American psychologist who, more than anyone else, brought European existentialist thought into American clinical psychology. May studied theology under Paul Tillich at Union Theological Seminary — the two became lifelong friends — and his work keeps one foot in the theological and philosophical tradition Tillich represented while the other stood firmly in the consulting room.
His dissertation, published as The Meaning of Anxiety (1950), was written while May himself was gravely ill with tuberculosis. He drew on Søren Kierkegaard to distinguish normal anxiety — the appropriate response to the real threats and open possibilities of a human life — from neurotic anxiety, which arises when normal anxiety cannot be faced and is displaced into symptoms. This was a direct challenge to a psychiatric orthodoxy that treated all anxiety as pathology to be suppressed.
May's mature work extended this existential framework across a series of popular books: Man's Search for Himself (1953) on the loss of inner purpose in mass society; Love and Will (1969) on the collapse of authentic erotic and moral life under the pressures of commodified sexuality and technological rationality; The Courage to Create (1975) on creativity as confrontation with being; and The Cry for Myth (1991) on the psychic cost of a culture without shared mythic narratives. His Existence (1958), co-edited with Henri Ellenberger and Ernest Angel, introduced Binswanger, Minkowski, and other European existential analysts to American readers and functioned as the founding anthology of American existential psychology.
May was one of the three founders of American humanistic psychology (with Maslow and Rogers) but remained the darkest of the three — closer in sensibility to Tillich's tragic Protestantism than to Maslow's sunnier developmental optimism.