A Crude Introduction
Empathy is a fundamental process to not just psychotherapy but also life itself and relationships. To have empathy is to have first and foremost a personal experience while in the presence of another. Some connection with the other. As I’ve come to understand it, empathy is a remaining with another and acknowledging, experiencing, and understanding the truth of their reality, in correlation or contrast to my own, without losing myself. What I will convey is that according to May, is that we cannot empathize or love another without having a connection to ourselves. This comes with a bit of theory around the role of culture and cultural anxiety on our personal psychology and our relationship with ourselves. For it is from the individual that empathy, love, and care springs. If there is no relationship with myself, then there is no genuine love. For it is in empathy, a personal openness towards what “I” experience of the other, that one personality interacts with another. For to love another is to be relating from person to person without facades.
“Love is at the root of everything…sometimes we need to struggle with tragedy to feel the gravity of love.”
— Mr. Fred Rogers —
Rollo May is not often cited as a source in the study of empathy. However, in 1939, at the beginning of his career he wrote The Art of Counseling, one of the earliest published books on counseling. May put empathy right underneath the concept of personality, our understanding of what make a person a person, as he understood the nature of counseling/psychotherapy. Though very early in May’s career, The Art of Counseling was already showing and establishing the emerging tradition of existential psychology: particularly in May’s critiquing Freud and Adler's views of personality and how it is that one person encounters and remains with another. Existentially, it is through empathy that one person experiences and takes up relationship with another.
Existentialism for May focused on the ontological basis of what constitutes or makes up what it means to be a person. For May, he believed that thought essence, that which is most deeply and personally us - our self, was fixed—we are always in process of shaping our existence - how we are in the world (1983/1994). Although May believed in the unconscious and the drive or biological aspect of personality, May critiqued Freud for being overly deterministic and that the person had very little to no freedom. Where with Adler, May picked up on influence between individuals and society, but thought his theories were too simple and didn’t grasp the dark side of human capacities (May, 1939/1977).
May’s view of psychology, which he fine-tuned throughout his career, focused on this ontological level of personality. That means that May (1979) highlighted and studied the nature of the person as a person: that which makes the person themself. He was taking account of, while looking beyond their social status, body, profession, or behaviors towards what makes them them.
In exploring personality, May (1979) stated that “the human being cannot be understood as a self if participation with other selves is omitted” (p. 19). May (1983/1994) used the word participation here, which is not just to make contact but to engage with another where both individuals are impacted and also influence on one another. This points towards an I that is being impressed upon and responded from: a theme that I will come back to in discussing the therapeutic relationship. It’s worth noting that May trained for a number of years at the Williamson Allenson White Institute in New York City where May was greatly influenced by Harry Stack Sullivan. May’s ontological inquiry about human beings, then, was inseparable from relationships, and that our personality structure was relational in nature.
Empathy
In exploring his idea of personality, from an ontological basis, May (1939/1977) posed the question of how it is that one person, or personality, interacts with another. In its German and Greek origins, empathy is a feeling into or the sense of emersion into the other's experience. It is contrasted with sympathy, which is a feeling with or alongside. Empathy is a much deeper state of identification. At the time, May believed that when most immersed in another, there is an experience of losing one's own identity and identifying with the other. It is from this place that understanding is possible. Here you have one’s experience of another’s essence. May stated, “it is in this profound and somewhat mysterious process of empathy that understanding, influence, and the other significant relations between persons take place” (p.75). Though May stated that empathy is a mysterious phenomenon, it is not magical. What we know through the discovery of mirror neurons is that there is neurological activity going on when we observe feelings of joy and sadness, those same pathways within ourselves begin to show activation (Debes, 2017).
May (1939) described empathy as “the thinking, of one personality into another until some state of identification is achieved” (p.77). Here May seems to state that there has to be a sense of merging or identification for empathy to take place and that the process begins the moment people begin speaking to one another. Though he wrote this in the context of the therapeutic relationship, this is the process of participating with life. May later in the text stated that it is through participation and being influence or touched by relationships with people or things that we know “the meaning of beauty or love or any other so-called value in life” (p.81). Here is an immersing point that it is through contact with another that we come more into our own experience of life.
