When the azure skies of Tiburon, Calif. darken at sundown, Rollo May slips out of his brown turtleneck sweater and into his brown leisure jacket and yellow print ascot. At 5:45 p.m. the doorbell sounds. He greets his patient with a palm raised in salute, Indian fashion. She has driven more than 100 miles for 50 minutes with him. “It’s the least I can do,” she says. “I am one of his chosen few.”

Rollo May, pioneering spirit of existential psychology and best-selling author, is at 67 the high priest of the age of anxiety. His theories inspired group encounters and nude marathons. He has emerged as the super-shrink of the 1970s.

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This oracular status resulted from his gospel, Love and Will. Published in September 1969, it is now a classic of modern psychology. In rich, witty and erudite prose, May explains how living in this transitional era has strung out an entire generation. He suggests that it is the responsibility of every individual to determine new values for himself.

Love and Will has sold about half a million copies in this country and has been translated into 15 languages. Six years ago it made publishing history when it brought the highest price ($500,000) for paperback rights of any book in the field of psychology.

Early next year May’s 12th book, The Meaning of Anxiety, is scheduled. It is a revision of his doctoral thesis, published in 1950 as a psychology text. Although unknown to popular audiences, his thesis set off a controversy in his profession by suggesting “anxiety is good for you as long as it is not out of proportion to the situation.”

These days May is inundated by as many as 150 requests a month for therapy but limits himself to four patients only. How does he choose them? He squints his sharp brown eyes. “I like people who are fairly upset,” he finally says. “Yesterday I had a college student who has a problem separating herself from her mother. That’s too simple for me.

“I once had a patient who was a homosexual, an alcoholic and even played around with drugs a bit. He was occasionally impotent, and his wife was divorcing him. She forbade him from seeing their children. He couldn’t hold a job and even had attempted suicide. He had been to three or four therapists already, and none of them could help him. Now that’s the sort of fellow who interests me.”

Would he analyze Patty Hearst? “No, I’d have to have found her before she got into this fracas. Right now she only needs a therapist to help her pull herself together around some new values. It’s too prosaic for me.”

Gerald Ford? “Definitely not,” he replies unhesitatingly. “I’d have a hell of a time with him. He’s a decent enough guy. But his universe is bound by two times two.”

Jimmy Carter? “Yeah. Not because he’ll be President, but because I feel Carter has some inner life, and I think he’s a hell of a good fellow.”

What about Cher? “Who’s Cher?”

His patient is seated in a worn armchair; on the couch lie three of his six honorary degrees. The office has a breathtaking view of the hills of Tiburon extending down to the blue waters of San Francisco Bay. On the wall, facing the patient, is an abstract Rollo May watercolor.

Dr. May sits upright. “Recently a patient told me that I was the picture of confidence,” he boasts. “He had a dream in which he pointed a gun and shot me, and in the dream I didn’t seem at all upset. It’s a terribly positive dream, isn’t it? I think the confidence which I convey to my patients during therapy comes out of the fact that I always sit up straight when listening.”

May’s philosophy of treatment is simple. “What I strive for,” he says, “is to increase my patients’ sense of freedom by helping them to see possibilities so that they no longer feel trapped. I try to get every patient to take a little more of his life into his own hands during every session.” Does he talk during therapy? “Never for more than a quarter of the session,” he responds. “If a therapist speaks more than 12½ minutes out of any 50-minute session, something is very wrong.”

At 6:50 p.m. May glances at his watch and gallantly escorts his patient to the door. When he closes it his concentration turns into fatigue. He slips into the kitchen and returns to the living room with a wine glass filled with California burgundy. He plops down on the modern couch and switches on the portable color television. Sipping his wine, he turns to a football game. The volume is almost inaudible.

A couple of hours later he pulls off his boots and pads into the large, modern kitchen. What he wants is a tuna fish casserole, which is the specialty of his Dutch housekeeper, Thelma Yuvan, a jovial, middle-aged woman who cooks and cleans for him twice a week. There is no casserole in the refrigerator. Disappointed, he heats up chipped beef, rice and a package of frozen peas. At 9:30 p.m. he eats dinner alone in his long dining room.

When he has finished, he carries the wine back into the living room and watches an opera with Beverly Sills on TV. At 11 p.m. he wanders down the corridor to bed.

Rollo May adopted this somewhat reclusive lifestyle shortly after he came to California from New York 15 months ago. “I was walking the concrete one day when it was impressed upon me that I would probably not live much longer if I stayed in New York City.”

Part of his difficulty in New York was undoubtedly caused by personal upheavals which began at age 60. After his three children finished college, he divorced his wife of 30 years and faced “the wounds. Divorce is not pleasant. It’s a time when you’re cut open.”

