Interview with Professor Emeritus Dr. Robert Abzug: Author of “Psyche and Soul in America: The Spiritual Odyssey of Rollo May”
AMS : ATX is thrilled to sit down with Dr. Robert Abzug, Professor Emeritus in American Studies and Jewish Studies at UT Austin. Dr. Abzug’s latest book, Psyche and Soul in America: The Spiritual Odyssey of Rollo May, was published by Oxford University Press in February. Current UT AMS Ph.D. student Hartlyn Haynes sat down (virtually, of course) with Dr. Abzug to chat about his friendship with Rollo May, his experience with oral history and biography and how it has influenced his pedagogy, and his future projects and interests. Check out Dr. Abzug’s website here.
Hartlyn Haynes: Hi Dr. Abzug, thank you so much for joining me today. Immense congratulations on the publication of your latest book, Psyche and Soul in America: The Spiritual Odyssey of Rollo May! Can you tell us a bit about how you came to the project?
Robert Abzug: I came to the project initially in the late 1980s. I’d written a biography of an abolitionist and pre-civil war America that was published in 1980 and started work on a broader study of pre-civil war reform that was published in 1994, and in between had done a book and some articles on America and the Holocaust. A lot of this work was informed by psychology, but psychology wasn’t exactly my field, as they say. I had a personal passion and interest in the subject from taking an undergraduate course in psychology at Harvard with Erik Erikson, my own psychotherapy sessions, and attending seminars at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute while in graduate school at UC Berkeley. While living in the San Francisco Bay Area, I met someone who turned out to be a lifelong friend who was also a great believer in psychotherapy, John Vasconcellos. John was a member of the CA Legislature for over thirty years. I’d moved to Austin in 1978 as a faculty member in the American Studies department here at UT, but was in California often for conferences and research trips, so John and I kept in close contact throughout the years.
In the late ’80s, John visited Austin to speak at the Texas legislature and my wife and I had him over for dinner. In the middle of dinner, John mentioned enjoying my last biography and suggested I write one about Carl Rogers, the famed humanistic psychologist with whom John was close friends. I said, “I love Carl Rogers, but Carl Rogers doesn’t move me.” If you're a biographer you really need some connection to the person you're dealing with, be it good or bad! I said, “if I ever wrote about a psychologist, I’d write about somebody who had a little more emotion, into whom you could read light and darkness—somebody like Rollo May.” Without missing a beat, John said, “next time you are in the Bay Area, let's all have a brunch meeting—you and me and Rollo.” So, the next time I was in town, we met in Sausalito for lunch; we sat outdoors and almost under the Golden Gate Bridge. It was just beautiful.
Rollo and I really hit it off and decided to exchange information; we began a courtship, of sorts. I wasn’t entirely sure that I wanted to do this project, and he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to reveal what he considered a somewhat messy life. For the next few years, we spent time reading each other’s works. I’d spend time with him at his home in Tiburon, CA whenever I could, during the summer and spring breaks, getting to know him and studying his papers. By the time 1990 rolled around, we reached a point where we both agreed we’d do this biography, but I let him know that I would need his permission to use all of his papers without censorship and without showing him the manuscript until it was finished, unless I needed him to comment on a certain passage. And, he said, “okay, I trust you.” He trusted me not necessarily to make him a nice guy, but he trusted me to tell a story, warts and all—as he said, this story was critical to how he’d developed as a psychologist and a person.
But, it has weighed on me that it has taken twenty-five years to complete the book. I had a lot of learning to do about psychology and psychotherapy and liberal Christian theologies in order to prepare to write it. I published a collection of documents about America and the Holocaust and an abridged edition of William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, and those were all related in some way to the book. I was also involved in institution-building in the interim. In 1996, the Dean asked me to help create a second honors program and, in 2007, UT received a grant from a major philanthropic organization to create the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies. In 2017, I handed the reins of the Center over to someone else and got back to the May book.
HH: Thanks for mentioning the length of time you spent working on the book. I think about the fact that you two met in the 1980s and, a few years later, decided to do this project and he granted you unfettered access to his papers. Since he died in 1994 at age 85, I’m curious about whether or not both he and you were aware that he was probably not going to live to see this project come to publication?
RA: I think we were. I think he was pretty sure he wouldn't see it published because he’d had a stroke during the time we knew each other. His widow, Georgia May, is still alive. She’s 94 years old and has been very helpful. His daughter, Carolyn May, herself a psychotherapist, and Georgia both received express copies as soon as I received the book. And they’ve both said they love the book. While at no point did I censor the book or intend to, I was really happy that it turned out like that, that Carolyn could see her father and Georgia could see her husband. And the book—it lives for them. I received a wonderful early review from the Kirkus Reviews and I just love the phrase the reviewer opened with, by saying the book was “penetrating yet tender.” I really like that. At times, I was upset with myself for taking this long, but I realized I was doing all of these other things that I also wanted to do, so I finally decided it was okay.
HH: And I’d imagine that not only knowing May for eight years, but also then spending another twenty or so years studying his life and his papers so closely, and really almost living with his materials, was part of what allowed for that “penetrating yet tender” treatment.
RA: I’d like to think so. I don't think I could have written the book without knowing him, and I wouldn't want to have tried to do so. I think it was quite important, and it was quite important that he opened himself up to that. He shared a number of experiences with me in which he was transformed. He talked, for example, about how he had been not quite dismissed, but strongly encouraged to leave Michigan State University, where he was an undergraduate, after he published a critique of their agricultural department. And he described that someone he knew was able to help get him into Oberlin during his last two years of college and, as he was thinking back on these parts of his life, he actually wept. And I sat there because what I had learned from being a patient of a psychotherapist is to sit in that quiet and let things develop. I was his biographer and not his patient and, in fact, there were points toward the end of his life during which I sort of felt like he was my patient, because we had a lot to talk about and I did a lot of listening.
