The Need for Power

Among the truths that keep getting buried under the icing of cliche is one about frustration and how it leads to violence. In a bestselling study, Love and Will (1969) Psychiatrist Rollo May began his "search for the sources of violence." That phrase is now the subtitle of his new book Power and Innocence (Norton; $7.95). Both works are closely related; an understanding of one is a help in reading the other.

Among the most useful insights provided in Love and Will was that the opposite of love is not hate but apathy. May's point rested on a foundation of classical humanism and his own 25 years as an analyst. Briefly the message was that there is no real love without intention, and that intention falters particularly during great periods of historic and cultural change and shifting values. Like now, for instance. During such times, said May, the basis of the will itself is in doubt. "It is no longer a matter of deciding what to do," he wrote, "but of deciding how to decide."

May's principal decision in Power and Innocence is to postulate for every individual a basic power need. He sees it as essential to selfesteem. When this power need is thwarted or goes unrecognized, frustration, apathy and violence result. May distinguishes between senseless street violence, the often justified violence of oppressed nationalities and racial groups, and the psychological violence people unwittingly inflict on themselves. For example, Mercedes, one of Dr. May's patients, was unable to have a child until she realized not only her right but her duty to express anger. As a black woman whose father had forced her into prostitution, she had a lot to be angry about.

Such a case history sounds familiar and predictable. But May is no over-simplifier of the human heart. In conflict with power needs, most people push themselves through emotional hoops to maintain their claim to innocence. Oliver, another patient with rotten parents, had to get out of bed and dress according to a precise procedure. He believed that if he missed a step, God would punish his family. This ritual gave him a feeling of power, while allowing him to blame God for any mishap that might befall his parents.

Joy and Woe. Nations, too, prefer what May calls "pseudo innocence." He quotes that beloved Founding Father Benjamin Franklin on the fate of the American red man: "If it be the design of Providence to extirpate these savages in order to make room for the cultivators of the earth, it seems not improbable that rum may be the appointed means."

May's true hero is Oedipus, who dared to learn the terrible truths about himself and paid the price of self-awareness: the perpetual burden of guilt and responsibility without which there can be no lasting morality. By contrast, May treats such facile Utopians as Charles Reich to sympathetic though sharp criticism. After calling Reich's book, The Greening of America, "an impressionistic painting of the Garden of Eden...for children and not for adults," May downgrades Consciousness III. It is he says "no consciousness at all, for it lacks dialectic movement between 'yes' and 'no,' good and evil, which gives birth to consciousness of any sort."

May asks for nothing less than a return to the traditional tragic view of life, agreeing with William Blake that "Man was made for Joy and Woe," and that no amount of technology, drugs or occult dabbling will change this noble condition. The wider implications of the challenge--the establishment of a humanist morality--have always been too demanding for most people. It must be especially so today when many social engineers and behaviorists would like to believe that free will is only an illusion.

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