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.
In Love and Will we are treated to the thoughts and observations of a four-part man—May the psychologist, May the existentialist, May the theologian, and May the human being who is interested in seeking truths and in understanding what is going wrong in our present society.
The author's approach is one which sustains the interest of the reader by frequently shifting from his case work in analytic practice to observations on the larger problems that are confronting man today, and by calling upon a variety of disciplines—mythology, religion, biology, and philosophy—to accomplish his task.
May believes that our neurotic patients experience more fully than other people and therefore serve as accurate barometers of their time and place. They “are the ones who express and live out the subconscious and unconscious tendencies in the culture” and “predict the culture by living out consciously what the masses of people are able to keep unconscious for the time being.” May, therefore, uses his patient interviews amply and sensitively to gain insight into the phenomena of our time.
He contends that the shift in his private practice has been, over the years, from the patient who came in because of feelings of anxiety and guilt about sex in the 1940's to the patient in the 1950's whose problem was one of identity, to the patient of the present day who comes in complaining of a lack of feeling and passion. May believes that in our attempt to emancipate ourselves from puritanical and Victorian repressive influences, we have become a society that is more concerned with the mechanical performance of the sexual act, for example, than with actual enjoyment of sex, or with feelings of intimacy, love, and just being close that may accompany the sexual act.
As a concomitant of our emphasis upon performance, May contends, we are increasingly becoming a nation of schizoid individuals, individuals who overly intellectualize, who view emotions as reactions that can be evoked mechanically, and who