We cannot rest with the contradictions we have seen in psychology and psychotherapy. Nor can we leave will and decision to chance. We cannot work on the assumption that ultimately the patient “somehow happens” to make a choice or slides into a decision by ennui, default, or mutual fatigue with the therapist, or acts from sensing that the therapist (now the benevolent parent) will approve of him if he does take such and such steps. I propose that we need to put decision and will back into the center of the picture—“The very stone which the builders rejected is the head of the corner.” Not in the sense of free will against determinism, nor in the sense of denying what Freud describes as unconscious experience. These deterministic, “unconscious” factors certainly operate, and those of us who do therapy cannot escape having this impressed upon us many times in an hour.¹

The issue, rather, is not against the infinite number of deterministic forces operating on every person. We shall keep our perspective clear if we agree at the outset that there are certain values in determinism. One is that a belief in determinism, as in Calvinism or Marxism or behaviorism, allies you with a powerful movement. The fact that one is most free to act energetically and with abandon—as is the Marxist—by virtue of being allied to a determinism is one of the paradoxes of our problem. Another value is that the determinism releases you from most of the innumerable petty and not-so-petty issues that you must settle every day; these are all settled beforehand. A third value is that a belief in determinism overcomes your own self-consciousness: sure of yourself, you can charge ahead. For determinism in this sense is an enlarging of human experience by placing the issues on a deeper level. But if we are true to our experience, we must find our freedom on the same deeper level.

This paradox precludes our ever talking of “complete determinism,” which is a logical contradiction. For if it were true, there would be no need to demonstrate it. If someone does set out to demonstrate, as often used to occur in my college days, that he is completely determined, I would agree with his reasons and then add to his list a number of ways in which he is determined by unconscious dynamics which he may not be aware of and, indeed, is determined (possibly for the reasons of his own emotional insecurity) to make this very argument for absolute determinism. I could go on to make the logical rebuttal that if his present argument is simply a result of his being completely determined, he is making the argument without consideration of whether it is true or false, and, therefore, that he and we have no criteria for deciding that it is true. This logical self-contradiction of complete determinism is, I believe, irrefutable. But I would probably choose—remaining existential—rather to point out to my questioner that in the very raising of these questions, and by taking the energy to pursue them, he is exercising some significant element of freedom.

In therapy, for a better example, no matter how much the patient is the victim of forces of which he is unaware, he is orienting himself in some particular way to the data in the very revealing and exploring of these deterministic forces in his life, and is thus engaged in some choice no matter how seemingly insignificant; he is experiencing some freedom, no matter how subtle. This does not at all mean that we “push” the patient into decisions. Indeed, I am convinced that it is only by the clarification of the patient’s own powers of will and decision that the therapist can avoid inadvertently and subtly pushing the patient in one direction or another. My argument is that self-consciousness itself—the person’s potential awareness that the vast, complex, protean flow of experience is his experience, a fact that often takes him by surprise—unavoidably brings in the element of decision at every point.

I have had the conviction for a number of years, a conviction which has only been deepened by my experience as a psychoanalyst, that something more complex and significant is going on in human experience in the realm of will and decision than we have yet taken into our studies. And I am convinced that we have omitted this realm to the impoverishment of both our science of psychology and our understanding of our relations with ourselves and others.

Our task in these chapters is to explore these problems. We shall first take up the interrelation between will and wish, and then the deeper meanings of wish. We shall proceed to an analysis of intentionality. Finally, we shall apply what we have learned to the practice of therapy. The underlying questions all the way through will be, Can we find through such explorations new insight into the meaning of human volition and a new basis for solutions to the problems of will and decision?

THE DEMISE OF WILL POWER

To begin with, the terms “will power” and “free will” are dubious, to say the least, and perhaps no longer even helpful if they were available. “Will power” expressed the arrogant efforts of Victorian man to manipulate his surroundings and to rule nature with an iron hand, as well as to manipulate himself, rule his own life in the same way as one would an object. This kind of “will” was set over against “wish” and used as a faculty by which “wish” could be denied. Victorian man sought, as Ernest Schachtel has put it, to deny that he had ever been a child, to repress his irrational tendencies and so-called infantile wishes as unacceptable to his image of himself as a grown-up and responsible man. Will power, then, was a way of avoiding awareness of bodily and sexual urges and of hostile impulses which did not fit the picture of the controlled, well-managed self.