May (1939) believed that it is within empathy—this state of self and other identification—that there is the most powerful influence on the shaping of personalities. May believed that as a therapist, one would do well to forget or give up all experience and knowledge and to surrender to the experience of the other before onself. Rogers believed something very similar, believing that theory had little to no role within the counseling hour. Taking it a step further, May believed that working to empathize with another would actually hinder the experience of what was actually taking place in there here and now. When theory enters the room we let our own ideas of life and being enter the room rather than be with the persons view and way of being in relationship.
“Empathy is a remaining with another and acknowledging, experiencing, and understanding the truth of their reality, in correlation or contrast to my own, without losing myself.”
- Caleb A. Dodson -
Over the course of May’s prolific career, outside of The Art of Counseling, he never revisited empathy at length. From this point forward in his writing, he doesn’t provide instruction or deeper explanation on the process of empathy. May shifted towards the ontological or being aspect of psychotherapy, and began writing more on ontological issues facing individuals as opposed to the process of psychotherapy. For May, empathy was located within his concept and understanding of love. May (1939/1977) stated that empathy is “the fundamental process in love” (p. 77). Love is not re-introduced until 1953 in Mans Search for Himself and not explored in depth until 1969 in Love and Will. It’s within this concept of love that we come to a deeper understanding of empathy.
Love
May (1953/2009) opines that love is central to human interactions and also is an achievement of “becoming a person in one's own right” (p.180). Yet, this cannot be cultivated by mere whim or will. May (1953/2009) defined love as “delight in the presence of the other person and an affirming of his value and development as much as one’s own” (p. 182). May describes our culture as recognizing that love is the most powerful force that brings one to life and out of one’s isolation. When May talks about love, he’s not talking about romance and sex, but eros and the experience of being pulled toward something or a feeling of connection with another. However, these experiences are not necessarily love, for love is the apex of feeling. Mays exploration began with the prevailing context of the loss or repression of feeling in individuals coping with the human experience.
For May, love was a central and overriding theme for his philosophy of psychology: one which he continued to deepen and develop throughout the first half of his career. For May, love had a strong ontological basis—a theme that constituted being a person. In looking at love, May considered the concepts of eros, feeling, the other as inseparably linked. Love is a feeling, like many others, and it’s through our body that we sense and experience the world. An understanding of the cultural and psychological context provided by May is vital to our conceptualization of love.
Much of May’s (1950/2015) psychology was highly influenced by his understanding of anxiety and its effect on individuals and the collective society to cope with the experience of anxiety. May believed that our personality is formed by both the immediate context of the family and the broader context of society, while also maintaining that the person is free. We’re born and therefore exist, but we create our individual self through the dialogue with our contexts and relationships we encounter through life. It takes a “we” to create consciousness (1969/1989).
May (1953/2009) describes that through the way the individual interacts with their anxiety they are at risk of separating themselves from their bodies, and in doing so their selves. May asserts that this diminishment of relationship to self via the body produces loneliness, isolation, and a diminished sense of feeling, which consequently quells the very capacity to connect and love (Reeves, 1977). May points specifically to how we have divided ourselves: “Not only do people separate the body from the self in using it as an instrument of work, but they likewise separate it from the self in their pursuit of pleasure” (p.7 6). Culturally, we have come to believe that we can have sex without a connection to the other. May later called this separation the “new puritanism,” which is characterized by alienation of the body, separation of emotion from reason, and the use of the body as a machine (May, 1969/1989). Sex, and love at large, had begun to become a process of technique as opposed to tuning into one’s bodily and felt experience with and of the other.
Mays’ Mans Search for Himself is written in the context of the emerging revolution of love in the 1960s when May then began to write Love and Will. May (1953/2009) stated in writing Man’s Search for Himself that up to that point, “society is…the heir of four centuries of competitive individualism, with power over others as dominant motivation, and our particular generation is the heir of a good deal of anxiety, isolation, and personal emptiness” (p. 181). For as we are heirs to trying to control others, so we are heirs to believing that we can control or will our own destiny (1969/1989). He further discusses this in relation to the individual anesthetizing themselves from their very experience of their partner and intercourse.
