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
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. 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.
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."
