Fenomenologia miłości Rollo Maya: odpowiedź na dwudziestowieczny kryzys kultury
Rollo May’s phenomenology of love: a response to the twentieth-century cultural crisis

Summary/Abstract: Rollo May’s phenomenology of love: a response to the twentieth-century cultural crisis: Love, belonging to the domain of affections, is considered in psychology along with motivation processes. The concept of will, which rarely appears in the discourse of empirical psychology, is also associated with motivation. The analysis of the phenomenon of love was one of the foundations of Sigmund Freud’s theory. In fact, Eros, entwined in the inseparable embrace of Thanatos, defined human personality along with him in psychoanalytic terms. The interaction of these two drives explained the process of directing the primary energy of life. Rollo May considered the concept of Freud as anti-voluntary, simultaneously formulating, in the spirit of existentialist thinking, an affirmative conception of will. The relationship of will and love, recognized by May, does not seem to be obvious from Freud’s psychology perspective. Identifying modern times as the times of alienation of love and domination of apathy, May proposed as a remedy for this crisis a specific dialectic of love and will. He distinguished the phenomenon of the will without love when the will inhibits love and love without a will when love undermines willpower. He perceived the proper relation of will and love as an important criterion for achieving maturity in all the basic aspects of life. In the article, I propose a critical reflection on the validity of May’s phenomenology and the placement of this theory in the context of the psychoanalytic tradition.

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