Love & Will

Rollo May's Love and Will is the most important book I've read -- of any kind, at any time. Its importance to me is not because of some specific thesis May advances, but for an integrated set of ideas and values, and an understanding of human nature, that May presents. These have deepened my own thinking and understanding of my internal and external life experience. I re-consult the text frequently, and find myself quoting or paraphrasing it to others in many contexts, as I try to explain how I understand human interactions to actually work. Shortly after first reading it, I myself went to the length of honoring my baby daughter with the middle name "Will." She has certainly fulfilled that anticipation.In general comments elsewhere about Existential Psychology (a 'school' of psychology he helped 'father'), psychoanalyst Rollo May sees psychotherapy as more than a cure or remedy; serving rather to broaden the client's ability to create meaning. Love and Will has helped me to do that -- to perceive, create and deepen meaning in my life.The book was originally written in the late 60s during the sexual revolution, which was spurred on by widespread distribution of the birth control pill and the resulting opportunity to (further) separate love from sex in much of our culture. Love and Will may appear at first blush to be a mere response to the sexual revolution, arguing as it does that separating sex from love exacts a terrible toll in apathy. But the meaning of May's ideas are both broader and deeper, and reading his content as primarily about sex, or Eros, or even Love -- each among the major subjects addressed here -- gives less importance to this work than it merits. In the formulation about sex, love and apathy, for example, his most urgent focus is on apathy! I don't mean to deny the importance of sex, Love, Eros, or of these to his work; I mean to broaden the importance I attach to what May has written here, and what I think he contributes more generally.When May speaks of Eros, he speaks most profoundly of it as a "daimon," a term which he debated vigorously, for example, with the great pioneer Carl Rogers, who insisted on misreading into it a simpler notion of "demonic!" But May's concept of the daimon was different. In Love and Will, May defines "daimon" as "the urge in every being to affirm itself, assert itself, perpetuate and increase itself...." So May's "daimonic potentialities -- notably the daimonic urge of Eros -- are the source of both our constructive and destructive impulses -- and normally both" -- e.g., toward creativity and love on the one hand, vs. toward rage, paranoia, compulsive sexuality and oppressive behavior on the other. Love and Will has for me held this revelation -- the notion of the same core urges within our psyches being for both good and ill, depending on how we channel them, and often for both. It is fascinating to read a giant like Carl Rogers himself struggle with the subtlety of reconciling both the good and evil within the same daimonic impulse. It exemplifies for me how the power of May's subtle insight works.Among my challenges in initially chewing through Love and Will was his Chapter on Love and Death. I had to return to the chapter several different times before I could make my way through it emotionally. Here, May applies his broader notions of the meaning of anxiety in their most frightening setting. May makes the case the truest love can be experienced only in the face of death -- i.e., with the awareness of death's possibility, the evanescence of life and love. How well we know this from all our tradition of art and literature -- Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde loom so large! Yet how urgently we deny its applicability to our own lives. A skilled deployer of biblical and mythological references, nowhere is May's use more telling than in his noting the banality of love between the immortals in Greek mythology, compared with the fire that infuses those gods' relations with mortal lovers.In his discussion of Will, May quickly distinguishes Will from the straw man version of Will many of us were raised with, which he calls "Victorian Will Power." Will power and 'nose to the grindstone' are decidedly not what May means by Will -- "Victorian Will Power" is an artificial social convention for denial or even repression of one's wishes. It neither entails Free Will, nor the genuine consultation of one's own wants, wishes or hopes about anything.May's exploration of this realm takes us through his idea of "Intentionality," (often misused as a mere synonym for intention).. May's Intentionality focuses heavily on our way of perceiving and knowing, interdependent with our way of intending. We see what we see based on what we intend about it. If we can form no intention, we literally do not perceive! Don't we all have examples of bumping into something right in front of us that, somehow, we literally did not see because we did not have it in mind, i.e., had no intention about it? May's illustrations are more elegant... In one charming example, he describes how we might see a piece of paper in terms of its surface texture if we intend to draw on it, but perceive it in terms of its sturdiness if we intend instead to make a paper airplane from it -- so intertwined are intention and perception. May's theory of Intentionality builds from this foundation on up.As elsewhere, May's approach combines practical, real life experience with reference to etymology and philosophy to reinforce the human understanding of how we humans think and understand our reality. Again and again, I have found myself enlightened and enriched by what he has shared.These are just a few glimpses into a book rich with insights I return to again and again in the 30+ years since I first received this book as a gift in 1979. I recommend it to you for yourself, or as a gift -- not necessarily to read in a single sitting or week, but just as well for noshing and chomping. It need not be consumed as one integrated thesis, even though -- as one fine review here notes -- it will hold up quite well that way.Make this fine book yours, use it as you wish so long as you actively engage your own mind, and it will serve you well.

