
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, October 24, 1994                   TAG: 9410240094
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: TIBURON, CALIF.                                 LENGTH: Short

EXISTENTIAL PSYCHOLOGIST DIES AT 85

Rollo May, who helped found humanistic and existential psychology and introduced a generation to the meaning of anxiety, is dead at age 85.

May was surrounded by family and friends when he died Saturday at his home north of San Francisco, said family friend Jacqueline Doyle.

May wrote more than a dozen ground-breaking books on psychology. In his pioneering ``The Meaning of Anxiety,'' published in 1950, he argued that the nuclear age was cause for anxiety.

``Before that, anxiety was thought to be neurotic,'' May said in an interview in 1987. After that, he said, people better understood that there is ``both neurotic and normal anxiety.''

May took a tragic view of life after contracting tuberculosis in his 30s and spending 18 months in two hospitals, where he read theology, psychology and existential philosophy.

A quick wit, he said contracting TB was not a prerequisite for such a conversion.

``Anyone who reads the morning newspaper'' could undergo such a change in awareness, he once said.

Survivors include his wife, a brother, a son and two daughters.

by CNB