Rollo May Research Paper

Rollo Reese May was born on April 21, 1909, in Ada, Ohio, to Earl Tittle and Mary Boughton. Being the first son and the second child in a family of six children, Rollo was migrated and grew up in Marine city, Michigan with parents that did not value education. Rollo May’s childhood was lonely and unpleasant, his parents didn’t get along, and when his older sisters became schizophrenic, his father blamed it on too much education. According to Olson and Hergenhahn (), May was never close with either of his parents, primarily his mother whom he called “Bitch-Kitty on Wheels” (p. 501).

In 1930, May attended college at Michigan State University where he majored in English, but after a brief time he was asked to leave due to his involvement with a radical student magazine. He then transferred to

Both of which were religiously oriented. During the 1940s, May studied psychoanalysis at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology in New York City, Where he meet and was influenced by Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm. In 1946, May became a practicing psychoanalyst and shortly after enrolled in the Clinical Psychology Program at Columbia University. During this time, he had contracted Tuberculosis and lived in a Sanatorium for about 18 months. This was probably the turning point of his life and while facing the possibility of death, May filled his empty hours with reading. Authors he read were Soren Kierkegaard and Freud, which inspired the existential movement and also became the basis of inspiration for Rollo May’s theory. In 1949 at Columbia University, graduating Summa Cum Laude, Rollo May received the first PhD award in clinical psychology that institution ever awarded at the relatively advanced age of 40. After receiving his PhD, he went on to teach at a variety of top