I have not infrequently observed in patients that the emphasis on “will power” is a reaction formation against their own repressed passive desires, a way of fighting off their wishes to be taken care of; and the likelihood is that this mechanism had much to do with the form that will took in Victorianism. Will was used to deny wish. Speaking in clinical terms, this process results in a greater and greater emotional void, a progressive emptying of inner contents. This impoverishes imagination and intellectual experience as well; it stultifies and suffocates longings and yearnings as well as wishes. No one needs to remind us of the great stores of resentment, inhibition, hostility, self-rejection, and related clinical symptoms which can develop as a result of this repressive kind of will power.

A woman in her late twenties—since we shall refer back to her, we shall give her a name, Helen—informed me at the beginning of her therapeutic treatment that her motto had always been, “where there’s a will, there’s a way.” This motto seemed to fit her executive job, which required a lot of routine as well as serious decisions, and her respectable New England background in a typically upper middle-class family. She gave the impression at first of being a “strong-willed” person. The only trouble was that one of her most pronounced symptoms was compulsive, promiscuous sexual activity; she seemed incapable of saying no. Whatever the cause, this symptom—no doubt aided by the fact that she was a pretty girl—was directly contradictory to her “will power,” as she could easily see. She would also “wolf” food, occasionally eating everything left on the plates by others at breakfast, paying the price of a stomach ache and later struggling to diet to keep her figure. Her job revealed similarly driven patterns—she would work for fourteen hours at a stretch but never seem any farther ahead. It soon came out, with a good deal of painful weeping, that, despite her superficial social success, she was a profoundly lonely and isolated person. She talked of longings for her mother expressed in the half-fantasy, half-memory of sitting with her in the sun when she was a little girl, and a recurrent dream of wanting to be encircled again by waves of the ocean. She dreamt that she went home and knocked on the door, but her mother, on opening the door, did not recognize her and closed the door in her face. The historical fact was that her mother had suffered a serious depression and had been hospitalized in mental institutions for a good deal of the several years after the girl’s birth.

So what we see in our patient is a lonely, pathetic infant, overcome with longing for what she never had. It seemed clear that the great stress of “will power” was a frantic “reaction formation,” a desperate endeavor to compensate for the symptoms of her unfulfilled infantile needs, a strategy of living on despite these painful early longings. It is not surprising—such is the irony and “balance” of the complex processes of human consciousness—that her symptoms were of the compulsive, driven type. This is precisely will gone awry; will turned self-destructive, directed against the person herself. Life is saying to her—if we may put it figuratively, in terms of her motto—where there are such longings and unfulfilled needs, will is exactly not the way.

We note, furthermore, that her problem was not mere defiance of her parents, as we normally see it in adolescent behavior. That would show the “will” still present and active, though negative, and a situation not too difficult to deal with. Our patient’s problem was more serious—an emptiness, a vacuity, a longing to fill something which from infancy had always been empty. This kind of pattern can lead to critical problems of apathy if the “will” breaks down before the dependent longings have been brought to consciousness and to some degree integrated. The early trauma taught Helen as an infant that she must renounce her wishes, for they carried a degree of despair which would have probably sent her into psychosis. “Will power” was the means by which she accomplished this. But the neurosis then takes revenge exactly in the area in which the problem originated.

FREUD’S ANTI-WILL SYSTEM

Psychoanalysis was brought into being by the failure of will. It is not surprising that Freud, observing in his Victorian culture how regularly will was used in the service of repression, should have developed psychoanalysis as an antiwill system. In Freud, as Professor Paul Ricoeur puts it, the phenomenon of will is crushed in the dialectic of instinct on one side and authority, in the form of the superego, on the other. Freud’s observation that will is under three masters, id, superego, and external world, leaves will lost—or, if not actually lost, powerless under its masters. Needing very much to succeed in the world, Helen had an active conscience; but world, id, and sugerego—if one accepts this formulation—were hopelessly grinding her motto “where there’s a will, there’s a way” into pathetic mockery and extorting a painful price in her masochistic guilt.

