It is a curious thing that Schopenhauer, old misanthrope as he is often called by the thin-skinned, should have, in this section referred to above, called sexual passion the “kernel of the will to live” and the “genital organs the focus of will.” He here expresses a truth of the relationship of love and will, indeed the interdependence of them in a way which runs contrary to modern man’s conventional understanding. Power—which we can for the moment identify with will—and love, even sexual love, are considered to be antithetical. I believe that Schopenhauer was right, that they are not opposites but closely related.

Our discussion of the daimonic has shown that self-affirmation and self-assertion, obvious aspects of will, are essential to love. We discuss them together in this book because they are interrelated in ways which are crucial to the personal lives of all of us, as well as specifically to psychotherapy.

Both love and will are conjunctive forms of experience. That is, both describe a person reaching out, moving toward the other, seeking to affect him or her or it—and opening himself so that he may be affected by the other. Both love and will are ways of molding, forming, relating to the world and trying to elicit a response from it through the persons whose interest or love we covet. Love and will are interpersonal experiences which bring to bear power to influence others significantly and to be influenced by them.

LOVE AND WILL BLOCKING EACH OTHER

The interrelation of love and will is shown, furthermore, by the fact that each loses its efficacy when it is not kept in right relation to the other; each can block the other. Will can block love. This can be seen particularly in the “will power” of the inner-directed type of man, as he appears in Riesman’s studies.¹ This was the man who was often the powerful captain of industry and finance in the early decades of this century and was our link to the great emphasis that was placed on individual will power which characterized the end of the Victorian Age.² This was the period in which a man could talk of his “unconquerable soul” and could proclaim, “I am the captain of my fate.” But if my soul is really unconquerable, I shall never fully love; for it is the nature of love to conquer all fortresses. And if I must cling to being the master of my fate, I shall never be able to let myself go in passion; for passionate love always has tragic possibilities. Eros, we have seen in an earlier chapter, “breaks the limbs’ strength,” and “overpowers the intelligence in all its shrewd planning.”

An example of will blocking love can be seen in the father of a young student-patient of mine, who was the treasurer of a large corporation. He telephoned me to talk about “maximizing the effectiveness of his son’s treatment” exactly as though we were at his company board-meetings. When the son became sick with a minor illness in college the father immediately flew to the scene to take charge; the same father became furious when his son held hands and kissed his girl friend on the front lawn of their resort home. At dinner, the father told how he had entered into negotiation to buy the company of a friend of the son’s but, having become irritated over the slowness of the negotiations, had called up the would-be partners and told them to “forget the whole thing.” He showed no awareness that he was sending another company into bankruptcy with the snap of his fingers. This father was a public-spirited citizen, the chairman of several committees for civic betterment; and he could not understand why, when he had been treasurer of an international corporation, his subordinates secretely referred to him as the “hardest S.O.B. in Europe.” The strong “will power” which the father thought solved all his problems, actually served at the same time to block his sensitivity, to cut off his capacity to hear other persons, even, or perhaps especially, his own son. It is not surprising that this exceedingly gifted son failed in his college work for several years, went through a beatnik period, and ultimately had a tortuous time permitting himself to succeed in his own profession.

Typical of the inner-directed genre, the father of my patient could always take care of others without caring for them, could give them his money but not his heart, could direct them but could not listen to them. This kind of “will power” was a transfer into interpersonal relationships of the same kind of power that had become so effective in manipulating railroad cars, stock transactions, coal mines, and other aspects of the industrial world. The man of will power, manipulating himself, did not permit himself to see why he could not manipulate others in the same way. This identifying of will with personal manipulation is the error that sets will in opposition to love.

It is a sound hypothesis, based on a good deal of evidence in psychotherapeutic work, that the unconscious guilt which parents like this carry because they manipulate their children leads them to be overprotective and overpermissive toward the same. These are the children who are given motor cars but not moral values, who pick up sensuality but are not taught sensitivity in life. The parents seem vaguely aware that the values on which their will power was based are no longer efficacious. But they can neither find new values nor give up the manipulative will. And the fathers often seem to act on the assumption that their will therefore has to do for the whole family.

