Psyche and Soul in America

Abzug illuminates psychology's role in relation to religion in an American cultural context through an insightful and contextualized retelling of one of the major figures of religion and psychology in the twentieth century. This book will interes pastors, pastoral counselors, and historians alike. * Aaron Klink, Religious Studies Review *
Abzug offers a scholarly account of the life and career of Rollo May (1909–94), one of the 20th century's most influential psychologists and psychotherapists. Abzug makes liberal use of May's personal diaries and testimonies from interviews with his associates. The text describes May's ministerial and psychoanalytic training and his emergence as a co-founder of humanistic psychology and the practitioner most responsible for the 'Americanization' of existential psychotherapy. Abzug also traces May's career as a best-selling author (e.g., Love and Will, published in 1969), political activist, and public intellectual. He follows May personally through an early bout with tuberculosis, three marriages, his execution of several splendid paintings, and his delving into the tragic aspects of the human condition.... Recommended. All readers. * Choice *
As a mid-century public intellectual, Rollo May became the foremost American exponent of existentialism in religion and psychology. Now, in what will surely be a defining assessment, Robert Abzug melds social history, intimate biography, and a masterly explication of the work to introduce or reintroduce readers to Rollo May. * Peter D. Kramer, Brown University *
Robert Abzug expertly weaves together Rollo May's tumultuous personal life and pathbreaking work in this comprehensive, thoroughly absorbing, and remarkably intimate biography. An intrepid explorer of anxiety, emptiness, and boredom, as well as of LSD, sex, and the counterculture, May brought European existentialism to American readers in a comprehensible and appealing form. A celebrity psychologist in his day, May and his writings on the contours of a meaningful life are all the more pertinent in our own anxious, turbulent times. * Elizabeth Lunbeck, author of The Americanization of Narcissism *
Making his way from small-town Michigan Christianity to Manhattan psychoanalysis and San Francisco Bay Area spirituality, May's talents — 'working with people' and helping them 'by means of ideas' — produced a deeply American contribution to the perennial problem of living soulfully with human contradiction. In Robert H. Abzug, Rollo May, who described himself as a 'wounded healer,' has found a biographer who does justice to his lifelong quest for thoughtful soulcraft and the higher reaches of self-help. * Todd Gitlin, author of The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage *
Abzug reminds us of Rollo May's continuing relevance to our personal lives and the life of our country. May's insights into the union of outer and inner life speaks to us in good times and bad, connects us with our past, and gives us hope. You will be glad you've read this book. * Senator Bill Bradley *
A singularly contemporary biography... Abzug's book brilliantly shows how psychology emerges from the lifeworld of individuals at a particular moment in history...The book will be of special interest to historians of psychology for the way the account intertwines May's psychological contributions with his personal life and the social milieux in which he lived. Readers interested in existential and humanistic psychologies will find the book valuable for how it demonstrates the embeddedness of those psychologies in North American culture. * Robert Kugelmann, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences *
Reading this meticulously researched and thoroughly enjoyable biography of the eminent Rollo May was an astonishing journey... A scholarly page turner is an unusual feat, but Abzug carries this off in style... Abzug gives us a full picture of an outspoken, thought provoking, and sometimes quite provocative human being. * Sandra Buechler, Contemporary Psychoanalysis *
Robert Abzug has written a magnificent biography. Rollo would, I have little doubt, have found Abzug's book to be 'marvelous' in its thoughtfulness, warmth, and pervasive integrity -one, I think, many Journal of Humanistic Psychology readers will likely cherish and that every one of us should wish to read. Psyche and Soul in America should be required reading for all those among us who hear the Siren-like call, those evocations of what William James... had called the 'MORE.'...Abzug's graceful study of May returns us, it may be hoped, to our own moral and spiritual sensibilities and predicaments, consciences, and yearnings, as we ponder our own journeys vis-a-vis that of such an exemplar. * Ed Mendelowitz, Journal of Humanistic Psychology *
Abzug's biography is not just a wonderfully written, balanced, judicious assessment of one man's life and works: it also offers us a portrait of interwar America that is itself fascinating, and another of postwar America, too. Some of the turmoil of, for example, the 1960s is really captured well in several chapters here. So are the changes as we move into the sunset of May's life in the late1980s and early 1990s when he felt the world passing him by, and the mid-century 'existential' moment being obliterated in part at the hands of pharmaceutical companies trying to offer everyone a happiness pill. * Adam J. DeVille, University Bookman *
Robert Abzug's Psyche and Soul in America: The Spiritual Odyssey of Rollo May is a magnificent adventure. Abzug is an outstanding scholar, and the subject of his biography is perhaps the most important American-born depth psychologist in history....I highly recommend Abzug's biography of Rollo May not only for existential, humanistic, and Jungian psychologists, who will naturally be interested, but for my colleagues within the broader Freudian psychoanalytic tradition, who will find May's distinctly North American approach to psychoanalysis quite compelling * Daniel Benveniste, Carter Jenkins Center *