May grew up in Michigan in a family that had “more than its share of troubles.” May said that he felt closer to his father (who traveled often) than to his mother. May was the second of six children and the eldest son of Earl Tuttle, a Young Men’s Christian Associations field secretary, and Matie Boughton May, a homemaker. 22 October 1994 in Tiburon, California), innovative philosopher, psychotherapist, and writer regarded as a founder of American existentialist psychotherapy. Obviously if we are to experience insights from our unconscious, we need to be able to give ourselves to solitude.( b. The avoidance of the anxiety of solitude by constant agitated diversion is what Kierkegaard, in a nice simile, likened to the settlers in the early days of America who used to beat on pots and pans at night to make enough din to keep the wolves away. Of course, when an individual is afraid of the irrational-that is, of the unconscious dimensions of experience-he tries to keep busiest, tries to keep most “noise” going on about him. It often occurs to me that people living in our modern, hectic civilization, amid the constant din of radio and TV, subjecting themselves to every kind of stimulation whether of the passive sort of TV or the more active sort of conversation, work, and activity, that people with such constant preoccupations find it exceedingly difficult to let insights from unconscious depths break through.
It is a characteristic of our time that many people are afraid of solitude: to be alone is a sign one is a social failure, for no one would be alone if he or she could help it. It requires that we be able to retire from a world that is “too much with us,” that we be able to be quiet, that we let the solitude work for us and in us. “I propose that in our day this alternation of the market place and mountain requires the capacity for the constructive use of solitude. They have the power to reveal the underlying meaning of any period precisely because the essence of art is the powerful and alive encounter between the artist and his or her world." (pg 52)” This is not because artists are didactic or set out to teach or to make propaganda to the extend that they do, their power of expression is broken their direct relations to the inarticulate, or, if you will, 'unconscious' levels of the culture is destroyed. For in the art the underlying spiritual meaning of the period is expressed directly in symbols. If you wish to understand the psychological and spiritual temper of any historical period, you can do no better than to look long and searchingly at its art. “What genuine painters do is to reveal the underlying psychological and spiritual conditions of their relationship to their world thus in the works of a great painter we have a reflection of the emotional and spiritual condition of human beings in that period of history.
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