurotic” forms that block growth and the “normal” anxiety that accompanies real choice.
During the late 1940s and 1950s, May’s career accelerated. He counseled students and adults, taught at various universities, and helped shape the emerging field of counseling psychology in the United States. As behaviorism and more mechanistic forms of psychoanalysis dominated the academic scene, he carved out a distinctive position. In 1958, together with Ernest Angel and Henri Ellenberger, he edited the influential volume Existence, which introduced English-speaking readers to key European existential psychiatrists such as Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss. The book announced, quietly but firmly, that there was another way to think about psychological suffering: not just in terms of drives and conditioning, but in terms of how a person relates to their own existence.
May’s clinical work reflected this stance. He listened, not simply for diagnostic categories, but for how his patients experienced themselves as agents or victims in their own lives. A woman complaining of chronic anxiety, for example, might describe a marriage in which she had systematically silenced her own desires to fit an image of the “good wife.” A business executive might describe success accompanied by an inexplicable sense of emptiness. May would push them to see how their symptoms were often expressions of deeper conflicts between their current way of living and their unacknowledged values. Therapy, in this frame, was not merely about adjusting behavior or uncovering childhood memories. It was about confronting the patient with the fundamental questions they had been avoiding: What commitments have you made? What possibilities are you refusing? What kind of person are you becoming?
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, May was known not just for his early book on anxiety but for a series of works that brought existential ideas into broader public consciousness. Love and Will, published in 1969, became a bestseller and won the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award for humane scholarship. In it, May argued that modern Western culture had become rich in techniques and poor in purposes. Erotic desire was commodified, romantic love sentimentalized, and will misunderstood as mere stubbornness or ambition. He tried to restore more robust meanings to these words. Love, for him, was not only a feeling but a way of affirming another person’s being. Will was not just grim determination but the capacity to organize one’s drives into a coherent direction. When love and will are severed—when we feel deeply but cannot commit, or when we push forward without genuine care—both individuals and societies become fragmented.
In The Courage to Create, he turned explicitly to art and creativity. Having spent his youth among painters and writers, he refused to treat creativity as a quirky trait belonging to a few geniuses. Rather, he portrayed it as a fundamental way of participating in reality: to create is to bring something new into being that did not exist before, whether that is a painting, a scientific theory, or a new way of relating to one’s children. Creativity demands courage because it exposes us to rejection and failure; it also reveals, through anxiety, how much we care about whether our work matters. For May, the creative act is one of the clearest examples of how anxiety, freedom, and destiny interact. We do not create in a vacuum; we inherit a language, a culture, a body, a history. But within those constraints, there is still room to say “I” and to offer something unique.
Running through all these books is a persistent preoccupation with myth. In The Cry for Myth, written toward the end of his life, May argued that modern people suffer not only from too much information but from a lack of shared narratives that tell them who they are and where they belong. Traditional religious and cultural myths have lost their power for many, yet nothing adequate has replaced them. In this vacuum, individuals are left to cobble together private meanings from media, consumer choices, and personal memories. May did not urge a return to literal belief in ancient stories. Instead, he suggested that we re-examine myths as symbolic expressions of perennial human struggles—love and betrayal, courage and cowardice, destiny and freedom. A patient grappling with a midlife crisis might find themselves drawn to the story of Odysseus or to modern tales of superheroes; rather than dismiss this as childish, May would ask what that narrative says about the patient’s own sense of homecoming, exile, or moral responsibility.
Alongside his theoretical contributions, May developed a picture of human development that departed from Freud’s psychosexual stages. He described “stages” not as rigid time-locked phases but as recurring modes of being: innocence, rebellion, ordinary existence, and creative existence. An infant is “innocent” in the sense that it simply seeks gratification without self-consciousness; adolescents often enter “rebellion,” desiring freedom without yet grasping responsibility; many adults settle into the “ordinary” stage, fulfilling social roles but secretly longing for more. Only some reach a “creative” or “authentic” mode, in which they accept their freedom and responsibility and live in a way that expresses their unique possibilities. The point, he stressed, was not to pathologize the earlier stages but to recognize that at any age, we move back and forth among them. On a given day, a university professor may be creative in research, ordinary in family life, and rebellious in political views.
