Love and Will

I like Rollo May, I think. I know, damning with faint praise. Credit where credit is admirably due, however, for parsing good from bad with regard to Freud's legacy, and making an impassioned (and excellent) argument against indiscriminate use of medication (“It is the failure of therapy, rather than its success, when it drugs the daimonic, tranquilizes it, or in other ways fails to confront it head on.”). But, at the end of the day, he's just not my favorite existentialist. It took me a long time to drag my way through this, despite fits and piques of interest, and in the end, two of my three favorite quotes are from people other than May:

” ‘Apathy is a curious state,' remarks Harry Stack Sullivan; ‘It is a way used to survive defeat without material damage, although if it endures too long one is damaged by the passage of time. Apathy seems to me to be a miracle of protection by which a personality in utter fiasco rests until it can do something else'.”

“The moral problem is the relentless endeavor to find one's own convictions and at the same time to admit that there will always be in them an element of self-aggrandizement and distortion. Here is where Socrates' principle of humility is essentially, for psychotherapists and for any moral citizen.”

Finally:
” ‘If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well.' –Rilke”