Freud saw will as an implement in the service of repression, no longer a positive moving force. Seeking the force and the motive of human activity, he looked instead into the “vicissitudes of instincts,” the “fate of the repressed libido,” and so on. Object-choice, in the Freudian system, is not choice in a real sense, but a function of the transposition of the historical vicissitudes. Indeed, Freud sees “will” as the devil of the whole system, in that will has the negative function of setting resistance and repression into motion. Or, if the term “devil” begs the question, we can use a sophisticated name for it, which Wheelis supplies, namely “counterphobic” maneuver.² This marks the moment when the “unconscious became heir to the power of will.”

What are the sources of this destruction of will in Freud’s theory? One source is obvious: Freud’s accurate clinical observation. A second source is cultural; Freud’s theory was consistent with and an expression of the alienation it described. It must not be forgotten that Freud spoke out of and reflected an objectivistic, alienated, market-place culture. As I have indicated elsewhere, the very overemphasis on will power in Victorian times was part and parcel of the compartmentalization that foreshadowed the culture’s collapse, which indeed occurred in 1914. The overemphasis on will power was parallel to the increasingly rigid pattern of “will” of the compulsive neurotic before his whole system breaks down. The alienation of Victorian man from himself, under the rubric of will, is expressed in Freud’s system under the rubric of the opposite pole, namely wish.

A third reason is that Freud needed to replace will because of the requirements of his scientific model, his aim and desire being to make a deterministic science based on the image of nineteenth-century natural science. He thus needed a quantitative, cause-and-effect system: he speaks of his mechanisms as “hydraulics,” and in his last book, libido is given the analogy of an “electro-magnetic” charge.

A fourth reason for Freud’s seeking to destroy will was exactly why we are now interested in rediscovering it on a more profound basis: namely, to deepen human experience, to place these phenomena on a level which would reflect more adequately a dignity and respect for human life. For, contrary to its intention, Victorian “will power,” by implying that every man was “master of his fate” and could decide the whole course of his life by a resolution on New Year’s Eve or on a chance whim in a Sunday-morning church service, actually belittled life, robbed it of dignity, and cheapened human experience.

That some of these aspects of Freud, like the last two, are contradictory, should not daunt us; one of the marks of his greatness was that he could live with such contradictions. He might well have countered such a charge with the lines of Walt Whitman, “I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself.”

THE WISH

In attacking the morbid psychological processes of “will power,” Freud developed his far-reaching emphasis on the “wish.” It is not “will” but “wish” that moves us. “Nothing but a wish can set the mental apparatus in motion,” he says time and again. Since we are setting out to explore the implications of wish, it is helpful to point out that wish is also assumed to be the “force” in other, more or less deterministic, psychological systems as well. In the Hullian type of behaviorism, “wish” is present as the desire and need to reduce tension, an emphasis surprisingly akin to Freud’s definition of pleasure as the reduction of tension. In general, our sciences of man assume the usual adaptational and evolutionary wishes, that people wish “to survive” and “live long.”

The word “wish,” let us hasten to say in view of the fact that in our post-Victorian day we still tend to impoverish the term by making it a concession to our immaturity or infantile “needs,” may be seen in processes much more extensive than the residue of childhood. The correlates of “wish” can be found in all phenomena of nature down to the most minute pattern of atomic reaction; for example, in what Alfred North Whitehead and Paul Tillich call the negative-positive movements in all particles of nature. Tropism is one form, in its etymological sense of the innate tendency in biological organisms to “turn toward.” If, however, we stop with “wish” as this more or less blind and involuntary movement of particle toward another or of one organism toward another, we are inexorably pushed to Freud’s pessimistic conclusion of the “death instinct” taken literally, namely, the inevitable tendency of organisms to move back to the inorganic state. If wish is only a force, we are all involved in an abortive pilgrimage which consists of simply moving back to the state of the inorganic stone again.

But wish also has the element of meaning. Indeed, it is the particular confluence of force and meaning which constitutes the human wish. This “meaning” element is certainly present in Freud’s concept of wish and is one of his central contributions, even though he speaks, contradictorily, as though wish were only blind force. He was able to use the wish with such fecundity—particularly in fantasies, free associations, and dreams—because he saw in it not simply a blind push but a tendency which carried meanings. Despite the fact that when he writes about wish fulfillment and satisfaction of libidinal needs, and talks as if the wish were only an economic quantity, a force by itself the context he assumed is the point of the meeting of meaning with force.

