Love and Will, in detail
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.
The concept of will receives equally careful treatment. May distinguishes between wish and will — the capacity to act from genuine commitment rather than compulsion or social expectation. He traces the decay of will in modern life to the collapse of shared myth and the retreat of the self into what he calls the "schizoid" posture: detachment as a defense. Daemonic energy — the life-force that can be either creative or destructive — must be acknowledged and integrated rather than repressed or surrendered to.
The book is dense and rewards slow reading. May's prose is literary rather than clinical, and the argument circles back rather than proceeding in a straight line. Its core claim has held up: that love and will require each other, that the attempt to have one without the other produces precisely the flatness and compulsive behavior the sexual revolution was supposed to cure. Anyone wrestling with questions about commitment, desire, or the relationship between freedom and meaning will find May a rigorous and honest guide.
The big ideas
- 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.
