Yes Begins With a No

In my 30s I contracted tuberculosis, and the next ten years of my life were spent not being sure if there would be a tomorrow. All of a sudden the important projects, relationships, criteria, values by which 1 defined myself lost their worth. I learned quickly to tune in on my being, my existence in the now, because that was all there was --that, and my tubercular body. It was a valuable experience to face death, for in the experience I learned to face life.

HALF a lifetime has passed since that experience befell Rollo May. He took from it the principle that illuminates his life and unites the psychotherapeutic school of which he is perhaps the most prominent and certainly the most articulate American member. The principle--that awareness of death is not opposed to, but essential to life--runs like a spine down May's latest work, Love and Will. Published last September by Norton, the book languished for months before popping up on the bestseller list in February. Today, 89,000 copies later, Love and Will is still there.

Disturbing Alternative. This feat is all the more remarkable because May, now a vigorous 61, espouses a theory that is unpopular in his professional field and almost unknown beyond it. He is an existential therapist. This practice, which claims only a few hundred adherents in the U.S., is dismissed in some quarters as either trivial or derivative. For ordinary travelers, the theory makes heavy going indeed. Love and Will demands of even the most persistent reader the same emotional and intellectual commitment that the author made three decades ago.

The old values--the myths and institutions with which civilization consoles itself and explains the unexplain-able--are everywhere under attack and crumbling. Bereft of their support, says May, contemporary man faces a deeply disturbing alternative. He must either look to himself for the meaning of life, or he must decide that he and life have no meaning. All too readily, man takes the latter course.

Airless Refuge. "We cling to each other and try to persuade ourselves that what we feel is love," writes May. "We do not will because we are afraid that if we choose one thing or one person we'll lose the other, and we are too insecure to take that chance." The individual retires to what May calls "feel-inglessness," from which it is only a short step to apathy. And from apathy, it is only another step to violence.

Not all the world's disenchanted are lured into taking that final step. In May's judgment, apathy, not hate, is the antonym of love, just as detachment --not indecision--is the opposite of will. Some settle for the airless refuge that offers an anodyne for the anguish of being --commitment to life. Those who seek safe harbor become what C. Wright Mills called "cheerful robots" and Wilhelm Reich "living machines." They have opted out of life; they have surrendered the ability to be.

But many feel compelled to strike out blindly against the one implacable adversary of life that never loses. Alone among the living, man knows that he is going to die. In a time that questions the comforting belief in a better world to come and that also challenges the point of this one. the temptation is strong to deny both life and death. Many men do--at exorbitant psychic cost. "No one who has worked with patients for a long period of time," May writes, "can fail to learn that the psychological and spiritual agony of depersonalization is harder to bear than physical pain."

There are ways to deny the painful transitoriness of existence at culturally permissible levels. Sex is one of them, and May devotes a large part of his book to examining the "new puritanism," which escapes the commitments of love by concentrating on the act. In the present obsession with physical sex, he sees a desperate campaign to beat the clock: "Death is the symbol of ultimate impotence and finiteness," he writes. "Sex is the easiest way to prove our vitality, to demonstrate we are still 'young.' attractive, and virile, to prove we are not dead yet."

In the sheer mechanics of sex the participant can prove, at least to himself, that he is not alone. Like the technician in the age of technology, he can insist that the machine needs him. He can defeat, if only for the moment, "the utterly unbearable situation of anonymity." And he can accomplish this without getting involved, without resorting to violence. But when such halfway measures fail, the individual who denies his autonomy confronts a more dreadful alternative: convinced at last of his own valuelessness, he must revolt against this self-debasement. "To inflict pain and torture at least proves that one can affect somebody." writes May. "To be actively hated is almost as good as to be actively liked."

Love and Will invites its readers to embark on an even more hazardous and painful course: to recover the lost sense of self by accepting the shadow of death. To May and the existentialists, life is a moving sliver of time between what was and what will be. Man, too, is ever in motion: a process rather than a product, of which all that can be said with any certainty is that it will one day end. But to this school it is the inevitability and awareness of death that defines life and liberates the human will to act and to be. Writes May: "Abraham Maslow* is profoundly right when he wonders whether we could love passionately if we knew we'd never die."

Self-Imprisoned. It is just here that existential thought seemingly departs from the mainstream. To Freud, man was the hapless prisoner of his past. The best that he could hope for in the present was a truce with those stern and deterministic taskmasters whom Freud called the Super Ego and the Id. The goal of life was "adjustment." Hence it followed that unhappiness, anxiety and guilt were usually pathological states --a measure of the struggle against those dynamic and contradictory forces.

May contends that man is a prisoner only if he chooses to be, and that life is more than a sentence imposed by the past. To accept this much is to break out of confinement into a self-awareness in which anxiety, guilt and unhappiness are not necessarily symptoms of maladjustment. They can count among the unavoidable costs of being.

Existential therapy stresses the vital importance of accepting the pain as well as the pleasure, which, like life and death, are complementary. To be anxious, says May, may be merely to live within the awareness of death. To be unhappy may be only the free will's demand for expression.

Existential therapy is not so much a new school as a new interpretation of Freudian analysis. It is less interested in the past simply as past; indeed, May defines the past as "having been," a state that survives. Existentialists also quarrel with the common interpretation of the Oedipus complex as the guilt and fear engendered by the male child's attraction to his mother. May and others say that the conflict actually signifies man's refusal to face the truth of his own being. They ask pointedly: What does Oedipus do when he confronts the awful knowledge that he has loved his mother? He puts out his eyes--the organs of sight, not sex.

People and Things. Some critics claim that existential theory differs only semantically from the Freudian, others that it is no more than a cupola added to the edifice that Freud built. In the opinion of Dr. Edith Jacobson, a New York analyst and a staunch Freudian, the whole concept of ego psychology (which deals chiefly with conscious processes) pays much the same respect to the human will that existentialists claim as their own creation.

Says Dr. Leo Rangell, president of the International Psycho-Analytical Association and clinical professor of psychiatry at U.C.L.A.: "It is difficult to know who is speaking in the book--May the psychoanalyst, May the theologian or May the existentialist." The comment is accurate, because May does speak in all those voices. He has also been trained in all three disciplines.

Born in Ada, Ohio. Rollo Reese May studied psychoanalysis under Alfred Adler, who was one of Freud's apostates. He also studied art in Poland and Greece and, after returning from Europe in the 1930s, enrolled in New York's Union Theological Seminary .--"to ask questions, ultimate questions about human beings--not to be a preacher." He did serve briefly in a Congregational parish in Verona, NJ. The years he spent as a tuberculosis patient brought this varied background into focus. There, face to face with death, he discovered what he took to be its true relation to the human will.

The message he has since steadily proclaimed is that people happen to things; things do not happen to people. He does not deny man's limitations; he says only that within those limitations there is more freedom to move than most men realize. Everything, even apathy, is an act of will. "I cannot look at one thing at this instant without refusing to look at another,'' he writes. "To say 'yes' means for that moment I must say 'no' to something else. This is one example of how conflict is of the essence of consciousness."

For May, conflict is also at the heart of will--and the only way to give it exercise. It is easier to do than to be, easier to think than to feel, easier to succumb to apathy than to take a stand. "Human will begins in a 'no.' " he writes. "The 'no' is a protest against a world we never made, and it is also an assertion of one's self in the endeavor to remold and reform the world." Elsewhere he has said: "I think Dostoevsky was right, that every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, this is me and the damned world can go to hell."

*Humanist psychologist, formerly president of the American Psychological Association, who died last week (see MILESTONES).

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