In the first few weeks of life, for example, the infant may be thought of as indiscriminately and blindly pushing its mouth toward the nipple; any nipple, human or rubber, will do.³ But with the emergence and development of consciousness and the capacity to experience one’s self as subject in a world of objects, new capacities arise. Chief among these is the use of symbols and the relating to life by way of symbolic meanings. From then on, the wish is more than merely a blind push; it carries a meaning as well. The nipple becomes breast—and how different the words are! The former is an anatomical description of the part of the body that gives us our rations for survival. The latter is a symbol which brings in a total experience—the warmth, the intimacy, even the beauty and possible love which go with feminine care.

I am aware of the difficulties this dimension of symbolic meaning introduces for a natural science of man. Nevertheless, we must take man, our object of study, as we find him—a creature who relates to his life by way of symbolic meanings which are his language. It is thus methodologically unsound and empirically inaccurate to reduce the wish to mere force. After the emergence of consciousness in man, wishes are never merely needs, nor merely economic. I am attracted sexually by one woman, not by another; it is never just a matter of sheer, stored-up quantities of libido, but rather my erotic “force” channeled and formed by the diverse meanings the first woman has for me. We should qualify our “never” in the previous sentence with two exceptions. One is artificial situations, like soldiers stationed in the arctic for twelve months, in which certain aspects of experience are simply and consciously bracketed. Another exception is in pathology, when a person is driven by indiscriminate sexual urges toward any male or female, like our patient Helen. But here we have a state precisely defined as pathological; and it is an important proof of my point that indiscriminate sexuality goes against a significant element in the human wish. I do not know what Louis XVI was bracketing when he said, “Any woman will do, just give her a bath and send her to a dentist.” But I do know that when people who are not kings and not radically disturbed have sexual relations with someone fairly frivolously, let us say, in a chance meeting or in carnival, they find themselves afterwards investing the other person, possibly only in fantasy, with tenderness or virtue or special attributes that have some meaning for them. Disgust is also an expression of a humanly meaningful wish or, more specifically, a frustration of it. In instances of almost purely anonymous sexual relationship, as it occurs for example in some homosexual practices, the later reaction in which the person feels disgust also demonstrates the point we are making. My experience as a therapist suggests that the human being has to make the creature with whom he has sexual relations in some way personal, even if only in fantasy, or else suffer depersonalization himself.

This carries the corollary that discussions and approaches in therapy based on such concepts as “control of id impulses” and “integration of primary processes” all miss the point. Is there ever such a thing as a primary process as such? Only in very severe pathology or in our own abstracted theory. The former is the situation in which meaningful symbolic processes break down, as in our patients; the latter is when our own symbolism is used as therapists. What we have is not an organism constituted by primary processes and the control of them, but a human being whose experience involves wishes, drives, and needs experienced and known by him, and by us if we can understand him, in symbolic meanings. It is the symbolic meanings that have gone awry in neurosis, and not the id impulse.

The human wish, we are saying, is not merely a push from the past, not merely a call from primitive needs demanding satisfaction. It also has in it some selectivity. It is a forming of the future, a molding by a symbolic process which includes both memory and fantasy, of what we hope the future will be. The wish is the beginning of orienting ourselves to the future, an admission that we want the future to be such and such; it is a capacity to reach down deep into ourselves and preoccupy ourselves with a longing to change the future. Note that I say beginning, not the end; I am perfectly aware of “wish fulfillment,” wishes as a substitute for will, and so on. I am saying that there is no will without a prior wish. The wish, like all symbolic processes, has a progressive element, a reaching ahead, as well as a regressive pole, a propulsion from behind. The wish thus carries its meaning as well as its force. Its motive power lies in the conjunction of this meaning and force. We can now understand why William Lynch should hold that “to wish is the most human act.”⁴

