A friend of mine with whom I was having lunch seemed depressed. The lunch was not far along when he told me that he was preoccupied over some events of the weekend. His three children, aged twelve to twenty-three, had devoted several pithy hours to pointing out how he had been, if not responsible for, at least a prime contributor to, their problems. The upshot of their attack was that the hadn’t made enough clear decisions in his relation to them, hadn’t taken a firm enough stand or set a strong enough structure.

My friend, a sensitive, imaginative man who was a considerable success in his own life and work, had been brought up by strict “inner-directed” parents. But he had known that he could never raise his children on that Victorian “will-power” pattern. At the same time, he and his wife had also never been devotees of the popular overpermissiveness which filled the vacuum when Victorianism was routed. What struck me with poignancy as he talked was my awareness that almost every parent these days seems to express in some form the same pain and perplexity that infused his question, “How does a parent make decisions about his children? How should a father assert his will?”

This crisis of will affects the “neurotic” and “normal” alike—the patient on the couch as well as the psychiatrist or psychologist in the chair listening to him. The man I referred to was not in treatment for neurosis; yet he was experiencing the same contradiction in will and decision that is an inescapable expression of the psychological upheaval of the transitional age in which we live. The inherited basis of our capacity for will and decision has been irrevocably destroyed. And, ironically if not tragically, it is exactly in this portentous age, when power has grown so tremendously and decisions are so necessary and so fateful, that we find ourselves lacking any new basis for will.

THE UNDERMINING OF PERSONAL
RESPONSIBILITY

One of Sigmund Freud’s great contributions—if not his greatest—lay in his cutting through the futility and self-deceit in Victorian “will power.” That “will power” was conceived by our nineteenth-century forefathers as the faculty by which they made resolutions and then purportedly directed their lives down the rational and moral road that the culture said they should go. I say that this was possibly Freud’s greatest discovery because it was this exploration of the ill effects of Victorian will power which led him to what he called the “unconscious.” He uncovered the vast areas in which motives and behavior—whether in bringing up children or making love or running a business or planning a war—are determined by unconscious urges, anxieties, fears, and the endless host of bodily drives and instinctual forces. In describing how “wish” and “drive” move us rather than “will,” Freud formulated a new image of man that shook to the very foundations Western man’s emotional, moral, and intellectual self-image. Under his penetrating analysis, Victorian “will” did, indeed, turn out to be a web of rationalization and self-deceit. Now he was entirely accurate in his diagnosis of the morbid side of the vaunted Victorian “will power.”

But along with this inevitably went an unavoidable undermining of will and decision and an undercutting of the individual’s sense of responsibility. The image that emerged was of man as determined—not driving any more, but driven. Man is “lived by the unconscious,” as Freud, agreeing with the words of Groddeck, put it. “The deeply rooted belief in psychic freedom and choice,” wrote Freud, “…is quite unscientific and must give ground before the claims of a determinism which governs mental life.”¹

Now whatever the theoretical truth or falsehood of such a position is, it had very great practical significance. It reflected, rationalized, and played into the hands of modern man’s most pervasive tendency—which has become almost an endemic disease in the middle of the twentieth century—to see himself as passive, the willy-nilly product of the powerful juggernaut of psychological drives. (And of economic forces, we may add, as Marx, on the socio-economic level, had demonstrated with an analysis parallel in brilliance to Freud’s.)

I do not say that Freud and Marx “caused” this loss of individual will and responsibility. Great men, rather, reflect what is emerging from the depths of their culture and, having reflected, then interpret and mold what they find. We may disagree with their interpretations of their findings; we cannot disagree with the fact that they found it. We cannot ignore or slough over Freud’s discoveries without cutting ourselves off from our own history, mutilating our own consciousness, and forfeiting the chance to push through this crisis to a new plane of consciousness and integration. Man’s image of himself will never be the same again; our only choice is to retreat before this destruction of our vaunted “will power” or to push on to the integration of consciousness on new levels. I do not wish or “choose” to do the former; but we have not yet achieved the latter; and our crisis of will is that we are now paralyzed between the two.