Though May (1953) initially discusses these cultural characteristics of separation of the mind from the body in the context of sex, May ultimately saw this as a problem of depersonalization and the reduction of the person. May believed this manner of coping with life is a defense that serves to insulate ourselves from intimate relationships. May highlights our society’s absence in relating on a personal level with one another. He notes that this dynamic has even crept its way into the practice of psychotherapy in viewing the client as an object or machine to be fixed.
Having discussed the context in which love is examined and explored, May asks: “How does the person move towards being able to love?”(1953/2009). This question is posed in the shadow of nearly the entire book, which details the human experiences of loneliness and disconnection from ourselves and our feelings. May asserts that the individual's ability to move towards loving another is a product of becoming re-integrated or aware of their own sense of feeling and embodiment: an ontological awareness of one’s being. May (1953/2009) states: “The capacity to love presupposes self-awareness because love requires the ability to have empathy with the other person, to appreciate and affirm his potentialities” (p. 182). Moving towards love requires getting back in touch with inner feelings and sensations.
May (1989) described love as two sides of the same coin. He located his conception of love within the different conceptualizations of eros. One is based on the Freudian concepts of the past or drives or push, and the other side is based on the Platonic instinctual and purposeful oriented pull. We have a push or drive towards connection while also being pulled or desire to create with another.
Eros
Within May’s discussion of love, he puts eros at the forefront. His first mention of eros was prior to Love and Will, in the context of defining love at the end of Man’s Search for Himself. May (1953/2009) described eros as “the sexual drive towards the other, which is part of the individual’s need to fulfill himself” (p. 180). He then goes on to describe his two-sided explanation of eros in terms of Freud and Plato.
May (1953/2009) wrote, “For eros is the power that attracts us” (p. 74). Contrasting the Freudian and Platonic ideas of eros again, it was eros that pulled or motivated us to connect and create an experience with the other where sex is often times a drive that doesn’t consider the person as a person but merely a body to be used.. The experience of eros is that something touches the individual, stimulated on a whole-person level, and they’re drawn towards that stimulus. This is easiest to talk about in regard to relationships. Our culture is permeated by statements such as “love at first sight” or being fixated and enraptured in love with someone who you do not even know. It is because of experiences like these that the Greeks believed that eros is one of the most powerful and enlivening forces. May (1953/2009) states that eros is the “procreating of new dimensions of experience which broaden and deepen the being of the other” (p. 74). This experience of eros instills us with the motivation to connect and create with another—not as an object of one's desire but to create a new experience and, in a way, become more awake to oneself and the other.
May (1989) later stated that the “imagination is the lifeblood of eros” (p. 43). Hart (1998) discussed imagination as being in the same pathway as inspiration. For when an individual is drawn towards another, they are imagining something in relationship to them. May opines that imagination, or what he also described as intentionality, moves us towards interpersonal relationships; eros’ desire to create something from which there was nothing. Love is not merely something that can be willed; it is a natural product of one’s wrestling to connect. For love is something that is freely given and presupposes empathy, which implies a deep identification and sharing of both cognitive and affective experience with the other where we are deeply connected to the other.
Care
May (1969/1989) wrote, “Care is the necessary source of Eros, the source of human tenderness” (p. 289). It is in care, the individual identifying with the other—this process of empathy—that eros finds its direction. One is not a product of the other. Eros is a “mode of relating” and the desire to cultivate or create with another (p.74). May stated that eros could not live without care because it is in care that eros finds its origin. Care begins physiologically as something that stirs us and gives us a feeling, or bodily sense. It becomes psychological when that feeling becomes attached or identified with. May defined care as,
“the recognition of another, a fellow human being like one’s self; of identification of one’s self with the pain or joy of the other; of guilt, pity, and the awareness that we all stand on the base of common humanity from which we all stem. (p. 289)
May believed the experience of care is a moment of openness to being touched by life, or something reaching us deeply. Care is a moment of connection where there was once none, constituted by openness, valuing, and a desire to create within oneself.