One of the things I was fascinated by originally was his transformation from the believing Christian into the believing existential psychotherapist, during which he essentially shed his theological faith. So, I wrote a paper about this, and I gave him the paper before I presented it at a conference because I wanted to see what he thought of how I was representing his transformation. The paper, The “Deconversion of Rollo May,” had a similar tone as the book—it was “friendly critical.” I read him the paper and he thought for a minute and then simply said, “that’s me.” I thought that was good. It was important to have known him in that way so I had the confidence to write this book.
HH: You mentioned to me early on that you really enjoy teaching, and actually taught your last semester during Spring 2020. How do you think your experience with oral history and biography across your various projects has shaped your pedagogy, if it has? I’m curious if you created assignments and syllabi that aligned with those specialties, or how it otherwise influenced your teaching or course-building.
RA: You know, what’s interesting about oral history as a methodology is that you bring things to it emotionally and based on life experience. Rollo and I were talking about things that only someone who has some decades behind them might know or have experienced. When I was first working on my first book, I was thirty years old and the man I was writing about was ninety-two. Before I was in my forties, I was certainly flying blind in terms of a deeper sense of the life experiences I was writing about, and I think that might be true of undergraduates doing this sort of research.
Doing this sort of research is a great exercise and a great way to widen one’s sense of the world, though, and I’ve tried to adapt some of that to my pedagogy over the years. Steve Hoelscher and I used to teach a graduate seminar on photography at the Harry Ransom Center and, early on, we created an assignment to write a term paper and create an exhibit of eight to ten photographs with an artist statement, and we spent the last class touring together the exhibits everyone had created. I also decided to teach that course at an undergraduate level with a similar assignment, which produced really interesting projects—we have really fabulous students in the American Studies department. The other course I taught regularly was Psychology and Religion, which I also taught at the Ransom Center. That was interesting because we regularly went into the archives and pulled out manuscripts, diaries, and other materials that really revealed the intersections of psychology and religion. We looked at Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s work on the Cottingley Fairies and Allen Ginsberg’s Senate testimony, for example, which I encouraged students to consider alongside their own experiences with psychology and religion.
They wrote semi-autobiographical papers using primary and secondary sources, so this was a nice adaptation that wasn’t quite biography or oral history, but was an assignment wherein students could draw on their own life experiences. One of the finest papers was written by an Iranian student who was grappling with the conflict she felt within Islam between individual needs and the needs of the community of faith, and how she was grappling with religion in a new culture. She used William James’ work to get at these questions. Students also often wrote about their sexual and gender identities, and could draw on both theoretical literature and personal memoir to craft their papers. The assignment let them deal with certain questions that were on their minds in a way that came as close to biography as I’d want to get in that sort of course because, like I said a few minutes ago, I imagine that if I asked them to go in and talk to an 83-year-old veteran, they wouldn’t know where to start—just like I hardly knew where to start when I was working on my first book!
HH: That’s a really interesting insight about doing oral history—of course, we hear about positionality and identity, but there is a facet of that regarding the breadth and length of the life experiences you, as the researcher, have had and how those will always be a prism through which you write someone else’s story.
RA: Right, that is a constant question when doing this sort of work—am I believing this and writing about this in this way because of who I am, or because of who Rollo is, for example? It’s a really important exercise when doing biography and oral history and, also, an important exercise in self-knowledge, even if it’s incomplete—well, it’s always incomplete.
HH: That’s great. Well, speaking of seeing things through your own eyes, I know you have an interest in photography, so I wonder what future projects you have on the horizon and if photography intersects with any of those?
RA: I’ve been taking photos since I was thirteen or so; I got a camera for my Bar Mitzvah. When I was in Berkeley in graduate school in the late 1960s and early ’70s, I covered concerts, political demonstrations, things like that—I said to someone once, you could fall out of bed and pick up your camera and go out and capture something great. I’d publish some in the underground newspapers in Berkeley. I spent six months in Africa in 1968 and some of those nature photos are in the Museum of Natural History in New York now. I have a Flickr account where I publish some of my photographs, as well. I do think about doing a photography project about Texas sometimes. I have a friend, Joe Holley, who grew up around Waco and wrote for the Houston Chronicle for many years, and we’ve been talking about doing a book that illustrates his columns with photographs so, who knows, I may be spending a lot of time in Waco in the near future!
The topic that I’m really thinking about now is something that comes out of Psyche and Soul, and it’s the fate of thinking about the word “meaning.” The meaning of “meaning,” to put it bluntly! I’m thinking about what technology and the market economy have done to people’s lives that have shaped their ideas—some of those ideas useful and some of them downright destructive. That would be more of a short book in essay rather than formal research format, probably. Oxford also asked me to write a blog for their site about something that also comes out of Psyche and Soul, around questions of authenticity and alienation that come down to, essentially, “am I doing something that’s meaningful with my life?” May was very interested in that question as an existentialist and as a student of myth in society—that might be a short book, as well. We’ll see—if I do those two things, that will be a delight. For now, we have a new granddaughter and she’s also been a delight! Because I retired right when the pandemic hit, I don’t know what’s exactly ahead; I feel a little bit like when I was trying to choose a topic for my undergraduate honors thesis, coming up with a different topic every week. You know, ask me again in a year!
We are so appreciative of your time, Dr. Abzug and, again, a huge congratulations from the Department of American Studies on this publication! To purchase Psyche and Soul in America, please visit Oxford University Press here. For more on Dr. Abzug’s work, please visit his website here.