ILLNESS AS THE INABILITY TO WISH

Further data are given for our enlarging of the significance of wish from another quarter. That is the fact of the illness, emptiness, and despair which is caused by a person’s inability to wish. T. S. Eliot shows this on a broad cultural scale in The Waste Land. The unforgettably vivid incidents in this epoch-making poem sing out over and over again, with the cumulative power of a symphony. The main character, a lady of leisure satiated with sex and luxury, says to her lover:

We can identify in the poem some of the characteristics of the contemporary emotional and spiritual wasteland. One is the desperate lack of communication: when the lady asks her lover why he does not talk to her, and implores him to tell her what he’s thinking, he answers only,

To cease wishing is to be dead, or at least to inhabit a land of the dead. Another characteristic is satiety: if wishes are thought of only as pushes toward gratification, the end consisting of the satisfying of the need, the poem is saying that emptiness and vacuity and futility are greatest where all wishes are met. For this means that one stops wishing.

But Eliot, writing poetically of the most unpoetic subjects, is more profound than that—and our psychology could well be also. He describes the underlying cause of this situation, in a word, as sterility. It is a literal sexual sterility in the particular myth he takes as the basis for his poem, the legend of a man called the Fisher King who ruled over a Waste Land. This very old legend has to do with fertility of land, spring following the “waste land” of winter; and later, the myth became worked into the King Arthur stories, the Holy Grail becoming the means of healing the Fisher King. “The land was barren and dry and was to remain so until a knight of purity should arrive to heal the Fisher King, who is wounded in the genital organs.”⁵ The essence of the sterility is futility, aimlessness, purposelessness, lack of zest in life; these are associated with the radical blocking off of consciousness. “It is the unawareness of the woman that is so terrible….”⁶ This, in turn, is interpreted by Eliot as due to a lack of faith, which in part comes from severing one’s self from the great symbolic experiences in the tradition of our historical culture. He sets his contemporary boudoir in a milieu of references to Shakespeare, Milton, and Ovid, but the woman has no awareness at all of the beauty that surrounds her. He sets the sexual affair amid allusions to the great passionate lovers of the past like Dido and Aeneas and Anthony and Cleopatra—but sex for this lady and her lover, far from being passionate, is no longer even a “futile panting palm to palm.”

Eliot is saying, in effect, that without faith we cannot want anymore, we cannot wish. And this includes sexual wants: without faith we become impotent, genitally as well as otherwise. The religious context of the poem can be interpreted in the terms I am using in this chapter—that there is a dimension of meaning expressed in the symbolism of the wish, that this is what gives the wish its specifically human quality, and that without this meaning, even the emotional and sexual aspects of wanting become dried up. The poem was written in 1922, early in the age of optimism when we believed that peace and prosperity were just around the corner and that it was only a matter of a few years’ progress until all our needs would be met; the “jazz age” of F, Scott Fitzgerald when the only pessimism was a romantic, nostalgic, self-pitying melancholy. Though this is the most discussed poem of our age, few people in that day, no matter how gripped by the poem they were, must have realized how predictive it was; and I would wonder if even Eliot knew how clinical psychotherapy would later substantiate his prediction of apathy and impotence.

Eliot, like a number of the existentialists, did not believe that an answer was yet possible in the culture in which he wrote the poem. The “time was not ripe,” in Heidegger’s terms; in Tillich’s Kairos not yet present. He has the Knight going only as far as the Chapel Perilous:

He does not see any real hope of revival at that time and, at the conclusion of the poem, the Fisher King is still

I find this turning of the Fisher King to technical pursuits very gripping, setting his “lands in order” as one does when anxiety blocks one’s deeper intentionality. The technical preoccupation is especially striking when set in juxtaposition to that powerful line, “London Bridge is falling down….” Though the time was obviously not ripe for an answer in 1922, it may be more ready for a resolution in our age.

There is in this poem, moreover, a kind of wishing that goes way below the question of the relieving of genitalia or the filling of the stomach. This is the imaginative yearning expressed in the “lidless eyes…waiting for a knock upon the door.” On its simplest plane, biologically and psychologically, we see echoed here the myth of Sleeping Beauty, waiting for the kiss of the prince. Except that the princess, in her naïveté, sleeps; whereas our lady, in her despair, has lidless eyes which cannot be closed in rest. On a deeper level, there seems to me in this “waiting for a knock upon the door” a profound wishing that still takes place in despair, a waiting that may be pictured as a wish for a state beyond despair, as is implied in Waiting for Godot. But it also has within it the hope for the way out, however latent, the dynamic beginning of the wish for constructive possibilities that transcend the emptiness, futility, and apathy.

