ABSTRACT
Rollo Reese May was born on April 21, 1909, in Ada, Ohio, but spent most of his childhood in Marine City, Michigan. May received his bachelor of arts degree from Oberlin College in 1930, after which he pursued an Eriksonian course by touring Europe as an itinerant artist and teacher. During this time he attended the summer school of Alfred Adler, whose work he admired but regarded as somewhat oversimplified. (See May, 1975, p. 37; Reeves, 1977, pp. 251-263.)
May returned to the United States to earn a divinity degree from the Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1938, where he first encountered existential thought, and later served in a parish in Montclair, New Jersey. But he became more interested in psychology and underwent training in psychoanalysis at the William Alanson White Institute, where he met and was influenced by Fromm and Sullivan. May opened his own private practice in 1946, and received the first Ph.D. in clinical psychology ever awarded by Columbia University in 1949. At about this time he underwent the aforementioned traumatic bout with tuberculosis, which did considerably more to influence him toward existentialism than his formal education. May married Florence deFrees in 1938, a union that was to produce one son and two daughters, and was married to Georgia Johnson at the time of his death.
