Rollo May – författare

Rollo May brings together the ideas of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and other great thinkers to offer insight into the ideas and techniques of existential psychotherapy, of which he was a major force. He pays particular attention to the causes of loneliness and isolation and to our search for stability in order to move towards a future where responsibility, creativity and love can play a role.

Personligheten är inte objektivt mätbar, hon kan inte helt fångas in i ett vetenskapligt system. Bakom varje teori upptäcker vi individen, den människa som allt detta händer med. Här finner vi de djupaste och mest fundamentala frågorna – om kärleken, meningen med livet, individens frihet, ansvar, lidande och död.

Utan att förkasta behaviorism eller psykoanalys vill May tillföra ytterligare en dimension i vetenskapen om människan, nämligen existentialismens människosyn. Influerad av bland andra Kierkegaard, Heidegger och Jung förordar May en existentialistisk psykoterapi där det förbehållslösa mötet mellan verkliga, medkännande människor är det väsentliga. Terapeuten bör, liksom varje medmänniska, lyssna till den andre och hjälpa honom att upptäcka sina möjligheter och komma i kontakt med sin sanna existens.

Översättning Margareta Wentz Edgardh

Loneliness, boredom, emptiness: These are the complaints that Rollo May encountered over and over from his patients. In response, he probes the hidden layers of personality to reveal the core of man's integration--a basic and inborn sense of value. Man's Search for Himself is an illuminating view of our predicament in an age of overwhelming anxieties and gives guidance on how to choose, judge, and act during such times.

The Meaning of Anxiety is as relevant and illuminating now as when it was first published in 1950. Challenging the idea that mental health means living without anxiety, it explores anxiety’s potential for self-realisation and explores ways to avoid its destructive aspects.

Rollo May framhåller i denna klassiker från 1975 att all verklig kreativitet innebär ett hot mot konformiteten. Den skapande människan går in i ett intensivt möte med något bortom sitt eget subjekt, och i detta möte måste hon satsa allt och riskera att misslyckas. Skapandet kräver mod och är inte en syssla bland andra. Det är emotionell hälsa i dess högsta form. 

Översättning Margareta Wentz Edgardh

The heart of man's dilemma, according to Rollo May, is the failure to understand the real meaning of love and will, their source and interrelation. Bringing fresh insight to these concepts, May shows how we can attain a deeper consciousness.

What if imagination and art are not, as many of us might think, the frosting on life but the fountainhead of human experience? What if our logic and science derive from art forms, rather than the other way around? In this trenchant volume, Rollo May helps all of us find those creative impulses that, once liberated, offer new possibilities for achievement.A renowned therapist and inspiring guide, Dr. May draws on his experience to show how we can break out of old patterns in our lives. His insightful book offers us a way through our fears into a fully realized self.

He pays particular attention to the causes of loneliness and isolation, and to our search for stability in an age of anxiety.

Whether reflecting on war, psychology, or the ideas of existentialist thinkers such as Sartre and Kierkegaard, Dr. May everywhere enlarges our outlook on how people can develop creatively within the human predicament.

Rollo May defines power as the ability to cause or prevent change; innocence, on the other hand, is the conscious divesting of one's power to make it seem a virtuea form of powerlessness that Dr. May sees as particularly American in nature. From these basic concepts he suggests a new ethic that sees power as the basis for both human goodness and evil.Dr. May discusses five levels of power's potential in each of us: the infant's power to be; self-affirmation, the ability to survive with self-esteem; self-assertion, which develops when self-affirmation is blocked; aggression, a reaction to thwarted assertion; and, finally, violence, when reason and persuasion are ineffective.

"May is an existential analyst who deservedly enjoys a reputation among both general and critical readers as an accessible and insightful social and psychological theorist. . . . Freedom's characteristics, fruits, and problems; destiny's reality; death; and therapy's place in the confrontation between freedom and destiny are examined. . . . Poets, social critics, artists, and other thinkers are invoked appropriately to support May's theory of freedom and destiny's interdependence."—Library Journal "Especially instructive, even stunning, is Dr. May's willingness to respect mystery. . . .There is, too, at work throughout the book a disciplined yet relaxed clinical mind, inclined to celebrate . . . what Flannery O'Connor called 'mystery and manners,' and to do so in a tactful, meditative manner."—Robert Coles, America

It happens almost daily in a therapist's office. A patient, recalling a person, an event, an emotion, quite unexpectedly supplies a link from a life in the present to one of the durable myths of our culture. In this moment, the myth becomes a mirror, revealing to the patient the source of disturbance and pain in a pattern of behavior that often stretches a year or longer. The healing process begins. The myth, "eternity breaking into time" in Rollo Mays's words, becomes the focal point of recovery.Through tracing myths – whether from classical Greece and Dante's Middle Ages, European legend (Faust and the prototype of Sleeping Beauty), or contemporary American life (Jay Gatsby) -- and relating them to the dreams and associations he encounters in his own practice, Dr. May provides meaning and structure for all who seek direction in a morally confusing world.In this, perhaps the finest achievement of a great therapist, Rollo May writes with "the grace, wit, and style: for which he recently received the Gold Medal of the American Psychological Society.

Since its publication, Existence has been regarded as the most important, complete, and lucid account of the existentialist approach to psychology.From the works of the leading spokesmen of the existential analytic movement, the editors have selected classic case histories and other writings to define the approach that seeks to understand mental illness, in the words of Rollo May, "...not as deviations from the conceptual yardstick of this or that psychiatrist...but as deviations in the structure of the particular patient's existence, the disruptions of his condition humane."

'An innovator in psychology' The New York TimesA timeless, accessible guide to giving good counsel at work.Whatever you do at work, if you interact with people - either as colleagues or clients - you will need the skills to have sensitive conversations. We cannot all be trained psychotherapists, but we can learn how to effectively listen, support and advise others in need. In The Art of Counselling, leading psychologist and psychotherapist Rollo May gives you to tools to interact compassionately and productively, helping you to:- Appear approachable and build empathy from the outset- Tailor your approach according to personality types- Listen with purpose in order to give meaningful adviceA pioneer in the field of existential psychology, Rollo May recognised that many people who are not counsellors by profession are often required to act as such at work. The Art of Counselling has since become a classic of the genre and is more relevant than ever to the modern workplace.

The concept of fear (or anxiety) is of great importance in existential philosophy. Existentialists give fear a positive connotation: we need it in order to pull a person out of a thoughtless life. Fear is like fire, it burns everything unimportant and temporary; only in it is true existence revealed. The first to write about this was Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), a Danish philosopher and psychologist, the founder of existentialism. Then the topic was continued by other representatives of this trend, in particular, Rollo May (1909–1994), an American philosopher and psychologist, theorist of existential psychology. It examines the main problems of human existence: anxiety and fear, freedom, responsibility and fate, in addition, it gives a historical overview of the development of these ideas in scientific thought.