The dilemma arising from the undermining of will has become a thorny problem in Freud’s own field, psychoanalysis. The analyst Alan Wheelis is particularly perceptive of the problem as he writes:

The tendency to see ourselves as the spawns of determinism has spread, in late decades, to include contemporary man’s conviction that he is the helpless object of scientific forces in the form of atomic power. The helplessness is, of course, vividly represented by the nuclear bomb, about which the typical citizen feels powerless to do anything. Many intellectuals saw this coming and asked in their own terms whether “modern man is obsolete.”³ But the important development in our present decade is that this is the common awareness of all who even watch TV or go to the movies: a recent film stated it baldly, “The nuclear age has killed man’s faith in his ability to influence what happens to him.”⁴ Indeed, the central core of modern man’s “neurosis,” it may be fairly said, is the undermining of his experience of himself as responsible, the sapping of his will and ability to make decisions. The lack of will is much more than merely an ethical problem: the modern individual so often has the conviction that even if he did exert his “will,”—or whatever illusion passes for it—his actions wouldn’t do any good anyway. It is this inner experience of impotence, this contradiction in will, which constitutes our critical problem.

CONTRADICTION IN WILL

Some readers will be countering with the assertion that man was never more powerful, both in respect to his individual opportunities and in his collective conquest of nature. To be sure, the emphasis on the human being’s great power is exactly the other side of what I have referred to as the contradiction in will. Just as the individual is feeling powerless and plagued with self-doubts about his own decisions, he is, at the same time, assured that he, modern man, can do anything. God is dead and are we not gods—for have we not re-enacted Genesis by splitting the atom in our own laboratories and over Hiroshima? Of course, we did it in reverse: God made form out of chaos and we have made chaos out of form, and it is a rare human being who is not, in some secret place in his heart, scared to death that we shall not be able to turn chaos into form again before it is too late.

But our anxiety can be easily enough hushed up by all the excitement and glamor of standing on the brink of a new age, a Garden of Eden in which there never will be any snakes. We are bombarded with advertising which tells us that a new world lies at the end of every plane ticket and every endowment policy. We are promised every hour on the hour (in the commercial spot) our daily blessing, told of the tremendous power available in the harnessing of our computers, in the techniques of mass communication, in the new electronic age which will re-form our brain waves and make us see and hear in new ways, and in cybernetics, in the guaranteed income, in art for everyone, in new and ever-more amazing forms of automatic education, in LSD which “expands the mind” and releases the tremendous potential that was once hoped for from psychoanalysis but which now—thanks to an accidental discovery—can be achieved much more effortlessly and quickly in drugs, in chemical techniques which remake personality, in the developing of plastic organs which replace wom-out hearts and kidneys, and in the discovering of how to prevent nerve fatigue so that one can live on almost indefinitely, and so on ad infinitum. And it is not surprising that the listener is confused at times as to whether he is the anointed one, the recipient of all the blessings from these genii—or just the dumb fall-guy? And of course he is both.

In almost all of these promises of great power and freedom, a passive role is expected of the citizen who is to be recipient. Not only in the medium of advertising, but in matters of education, health, and drugs, things are done to and for us by the new inventions; our role, however subtly put, is to submit, accept the blessing, and be thankful. This is obvious in the area of atomic power and in the vast space explorations which may unite new planets to ours: you and I as individual persons have nothing whatever to do with the achievements except pay our taxes through anonymous, labyrinthine channels and watch the space flights on TV.

The phrase used, for example, for exploring new worlds through drugs or “happenings” is to “turn on.” The positive side of this phrase lies in its undermining the delusion of Victorianism that “I am the captain of my soul,” that nothing could occur unless I forced it to happen with my own Calvinistic effort and muscles—a voluntaristic arrogance which does, indeed, shrink our experience and all but suffocates our feelings. The phrase “to be turned on” points toward the spontaneity of letting ourselves be stimulated, be grasped, be opened. But it is no accident that it is also the phrase we use when we “turn on” our electricity, our motor cars, our TV’s. The contradiction is clear: we move from the Victorian “will power” and rigid ego-control that produced the arid industrial civilization against which the hippies rightly revolt, to a “freedom” that may not be a new expansion of consciousness at all but a making of ourselves over into the image of the machine in a more powerful and subtle form. LSD is talked of as the remedy for a stiflingly nonpersonal civilization of mechanics. But the essence of the machine is that it does something for us by standing between us and nature. And does not the essence of the act of taking a drug have within it the same element as the using of the machine in that it too renders us passive? Our curious predicament is that the same processes which make modern man so powerful—the magnificent development of atomic and other kinds of technical energy—are the very processes which render us powerless. That our wills should be undermined is inescapable. And that we are told by many people “will is an illusion anyway” seems only a repetition of the obvious. We are caught, as Laing puts it, in a “hell of frenetic passivity.”