This overemphasis on will, which blocks love, leads sooner or later to a reaction to the opposite error, love which blocks will. This is tpyically seen in the generation made up of the children of parents like the father we described above. The love proposed in our day by the hippie movement seems to be the clearest illustration of this error. “Hippie love is indiscriminate,” is a common principle within the movement. Hippie love emphasizes immediacy, spontaneity, and the emotional honesty of the temporary moment. These aspects of hippie love are not only entirely understandable reactions against the manipulative will of the previous generation, but are values in their own right. The immediacy, spontaneity, and honesty of the relationship experienced in the vital now are sound and telling criticisms of contemporary bourgeois love and sex. The hippies’ revolt helps destroy the manipulative will power which undermines human personality.

But love also requires enduringness. Love grows in depth by virtue of the lovers experiencing encounter with each other, conflict and growth, all over a period of time. These cannot be omitted from any lasting and viable experience of love. They involve choice and will under whatever names you use. Generalized love, to be sure, is adequate for generalized, group situations; but I am not honored by being loved simply because I belong to the genus “man.” The love which is separated from will, or the love which obviates will, is characterized by a passivity which does not incorporate and grow with its own passion; such love tends, therefore, toward dissociation. It ends in something which is not fully personal because it does not fully discriminate. Such distinctions involve willing and choosing, and to choose someone means not to choose someone else. This is overlooked among the hippies; the immediacy of love in the hippie development seems to end in a love that is fugitive and ephemeral.

Now spontaneity is a tremendous relief after the assembly-line, sex-on-Saturday-night artificiality of bourgeois love against which the hippies are rebelling. But what of fidelity and the lasting qualities of love? Erotic passion not only requires the capacity to give one’s self over to, to let one’s self be stimulated by, the power of the immediate experience. But it also requires that one take this event into one’s own center, to mold and form one’s self and the relationship on the new plane of consciousness which emerges out of the experience. This requires the element of will. Victorian will power lacked the sensitivity and flexibility which goes with love; in the hippie movement in contrast, there is love without the staying power which goes with will. Here we see another important illustration of the fact that love and will are inseparable from each other.

A final indication that the problems of love and will belong together is the similarity in their “solutions.” Neither can be adequately dealt with in our day simply by new techniques, patching up the old values, restating old habits in more palatable form, or any other such device. We cannot content ourselves by painting the old building a new color; it is the foundations which are destroyed, and the “resolutions,” by whatever name we may call them, require new ones.

What is necessary for “resolutions” is a new consciousness in which the depth and meaning of personal relationship will occupy a central place. Such an embracing consciousness is always required in an age of radical transition. Lacking external guides, we shift our morality inward; there is a new demand upon the individual of personal responsibility. We are required to discover on a deeper level what it means to be human.

IMPOTENCE AS AN EXAMPLE

The problem of sexual potency is especially interesting because it represents the confluence of will and love. Impotence is an expression of the fact that the person is trying to make his body do something—perform the sex act—which “it” doesn’t want to do. Or, to put it slightly differently, the patient is trying to will his body to love when he does not love. We can’t will potency; we can’t will to love. But we can will to open ourselves, participate in the experience, allow the possibility to become a reality. Impotence is the failure not of intention, but of intentionality. For just as the language of sex is tumescence and erection of the penis in the man and excitement and readiness for intercourse in the woman, so the language of eros is fantasy, imagination, and the heightened sensitivity of the whole organism. And if the deeper but more subtle language of the second falls on deaf ears, the more direct, insistent, and obvious language of the body takes over to communicate the message by means of sexual impotence.

The incident given in the previous chapter, that of Preston’s impotence, may be cited here in greater detail to give us a picture of the dynamics of impotence as well as the contrast between eros and sex. During that hour, I asked Preston what fantasy was going on in his mind that evening as he was undressing and on the brink of going to bed with the girl. Understandably, it was difficult for him to recall it since these images and the feelings associated with them had to be repressed in the service of trying to force himself ahead in the act. But, when he did remember it, the fantasy he related was this: the woman’s vagina was a bear trap; she would take in his penis, get him to impregnate her, have a baby, and thus catch him for good. As he went on in telling the fantasy, it became evident that he had experienced the situation not only as his getting trapped by the woman and—as contradictory as it sounds—as being seduced rather than doing the seducing, but also as an expression of his own countersadism toward her in that he went ahead in the act, getting her more excited only to disappoint her. The impotence, therefore, turns out to be an accurate expression of the denied symbolic meanings occurring in Preston’s subconscious fantasies. Such fantasies are not at all the result of whim, but are the accurate and necessary expressions of his anxiety, his need to submit to the woman, and his revenge on her.