Care finds its source in relationship to ourselves and our own body, where we are then able relate or identify to the experience of the other. In our turning towards the other, we feel the pain and joy of the other in our body. This, too, is a point of dispelling the Freudian view of eros as the desire for the release of tension. For May (date), life was far more than a process of satisfying bodily needs and releases. Life is what we care about, that which touches us, gives us an experience, and chose to take up relationship and create with.
Life is inextricably linked to relationship. May (date) states that “when we do not care, we lose our being; and care is the way back to being” (p. 290). May viewed the ontological basis of care as a process of forming the person. For Heidegger (date), care and selfhood were inseparable. Man is born into the world, and it is in the world that he takes up relationship with himself. We come into consciousness not through our own individuation, but through relationship. Though the person must eventually, from his freedom and intentionality, move out as an individual, it is always with a background of relationship (1969/1989).
The Therapeutic Relationship
May’s (1969/1989) description of the numerous layers that make up and constitute a caring relationship leans towards a reconsideration of what defines the therapeutic relationship. Though much has been written on what is a therapeutic relationship, we get a much more ontological basis of what’s taking place within relationship, whether with a therapist or not. For this, I use the words therapist(s), individuals, or persons interchangeably, because the experience of being in a therapeutic relationship with openness, feeling, and care towards one another, is not exclusive to a relationship with a licensed mental health professional.
May’s (1969/1989) statements around love, empathy, and personable participation with another point back to numerous axioms of psychotherapy and training to be a psychotherapist that he identified. The extent to which we have been seen and empathized with reflects our ability to know and be with ourselves, which reflects our capacity to empathize with others. This reflects a well-known axiom of psychotherapy from Socrates to “know thyself” and be in relationship to our experiencing of life, which is a constant process of discovery. Lastly, and one I cannot do justice to in a few sentences, is the phenomenological nature of existentialism and counseling through the consideration of the influence of the researchers’ and observers’ meaning-making structure on the formulation of the human experience. Each person has a personality by which they view, sense, make meaning, and construct the world. It could be said that May was an early contemporary and forerunner of the Intersubjective tradition of psychoanalysis which focusing on the here-and-now or between therapist and patient. Stolorow (2013) states that Mays writing in Existence (1958) had a huge influence on he and George Atwoods professional and personal development.
A starting point in May's conceptualization of the therapeutic relationship was explored in a panel discussion with May, Rogers, Satir, and Szasz (1983) on the “role” of the therapist. This discussion provides a glimpse into how May viewed the posturing of the therapist. Both Rogers and May similarly disagreed about the use of the word role within the counseling process. They asserted that being a therapist is not a role, but instead is the task of being completely present as a fellow person to the other as a co-experiencer. For May, counseling is more about the therapist’s being-ness, the here-and-now, and who they are than about technique, agenda, or goal. May and Rogers believe that therapy is first and foremost a personal relationship where we make ourselves completely available to what is here and now.
May (1969/1989) describes relationship as openness and empathy towards the full spectrum of feeling and experiencing between people, characterized by a genuineness and a sensing or felt experience that finds its peak in caring. Without that sensing and care, the relationship is bound to fail (1969/1989). Empathy is not merely a tool to be attained, but a human capacity that is re-discovered or re-cultivated. As therapists, it is not empathy that we seek, but to rediscover ourselves as a sensing, feeling, imagining, creating being that is constantly in relationship with the world.
