You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Rollo May: Love and Will.
New York: W. W. Norton, 1969. 352 pages, $7.95.
ALFRED ADLER USED TO SAY about a unified personality, or as we call it today, one's identity, that the self-constructed personality is fiction. 1, p. 9 Rollo May, in asserting the thesis that man's task in life is to transcend what he is, to create a self out of the raw material at hand, readily admits to man's tendency to self-deception, but insists on his need for myths to live a meaningful life. May not only discusses at great length, love and will, which gives this large, classically erudite tome its title, but fills a broad canvas with a philosophy of man, in the development of which a theory of personality is implicit. In so doing, he carries on Adler's emphasis on the role of social interest in one's style of life; for social interest, or ethics, according to May, is based on man's psychology,
the capacities of a human being to transcend the concrete situation of the immediate self-oriented desire and to live in the dimensions of the past and future, and in terms of the welfare of the persons and groups upon which his own fulfillment ultimately depends. 10, p. 25
This achievement apparently involves, either in or outside of therapy, the bringing together of wish, will, and decision. For, May tells us,
decision creates a pattern of acting and living, which is empowered by wishes, asserted by will and is responsible to and responsible for the significant other persons who are important to oneself in the realizing of long term goals. 10, p. 25
Sullivan leaps to mind immediately with his remark about being "born with something of this power motive in us." 15, p. 6 By power Sullivan