Fantasy is one expression of imagination. Both fantasy and imagination are capacities by which personal meaning is given an act. Imagination is the home of intentionality and fantasy one of its languages. I use fantasy here not as meaning something unreal to which we escape, but in its original meaning of phantastikous, “able to represent,” “to make visible.” Fantasy is the language of the total self, communicating, offering itself, trying on for size. It is the language of “I wish/I will”—the projection in imagination of the self into the situation. And if one cannot do this, he will not be present in the situation, sexual or other, whether his body is there or not. Fantasy assimilates reality and then pushes reality to a new depth.

IMAGINATION AND TIME

The positive side of the use of fantasy can be seen in other hours of Preston’s. We take one example in which he speaks:

The good sexual relationship they then had was not, of course, the total answer to his problem. The deeper sources of his conflict were shown by what came up in the second half of that therapeutic hour after he said, “I can’t afford to deserve Beverly’s love.” Then, talking about his mother and sister, he cried, “I can’t give in to them. I have to get even with them. They’ll go to their death. I won’t give in.” Obviously, this reveals a neurotic problem which has to be resolved. But the first part, the constructive “act of will,” must go along with the second. Just as the second, unconscious aspects cannot be ignored, so the first, what he calls the act of will, likewise cannot be ignored. The two poles of the problem move dialectically, each helping the other.

We cannot will love, but we can will to open ourselves to the chance, we can conceive of the possibility—which, as patients testify, sets the wheels in motion. This flushes out what keeps us from conceiving of it, the source of the unconscious and repressed difficulties. We can then let our imaginations play on it, dwell on it, turn it over in our minds, focus on it, “invite” the possibility of love in fantasy.

This brings us to the problem of time. In cases of impotence we recognize an all too familiar pattern: the impression of being compulsively hurried: “We undressed immediately,” the patient says, or, “We went to bed immediately and I was impotent.” In order to make ourselves do something about which we are in significant conflict, we act compulsively, trying to jump into it in order to outwit, or at least to get ahead of, the pursuing, repressed “hounds” of consciousness. “If it were done when ’tis done,” as Macbeth classically states in his crucial moment, “then ’twere well it were done quickly” (1, 7). We must hurry in order not to let ourselves know consciously what, on another level, we know that we know. The fact that many people tend not to give themselves time to know each other in love affairs is a general symptom of the malaise of our day. We are the age, says John Galbraith referring to the motels along the highways, of “short order sex.”

When I said above that we “fly to sex in order to avoid eros,” the word “fly” can be taken in several senses. Fly means to go in haste: we experience a compulsion, little aware that it is our own anxiety which pushes us. Fly also can be taken as flight from—it would be well if it were done quickly before our fantasies catch up, before the voice of the conflict gets so strident that its takes away our erection and desire to have intercourse with the woman. The haste to engage in sex often serves to short circuit eros.

We arrive now at the fundamental relationship between eros, time, and imagination. Eros takes time: time for the significance of the event to sink in, time for the imagination to work, and if not “time to think,” at least time to experience and to anticipate. This is why someone in love wants to be alone, wandering here and there by himself, not concentrating or trying to work; he is giving eros time to do its work. This significance of time is one of the characteristics which distinguishes eros from sex. Eros may seem to take effect simultaneously with the first glimpse of the other person (love at first sight is by no means necessarily neurotic or to be relegated to the immature). The suddenly beloved elicits a composite image from our experiences in our past or in our dreams of our future; we spontaneously experience him or her in relation to our personal “style of life” which we form and carry with us all our lives and which becomes clearer the more fully we know ourselves. But it takes time for the integrating process to take place, time for eros to be interwoven with the multitude of memories, hopes, fears, aims, ad infinitum which form the pattern we recognize as ourselves.

UNION OF LOVE AND WILL

Man’s task is to unite love and will. They are not united by automatic biological growth but must be part of our conscious development.