The dilemma is sharpened, furthermore, by the fact that just when we feel most powerless in the face of the juggernaut of impersonal power that surrounds and molds us, we are called upon to take responsibility for much vaster and more portentous choices. Consider the matter of increased leisure. Choices will be necessary for the growing mass of people who will be working only four or six hours a day. There is already evidence that if people cannot fill the void with meaningful activities, they will be confronted with an endemic apathy that breeds impotence, addiction, and self-destructive hostility. Or take the birth control pills, particularly the retroactive one now being developed. The new freedom—principally, the complete freedom of choice about sexual relations—brings into the picture exactly that word “choice.” If there is to be anything but anarchy, it rests now on the individual person to choose the values of sexual experience or at least the reasons for participating. But this new freedom occurs just at the time when the values which normally serve as a basis for choice (or rebellion, which also implies a structure) are most in chaos, when there is confusion approaching bankruptcy in outward guidance for sex by society, family, and church. The gift of freedom, yes; but the burden placed on the individual is tremendous indeed.

Or consider the contradiction in the area of physical health. The dramatic growth of medical techniques coupled with the increase of specialization tend inevitably to make the patient the object of cure, to send the patient hurrying to the phone to ask his doctor not for advice about his illness, but rather which specialist he should go to this morning, or which X-ray office, or which hospital clinic. As the process becomes more impersonal and Kafkaesque, the patient’s responsibility is more and more reduced. But this all happens just at the time when the illnesses of the patient become increasingly personal. As in heart conditions and the infirmities of old age, the illnesses affect the total self rather than specific mechanisms in the body. How starkly this is true of old age, which requires accepting the limitations of the body, the finitude of one’s self, and ultimately death! The “cure” or management of these illnesses can come only with a widening and deepening of the patient’s own consciousness in relation to his body, and with his active participation in his own cure.

The kind of consciousness that enables a person to affirm, rather than to destructively fight against, the limitations of the body, as in heart conditions and the infirmities of old age and approaching death, used to be called “spiritual strength.” It was, in its best form, a process of acceptance and reconciliation. This gave certain perspectives and values to the person which transcended the question of whether he lived or died, and made the necessary decisions possible for him. But the spiritual basis for this consciousness is not available in its old form for great segments of our modern secular society. And we have not yet found the new bases for such values and choices.

Particularly with the possibility of replacing bodily organs by artificial ones and the overcoming of nerve fatigue, the choice of how long you are to live may become a very real option. The ultimate decision based on the question, Do you want to live, and if so, how long?—which used to be posed as a metaphysical question on the theoretical basis that suicide is possible—now may become the practical choice of each one of us. How is the medical profession to decide how long to keep people living? Often the answer is that that question must be left to the philosophers and theologians. But where are these philosophers who are going to help us? Philosophy, in its academic sense, is reputed to be “dead” like God;⁵ and in any case, philosophy in our day—with the emphatic exception of the existentialists—concerns itself with formal problems rather than with these critical life questions. Now that we have bid goodbye to the theologians at the wake for our dead God, we return to open the last testament and assess the legacy, and we find ourselves bereft. We have inherited a plentiful amount of physical wealth—but almost nothing of those values, and the myths and symbols from which they come, which are the basis for responsible choice.

Friedrich Nietzsche, who in the Victorian age saw with amazing astuteness what was coming, was one of the first to announce that “God is dead.” But he, in contradistinction to the proclaimers of the divine demise in our day, dared to confront the consequences. “What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun?…Whither do we move now? Away from all suns? Do we not fall incessantly? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there yet any up and down? Do we not err as through an infinite naught? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night and more night coming on all the while?…God is dead!”⁶ With profound irony, Nietzsche puts this description of the wild disorientation of the self, and the paralysis of will which results, in the mouth of a madman. “The tremendous event is still on its way,” the madman says at the end of this parable. It is now upon us; and is indeed a tremendous event—that man stands at the point where he can be present at the birth of a new world or can preside at the destruction of humanity itself.

