Ed Mendelowitz
Ed Mendelowitz received his doctorate from the California School of Professional Psychology in Berkeley where he worked closely with the preeminent psychotherapist and author Rollo May. His writing explores the commingling of psychology and narrative with art, literature, music, cinema, religion, philosophy, and also science. His book ETHICS AND LAO-TZU has been called "an extraordinary moral narrative” by the renowned child psychiatrist Robert Coles and "a compendium of wisdom from an astonishing variety of sources” by psychoanalyst and author Allen Wheelis. Mendelowitz serves on the Existenz Executive Council for the Karl Jaspers Society of North America and the Honorary Advisory Board of The Humanistic Psychologist. He received the Rollo May Award for “independent and outstanding pursuit of new frontiers in humanistic psychology” and, currently, authors the Rollo May Consortium on Substack. His time is divided between Saigon and Greater Los Angeles.
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Papers by Ed Mendelowitz
between virtue and vice.”—Henry David Thoreau, Walden
“The road from appearance to reality is often very hard and long,
and many people make only very poor travelers. We must forgive
them when they stagger against us as if against a brick wall.”—
Franz Kafka, in Gustav Janouch’s Conversations With Kafka
—Herman Melville, Pierre, or the Ambiguities
Rollo May’s "Power and Innocence," first published in 1972, is aptly subtitled: "A Search for the Sources of Violence." Written during the madness of the Vietnam War (a mortifying conflagration remembered here where I write along the South-Central Vietnamese coast, as the American War), May’s book has been on my mind for some time. We are living in perilous times in so many respects, and one finds few voices as relevant, wise, or compelling as May’s on what he called the daimonic—a coinage borrowed from the Ancient Greeks for that part of the mind associated with humanity’s darkened corners.
“It was more or less the way an essay, in the sequence of its paragraphs, explores a thing from many sides without wholly encompassing it—for a thing wholly encompassed suddenly loses its scope and melts down to a concept—that he believed he could most rightly survey and handle the world and his own life. The value of an action or a quality . . . seemed to him to depend on its surrounding circumstances, on the aims it served; in short, on the whole—constituted now one way, now another—to which it belonged . . . Ulrich regarded morality as it is commonly understood as nothing more than the senile form of a system of energies that cannot be confused with what it originally was without losing ethical force.”—Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1954, p. 129).
"The only possible spiritual development is in the sense of depth."
—Samuel Beckett (1931, pp. 46-47).
"Art flies around truth but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before."--Franz Kafka, Blue Octavo Notebooks
preface that he discovered Rollo May when chancing upon a copy of Man’s Search for
Himself (1953) at the age of 19. The author had survived a brain tumor shortly before
that serendipitous discovery, intimating that he resonated with themes revolving around
anxiety and courage so compellingly addressed by May who himself had undergone a
stark encounter with mortality during his own struggle with tuberculosis as a somewhat
older man. May, my revered personal mentor, would have been appreciative, I think, if
unsurprised by the impact of his book upon the younger man. He understood, as Robert
Abzug’s (2021) recent biography makes clear, the impact his writing had upon admiring
readers throughout the world. Indeed, Abzug closes Psyche and Soul: The Spiritual
Odyssey of Rollo May with first-hand accounts that are, likely, not dissimilar to Schlett’s
happenstance introduction to the sagely, down-to-earth presence that was uniquely Rollo
May. May would likely, however, have been surprised by Schlett’s book about a
mid-20th century political struggle to which he referred episodically and about which he
remained justifiably proud.