How did one of the world’s leading psychoanalysts cope? He consulted a therapist. “No psychoanalyst has all the answers for himself,” he says somewhat defensively, “though people always expect us to. I only psychoanalyze people when I’m paid for it. The rest of the time I’m just like everybody else. How could I ever empathize with my patients if I didn’t experience my own share of grief and disappointment?” His wife has remarried—her husband is May’s “oldest friend”—and they live in Connecticut.

For two years May resumed bachelorhood. “But I was not a playboy,” he emphasizes. “I do not have promiscuous relationships.” One evening in Hawaii after a lecture, he called for questions and “there appeared the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.” Ingrid Schöll was a divorced German secretary in her 40s. The attraction was mutual. The two came to be known as the Romeo and Juliet of the intellectual set. At professional parties they danced cheek-to-cheek.

Shortly after they married in 1971, she began studying to become a therapist, and he reportedly resented having to help with the household chores. By the time they moved to California, their marriage was through. May laments its passing, and says simply, “It was inevitable.” He saw himself as the traditional husband. She was a free spirit, touched by feminism.

A month after the Mays took over the $138,000 Tiburon house, Ingrid moved out to a nearby apartment in Larkspur. Although they are legally separated, she telephones May almost every day. Concerned about his eating right, she makes an occasional dinner for him.

Rollo Reece May was born April 21, 1909 in Ada, Ohio. His father was a YMCA field secretary and planted its solid Christian values in his six children.

“Unfortunately,” May says, his mother was a great fan of “The Rollo Books,” a character-building series for children. Proudly, she called her first son Rollo. “I hated the name passionately and used to invent nicknames.” At age 20, when he graduated from Oberlin, May took a job teaching English at Anatolia College in Salonika, Greece. He stayed for three years and sowed his wild oats in Europe.

When he returned to the United States, May enrolled in Union Theological Seminary “not so much to become a minister as to study certain intellectual problems.” Upon graduation he married a fellow student, Florence De Frees, and settled into the ministry in Verona, N.J. “The only thing I ever enjoyed was the funerals,” he says cryptically.

When he was 27 years old, though, he earned an international reputation in psychology for writing The Art of Counseling. Encouraged by its success, he started work toward his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Columbia University.

At 31 May was a husband, father, graduate student, teacher and counselor—a man, in short, worn down by responsibilities. “I was very thin in those days,” he says. “I was six foot and weighed 130 pounds. Working and studying 24 hours a day and coughing up my lungs. I was a sitting duck.”

The doctor diagnosed tuberculosis—”The disease,” May says, “had already eaten away half my lung.” He lay in bed for six months “full of grief. The patients who remained gay and hopeful and tried to make light of the disease frequently died. I lived quite consciously in a state of constant anxiety which I would characterize like a horse running wild. I accepted it and recovered through the sheer exertion of my will. I came to believe less in the doctor and medicine than in my own strength to face each day as a new battleground.”

May was well enough to leave the sanitarium in 1944. Five years later he had earned his doctorate at Columbia. Remarkably ahead of his time, he quoted Hesse in his thesis on anxiety: “Now there are times when a whole new generation is caught…between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standards, no security, no simple acquiescence.”

When May emerged from this period, he was in his early 40s, at once a pioneering genius in his field and a middle-aged man heavily in debt. For the next 15 years, he worked around the clock. His three children remember seeing him on Sundays when he took them for long walks along the Hudson River and then to the Museum of Modern Art. “If I had to characterize my father,” his daughter Carolyn recalls, “I would say he always impressed us as a very serious, very dedicated and very private man.”

Undoubtedly inspired by his water-colors, which he paints throughout the summer at his retreat in New Hampshire, both his twin daughters, age 31, became artists. Carolyn works in Boston. Allegra also makes films in New Hampshire. His only son, Robert, 34, is director of counseling at Amherst College.

When May’s The Meaning of Anxiety was published in 1950, it challenged accepted Freudian theory. According to Freud, anxiety originates in the trauma of birth and the fear of castration. May suggests that anxiety is normal, the result of interpersonal difficulties and the fear of death. He was branded a heretic—May prefers to call himself a “frontiersman.” In the 1950s he also emerged as one of the first nonmedical psychoanalysts in this country. He led the fight in New York State against the AMA, which tried to restrict psychotherapy to psychiatrists. In 1953 his book Man’s Search for Himself emphasized the importance of taking responsibility for one’s own life. Out of his theories of freedom, responsibility and community developed the controversial human potential movement of the 1970s. It spawned the phenomenon of the encounter group. “I’ve always been a rebel and a fighter,” says May, summarizing the spirit of his career. “I don’t consider a day well spent unless I have at least one good fight in my profession.”