Rollo May Glossary
Instructor's addition: This glossary was created as a supplemental course resource and was not part of Dr. C. George Boeree's original text.
Existential Foundations
- Existential Psychology
- An approach to psychology concerned with the human experience of existence, including freedom, responsibility, choice, anxiety, meaning, isolation, and death. May helped introduce and develop existential psychology in the United States.
- Existence
- Human life as it is actually lived and experienced. Existential psychology emphasizes the person as an active participant in life rather than merely an object shaped by internal or external forces.
- Being
- The experience of existing as a person who is aware, choosing, developing, and relating to the world.
- Being-in-the-World
- The existential idea that a person cannot be understood separately from the world in which that person lives. Human existence always involves relationships with the physical world, other people, and oneself.
- Freedom
- The human capacity to recognize possibilities, make meaningful choices, and participate in shaping one's life within the limits imposed by circumstances and destiny.
- Responsibility
- The recognition that freedom involves accepting responsibility for one's choices and for the way one responds to the circumstances of life.
- Destiny
- The aspects of life that are given to us rather than chosen, including biological characteristics, historical circumstances, past events, and other limitations. May viewed destiny as the raw material from which people create their lives.
- Courage
- The willingness to face anxiety, uncertainty, and the risks involved in living and choosing. Courage does not mean the absence of anxiety, but the ability to move forward despite it.
- Authenticity
- Living in a manner that acknowledges one's actual situation, freedom, responsibility, possibilities, and limitations rather than escaping into conformity or self-deception.
Ways of Developing and Living
- Innocence
- May's description of the pre-egoic, pre-self-conscious condition most characteristic of infancy. The innocent person is premoral rather than either morally good or bad and acts primarily according to immediate needs.
- Rebellion
- A way of developing self-consciousness and independence through opposition. It is especially noticeable in childhood and adolescence. The rebellious person seeks freedom but may not yet fully accept the responsibility that accompanies it.
- Ordinary
- May's description of the conventional adult who has learned responsibility but may find its demands difficult and seek security through conformity and traditional expectations.
- Creative
- May's description of the authentic adult who accepts destiny, confronts anxiety with courage, and actively participates in creating a meaningful life.
- Developmental Ways of Being
- May's innocence, rebellion, ordinary, and creative orientations are not rigid developmental stages. Different orientations may appear at different ages, although some are more prominent during particular periods of development.
Anxiety and Human Existence
- Anxiety
- May described anxiety as apprehension arising when something a person considers essential to existence as a self is threatened.
- Normal Anxiety
- Anxiety that is proportionate to a genuine threat, does not require repression, and can be confronted constructively. Because human beings must choose under conditions of uncertainty, some anxiety is an unavoidable part of living.
- Neurotic Anxiety
- Anxiety that becomes disproportionate to the actual threat and tends to restrict awareness, freedom, and constructive action. Avoiding normal anxiety can contribute to the development of neurotic anxiety.
- Anxiety of Freedom
- The anxiety that accompanies awareness that one has choices and must accept responsibility for making them. Freedom creates possibilities, but possibilities also involve uncertainty and risk.
- Nothingness
- The existential awareness of nonbeing, loss, and ultimately death. Awareness of the possibility of not existing gives urgency and significance to human choices.
The Daimonic
- Daimonic
- May's term for the total system of motives within a person. The daimonic includes the many powerful needs, desires, and possibilities that contribute to motivation.
- Daimon
- A particular motive or powerful human drive within the larger daimonic system. Daimons may involve basic needs as well as higher motives such as love.
- Daimonic Possession
- A condition in which one daimon becomes so dominant that it takes over the personality and disrupts the balance among the person's other motives.
- Balance of Daimons
- Healthy functioning requires that powerful motives be integrated rather than allowing one motive to dominate the entire personality. A daimon is not necessarily destructive in itself; problems arise when it takes control of the person.
Love and Will
- Eros
- A form of love involving the desire for union and meaningful connection with another person. May distinguished eros from sex alone and treated it as an important human motive.
- Will
- The capacity to organize oneself in order to move toward goals and turn possibilities into action.
- Wish
- A playful imagining of a possibility. Wishes express desires and possibilities, but will is required to organize action that may bring them into reality.
- Love and Will
- Two fundamental aspects of healthy human functioning that May believed should be integrated. Love provides connection and meaningful desire, while will provides direction, organization, and action.
- Neo-Puritan
- Boeree's representative name for May's description of a person with strong will but insufficient love or meaningful wishes. Such a person may be highly disciplined and effective but rigid, perfectionistic, and emotionally empty.
- Infantile Type
- Boeree's representative name for May's description of a person rich in wishes and desires but lacking sufficient will to transform those possibilities into purposeful action. The person may become dependent and conforming.
- Creative Type
- The orientation that integrates love and will. The person can imagine possibilities, form meaningful relationships, choose goals, and organize action to bring possibilities into reality.
- Integration of Love and Will
- May's view that psychological health requires balancing the capacity for relationship and connection with the capacity for choice, direction, and purposeful action.
Choice, Meaning, and Intentionality
- Intentionality
- The structure through which people give meaning to experience and orient themselves toward possibilities and action. Intentionality connects wishes, awareness, choice, and will.
- Choice
- The act of selecting among possibilities. For May, meaningful human freedom involves making choices while recognizing both personal responsibility and the limits imposed by destiny.
- Meaning
- The significance a person discovers or creates through relationships, choices, values, commitments, and interpretations of experience.
- Becoming
- The continuing process of developing and creating oneself through choices, relationships, commitments, and responses to life's possibilities and limitations.
Myths and Values
- Myth
- A story or guiding narrative that helps people understand their lives, organize experience, express values, and find meaning. May did not use the word simply to mean something false.
- Guiding Narrative
- A story that provides a framework through which a person or culture can interpret experience and understand possibilities, values, conflicts, and purposes.
- Personal Myth
- A narrative through which an individual understands and gives meaning to personal experience, identity, values, and direction in life.
- Cultural Myth
- A narrative shared within a society or group that communicates values, expectations, ideals, and ways of understanding human experience.
- Loss of Values
- May's concern that modern people can become surrounded by competing values without having a meaningful framework for deciding among them, producing uncertainty and difficulty finding direction.
- Creation of Values
- The existential responsibility to participate actively in choosing and developing values rather than simply accepting values imposed by tradition or society.