Giving in Love: Part One: Marc Gafni

Sensual Saints

Rollo May, in his classic work Love and Will, correctly bemoans modernity’s overemphasis on performance and technique at the expense of feeling and passion.

He tells one story of a patient who used ointment on the tip of his sexual organ because it dulled feeling, thus increasing his ability to perform. May viewed this as a kind of pathology symptomatic of his time; a telling example of the wanton willingness to forfeit feeling for the sake of achievement. And Rollo May may well be right.

Yet, a second look reveals a deeper message in this story. Actually, this patient’s goals are not at all worthy of our contempt. After all, the achievement he is after here is fully based upon giving to another, even at the expense of his own pleasure! How often in life is the standard of ‘success’ based on how much you give, rather than how much you’ve got?

It is a rare finery.

Imagine if everyone’s greatest goal was to give the optimal amount of pleasure to other people. What a radically brighter, more alive world we would live in! So the sexual in May’s example actually sets the highest standard for what the moral/honorable heights of life can be.

marc gafni
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