Wounded Healer: Rollo May's Psycho-Spiritual Odyssey

Dr. Rollo May

Source: Wikimedia Commons

This is Part 3 of my conversation with historian Robert Abzug, whose authorized biography of celebrated psychologist Dr. Rollo May, Psyche and Soul in America: The Spiritual Odyssey of Rollo May (Oxford University Press) will be released on February 1, 2021. (See Part 1 here, and Part 2 here.)

DIAMOND: My musing regarding May's psychological type derives, of course, from Carl Jung's Analytical Psychology, with which, as we know from his earliest writings, Rollo, who later trained as a neo-Freudian psychoanalyst, had some familiarity. Jung, whose father was a dispirited Swiss pastor, is often credited with being the first psychiatrist who, in contrast to Freud, recognized the importance of the role of religiosity or spirituality in both his patient's problems and their therapeutic treatment. So this may be a 2-part question: First, based on your research and direct discussions with him, what was May's attitude toward Jung and Jungian analysis? Second, you mention May's religious roots, which, as clear in his earliest books play such an important part in both his own personal development and that of his distinctly spiritual approach to psychotherapy. I know that prior to becoming a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, Rollo pursued formal theological education in New York and served for several years as a Congregational minister in New Jersey. (He said that he ultimately left the ministry mainly because he felt he could be more helpful to people as a psychotherapist.) So his eventual professional evolution from minister to psychologist to psychoanalyst, to the preeminent American proponent and practitioner of existential therapy following the publication of the groundbreaking book Existence in 1958, and the fact, as you say, that despite this professional transition, May never entirely abandoned his religious roots, places him in the company of other religiously oriented (versus atheistic) existential thinkers like Kierkegaard, Niebuhr, Buber, Marcel, and his own teacher, existential theologian Paul Tillich. What is your understanding of May's mature religious beliefs or spiritual worldview, and its influence on both his theory and practice of psychotherapy?

Professor Robert Abzug

Source: Courtesy Robert Abzug. Photo Credit: Benjamin Abzug.

ABZUG: Let me address the question of May and Jung first within the context of one of May’s major intellectual approaches—the synthesis of ideas no matter the orthodoxies from which they derived. Even in college at Oberlin, he wrote a synthetic paper about philosophy derived from Will Durant’s just published The Story of Philosophy. In that precocious undergraduate paper, rather than taking the side of any one philosopher or movement, Rollo wrote what he called a "philosophy of philosophies" that brought together what otherwise might be considered strange bedfellows in order to create the “best” parts of each. Interestingly, considering his existential future, May spent a good chunk of the paper noting the complexities of Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought. His later honors thesis at Union Theological Seminary discussed the ways religion and psychology complemented each other by showing how Christianity, Freud, and Jung in one way added a dimension to our understanding of human consciousness, faith, and values. In general, his subsequent psychoanalytic writings and approach to therapy combined elements of Freud, Adler, Rank and, in the case of Carl Jung, a more existential version of “individuation.” In short, May was an American eclectic in the best sense of the term. He was neither a Freudian or Jungian, but rather aimed toward a synthesis of their views and his own experiential and existential views.

Speaking of Jung, May was in fact extremely interested in the mythic and spiritual elements that we associate with Jung. After all, his last book was called The Cry for Myth. However, Jung’s idea of the "collective unconscious" never really appealed to him, in part because of its mystical and at the same time very specific sense of its makeup. May arrived at a much more abstract notion of “infinitude” when it came to transcendent spiritual matters. And his concept of myth and the cry for it derived more from an appreciation of the mythic traditions of religion, literature, and philosophy in the West, from which he felt many had become detached, despite what he saw as the necessity of these myths for a sense of meaning, purpose and community. He wrote in contra-distinction to the Jungian idea of myth as conveyed in the work of his friend and rival Joseph Campbell. who more or less rejected the Western tradition in favor of Eastern and indigenous myth. As for Jung’s theory of psychological types and, for that matter, those of other systems, he sometimes found them useful, but again, not as a primary tool of understanding, at least in his mature years of the 1950s onward. . . . By then, following the publication of Man's Search for Himself in 1953, May found himself rather deeply engaged in the exploration and application of phenomenology and existentialism to psychotherapy, and its concentration on immediate experience and encounter. He hoped that his clients would develop an increasingly nuanced sense of self in their own terms rather than one defined by archetype or, for that matter, the DSM.

One final thought in response to your question regarding Rollo's mature religious or spiritual beliefs—May’s spiritual life was a moving target that began in everyday Methodism and ended up in the very abstract but meaningful world of his friend and mentor Paul Tillich’s “ground of being.” In fact, what I have called May’s “spiritual odyssey” originated at a liminal moment in American Protestantism and developed in a secularized, or at least theologically nonspecific, sense of essence he called infinitude. In doing so, he was really moving to even a less theologically specific version of Tillich’s radical concept of “God beyond God,” an ineffable order reflected in cultures that bound human beings together.

