For death is always in the shadow of the delight of love. In faint adumbration there is present the dread, haunting question, Will this new relationship destroy us?...The world is annihilated; how can we know whether it will ever be built up again? We give, and give up, our own center; how shall we know that we will get it back?... This...has something in common with the ecstasy of the mystic in his union with God: just as he can never be //sure// God is there, so love carries us to that intensity of consciousness in which we no longer have any guarantee of security.

An innocent is only doing what he or Rollo May must do. He claims that by shifting anxiety to a fear one can therefore discover incentives to either avoid the feared object or find the means to remove this fear of it. May wrote this book with the intentions of it being easily read yet still providing all the information that came from the research in studying the cause and effects of anxiety.

May was a close friend of the philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich who also had a significant influence on his work. He is often associated with both humanistic psychology and existentialist philosophy. He was the author of the influential book Love and Will which was publiRollo Mayd in 1969.