Rollo May
Rollo May
Rollo Reece Maywas an American existential psychologist and author of the influential book Love and Will. He is often associated with humanistic psychology, existentialist philosophy and, alongside Viktor Frankl, was a major proponent of existential psychotherapy. The philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich was a close friend who had a significant influence on his work...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth21 April 1909
CountryUnited States of America
people creative anxiety
Creative people... are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of 'divine madness,' to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks.
running wrestling artist
Artists do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being.
joy creation form
There is a curiously sharp sense of joy - or perhaps better expressed, a sense of mild ecstasy - that comes when you find the particular form required by your creation.
personality community healthy
No one can separate themselves from one's social group and remain healthy, because the very structure of personality is dependent on the community.
order data giving
The rebel is committed to giving a form and pattern to the world. It is a pattern born of the indomitable thrust of the human mind, the mind which makes out of the mass of meaningless data in the world an order and a form.
our-society way needs
Everyone has a need for significance; and if we can't make that possible, or even probable, in our society, then it will be obtained in destructive ways.
creativity immortality yearning
Creativity is a yearning for immortality
struggle self issues
Poets often have a conscious awareness that they are struggling with the daimonic, and that the issue is their working something through from the depths which push the self to a new plane.
fighting covered-up may
However it may be confounded or covered up or counterfeited, this elemental capacity to fight against injustice remains the distinguishing characteristic of human beings.
dream reality psychics
The value of dreams, like ... divinations, is not that they give a specific answer, but that they open up new areas of psychic reality, shake us out of our customary ruts, and throw light on a new segment of our lives. Thus the sayings of the shrine, like dreams, were not to be received passively; the recipients had to "live" themselves into the message.
responsibility community anxiety
Competitive individualism militates against the experience of community, and that lack of community is a centrally important factor in contemporaneous anxiety.
meaningful individual said
There is no meaningful yes unless the individual could also have said no.
creativity artist creating
... what the artist or creative scientist feels is not anxiety or fear; it is joy. I use the word in contrast to happiness or pleasure. The artist, at the moment of creating, does not experience gratification or satisfaction... Rather, it is joy, joy defined as the emotion that goes with heightened consciousness, the mood that accompanies the experience of actualizing one's own potentialities.
lazy coward blocked
To say a person is a coward has no more meaning than to say he is lazy: It simply tells us that some vital potentiality is unrealized or blocked.