Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionIII. Humanistic/Existential
Theories- May: Existential
Psychology
© The McGraw−Hill^369
Companies, 2009Chapter 12 May: Existential Psychology 363believed 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 fan-
tasy 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. Speaking for his
mother, he said that she was very proud of him and that he had always been her fa-
vorite child. Then talking for himself, he told his mother that he appreciated 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 thatwould 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 en-
sued, “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 psy-
chotherapy, but it has sparked almost no direct empirical research. This state of af-
fairs is no doubt related to the critical stance that May adopted toward objective and
quantitative measurement. Any theory that emphasizes the connection between sub-
ject 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 experience
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 con-
fronting 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
was provided by the American psychiatrist Ernest Becker, who was inspired by
Kierkegaard and Otto Rank. A basic argument of these existentialists (as well as