LACK OF CAPACITY TO WISH

In the past few years, a number of persons in psychiatry and related fields have been pondering and exploring the problems of wishing and willing. We may assume that this confluence of concern must be in answer to a strong need in our time for new light on these problems.

In his penetrating interpretations of literature in its relation to depth psychology, Father William Lynch develops the thesis that it is not wishing which causes illness but lack of wishing. He holds that the problem is to deepen people’s capacity to wish, and that one side of our task in therapy is to create the ability to wish. He defines wish as a “positive picturing in imagination.”⁷ It is a transitive verb—to wish involves an act. There is an autonomous element in the wish which Lynch relates to an act of imagination; “every genuine wish is a creative act.”⁸ I find support for this in therapy: it is indeed a positive step when the patient can feel and state strongly, “I wish such and such.” This, in effect, moves the conflict from a submerged, unarticulated plane in which he takes no responsibility but expects God and parents to read his wishes by telepathy, to an overt, healthy conflict over what he wants. On the basis of the theological myth of creation, Lynch says, “God exults when man comes through with a wish of his own.”⁹

Lynch then goes on to point out something that is generally overlooked, namely that the wish in interpersonal relationship requires mutuality. This is a truth shown in its breach in many myths, and brings the person to his doom. Peer Gynt in Ibsen’s play runs around the world wishing and acting on his wishes; the only trouble is that his wishes have nothing to do with the other person he meets but are entirely egocentric, “encased in a cask of self, sealed up with a bung of self.” In The Sleeping Beauty, by the same token, the young princes who assault the briars in order to rescue and awaken the slumbering girl “before the time is ripe,” in the words of the fairy tale, are exemplars of behavior which tries to force the other in love and sex before the other is ready; they exhibit a wishing without mutuality. The young princes are devoted to their own desires and needs without relation to the Thou. If wish and will can be seen and experienced in this light of autonomous, imaginative acts of interpersonal mutuality, there is profound truth in St. Augustine’s dictum, “Love and do what you will.”

But Father Lynch, and certainly St. Augustine, were not naïve about human nature (just as Freud was not). They knew full well that this wishing is stated in ideal terms. They knew that the trouble is precisely that man does wish and will against his neighbor, that imagination is not only the source of our capacity to form the creative mutual wish but it is also bounded by the individual’s own limits, convictions, and experience; and, thus, there is always in our wishing an element of doing violence to the other as well as to ourselves, no matter how well analyzed we may be or how much the recipient of grace or how many times we have experienced satori. Lynch calls this the “willful” element, willful here being the insistence of one’s own wish against the reality of the situation. Willfulness, he holds, is the kind of will motivated by defiance, in which the wish is more against something than for its object. The defiant, willful act, says Lynch, is correlated with fantasy rather than with imagination, and is the spirit which negates reality, whether it be a person or an aspect of impersonal nature, rather than sees it, forms it, respects it, or takes joy in it.

The autonomous, spontaneous element in wishing and willing is also present in the significant new studies of will by the psychiatrist Leslie Farber.¹⁰ Dr. Farber demarcates two realms of “will,” the first consisting of an experience of the self in its totality, a relatively spontaneous movement in a certain direction. In this kind of willing, the body moves as a whole, and the experience is characterized by a relaxation and by an imaginative, open quality. This is an experience of freedom which is anterior to all talk about political or psychological freedom; it is a freedom, I would add, presupposed by the determinist and anterior to all the discussions of determinism. In contrast, the will of the second realm, as Dr. Farber sees it, is that in which some obtrusive element enters, some necessity for a decision of an either/or character, a decision with an element of an against something along with a for something. If one uses the Freudian terminology, the “will of the Super-Ego” would be included in this realm. Farber makes these contrasts, using will in this second sense: we can will to read but not to understand, we can will knowledge but not wisdom, we can will scrupulosity but not morality. This is illustrated in creative work. Farber’s second realm of will is the conscious, effortful, critical application to the creative endeavor, in preparing a speech for meeting or revising one’s manuscript, for example. But when actually giving the speech, or when hopefully creative “inspiration” takes over in our writing, we are engrossed with a degree of forgetfulness of self. In this experience, wishing and willing become one. One characteristic of the creative experience is that it makes for a temporary union by transcending the conflict.