In society, will tends to be set against love. For this there is an important genetic history. We have a memory, a “reminiscence” in Plato’s sense, of a time when there was a union of ourselves with our mothers in the early experience of nursing at mother’s breast. Then we were also at union with the universe, were wedded to it and had the experience of “union with being.” This union yielded a satisfaction, calm happiness, self-acceptance, and elation. This is what is relived in meditation of the Zen or Hindu variety and in some drug experiences; it is a union with the universe which is shown in mysticism and produces a mild ecstasy, a blissful feeling that I am completely accepted by the universe. This is the backdrop of human existence implied in every myth of the Garden of Eden, every story of paradise, every “Golden Age”—a perfection which is deeply embedded in man’s collective memory. Our needs are met without self-conscious effort on our part, as, biologically, in the early condition of nursing at the mother’s breast. This is the “first freedom,” the first “yes.”³

But this first freedom always breaks down. And it does so because of the development of human consciousness. We experience our difference from and conflict with our environment and the fact that we are subjects in a world of objects—and even mother can then become an object. This is the separation between self and world, the split between existence and essence. Mythologically, it is the time when each child re-enacts the “fall” of Adam. This first freedom is inadequate because one cannot remain in it if we are to develop as a human being. And though we experience our separation from it as guilt (in Anaximander’s sense of separation from the boundless), we must nevertheless go through with it.⁴ But it remains the source of all perfection, the backdrop of all utopias, the perpetual feelings that there ought to be a paradise someplace, and the efforts—forever creative but forever doomed to disappointment—that make us try to recreate a perfect state like the early one in our mother’s arms. We cannot—not because of something God does, or some chance accident, or some happenstance that might have been different. We cannot because of the simple development of human consciousness. But nevertheless, we still always seek, as when we write a good paragraph or do a good work of art. We “fall” anew, but we remain ready to arise and pit ourselves anew against our fate.

This is why human will, in its specific form, always begins in a “no.” We must stand against the environment, be able to give a negative; this inheres in consciousness. Arieti points out that all will has its source in the capacity to say “no”—a “no” not against the parents (although it shows itself in coming out against them, representatives of the personal authoritative universe as they are). 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. Willing, in this sense, always begins against something—which generally can be seen as specifically against the first union with mother. Small wonder that this is done with guilt and anxiety, as in the Garden of Eden, or with conflict, as in normal development. But the child has to go through with it, for it is the unfolding of his own consciousness which prods him. And small wonder that, though he affirms it on one level, on another he regrets it. This is one aspect of the acceptance of the daimonic. During a re-experiencing of this period, one patient dreamt of a “tiger” which he was wont to interpret as his mother. But the therapist, with a wisdom which comes from having a view of the whole, continuously remarked “The tiger is in you.” He was by this means able to give up fighting it and assimilate it, take it in as part of his own strength, and, as a result, become more affirmative as a person.

Will begins in opposition, begins in a “no” since the “yes” is already there. The danger is that this stage of development will be interpreted negatively by the parents, as shown in their excessive anger or interpretation of the child’s original “no” as personally against them; and thus they may be seen by the child as opposing his development and autonomy. And he may, getting recriminations against choices, be tempted (and, to some extent, even give in to this temptation) to give it up, go back to the “bliss” (which now is now a bliss only in quotation marks). This is the hankering, nostalgic and self-defeating, which we see in adult neurotics, to go back to the first union again. But the past cannot be resurrected or ever made real again.

This is why the reuniting of will and love is such an important task and achievement for man. Will must come in to destroy the bliss, to make possible a new level of experience with other persons and the world; to make possible autonomy, freedom in the mature sense, and consequent responsibility. Will comes in to lay the groundwork which makes a relatively mature love possible. No longer seeking to re-establish a state of infancy, the human being, like Orestes, now freely takes responsibility for his choices. Will destroys the first freedom, the original union, not in order to fight the universe forever—even though some of us do stop at that stage. With the first bliss of physical union broken, man’s task is now the psychological one of achieving new relationships which will be characterized by the choice of which woman to love, which groups to devote himself to, and by the conscious building of those affections.

Hence, I speak of the relating of love and will not as a state given us automatically, but as a task; and to the extent it is gained, it is an achievement. It points toward maturity, integration, wholeness. None of these is ever achieved without relation to its opposite; human progress is never one dimensional. But they become touchstones and criteria of our response to life’s possibilities.