Towards the end of The Discovery of Being, in an essay taken originally from Existence (1958), May (1983/2015) stated that the existential approach is not merely focused on relationship and becoming, but views both the individual and therapist as confronting and wrestling with life. The theme of the imperative of love and mutuality in the therapeutic relationship is demonstrated well in a case by Robert Hobson (1985/2015). Hobson recounts a case with a client tormented by loneliness, badness, and a devastating longing to trust and be with her experience—both alone and with another. Hobson talks about how he “hope(d) to discover a true voice of feeling in a mutual personal relationship,” but so struggled to find the right words that would meet her deep longings of connection (p.211). Hobson ended the relationship because he could not find the words to connect with her. It caused Hobson much uncertainty regarding whether he did all he could in relationship with that client, made worse by hearing a year later that she had committed suicide. Hobson’s writing invites the question: “What good is the therapeutic relationship if the client does not feel loved?” This is similar to May (1969/1989) stating “woe unto the therapy,” where the therapist does not feel a sense of care for the patient or that what they say doesn’t matter (p.292). Sometimes we have to wrestle with life and with ourselves in order to come to a place where we love the other.
Though the therapist receives formal training on the aspects of therapy, these are not substitutes for the ongoing attention to ones experiencing of life. May (1983) wrote that education and psychological theory merely give us an image and idea of being a person. He warned us that if we are not first human, where we pay attention to our own experiencing, that our “expertness will be irrelevant and possibly harmful” (p. 164). May notes that the existential tradition has done the same as the Freudian tradition, which is to see the person or personality as something fixed and systematized rather than to see the person as in process. In doing so, the therapist is robbed we rob the therapist of one of the most important gifts, that of intuition and sensitivity towards life. Hobson, inspired by the work of Suttie, notes that there is no greater barrier to change in psychotherapy and relationship than to hold the person at a distance by keeping away our own experiencing due to the fear of drawing close, relating with, and feeling tenderness towards the patient. Hobson states that in order for change to occur “a more equal personal relationship” (emphasis added) must be reached (p.212). This tandems May's position that in each genuine personal act, love and will are present and that in those acts we shape our world, and in those moments both persons are changed (1983, 1969/1989).
Conclusion
May began his career in psychotherapy by asking how it is that one personality interacts with another and describing the numerous layers and their effect on both parties (1939, 1969). The interwoven phenomena of empathy, feeling, love, and care that make up encounter and relationship happen on the most profoundly human level. That of being a person with another person. Hobson (1988) states that problems in psychotherapy can only be “detected, explored, and healed within a mutual relationship of two experiencing subjects who are alone and together … If I am to discover what it means to go on becoming a person I must be a person sharing, and failing to share a language of feeling with another, here and now” (p.29). May states that in the act of love, within a shared experience, a new way of being or gestalt is being created. For when two people are really connecting in the interwoven phenomena of care, empathy, or love, both people are likely experiencing one another's feelings and both come out changed.
References
Debes, R. Empathy and mirror neurons. In The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy; Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group: Abingdon, UK, 2017; pp. 54–63.
Hobson, R. F. (2015). Forms of feeling: The heart of psychotherapy. Place of publication not identified: Routledge. (Originally Published in 1985).
May, R., Angel, E., & Ellenberger, H. F. (Eds.). (1958). Existence. Rowman & Littlefield.
May, R. (1977). The art of counseling. Gardner Press. (Originally published 1939).
May, R. (1989). Love and will (2nd ed.). Dell Pub. (Originally published 1969).
May, R. (2009). Man’s search for himself. Norton. (Originally published in 1953).
May, R. (1983). The Discovery of being: Writing in existential psychology. W.W. Norton.
May, R. (2015). The Meaning of anxiety. W.W. Norton &. Co. (Originally Published 1950)
May, R., Rogers, C., Satir, V., & Szasz, T. (Speakers). (1985). The role of the therapist, the role of the client: Panel. [Video/DVD] Milton H. Erickson Foundation.
Stolorow, R. D. (2013). Heidegger and post-cartesian psychoanalysis: My personal, psychoanalytic, and philosophical sojourn. The Journal of Humanistic Psychology, , 41(3), 209–218
This paper was written for coursework for my Ph.D in Psychology: Existential-Humanistic Psychology at Saybrook University in a course The Psychology of Rollo May. There are limited references used because the focus was on studying a specific aspect of Mays psychology.
My name is Caleb Dodson I’m a private psychotherapist in Seattle, WA and I’m most passionate about bringing kindness to and excavating a sense of humanity in the most challenging experiences to bring about a more full life.