Farber emphasizes that the temptation is for the second realm to take over the first; we lose our spontaneity, our free flow of activity, and will becomes effortful, controlled!—i.e., Victorian will power. Our error, then, in the words of Yeats, is that “will tries to take over the work of imagination.” As I understand it, what Farber is describing as will of the first category is very close to what Lynch calls “wish.” And they are both, Lynch in “wish” and Farber in his realm of “spontaneous will,” giving very good descriptions of something to which we shall devote our next chapter, intentionality.

I shall offer here some provisional definitions. Will is the capacity to organize one’s self so that movement in a certain direction or toward a certain goal may take place. Wish is the imaginative playing with the possibility of some act or state occurring.

But before we move on to more intricate questions, we must do two things. One is to block in a rough dialectic of the interrelation of will and wish. This is intended to show some of the phenomenological aspects that must be taken into consideration. “Will” and “wish” may be seen as operating in polarity. “Will” requires self-consciousness; “wish” does not. “Will” implies some possibility of either/or choice; “wish” does not. “Wish” gives the warmth, the content, the imagination, the child’s play, the freshness, and the richness to “will.” “Will” gives the self-direction, the maturity, to “wish.” “Will” protects “wish,” permits it to continue without running risks which are too great. But without “wish,” “will” loses its life-blood, its viability, and tends to expire in self-contradiction. If you have only “will” and no “wish,” you have the dried-up, Victorian, neopuritan man. If you have only “wish” and no “will,” you have the driven, unfree, infantile person who, as an adult-remaining-an-infant, may become the robot man.

WILLIAM JAMES AND WILL

The other task that must be done before exploring intentionality is to consider William James, that psychologist-philosopher American-man-of-genius, who struggled all his life with the problem of will. His experience will launch us on our way.

One of my esteemed colleagues, writing of James’s “severe depression” and the fact that “for a number of years he was on the verge of suicide,” asks us “not to judge him harshly” for those aspects of maladjustment.¹¹ I take a different view. I believe that understanding the depressions James suffered and the way he dealt with them increases our appreciation and admiration for him. True, all his life he was plagued by vacillation and an inability to make up his mind. In his last years, when he was struggling to give up his lecturing at Harvard, he would write in his diary one day, “Resign,” the next day, “Don’t resign,” and the third day, “Resign” again. James’s difficulty in making up his mind was connected with his inner richness and the myriad of possibilities for him in every decision.

But it was precisely James’s depressions—in which he would often write of his yearning for “a reason for wishing to live four hours longer”—which forced him to be so concerned with will, and precisely in the struggle against these depressions that he learned so much about human will. He believed—and, as a therapist, I believe that his judgment here is clinically sound—that it was his own discovery of the capacity to will which enabled him to live a tremendously fruitful life up to his death at sixty-eight, despite his depressions and his continual affliction with insomnia, eye troubles, back disorders, and so on. In our own “age of the disordered will,” as it has been termed, we turn to William James with eagerness to find whatever help he can give us with our own problem of will.

He begins his famous chapter on will, published in 1890,¹² by summarily dismissing wish as what we do when we desire something which is not possible for achievement, and contrasts it with will, which exists when the end is within our power. If with the desire there is a sense that attainment is not possible, we simply wish. I believe that this definition is one of the places where James’s Victorianism shows through; wishes are treated as unreal and childlike. Obviously, no wish is possible when we first wish it. It becomes possible only as we wish it in many different ways, and through considering it from this side and that, possibly over a great period of time, we generate the power and take the risk to make it happen.

But then James launches into what turns out to be one of the most thrilling treatises on will in literature, which I can only touch on. There is, first, the “primary” type, which is distinguished by the fact that it does not require a whole series of decisions. We decide to change our shirt or begin to write on a paper, and once we start, a whole series of movements is set going by itself; it is ideomotor. This “primary will” requires absence of conflict. James is here trying to preserve spontaneity. He is taking his stand against Victorian will power, the exercise of the separate faculty called “will power” which must have failed him dismally in his own life and led him into the paralysis which expressed itself in his depressions. Now we know in our day a lot more about this so-called “absence of conflict,” thanks chiefly to psychoanalysis, and that infinitely more is going on in states which seem without conflict.

