ABSTRACT
The concept of will has not been popular with psychologists and psychoanalysts with a few exceptions. It has always sounded too vitalistic and mysterious. It has, however, had an important place in the thinking of those few psychoanalysts, in particular Rollo May, Leslie Farber, and Allen Wheelis. In the use of the concept of will in the idea of willpower its status as an independent mental faculty capable of self-transcendence is of course stronger and more explicit. Of course people resist temptations and sacrifice immediate pleasures for more distant aims. They overcome even daunting obstacles and persist in their efforts to achieve a goal. The psychologist says, on the contrary, the existence of larger aims, will place the immediate temptation in perspective. Thus, psychotherapists assume that even the strangest symptoms can be understood to have their reasons, that these reasons are products of the individual’s psychological makeup, products of the way that person sees things.
