Abstract A biography of Rollo May is presented and a discussion of his stance as a psychologist and author. May concerned himself with the lived experiences of whole persons in contrast to part functions, and he did not hesitate to use his own subjective experience in his studies of human psychology. In these regards, May was in sharp contrast to the humans‐as‐machines image of much of current psychology. Examination of key assumptions of mechanistic psychology identifies: materialism, objectivity, positivism, explicitness, causality, historicity, statistical reality, sampling validity, and independence of parts. Seven contrasting qualities characterize a more humanistic perspective: unsophisticated description, phenomenological significance, personally meaningful, pertinent to the subjective, experientially supported, open‐ended conclusions, and value‐sensitive.
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