He then touches on the “healthy will” which he defines as action following vision. The vision requires a clear concept and consists of motives in their right ratio to each other—which is a fairly rationalistic picture.¹³ Discussing unhealthy will, he rightly focuses on the obstructed will. One illustration of this that he cites is the state that exists when our eyes lose focus and we are unable to “rally our attention.” “We sit blankly staring and do nothing.” The objects of consciousness fail to touch the quick or break the skin. Great fatigue or exhaustion marks this condition; “and an apathy resembling that then brought about is recognized in asylums under the name of abulia as a symptom of mental disease.”¹⁴ It is interesting that he relates this apathy only to mental disease. I, for one, believe this is the chronic, endemic, psychic state of our society in our day—“The neurotic personality of our time.”

The question then boils down to, Why doesn’t something interest me, reach out to me, grasp me? And James then comes to the central problem of will, namely attention. I don’t know whether he realized what a stroke of genius this was. When we analyze will with all the tools modern psychoanalysis brings us, we shall find ourselves pushed back to the level of attention or intention as the seat of will. The effort which goes into the exercise of the will is really effort of attention; the strain in willing is the effort to keep the consciousness clear, i.e., the strain of keeping the attention focussed. The “once-born” type of well-adjusted person doesn’t need much effort, James comments, but heroes and neurotics need a lot. This leads him to a surprising, though very keen, statement of an identity between belief, attention, and will:

He then beguiles us with one of his completely human and earthy illustrations. I cite it in detail because I wish to come back to it in discussing the unfinished aspects of James’ concept of will:

He concludes that the moment the inhibition ceases, the original idea exerts its effect, and up we get. He adds, with typical Jamesian confidence, that “This case seems to me to contain in miniature form the data for an entire psychology of volition.”

Let us now take, for our special examination, James’s own example. We note that just when he gets to the heart of the problem of will in this illustration there comes a remarkable statement. He writes, “We suddenly find that we have got up.” That is to say, he jumps over the whole problem. No “decision at all occurs,” but only a “fortunate lapse of consciousness.”

But, I ask, what went on in that “fortunate lapse of consciousness”? True, the paralyzing bind of his ambivalence was released. But that is a negative statement and doesn’t tell us why anything else happened. Surely we cannot call this just a “lucky instant,” as James does, or a “happenstance!” If our basis for will rests on the mere “luck” or “happenstance,” our house is built upon the sands indeed, and we have no basis for will at all.

Now I do not mean to imply that so far James, in this example, has not said something. He has, and it is very important: the whole incident shows the bankruptcy of Victorian will power, will consisting of a “faculty” which is based upon our capacity to force our bodies to act against their desire. Victorian will power turned everything into a rationalistic, moralistic issue—e.g., the attraction of the warmth of the bed, the giving in to of which is ignominious, as opposed to the so-called “superego” pressure to be “upright,” that is, up and working. Freud described at length the self-deceit and rationalization involved in Victorian will power and, I believe, dethroned it once and for all. The example shows James’s own struggle against the paralyzing effects of Victorianism, in which the goal becomes twisted into a self-centered demonstration of one’s own character and the real moral issue gets entirely lost in the shuffle.

So we return to our crucial question. What went on in that “fortunate lapse of consciousness”? James only tells us that “we fall into some revery connected with the day’s life.” Ah, here lies our secret! Psychotherapy has brought us a good deal of data about that “revery” which James did not have—and I do not believe that we “fall” into it at all.

For purposes of clarity, I shall state here my own argument concerning the “unfinished business” in James’s concept of will. I propose that a whole dimension of experience is left out by James, as it is also omitted by us in contemporary psychology. The answer does not lie in James’s conscious analysis or in Freud’s analysis of the unconscious, but in a dimension which cuts across and includes both conscious and unconscious, and both cognition and conation.

To this dimension, which has been known historically as intentionality, we now turn.