ABSTRACT
American psychologist, psychoanalyst, psychotherapist, and author Rollo May was born in Ada, Ohio in 1909. The son of Earl May, a field secretary for YMCA, and his wife Matie Boughton, May moved with his family to Michigan while he was still a child. His parents later divorced, and while his sister suffered a psychotic breakdown, he himself had personal difficulties both in school and with his antiintellectual father at home. After high school, May initially attended Michigan State College but was soon asked to leave because of his involvement with a controversial college magazine. He graduated in 1930 from Ohio’s more liberal Oberlin College with a major in English and a minor in Greek history and literature. After college he taught English at Anatolia College, the American College at Salonika, for three years. While in Greece he frequently traveled to Vienna and attended the seminars of Alfred Adler (1870-1937), but he also experienced a nervous breakdown.1 When he returned to the USA, his burning interest in existential and religious matters led him to enroll at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, one of the few places where such issues were seriously dealt with. At Union he befriended and received lasting impulses from Professor Paul Tillich (1886-1965), the noted existentialist theologian and expatriate from Nazi Germany. Pursuant to his divinity degree from the Seminary in 1938, May was active as a Congregationalist minister in New Jersey for two years before he lost his faith and took up psychology as his primary field of inquiry.2 He began at the White Institute and continued at the graduate program at Columbia University where in 1949 he received, with highest honors, the first Ph.D. in clinical psychology ever granted by that institution.
