Love and Will

Love and Will is Rollo May's existential study of the modern predicament, which he locates not in rigid morality but in emptiness, apathy, and the loss of an inner sense of significance. Its central claim is that authentic existence depends on reuniting love and will, which modern life tends to split, leaving people unable either to care deeply or to act decisively.

Central to the argument is the daimonic—the natural drives of creativity, anger, eros, and the hunger for power—which May holds becomes destructive only when denied or allowed to possess the whole self, and integrative when consciously owned and directed. He recasts anxiety as the felt edge of freedom rather than a pathology to be eliminated, and places intention, choice, and responsibility at the center of the healing process.

Bringing European existential thought into American psychotherapy, the book won the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award and became a bestseller. It stands as a key argument for the recovery of will against deterministic models that dissolved the acting self.