344 Part III Humanistic/Existential Theories
because it emanated from an external (i.e., the therapist’s) frame of reference. May,
however, believed that these kinds of interpretations can be an effective means of
confronting patients with information that they have been hiding from themselves.
Another technique May used with Philip was the suggestion that he hold a
fantasy conversation with his dead mother. In this conversation, Philip spoke for
both himself and his mother. When talking for his mother, he was able for the first
time to empathize with her, to see Philip from his mother’s point of view. Speak-
ing for his mother, he said that she was very proud of him and that he had always
been her favorite child. Then talking for himself, he told his mother that he appre-
ciated her courage and recalled an incident when her courage saved his eyesight.
When Philip finished the fantasy conversation, he said, ‘“I never in a thousand
years would have imagined that would come out’” (May, 1981, p. 39).
May also asked Philip to bring a photo of himself when he was a little boy.
Philip then had a fantasy conversation with “Little Philip.” As the conversation
ensued, “Little Philip” explained that he had triumphed over the problem that had
most troubled grown Philip, namely, the fear of abandonment. “Little Philip”
became Philip’s friendly companion and helped him overcome his loneliness and
allay his jealousy of Nicole.
At the end of therapy, Philip did not become a new person, but he did become
more conscious of a part of himself that had been there all the time. An awareness
of new possibilities allowed him to move in the direction of personal freedom. For
Philip, the end of therapy was the beginning of “the uniting of himself with that
early self that he had had to lock up in a dungeon in order to survive when life
was not happy but threatening” (May, 1981, p. 41).Related Research
Rollo May’s existential theory has been moderately influential as a method of
psychotherapy, but it has sparked almost no direct empirical research. This state
of affairs is no doubt related to the critical stance that May adopted toward objec-
tive and quantitative measurement. Any theory that emphasizes the connection
between subject and object and the uniqueness of each individual will not be
conducive to large sample research with experimental or questionnaire design. In
fact, May argued that modern science is too rationalistic, too objective, and that a
new science is needed in order to grasp the total, living person.
One existential topic to receive some empirical attention has been existential
anxiety. May (1967) defined anxiety as “the apprehension cued off by a threat to
some value which the individual holds essential to his [or her] existence as a self”
(p. 72). When events threaten our physical or psychological existence, we experi-
ence existential anxiety, and strongest among the threats to our existence is death.
Indeed, May and Yalom (1989) argued that “a major developmental task is to deal
with the terror of obliteration” (p. 367). In a sense, life is the process of coping
with and confronting death.
An existential approach to the study of terror and death has carried over into
“terror management,” a modern experimental offshoot of existential psychology. A
conceptual bridge between existential psychology and terror management theory
(TMT) was provided by the American psychiatrist Ernest Becker, who was inspired