Power and Innocence: A Search for the Sources of Violence

May, Rollo

ISBN 10: 039331703X / ISBN 13: 9780393317039

Published by W. W. Norton & Company, 1998

About this Item

Seller Inventory # I-9780393317039

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Power and Innocence: A Search for the Sources of Violence
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication Date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 039331703X
• ISBN 13: 9780393317039
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Stressing the positive, creative aspects of power and innocence, Rollo May offers a way of thinking about the problems of contemporary society.

Rollo May defines power as the ability to cause or prevent change; innocence, on the other hand, is the conscious divesting of one's power to make it seem a virtuea form of powerlessness that Dr. May sees as particularly American in nature. From these basic concepts he suggests a new ethic that sees power as the basis for both human goodness and evil.

Dr. May discusses five levels of power's potential in each of us: the infant's power to be; self-affirmation, the ability to survive with self-esteem; self-assertion, which develops when self-affirmation is blocked; aggression, a reaction to thwarted assertion; and, finally, violence, when reason and persuasion are ineffective.

About the Author

Rollo May (1909-1994) taught at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, and was Regents' Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. An influential psychologist, he was the best-selling author of Love and Will, as well as the author of The Courage to Create, Man's Search for Himself, The Meaning of Anxiety, and Psychology and the Human Dilemma.