The Essence of ‘Love and Will’ by Rollo MayIn the fewest words possible Love and Will is showing that to overcome our current Collective Crisis in anxiety, Identity and alienation and the disease of loneliness in our Culture: One must regain a connective consciousness that rejoins human relations via feelings relatedness expressed in emotional connection between intentionality, desire and freedom to reach and grasp the other.To reach this level of connection and maintain feelings of togetherness is Eros, which when related to sexual instinct creates a union raising consciousness that deny reactions of separation.This arises once a person engages his daimon, which represents one’s repressed emotions as well as the possibility for growth and new feeling awareness.Once these emotions are re engaged and are no longer dispossessed out of consciousness, the individual has access to new possibility of being and action.SUMMARY:What a few sentences can’t convey is how May see’s sexuality and sensuality expressed in current culture. What the Myth of Eros and it’s personal relation to all meaningful relations is.Also Just how repressed emotions are expressed in the Daimon of every individual, and just what is meant by Daimon ( angelic expression as well as Demon expression imbedded in the psyche’).Moreover to understand his use of intentionality in relation to his meaning of Will and how intentionality…born of infant wish.. has meaning in decision of a person to move toward his future in a new awareness of affectual connection.That is how feelings become the primary mode of relatedness.All of this new feeling action must have a myth to bring into focus and allow for the life enhancing capabilities that is currently lacking in today’s society.May shows how this ‘Love and Will’ is lost overtime w/o Myth that creates meaning in the lives of us all by showing how Myth in the past was the womb for Love.In the meantime Repressed emotions will destroy Culture as it is in Violence and loss of meaning which destroys first connectivity in feeling with man to man and undermines all existing Culture significance. Not to mention how Culture destroys man by ignoring inner needs and reinforcing repression.May shows that Greece and Rome and all civilizations break down due to this loss of meaning and affectual feelings that can no longer sustain itself in the rise of anxiety, depersonalization in the individual which forces emotional relatedness to be repressed which via violence breaks down the state. Culture Breaks down as the man looses touch with his capacity for self trust.Rollo May’s master work describes the breakdown of Culture, the Dark Age we are entering or we are in and what is needed to regain Human dignity and integrity in the deterioration of the times and points to a path of healing hoping for a new Myth of man.Bottom line is that May points out that w/o Will, the ability to wish and through intentionality allows us to decide our Future which is the essence of Loving Life.

I have slogged through many boring, clinical, dry and just plain hard to read books. I have never felt more like I am collapsing at the finish line of a marathon. Now before this is interpreted as a negative review let me clarify that this book is the hardest that I ever remember reading because it cut to the heart of my life (or lack thereof). Rollo May has been called an existential psychologist. I’m not even sure what that means

The book was in perfect condition, but I found the book too boring to read.

an incredibly interesting book. i must admit that many of the references were above my head being that i am not well versed in theater but being they were so pertinent to the subject matter i quickly saw their connection to the subject matter. the book itself is informative and insightful, offering a perspective on love and will and our use of them in modern life which isn't prevalent in our present day. the book can change your life...

Game changer for my mind and heart. This book has put me on a path to dig deeper, at 61 years old I finally feel that I have grown up

Much of May's insight is still highly relevant in the 2nd decade of the 21st century, though it was written many decades ago. I founds especially interesting how he explained the concept of the "daimonic", which added to what I had read elsewhere (via James Hillman, also a noted psychologist). Many of May's conclusions I can't follow, but there is still a lot in here to make us think and take stock. Parts of it may even be useful for students of psychology!

It is incredible that a book could be written fully 18 years before I was even born, and yet gives possibly the most precise diagnosis of the present relational ills of our culture that I've ever read. Highly recommended. I wish everyone would read this...

Great contemplations about the mechanization of sex and how this effect is reverberated in all aspects of our society. A wonderful read as always from Rollo May

It's amazing how relevant it still feels. Started to read it expecting to get some insights into the development of humanistic and existential psychotherapy, but this book gave me so much more. Many of his critical observations on society and the problems of modern man, seem to be even more acutely relevant to postmodern or postpostmodern man, or whatever we should call our age. His thoughts about love are especially full of such critical analyses of how social and cultural attitudes make it hard for us to love.His thoughts on will were even more exciting, since it really opened my ideas to a sensible way of thinking about will. If this was possible to be written in the sixties, all that nonsense that so called philosophers wrote about the problems of free will since really becomes utterly inexcusable.

A fascinating book about human nature, behavior, wishes and will. It is a great read for anybody interested in psychology, psychiatry and understanding why we behave in a certain way.

I agree with another reviewer here when they say this is the best book they have ever read. I am not an avid reader of psychoanalytical texts and somehow I tapped into this by instinct. This is so well written. His use of language is so accessible and free of the turgid vocabulary of many philosophical and psychological texts.If you need a reminder of what it is that makes us human in this increasingly confusing world, (and he wrote this when the world was not yet digitalised) do yourself a big favour and read this NOW.

Very good style and content. A useful reference book as well as an interesting read for entertainment. Would recommend it.