Rollo May

• _____ emerged shortly after World War II and spread from Europe to the US.

  Existential psychology
• The foremost spokesperson for existential psychology in the US developed a new approach based on clinical experience.

  Rollo May
• May contracted _____ in his early thirties and spent three years at the Saranac Sanitarium in upstate New York.

  Tuberculosis
• May discovered that _____ is an active process and that patients must actively participate in the therapeutic process.

  healing
• May attributed his own two failed marriages to his mother's unpredictable behavior and his older sister's psychotic episode. True or False?

  True
• He was the best-known American representative of the existential movement through his books, articles, and lectures.

  Rollo May
• He spoke out against the tendency of some existentialists to slip into an antiscientific or anti-intellectual posture and criticized any attempt to dilute existential psychology into a painless method of reaching self-fulfillment.

  Rollo May
• May regarded _____ as both good and evil and capable of creating cultures that are good and evil.

  human beings
• He opposed any attempt to see people merely as objects, but at the same time, he opposed the view that subjective perceptions are one's only reality. Instead, he was concerned with both the experiencing person and the person's experience.

  Rollo May
• May emphasized a balance between:

  freedom, responsibility
• It suggests process; it is associated with growth and change.

  Existence
• Refers to a product; it signifies stagnation and finality.

  Essence
• 2 basic concepts of existentialism:

  being-in-the-world, nonbeing
• Existentialists adopt a _____ approach for understanding humanity.

  phenomenological
• Existentialists believe that the basic unity of person and environment is expressed in the German word _____, meaning to exist there.

  Dasein
• Dasein literally means _____

  "to exist in the world"
• Dasein is generally written as _____

  being-in-the-world
• The hyphens in this term imply a oneness of subject and object of person and world.

  Dasein
• Many people suffer from anxiety and despair due to their alienation from themselves or their world, which manifests in three areas: (1) separation from nature, (2) lack of meaningful interpersonal relations, and (3) alienation from one's authentic self.
• People experience three simultaneous modes in their being-in-the-world:

  • Umwelt (the environment around us)
  • Mitwelt (our relations with other people)
  • Eigenwelt (our relationship with our self).
• Umwelt is the world of objects and things and would exist even if people had no awareness.
• Mitwelt refers to our relationships with others, such as love, which requires commitment and respect for the other person's being-in-the-world.
• We cannot escape Umwelt. True or False?

  True
• Eigenwelt refers to one's relationship with oneself, which is not usually explored by personality theorists.
• To live in Eigenwelt means being aware of oneself as a human being and grasping who we are as we relate to the world of things and to the world of people.
• Being-in-the-world necessitates an awareness of oneself as a living, emerging being, which leads to the dread of nonbeing or nothingness. May (1958) argued that to grasp existence, one must acknowledge that they might not exist and that death will arrive at some unknown moment in the future.
• Death is not the only avenue of nonbeing, but it is the most obvious one. Life becomes more vital and meaningful when we confront the possibility of our death.
• Our nonbeing can also be expressed as blind conformity to societal expectations or generalized hostility.
• The fear of death or nonbeing often provokes us to live defensively and receive less from life than if we confront the issue of our nonexistence.
• Existential psychology is concerned with the individual’s struggle to work through life’s experiences and to grow toward becoming more fully human. May (1981) described this struggle in a report on one of his patients - Philip.
• Death is the one absolute of life that sooner or later everyone must face.
• May (1958) defined anxiety as “the subjective state of the individual’s becoming aware that his [or her] existence can be destroyed, that he can become ‘nothing’”.
• May (1967) called anxiety a threat to some important value.
• May (1981, p. 185) quoted Kierkegaard as saying that “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”
• Anxiety can be either normal or neurotic
• May (1967) defined normal anxiety as that “which is proportionate to the threat, does not involve repression, and can be confronted constructively on the conscious level”.
• May (1967) defined neurotic anxiety as “a reaction which is disproportionate to the threat, involves repression and other forms of intrapsychic conflict, and is managed by various kinds of blocking-off of activity and awareness”.
• Although normal anxiety is felt whenever values are threatened, neurotic anxiety is experienced whenever values become transformed into dogma.
• Guilt arises when people deny their potentialities, fail to accurately perceive the needs of fellow humans, or remain oblivious to their dependence on the natural world (May, 1958).
• Both anxiety and guilt are ontological; that is, they refer to the nature of being and not to feelings arising from specific situations or transgressions.