A personal note, first: There are certain bits of May’s philosophy that draw me in: the focus on keeping ourselves open to the world, to affect others and be affected, the understanding that one must believe they are free to change and grow in order to change and grow, and the knowledge that true love is what matters in the face of death. This book is dense; I wrote this summary to process it.
Rollo May (1909-1994) was an influential existential psychologist who published Love and Will, his most influential book, in 1969.
[Existential therapy] focuses on concepts that are universally applicable to human existence including death, freedom, responsibility, and the meaning of life. Instead of regarding human experiences such as anxiety, alienation and depression as implying the presence of mental illness, existential psychotherapy sees these experiences as natural stages in a normal process of human development and maturation. [It] involves a philosophical exploration of an individual's experiences while stressing the individual's freedom and responsibility to facilitate a higher degree of meaning and well-being in his or her life. (Existential Therapy, Wikipedia)
We live in a schizoid (aloof, detached) world where we are alienated from the world and nihilistic. While apathy is a helpful defense mechanism, if we are apathetic for too long, it becomes a state of being that is the opposite of love and will. It’s impossible to avoid becoming schizoid, but we can be constructive about it; think living and working with the machine without becoming one, detaching enough to get meaning from an experience without being sucked into it.
Love
Caveat that this book was published 1969. May summarizes the state of love and sex as having moved from Victorian love (no sex, repression of sexual desire) to sex with no love, where the focus is on technique and treating each other as machines.
Eros is defined as a higher form of sexual desire; it looks towards the future, is the drive to unite and to reproduce, to find higher forms of truth and goodness. It leads us to open ourselves and participate emotionally and spiritually in the world. It’s important to face life as a total person, but this requires “an intensity and disciplined openness of consciousness which is not easy to sustain” (81). Sex driven by pleasure will drive us to death, while eros as the life instinct will keep us from it.
I am proposing a description of human beings as given motivation by the new possibilities, the goals and ideals, which attract and pull them toward the future. This does not omit the fact that we are all partially pushed from behind and determined by the past, but it unites this force with its other half. Eros gives us a causality in which "reason why" and "purpose" are united. (93)
To love completely means to be aware of death. When we experience the highest joys, we also become aware of the lowest lows, of loss, of death; it is only because of the contrast that we experience such difference. Love brings us both joy and destruction; but the real tragedy is not destruction, but apathy. To think that “nothing matters”.
The daimonic is any natural function which has the power to take over you completely (i.e. rage, sexual passion) and the power to destroy and create. It is a natural part of being a self, in which the self asserts itself as a self against the others. We should not repress such energy, but integrate it and use it constructively. When done so, it will reach out to others and affect them; it is a productive assertion of individuality that doesn’t exploit others.
We must also think about the daimonic in relation to others. May pushes for integrating the daimonic with the community so that it becomes conscious and personal. We can integrate the daimonic by becoming more conscious and mindful; breaking the automatic chain of stimulus and response.
Think about the baby that only asserts itself (by crying and screaming for its needs and desires) that eventually learns that it cannot get through its whole life this way; it depends on getting along with those that care for it (personalizing the daimonic). If it’s not personalized, it could be anonymous, in which we lose ourselves in a herd of others. While this could feel good and relieve our own daimonic urges, we will never feel known.
Naming the daimonic as an issue can be powerful, but sometimes we take it too far and consider naming our ailments a cure in itself because we separate ourselves from the ailment; the ailment is outside ourselves and our control.
Will
At the time, we thought of will as a result of anonymous drives and desires à la Freud. In psychoanalysis, we must feel like we have a sense of freedom and control instead of a focus on determinism in order to progress and grow. May posits that determinism and feeling like you don’t have control is the crisis of will.
Let’s define some important key terms:
will: the “adult” capacity to organize one’s self so that movement in a certain direction/goal may take place (218)
wish: childish, imaginative playing with the possibility of some act or state occurring
We need both of these to function well.
Intentionality is the missing piece here so far; it gives meaning to experience and is the heart of consciousness. With intention, you give everything a context for its meaning to you; when you look at an apple with the intention to eat it, you think of whether it will taste good. When you look at it with the intention to draw it, you think of its color, shape, dimensions. Every act of consciousness you participate in will be in line with intentionality whether you’re aware of it or not. Intentionality is the totality of your orientation towards the world, the way you perceive it, your commitments and your problems.
In therapy, often patients can’t believe obvious truths because the intentionality in which they are trapped makes it impossible for them to see it (231). You often won’t be able to perceive those truths, memories, or trauma until you’re ready to take a stand over it, and until then, we tend to develop a block towards it.
The therapist’s job is to be conscious of and to draw out the intentionality until it becomes obvious to the patient; the end goal is for the patient to thoroughly experience consciously the intention and its implications. That might consist of affirming an immediate wish (I want to be on time to therapy) to get to the genuine wish (I want to please people). Patients might avoid it by acting out, discharging the intention physically to avoid consciously dealing with it, or detaching and intellectualizing in an effort to distance themselves.
Additionally, we want to integrate the 3 dimensions of wish, will, and decision. Wish, the level of primal, biological needs, is transformed into will through awareness. “I am the one with these wishes; therefore I am able to do something about them”. Will is transformed into decision with the addition of responsibility: “a pattern of … living which is empowered and enriched by wishes, asserted by will, and is responsive to and repsonsible for the signficicant other-persons who are important to one’s self in the realizing of long-term goals” (267). We can will ourselves to be free, to know reality, and to create our meaning.
Love and Will
Love and will are types of experiences that describe “a person reaching out, moving toward the other, seeking to affect [them/it] — and opening himself so that he may be affected by the other” (276).
They can block one another: we should not be too willful to the point of not perceiving others truly; think of someone who forces a belief on someone with good intent but does not listen to what they actually want. Love can block will with an overemphasis on spontaneity, honesty, and openness; indiscriminating love is not personal.
Care is the recognition of another as a fellow human. There is a common humanity between you, an because of this, you wish them well; they matter to you. “This is the mythos of care…. whatever happens in the external world, human love and grief, pity, and compassion are what matter. These emotions transcend even death” (302).
We conclude with tying together the concepts we’ve just defined. The only way to answer life’s greatest questions is not necessarily to answer them, but to integrate them into deeper levels of consciousness. Eros draws us towards future ideals, to be grasped and to mold the future. The daimonic demands integration of our underground selves into personal consciousness. Intentionality is an imaginative attention that underlies intentions and informs actions. These point towards deeper levels of consciousness and form love and will.
In the act of loving are 4 aspects: first, a tenderness and union of being aware of another’s needs; next, an affirmation of the self by unifying for a second and splitting again; an expansion our ourselves and our feelings in experiencing our ability to please another; and lastly, active and grateful receiving, in that being able to give to the other in love-making is essential to your own pleasure.
In conclusion:
“We will the world, create it by our decision, our fiat, our choice; and we love it, give it affect, energy, power to love and change us as we mold and change it. This is what it means to be fully related to one’s world” 324
“Eros, infusing the whole, beckons us with its power with the promise that it may become our power. And the daimonic … leads us into life if we do not kill these daimonic experiences but accept them with a sense of the presciousness of what we are and what life is. Intentionality, itself consisting of the deepened awareness of one’s self, is our means of putting the meaning surprised by consciousness into action” 324-325
“For in every act of love and will… we mold ourselves and our world simutaneously. This is what it means to embrace the future” 325 [end]