Power and Innocence: A Search for the Sources of Violence

By Rollo May

Book Overview

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 virtue, a 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.

• Format: Audio CD
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0F47FJ9L3
• ISBN13: 9798228543393
• Release Date: March 2025
• Publisher: Tantor Audio
• Length: 1 Pages

Customer Reviews

Great Author!

I bought this for a gift for someone who works as a psychologist and they told me his books are fantastic!

The Causes of Violence

I found this book very instructive, full of insight into the underlying causes of violence of all kinds. I wish I had known about this earlier in my life. May makes the argument that every human being requires significance and if a system obstructs that for too long, violence will inevitably erupt like the sudden emergence of boiling in a pot of water that has been heated for some time. He describes some ideas that are difficult to face, such as that America has always been a land of violence, from the initial genocide of the Indians, through the 1968 political assassinations, to the present day occupations of other people's countries. Another is that the violence in war is sometimes described by soldiers as accompanying deep experiences they miss after their combat experience is over. I highly recommend this book for both its substance and its readability.

a good companion....

....to Stephen Diamond's ANGER, MADNESS, AND THE DAIMONIC, this book always reminds me of one of its central ideas: that innocence unaware of its own daimonic dimension (its own shadow) becomes evil.

May's study of violence is even more apropos today

POWER AND INNOCENCE is even more pertinent to today's violent society than it was when first published in 1972--during the Vietnam war. Subtitled A SEARCH FOR THE SOURCES OF VIOLENCE, May elaborates really on his introduction to readers in LOVE AND WILL of his conception of "the daimonic," pointing out how power--though corruptive when absolute or totally absent--can, like anger or rage, also be a positive, constructive force. He also warns of the dangers of "pseudoinnocence": an immature, naive inability or (often religious) unwillingness to recognize the reality of evil in the world, oneself or others. Such denial of the daimonic is the antithesis of true spirituality. Though the war is long over, we Americans are currently engaged in hostilities of a different kind: domestic violence, schoolyard massacres, bombings and general mayhem. We are as violent as ever--maybe more so--and May's superb and prescient book is as aprop! os as ever--maybe even more so.