What it argues
Love and Will is Rollo May's attempt to diagnose a civilizational problem: that contemporary Western culture has severed love from will, reducing both to hollow performances. May argues that the sexual revolution of the 1960s, far from liberating people, produced a new kind of anxiety — the anxiety of meaninglessness. People who can sleep with anyone discover they feel nothing. Freedom without intentionality is not freedom at all.
May draws on existential philosophy and clinical case material to reconstruct what he sees as the four forms of love in the Western tradition: sex (eros in its biological sense), philia (friendship), agape or caritas (the spiritual dimension), and eros in its fuller mythological sense — the drive toward union, beauty, and the new. His concern is that modern culture collapses all four into the first, stripping love of the depth that makes it worth having.
What it gets right
- 1.
Love and will are not opposites but interdependent: genuine love requires the will to commit, and will without love becomes coercion or compulsion.
- 2.
The sexual revolution increased freedom without increasing meaning. The result was not liberation but a new kind of emptiness — performing intimacy without experiencing it.
- 3.
May identifies four forms of love: sex, philia (friendship), agape (unconditional care), and eros (the drive toward beauty and union). Modern culture conflates all four with physical desire.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Rollo May (1909–1994) was an American existential psychologist whose work brought European existential philosophy — particularly that of Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Sartre — into contact with American clinical practice. He trained at the Alfred Adler Institute in Vienna, studied theology under Paul Tillich, and received his doctorate from Columbia University. His earlier book The Meaning of Anxiety (1950) established him as a serious contributor to both psychology and philosophy. Love and Will won the National Book Award in 1970. He remained a practicing therapist and writer until late in his life.
