Love & Will by May Rollo

Author:May, Rollo [May, Rollo]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011-03-07T06:00:00+00:00

THE UNDERMINING OF PERSONAL

RESPONSIBILITY

One of Sigmund Freud’s great contributions—if not his greatest—lay in his cutting through the futility and self-deceit in Victorian “will power.” That “will power” was conceived by our nineteenth-century forefathers as the faculty by which they made resolutions and then purportedly directed their lives down the rational and moral road that the culture said they should go. I say that this was possibly Freud’s greatest discovery because it was this exploration of the ill effects of Victorian will power which led him to what he called the “unconscious.” He uncovered the vast areas in which motives and behavior—whether in bringing up children or making love or running a business or planning a war—are determined by unconscious urges, anxieties, fears, and the endless host of bodily drives and instinctual forces. In describing how “wish” and “drive” move us rather than “will,” Freud formulated a new image of man that shook to the very foundations Western man’s emotional, moral, and intellectual self-image. Under his penetrating analysis, Victorian “will” did, indeed, turn out to be a web of rationalization and self-deceit. Now he was entirely accurate in his diagnosis of the morbid side of the vaunted Victorian “will power.”

But along with this inevitably went an unavoidable undermining of will and decision and an undercutting of the individual’s sense of responsibility. The image that emerged was of man as determined—not driving any more, but driven. Man is “lived by the unconscious,” as Freud, agreeing with the words of Groddeck, put it. “The deeply rooted belief in psychic freedom and choice,” wrote Freud, “…is quite unscientific and must give ground before the claims of a determinism which governs mental life.”1

Now whatever the theoretical truth or falsehood of such a position is, it had very great practical significance. It reflected, rationalized, and played into the hands of modern man’s most pervasive tendency—which has become almost an endemic disease in the middle of the twentieth century—to see himself as passive, the willy-nilly product of the powerful juggernaut of psychological drives. (And of economic forces, we may add, as Marx, on the socio-economic level, had demonstrated with an analysis parallel in brilliance to Freud’s.)

I do not say that Freud and Marx “caused” this loss of individual will and responsibility. Great men, rather, reflect what is emerging from the depths of their culture and, having reflected, then interpret and mold what they find. We may disagree with their interpretations of their findings; we cannot disagree with the fact that they found it. We cannot ignore or slough over Freud’s discoveries without cutting ourselves off from our own history, mutilating our own consciousness, and forfeiting the chance to push through this crisis to a new plane of consciousness and integration. Man’s image of himself will never be the same again; our only choice is to retreat before this destruction of our vaunted “will power” or to push on to the integration of consciousness on new levels. I do not wish or “choose” to do the former; but

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