Thus, the crisis in will does not arise from either the presence or absence of power in the individual’s world. It comes from the contradiction between the two—the result of which is a paralysis of will.

THE CASE OF JOHN

Our clinical work gives some analogies to this crisis of will and throws light on our general problem. My colleague, Dr. Sylvano Arieti, in an important paper in which he points out that catatonia is a disorder of the will and not of the motor apparatus, goes on to indicate that the catatonic, in his pathological world, is caught in the same inner deadlock as we are in our world of reality. The catatonic’s problem hinges on values and will, and his immobility is one expression of the contradition he experiences.

Dr. Arieti describes a patient, John, Catholic, an intelligent professional in his thirties, who was referred to him because of his repeatedly increasing anxiety. This anxiety reminded John of the time ten years previously when he had developed a full catatonic episode. Wanting to prevent a recurrence of the event, he sought treatment. I shall give some excerpts from Arieti’s case report, particularly with respect to the original catatonic episode.⁷

Without going into the rest of the details of John’s catatonia and his overcoming of it, let us note several things. First, the homosexual stimulation he was exposed to at the camp. Second, the refuge he sought in religious feeling. Third, the obsessive-compulsive mechanism and the fact that the anxiety which was first connected with any action that had to do with sexual feelings became extended to practically every action. Every action became loaded with a sense of responsibility, a moral issue. Every motion was not considered as a fact but as a value. Arieti notes that John’s “feelings were reminiscent of the feelings of cosmic power or negative omnipotence experienced by other catatonics who believe that by acting they may cause the destruction of the universe.”¹⁰

We see in John a radical conflict in will, tied up with the values he held. To me, the doctor’s question, “Don’t you want something?” is very significant, since it shows the importance of getting at the simple wish, the point where every act of will starts. Arieti points out that when one bears a tremendous responsibility as John did, his passivity is entirely understandable. It is not transference of conformism in the hypnotic sense. “The patient follows orders because these orders are willed by others, and therefore he does not have the responsibility for them.” This is parallel, in extreme form, to the fact that in our confused age people go apathetic, comparable to John’s stupor, and unconsciously yearn for someone to take responsibility for them.

Such a patient is in a “state where volition is connected with a pathologically intensified sense of value, so that torturing responsibility reaches the acme of intensity when a little movement of the patient is considered capable of destroying the world.” “Alas!” Arieti continues, “this conception of the psychotic mind reminds us of its possible actuality today, when the pushing of a button may have such cosmic effects! Only the oceanic responsibility of the catatonic could include this up-to-now unconceived possibility.”¹¹

In relatively normal persons, in contrast to John, the beleaguered will takes refuge in half-measures that temporarily promise it some viability. Thus, at the time of a crisis of will, we observe the dilemma of the protest. When I asked certain faculty groups about the sentiment of students on their campuses concerning the Vietnam war, they responded that the division was not between those who were “pro” and “con” with respect to the war, but rather between the protesters on one side and those protesting against the protesters on the other. Now protesting is partially constructive, since it preserves some semblance of will by asserting it negatively—I know what I am against even if I cannot specifically know what I am for. Indeed, the capacity of the infant of two or three to take a negative stand against his parents is very important as the beginning of human will. But if will remains protest, it stays dependent on that which it is protesting against. Protest is half-developed will. Dependent, like the child on parents, it borrows its impetus from its enemy. This gradually empties the will of content; you always are the shadow of your adversary, waiting for him to move so that you can move yourself. Sooner or later, your will becomes hollow, and may then be forced back to the next line of defense.

This next defense is projection of blame. We find an illustration in every war of this unwitting confession of failure to integrate the daimonic. In the Vietnam war, for example, Secretary Rusk and the Administration blamed the Viet Cong for the escalation, and the Viet Cong—and those in this country opposed to the war—blamed Rusk and our own Administration. The self-righteous security that is achieved by means of this blaming of the other gives one a temporary satisfaction. But beyond the gross oversimplification of our historical situation which this exhibits, we pay a more serious price for such security. We have tacitly given the power of decision over to our adversary. Blaming the enemy implies that the enemy has the freedom to choose and act, not ourselves, and we can only react to him. This assumption, in turn, destroys our own security. For in the long run, we have, against our intention, given him all the cards. Will is thus further undermined. We see here an example of the self-contradictory effect of all psychological defensiveness: it automatically hands the power over to the adversary.