DIAMOND: In this regard, I feel that, having been brought up from childhood as Christian, May's spirituality had much in common with Jung's, though curiously, so far as I know, Rollo never commented upon some of Jung's more religious or theologically oriented writings, such as his powerful Answer to Job. Indeed, as you are aware, I see May's ultimate concern with the problem of evil, for instance, as quite Jungian, and his own controversial conception of the "daimonic" --not unlike the notion of the "shadow" for Jung--as an elegant existential expression of May's own evolving spirituality. Despite May's dismissing Jung's seminal idea of the "collective unconscious" in general, which inherently contains the concept of "archetypes," he does speak of collective neurosis and collective expression of the daimonic, and wrote in his penultimate work The Cry for Myth, of intrinsic archetypal patterns in human behavior and psyche--which would appear to closely resemble the collective unconscious. May's differences with colleague humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers on the reality and origins of human evil have been well-documented previously in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, as have his fundamental differences with Viennese existential analyst and neurologist Viktor Frankl {1905-1997}, whom--despite telling me he believed Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning to be a "good book"-- May perceived as being overly "authoritarian" in his medicalized attitude toward patients, and therefore, not truly existential. For example, I recall that in an article appearing in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology in Fall, 1978, May sharply criticized Frankl's approach to at least one published case as running "counter to the existential approach to human beings, which in my judgment rests upon the belief that however much the patient's sense of responsibility has been eroded, it needs to be built upon and enlarged," pejoratively comparing Frankl's "authoritarian" attitude toward the patient to "fundamentalistic religion" ( p. 55). At the same time, there were, in my view, also some significant similarities between the essential spirituality of Frankl and May, despite their religious and philosophical differences. (Like Freud, Frankl was Jewish.} It would be interesting to hear your take on May's attitude toward these and other contemporaries who incorporated spirituality into psychology and psychiatry--and of theirs toward him.

ABZUG: Yes, within the broader realm of Christianity, Jung and May shared some basic symbolic ritual understandings. However, the established church of Switzerland retained much of the strict beliefs of the original Calvinist establishment. No wonder a modernist like Jung would rebel against the church proper, but retain certain elements of its structure of thought. For instance, as in the Red Book, he found the need to create in some ways a theology of his own. For May it was quite different. He was raised a Methodist with a liberal sense of religion (a giving up of Biblical literalism in favor of a literary and historical sense of Scripture and embrace of science) and in the inclusive spirit of the YMCA. In a sense he sought a more serious yet eclectic grappling with human nature—thus his attraction to thinkers like Niebuhr and especially Tillich, who sought a “God beyond God” and wisdom from psychology, sociology, and literature. And thus the facing of and attempts to “theorize” evil (I don't really like the term theorize) as one, but only one, product of the daimonic (you are the go-to expert here). May’s early attempts to merge psychology and religion involved juxtaposing basic Christian faith with what he had learned from the depth psychologists; Adler, Rank, Freud, and, Jung. He read Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul, which was published in English in 1933, when Rollo was twenty-four. And it certainly was of influence. The Cry for Myth is, as you say, heavily Jungian in its construction. But May’s basic sense that the world of faith and its guiding “myths” were crumbling much pre-dated his familiarity with Jung. It was rooted in more 19th century sources—Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold, certain works of George Eliot, Santayana and his first grappling with Nietzsche at Oberlin College. You mention The Cry for Myth as featuring concepts close to Jung’s archetypal thinking, and you certainly are right on that point. In fact, it is the most Jungian of his works. Yet, May’s own concept of archetypes had more to do with the imprint of thousands of years of Western culture and its dangerous dissolution in modernity than it did with the more esoteric or mystical of Jung’s ideas about the same phenomenon.

On the question of Frankl and other spiritualized concepts of psychology and psychotherapy, I think what you say is correct. May had doubts about the directive and, as you say, authoritarian aspects of Frankl's Logotherapy. I might add another contrast, one that isn’t exactly on point but is important in its own right. In talking to Rollo for the book, I rarely found a disparity between accounts May related about his life in all its aspects and the material I discovered in his journals, letters, etc. What we know about Frankl today, thanks to the controversial work of Frankl biographer Timothy Pytel, is that much of what Frankl's readers take as autobiographical gospel needs to be modified. . . . In any case, I think the more revealing moment in May’s late life concerning religion and psychology came with his spat with the transpersonal psychology folks, something that the manuscripts reveal to have been somewhat more measured, conflicted, and self-searching than the polarized public debate would reveal. It’s in the book.

Part 4 here.