MISHLOVE: I suppose much of our anxiety comes from the basic human dilemma of being mortal, of ultimately having to confront our own demise. I think anxiety, for people who have found their own heart and their own souls, for them it is a stimulus toward creativity, toward courage. What anxiety means is it’s as though the world is knocking at your door, and you need to create, you need to make something, you need to do something. But I think none of those things, including meditation, which I happen to believe in - none of those paths lead you to creative activity. When you’re in a situation of anxiety, you can of course run away from it, and that’s certainly not constructive or you can take a few pills to get you over it, or cocaine, or whatever else you may take. I think anxiety is associated with creativity. MISHLOVE: Would I be correct in assuming that when you speak of anxiety you don’t think of it as a symptom to be removed, but rather as a gateway for exploration into the meaning of life? The medical model had turned out to be a dead end, and I welcomed the chance to edit this book of existential chapters from Europe. This was exactly the model that we needed for psychotherapy. I hadn’t known a thing about the existential movement, but I knew that in this country I believed in it very firmly, because they are the ones who emphasize anxiety, they emphasize the individual, courage, they emphasize guilt feeling, that it has to be taken into consideration at least, and they see human beings as struggling, sometimes successful, sometimes not successful. I was delighted to hear there was such a book. Well, in the year I think ’56 or ’57, the publishers called me up and asked if I would edit a book on European existential psychotherapy.

You draw heavily on the works of philosophers such as Sartre, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard, who deal with basic notions such as anxiety in a different way than most medical clinical models do. That’s a discipline which, unlike most forms of clinical psychology that rely on a medical model or a behavioral model, relies more on a philosophical model. You’re really most known these days, I think, as a pioneer in establishing existential psychology as an independent discipline in the clinical area. MISHLOVE: It’s a pleasure to have you here. The Courage to Create, Love and Will, The Meaning of Anxiety, Freedom and Destiny, and Psychology and the Human Dilemma.

He is the author of numerous classic books, including He was recently awarded the Distinguished Career in Psychology Award by the American Psychological Association. May is one of the founding sponsors of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, and a genuine pioneer in the field of existential psychology and clinical psychology. Our topic today is existential psychology, and with me is Dr. JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome.

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