In these unsatisfactory measures, the activity of will becomes more and more tautological and repetitive, and finally tends toward apathy. And if apathy cannot be transmuted into an impetus to move to a higher state of consciousness in order to embrace the problem at hand, the person or group tends to surrender the capacity for willing itself. If apathy is to be avoided in such paralysis of will, the individual needs to ask sooner or later, Is there possibly something going on in myself that is a cause of, or contributes to, my paralvsis?

WILL IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

How have psychology and psychoanalysis confronted the crisis in will? We earlier noted how Freud’s destruction of Victorian “will power” was one expression of the undermining of will and decision in our whole age. And we also observed that analysts themselves are concerned about the predicament into which this confusion of will throws us. Pointing out that we have “gained determinism but lost determination,” Wheelis goes on in the paper we quoted above to remind us, “The crucial importance of will lies in the fact that…[it] may nevertheless be the decisive factor in translating equilibrium into a process of change.”¹²

Thoughtful persons in all branches of psychology as well as in other disciplines, such as philosophy and religion, have been asking pointed questions about what the process of psychoanalysis itself does to the patient’s will. The conclusions of some are negative. “Psychoanalysis is a systematic training in indecision,” charges Silvan Tomkins, professor at Princeton and the University of the City of New York, who himself had a number of years of analysis. “Psychoanalysis is in fact the disease of which its therapy purports to be the cure,” a trenchant remark reputed to Karl Kraus, referred, similarly, to the fact that psychoanalysis plays into modern man’s tendency to surrender his autonomy.

There have been indications for several years that the science and profession of psychoanalysis were moving into a state of crisis. One expression of this crisis—which is now present among us and cannot be evaded—is the turning against psychoanalysis on the part of outstanding members of the orthodox Freudian groups.¹³ Their speeches sound very much like the “God-is-dead” plaint of some present-day theologians. And indeed, the god of psychoanalysis may actually be dead to the extent that, like the god of the theologians, it was wrongly conceived.

Central in the roots of this crisis lies the failure of psychoanalysis to solve the problem of will and decision. For if the complete determinism in theory for which Freud argued were true in practice, no one could be cured in psychoanalysis. The opposite is likewise true: If we assumed a complete indeterminism, i.e., that we could make ourselves over in bland freedom by any New Year’s whim or resolution, no one would need to bother to come for psychotherapy. Actually, we find that people’s problems are stubborn, recalcitrant, and troublesome—but we find they can change. And so we need to look further for what changes them.

Academic psychologists tended also, no matter what the individual psychologist himself believed about his own ethical actions, to accept the position that as psychologists we were concerned only with what was determined and could be understood in a deterministic framework. This limitation of perception inevitably tended to put blinders on our perception; we made our man over into the image of what we let ourselves see. Psychologists tended to repress the problem of power, particularly irrational power. We took literally Aristotle’s dictum that man is a rational animal by assuming that he is only that, and that irrationality is merely a temporary aberration to be overcome by right education of the individual or, if the pathology is somewhat more severe, by re-education of his maladjusted emotions. There was, of course, in Alfred Adler’s psychology a concern with power, but that has generally been taken as merely a subhead to his beliefs in social inferiority and the struggle for security. Freud’s assumptions about primitive cannibalism and the aggressive instinct have the element of power in them. But this also tends to be rationalized away in that it is used in referring only to severe pathology. The repression of power enabled psychology more readily to discard will and hold to a theoretical determinism, since the critical daimonic effects of determinism did not then come out into the open.¹⁴

