Diamond: Yes, I remember Rollo once referring in private to the promoters of “personal” psychology as “vultures.” In the book, you give very personal and vivid details about May’s difficult emotional life.
As you reveal, Rollo came from what we would today call a “dysfunctional” family, the eldest and favorite son of parents who couldn’t get along, in part because of his absent father’s infidelity with women. May’s sister suffered from psychosis, and Rollo himself suffered from symptoms of depression and anxiety as an adult that could be debilitating at times. He later seems to have felt the need to nurture women emotionally, as he had always done with his emotionally unstable mother and sister.
At the same time, he was, as I have described, heavily dependent on women’s unequivocal approval and acceptance of his self-esteem, and had great difficulty dealing with them—so much so that on several different occasions over the decades, for this and other reasons, he sought professional support and advice from various psychotherapists such as the famous training analyst Erich Fromm, his wife, the psychoanalyst Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, the Holocaust survivor and analyst Alberta Zaleta, and later, during his seventies, with Joseph Henderson, a leading Jungian analyst and contributing author to Jung’s famous book Man and His Symbols in San Francisco. Based on his childhood history, Rollo suffered from a major narcissistic wound due to his basic dependency needs being painfully frustrated and unmet and formed early in the
somewhat grand myth, to use the term that later became favored, of himself as a special helper to others—first to his siblings and mother, then, in his early twenties, as a religious counselor to college students, later, as a dedicated pastor, and finally as a practicing psychotherapist, teacher, public speaker, and popular author. Yet even after his eventual massive professional success in the world, Rollo reportedly remained defensively isolated from others, leading to simultaneous feelings of loneliness, abandonment, and alienation, and he struggled with excruciating feelings of inferiority, insecurity, and self-loathing.
We all have painful experiences, emotional wounds, vulnerabilities, insecurities, self-destructive behavior patterns, complexes, and chronic defense mechanisms. In this respect, Rollo was no different from the rest of us. That is, we are all subject to and driven by what he called “the devil.” Rollo once told me in a private interview, “The difference between me and other people is that I admit it.” The key, May argues, lies in how we deal with our “demons” or metaphorical “demons”—whether destructively or creatively.
How then, from your perspective as his biographer, did Rollo’s persistent, painful personal problems and existential challenges—from his unusual family history including a “nervous breakdown” in his youth to his critical battle with tuberculosis in middle age to two difficult marriages and two divorces—play a role in his transformation into what he referred to as a “wounded therapist,” and one of the most famous psychologists and psychotherapists of the twentieth century?
Abzug: Great question. Let me answer it in several ways. First, I think his upbringing, rich with mixed love, stress, and expectations, and surrounded by Methodist/YMCA expectations of hard work and service, created a wealth of competing and sometimes contradictory demands that created endless possibilities for a young man of high intelligence, high energy, and a lot of pain. His upbringing more than qualified him for the title of “wounded healer.” I love what he said to you in private about the difference between himself and “other people.” And of course, his about with tuberculosis, though a different kind of wound, reminded him of his vulnerability and the importance of “will” to survive.
It reminds me of William James’s recovery from his collapse after visiting the sanitarium (disguised as a Frenchman in his Varieties of Religious Experiences), after reading the French philosopher Renouveux during his recovery. What I find most interesting is how actively Rollo deals with his struggles, traumas, and their temporary resolution, in his early books—The Art of Counseling, The Springs of Creative Life, and later in Freedom and Destiny—a kind of compulsion for repetition in print. He keeps returning to key events in his childhood and between Oberlin and Union Theological Seminary, retelling his story over the decades—for different reasons and in different settings. This is certainly a clear example of his turning the devil into creative use, his transformation into a wounded healer.
Diamond: Your answer raises another question that I think PT readers might find interesting: the point you make in the book about Rollo’s frequent but subtle use of his struggles and problems in his books.
As we know, May was more explicit in his much later book, My Pursuit of Beauty (1985), but he seems to have preferred to fictionalize his counselors, clients, and patients in earlier books, despite the many real cases he could draw on and discuss. As she puts it, this seems to have been “a kind of compulsion for repetition in print.” That is a relentless attempt to resolve and make sense of unresolved conflicts, traumas, and wounds through self-analysis. Indeed, this kind of verbal repetition and revisiting of painful experiences and persistent, disturbing symptoms is something that occurs frequently in psychotherapy and can be seen as part of the process of “dealing with” these profound, indelible, and moving life events, and of understanding them at increasingly profound levels. For example, even in his book Freedom and Destiny, published in 1981, when Rollo was 72, I believe he wrote about his therapeutic work with a fictional patient named Philip, who was in constructive dialogue with his “inner child.” (See my previous article.) What do you think of all this? Was Philip’s case based on May’s own experience of treating him?
Abzug: Another good question. We have only discussed his use of disguised personal history in the previous examples, where it seems interesting that his decisions are generated by his self-analysis and not specifically inspired by the incidents of therapy – whether his own or those of his clients. It seems to me that most therapists who include case histories in their books aimed at a popular audience create a combination of several patients, partly to protect confidentiality. Rollo certainly did that in his books.
As for the use of autobiographical material disguised by pseudonyms and changes in detail, William James (not a psychotherapist at all) was among those who used such a trick in talking about religious experience and other psychological conditions. Of course, Sigmund Freud based his interpretation of dreams on his dreams – but with one big difference: he openly discussed the choice between using the patient’s dreams or his own, and even noted the limits of such use. I think what is also interesting about Rollo May’s use of autobiography is that he told the same basic story many times, each time with the patient identified by a different name, different life circumstances, and different geographies.
Each time, too, he created stories from fictional therapeutic settings. His childhood and the period from college to the 1930s became fixed pieces of transformation from which he was able to creatively craft an ever-changing set of lessons. Compare, for example, Charles from Springs of Creative Living to Philip from Freedom and Destiny. In Charles’s fictional case, we see conversion to Christianity as the solution, a solution that therapy helped but ultimately by placing his faith in Jesus as “the healer of humanity.”
Philip, imagined a deep dive into his traumatic childhood as well as an account of a mental breakdown in his twenties, this time taking an integrative spiritual cue from Eastern religion. I cannot, in all of literature, think of a similar use of autobiographical material across forty years of writing, with each version of events tailored to a different time and place and new lessons to be drawn from. This brings us to My Quest for Beauty of 1985, his version of essentially the same story but, as I can attest from contemporary sources, closer to the truth than any other version that had been secretly put forward in earlier editions.
Why did he finally reveal the true source of these earlier stories? I can think of two reasons. First of all, Rollo had been writing a memoir…he had been trying unsuccessfully to write an autobiography for some time, and this was an opportunity to tell at least part of the story explicitly. Second, by 1985, his advancing age, his recent experience of psychotherapy, and the relative comfort of his relationship with his third wife, Georgia, had given him a somewhat less tortured perspective on his life, and opened the way for him to tell the “real” story publicly, albeit with a new mission in mind. Ironically, at about the same time he was working on the chapters of the book that would eventually become The Cry for Myth, and perhaps he realized that the “story” he had told over and over again for forty years was a myth, his myth, a myth that he was finally able to acknowledge, accept, come to terms with, acknowledge, and appropriate publicly as he contemplated his final years.
