Psyche and Soul in America

Abstract

Rollo May (1909‒1994), internationally known psychologist and popular philosopher, came from modest roots in the small town Protestant Midwest intending to do “religious work” but eventually became a psychotherapist and in best-selling books like Love and Will and The Courage to Create he attracted an audience of millions of readers in the United States, Europe, and Asia. During the 1950s and 1960s, these books combined existentialism and other philosophical approaches, psychoanalysis, and a spiritually-philosophy to interpret the damage bureaucratic and technocratic aspects of modernity and their inability of individuals to understand their authentic selves. Psyche and Soul in America deals not only with May’s public contributions but also to his turbulent inner life as revealed in unprecedentedly intimate sources in order to demonstrate the relationship between the personal and public in a figure who wrote about intimacy, its loss, and ways to regain an authentic sense of self and others.