But in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, where therapists dealt with living, suffering people, the problem of the undermining of will and decision became increasingly critical. For the theory and process of psychoanalysis and most other forms of psychotherapy inevitably played into the passive tendencies of the patient. As Otto Rank and Wilhelm Reich in the 1920’s began to point out, there were built-in tendencies in psychoanalysis itself that sapped its vitality and tended to emasculate not only the reality with which psychoanalysis deals but the power and inclination of the patient to change. In the early days of psychoanalysis, when revelations of the unconscious had an obvious “shock value,” this problem did not come out into the open as much. And in any case with hysterical patients, who formed the bulk of those Freud worked with in his early formative years, there does exist a special dynamic in what Freud could call “repressed libido”, pushing expression. But now, when most of our patients are “compulsives” of one form or another, and everybody knows about the Oedipus complex, and our patients talk about sex with an apparent freedom which would have shocked Freud’s Victorian patients off the couch (and, indeed, talking about sex is the easiest way of avoiding really making any decisions about love and sexual relatedness), the predicament resulting from the undermining of will and decision can no longer be avoided. The “repetition compulsion,” a problem that has always remainded intractable and insoluble within the context of classical psychoanalysis, is in my judgment fundamentally related to this crisis of will.

Other forms of psychotherapy do not escape the dilemma of psychoanalysis, namely that the process of psychotherapy itself has built-in tendencies which invite the patient to relinquish his position as the deciding agent. The very name “patient” proposes it. Not only do the automatic, supportive elements in therapy have this tendency, but so does the temptation, to which patient and therapist easily succumb, to search for everything else as responsible for one’s problems rather than one’s self. To be sure, psychotherapists of all stripes and schools realize that sooner or later the patient must make some decisions, learn to take some responsibility for himself; but the theory and the technique of most psychotherapy tends to be built on exactly the opposite premise.

ILLUSION AND WILL

The denial of will and decision has been restated by psychologists and psychoanalysts in various ways. The late Freudian, Robert Knight, holds, for example, that the freedom to make choices experienced by a human being “…has nothing whatever to do with free will as a principle governing human behavior but is a subjective experience which is itself causally determined.”¹⁵ In this article, Knight consistently puts quotation marks around the word “freedom” to show, presumably, that it is an illusion. Choice and responsibility are illusions caused by prior states but, in turn, causal of future acts.

But—and here we arrive at the radical inconsistency—as therapists, the analysts could not help recognizing that the patient’s act of choosing was of central importance. Freud, as a psychotherapist, took a view radically and amazingly different from his own theory. He writes in The Ego and the Id that “…analysis does not set out to abolish the possibility of morbid reactions, but to give the patient’s ego freedom to choose one way or the other.” (Italics Freud’s.)¹⁶

Wheelis goes on to show the practical dilemma in which the therapist is caught in his actual therapy:

Psychoanalysts then found themselves in the curious, anomalous position of believing that the patient must have an illusion of freedom in order to change, and they therefore must cultivate this illusion, or at least do obeisance to it. The paradox, for example, that Knight’s statement of the problem poses is well described by two reviewers. “As psychotherapy progresses the experience of freedom increases, so that successfully analyzed people report experiencing more freedom in the conduct of their lives than they did prior to psychotherapy. If this freedom is illusory, the purpose of therapy, or at least the result of successful therapy, is to restore an illusion even though most therapists believe that successful therapy increases the accuracy with which the patient perceives himself and his world.”¹⁸ Some analysts, indeed, admit openly that they are engaged in the cultivation of an illusion, and undertake to rationalize this in their theory.¹⁹

Consider what this means. We are told that an illusion is most significant in effecting personality change; that truth is not fundamentally (or is only theoretically) relevant to actions, but illusion is. Thus, we are to strive not for truth but for an illusion. We are to believe in definitions of the world by which we cannot live. Or, if we do try strictly to live by them, we shall, as Wheelis rightly suggests, slide back into a passive impotence that leads to apathy and depression.

I do not need to labor the point that this resolution of the dilemma is untenable. Even we analysts could not live by such an illusion—for how is it possible (without considerable pathology) to commit one’s self if one knows in advance he is committing himself to an illusion? Furthermore, if patients need to believe in illusions, the possibilities of illusion are, unlike truth, infinite— who is to decide which illusion the given patient is to live by? Are we to take the illusion which “works”? If so, then our concept of truth has been wrong; for if the illusion genuinely works, it cannot be entirely illusion. Indeed, the statement that the illusion is most decisive for change is essentially an antirational (and thus, anti-scientific) one, for it implies that at the level of behavior the truth or falsehood of a concept is irrelevant. This cannot be accepted; if it seems to be true, there must be some truth in what we call “illusion” and some illusion in what we call truth.

