Indeed, compulsive and rigid moralism arises in given persons precisely as the result of a lack of sense of being. Rigid moralism is a compensatory mechanism by which the individual persuades himself to take over the external sanctions because he has no fundamental assurance that his own choices have any sanction of their own

An innocent is only doing what he or Rollo May must do. He claims that by shifting anxiety to a fear one can therefore discover incentives to either avoid the feared object or find the means to remove this fear of it. May wrote this book with the intentions of it being easily read yet still providing all the information that came from the research in studying the cause and effects of anxiety.

May was a close friend of the philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich who also had a significant influence on his work. He is often associated with both humanistic psychology and existentialist philosophy. He was the author of the influential book Love and Will which was publiRollo Mayd in 1969.