Love and Will
The American existential tradition on the loss of both eros and intention.
The striking thing about love and will in our day is that, whereas in the past they were always held up to us as the answer to life's predicaments, they have now themselves become the problem.
Rollo May sets out a clinical anatomy of two capacities modern people were taught to trust and now find broken: the capacity to love and the capacity to will. Writing from within American existential psychology, he separates eros, the daimonic, intentionality, and care, then shows how each has thinned into its counterfeit: sex without eros, wish without will, activity without care. The result is a study of why patients arrive numbed rather than conflicted.
For the consulting room, May supplies working language. He treats apathy, not hate, as the true opposite of love, and reads it as withdrawn feeling that also drains the will. He frames the daimonic as any natural urge that can seize the whole person, so rage, sexuality, and creativity ask for integration rather than suppression. Will is recast as intentionality, the stance that lets a person mean what they do.
First published in 1969, it remains a reference for existential practice.
About the author
Rollo May
Rollo May (1909 to 1994) was an American psychologist and one of the founders of existential psychology in the United States. Trained in theology and clinical psychology, he brought European existential thought into American practice. He wrote on anxiety as a condition for growth, on the daimonic as a natural force in the psyche rather than a moral fault, and on will as a basis for personal responsibility. His book Love and Will appeared in 1969.
Details
- 1969
- English
- W. W. Norton
- W. W. Norton, 1969
- 352
- 9780393330052