Another solution has been proposed from a different angle. Recognizing that freedom and will have to be given some place in the psychoanalytic structure of personality, the later “ego” analysts such as Hartmann, Rapaport, and others, have developed the concept of the “autonomy of the ego.” The ego, then, is assigned the function of freedom and choice. But the ego is, by definition, a part of the personality; and how can a part be free? Rappaport has written his paper on the “Autonomy of the Ego,” Jung once wrote a chapter on “The Autonomy of the Unconscious,” and we could, following Walter B. Cannon, write a paper on “The Autonomy of the Body.” Each of these would have a partial truth. But would not each also be importantly wrong? Neither the ego nor the body nor the unconscious can be “autonomous,” but can only exist as parts of a totality. And it is in this totality that will and freedom must have their base. I am convinced that the compartmentalization of the personality into ego, superego, and id is an important part of the reason why the problem of will has remained insoluble within the orthodox psychoanalytic tradition.

We know in our practice of psychoanalysis that lack of freedom is shown in all aspects of the patient’s organism. It is shown in his body (muscular inhibitions) and in what is called unconscious experience (repression) and in his social relationships (he is unaware of others to the extent he is unaware of himself). We also know experientially that as this person gains freedom in psychotherapy, he becomes less inhibited in bodily movements, freer in his dreams, and more spontaneous in his unthought-out, involuntary relations with other people. This means that autonomy and freedom cannot be the domain of a special part of the organism, but must be a quality of the total self—the thinking-feeling-choosing-acting organism. I shall show below, when discussing the concept of intentionality, that will and decision are inseparably linked with id as well as ego and superego, if we are to use Freudian terms. Something of profound significance is going on—in spontaneity, feeling, symbolic meanings—in each decision one makes prior to anything which might be termed an “ego function.” Bettelheim is entirely correct, in my judgment, when he emphasizes that a strong ego is not the cause of decisions but the result.²⁰

Does not the concept of “autonomy of the ego” have the same difficulties as the old one of “free will,” in positing some special part or organ of the personality as the seat of choice? If we strip the concept of its sophisticated clothes, it becomes something akin to Descartes’s theory that the pineal gland, the organ at the base of the brain between body and head, was the place where the soul was located. To be sure, ego psychoanalysis has the positive aspect of reflecting the pressing concerns of contemporary man with his problems of autonomy, self-direction, and choice. But it is also caught in the contradictions with which these problems inescapably confront us.

Psychoanalysis and psychology, in all their representations, reveal, with the inconsistency and contradiction which lie therein, the dilemma of will and decision that Western man today experiences. It is a sign of Freud’s usual honesty that he frankly states that he is trying to give the patient “freedom to choose” even though he knows this is directly contradictory to his theory. He did not quail before contradiction nor leap to too easy a solution. But as the culture has evolved since Freud, it has become less and less possible to survive in this contradiction.

In this book, I propose a solution to this problem. I do it on the basis of my belief that we have omitted a dimension of human experience which is important, indeed critical, to human will. An illustration of the dilemma is given in a passage by Hudson Hoagland:

Human awareness and consciousness—that is, knowing—introduce unpredictable elements into our man. And man is the creature who obstreperously insists on knowing. The change of consciousness which this involves is both “outside” and “inside,” consisting of forces operating on the individual from the world and the attitude of the person who is attending to these forces. We can note that one’s awareness in Hoagland’s example would involve such things as becoming aware of forgotten and buried events in childhood and other aspects of the “depth” experiences which emerge in therapy.

This is—to predict our later discussion—the problem of intentionality in contrast to mere intention. Intentionality, in human experience, is what underlies will and decision. It is not only prior to will and decision but makes them possible. Why it has been neglected in Western history is clear enough. Ever since Descartes separated understanding from will, science has proceeded on the basis of this dichotomy, and we tried to assume that “facts” about human beings could be separated from their “freedom,” cognition could be separated from conation. Particularly since Freud, this is no longer possible—even though Freud, without full justice to his own discoveries, clung to the old dichotomy in scientific theory. Intentionality does not rule out deterministic influence, but places the whole problem of determinism and freedom on a deeper plane.