Despite his affinity with European existentialists, May was very much an American psychologist. He believed in science and empirical inquiry, and he grew impatient with what he saw as vague, anti-scientific trends in some existential circles. In a widely cited critique, he warned against both the proliferation of psychotherapeutic “gimmicks” and a romantic rejection of method altogether. Too many therapists, he argued, had abandoned the serious work of understanding “man-in-the-world” for quick fixes that promised symptom relief without addressing the person’s underlying way of being. At the same time, he resisted the temptation to turn existential psychotherapy into a codified technique or a rigid school. For him, it was an attitude—a way of taking seriously the patient’s freedom, responsibility, and capacity for meaning.
May’s own life embodied the tensions he explored. After completing his PhD, he spent decades as a practicing psychotherapist in Manhattan, seeing patients in an office that became a kind of crossroads between academic psychology, theology, and the arts. He wrote prolifically but never fully embraced the status of public guru; there was always a certain reserve about him, a sense that he had seen enough suffering to distrust easy enthusiasm. Colleagues and students recall a man who could be stern and demanding, but who listened with an attention that made people feel their struggles were understood not only clinically but existentially. One of his patients, the psychiatrist and novelist Irvin Yalom, would later become a leading existential therapist himself, helping to carry May’s influence into subsequent generations.
In the 1970s, May moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, settling eventually in Tiburon. There he continued to write, teach graduate students (notably at the nascent Saybrook program), and lecture widely. The move West matched a shift in cultural mood. The questions he had wrestled with—alienation, authenticity, the search for meaning—were now being asked in new ways by people experimenting with communal living, Eastern religions, and new psychotherapies. May watched these developments with a mixture of appreciation and concern. He welcomed the hunger for depth but worried about forms of spirituality and therapy that promised transcendence without the work of confronting anxiety, guilt, and responsibility. He kept insisting that a truly humanistic psychology must face, not evade, the darker dimensions of existence.
Old age did not bring May a simple serenity. He lived long enough to see psychology become both more biological and more commercial, with psychopharmacology and self-help industries booming. He accepted the importance of medication for some conditions, but he feared a culture in which pills might become substitutes for reflection and decision. For him, the central question remained: how can human beings live with dignity and courage in the face of death, isolation, and meaninglessness? To that end, he kept returning, in lectures and interviews, to the notion of “the human being as the one who can stand outside, who can take a position.” We are not free to choose our parents, our genes, or the initial conditions of our lives. But we are, he argued, capable of taking a stand toward those given facts—of saying, “This is what I will make of what has happened to me.”
Rollo May died in 1994 in Tiburon, at the age of eighty-five, attended by his wife and friends. Obituaries noted his role in bringing existential thought into American psychology, but the deeper measure of his influence lies in the way he reframed familiar clinical problems. Where some saw “just” depression or anxiety, he encouraged therapists and patients alike to ask what these experiences revealed about threatened values, unlived possibilities, and the person’s relationship to their own freedom. Where some forms of therapy promised adjustment, he reminded his readers that sometimes the world itself is disordered, and that health may require not compliance but creative resistance.
Today, echoes of May’s work can be heard far beyond explicitly existential clinics. When a counselor asks a burned-out executive not only about stress but about whether their work aligns with their deeper commitments; when a therapist helps a grieving spouse find a way to honor their loss rather than “get over it”; when a young adult wrestling with climate anxiety is encouraged to see their fear as a call to meaningful action rather than a defect to be numbed—Rollo May is in the room, whether named or not. His insistence that anxiety is tied to what matters, that creativity is an ethical as well as an artistic act, and that myths still shape us even when we think we have outgrown them, continues to offer a vocabulary for people who refuse both the comforts of reductionism and the fog of vague optimism.
In the end, May’s contribution is not a tidy system but a stance. It is the posture of a psychologist who sits with another person’s dread and does not rush to tranquilize it; who believes that the question “How shall I live?” cannot be outsourced to experts or algorithms; who sees in every symptom a possible doorway into a more authentic way of being. His work reminds us that being human is not a problem to be solved but a task to be undertaken—with anxiety at our side, freedom in our hands, and the knowledge that whatever we choose, we are choosing not only for ourselves but for what kind of world we help bring into being.