As we have been exploring the deeper significance of wish, we have noticed that a curious theme has been constantly emerging. Something more is going on in a wish than meets the eye. This theme is implied when Lynch speaks of the “autonomous” element in wishing, or when he and Farber both speak of the relation of the wish to imagination and spontaneity. And the theme is present especially when we consider the meaning of the wish, that aspect of the wish in human beings that goes beyond mere force and is expressed in language, art, and other symbols. The same theme was also present as the big “X” which James leaped over in his illustration of getting out of bed on a cold morning.

This theme, running through our discussion like an obligato, is intentionality. By intentionality, I mean the structure which gives meaning to experience. It is not to be identified with intentions, but is the dimension which underlies them; it is man’s capacity to have intentions. It is our imaginative participation in the coming day’s possibilities in James’s example out of which comes the awareness of our capacity to form, to mold, to change ourselves and the day in relation to each other. James’s reverie as he lay in bed is a beautiful, albeit denied, expression of it. Intentionality is at the heart of consciousness. I believe that it is also the key to the problem of wish and will.

First, what does the term mean? We shall define it in two stages; the preliminary stage is the fact that our intentions are decisive with respect to how we perceive the world. This afternoon, for instance, I go up to see a house in the mountains. Suppose, first, that I am looking for a place which some friends can rent for the summer months. When I approach the house, I shall question whether it is sound and well-built, gets enough sun, and other things having the meaning of “shelter” to me. Or suppose that I am a real-estate speculator: then what will strike me will be how easily the house can be fixed up, whether it will bring a price attractively higher than what I shall have to pay for it, and other things meaning “profit.” Or let us say that it is the house of friends I am visiting: then I shall look at it with eyes which see it as “hospitality,”—its open patio and easy chairs which will make our afternoon talk more pleasant. Or, if this is a cocktail party at the house of friends who have snubbed me at a party at my house, I find myself seeing things that indicate that anyone would prefer my cottage to theirs, and other aspects of the invidious envy and “social status” for which we human beings are notorious. Or, finally, if this afternoon I am outfitted with my watercolor materials and bent on doing a sketch, I shall see how the house clings to the side of the mountain, the pattern of the lines of the roof leading up to the peaks above and sweeping away into the valley below, and, indeed, now I even prefer the house ramshackle and run down for the greater artistic possibilities this gives me.

In each one of these five instances, it is the same house that provides the stimulus, and I am the same man responding to it. But in each case, the house and experience have an entirely different meaning.

But this is only one side of intentionality. The other side is that it also does come from the object. Intentionality is the bridge between these. It is the structure of meaning which makes it possible for us, subjects that we are, to see and understand the outside world, objective as it is. In intentionality, the dichotomy between subject and object is partially overcome.

THE ROOTS OF INTENTIONALITY

The concept seems to me so important, and has been so neglected in contemporary psychology, that I ask the reader to go with me into an exploration of its meaning. Its roots are to be found in ancient thought: Aristotle said, “What is given to the eyes [in our terms, what is perceived] is the intention of the soul.” Cicero speaks of “the soul as the tension of the body.”¹ But the specific concept of intentionality itself was introduced into western thought by Arabic philosophers in early medieval times, and became central for the thought of the Middle Ages. It then meant how we know reality, that is, it was an epistemology. Two kinds of intentionality were made distinct: intensio primo, referring to knowing particular things—that is, objects which actually exist; and intensio secundo, the relations of these objects to general concepts—that is, knowing by conceptualization.

All of this presupposes that we could not know a thing unless we already, in some way, participated in it. For St. Thomas Aquinas, intentionality is what the intellect grasps about the thing understood. He states, in language unfortunately not made easier for us by the translator, “The intellect through a species of being informed in the act of intelligence, forms itself some intention of the understood thing.”² We note the words “being informed” in the passive voice, followed later by form in the active voice. I take this to mean that in the process of knowing, we are in-formed by the thing understood, and in the same act, our intellect simultaneously gives form to the thing we understand. What is important here is the word “in-form,” or “forming in.” To tell someone something, to in-form him, is to form him—a process that can sometimes become very powerful in psychotherapy by the therapist’s saying just one sentence, or one word, at the right moment. How different this is from the indoctrination many of us got in graduate school, that information is simply dry data, external to us, which we manipulate!

Intentionality thus begins as an epistemology, a way of knowing reality. It carries the meaning of reality as we know it.

Our theme is carried a giant step forward by Immanuel Kant’s “second Copernican revolution” in modern thought. Kant held that the mind is not simply passive clay on which sensations write, or something which merely absorbs and classifies facts. What really happens is that objects themselves conform to our ways of understanding.³ A good example of this is mathematics. These are constructs in our minds; but nature conforms, “answers,” to them. As Bertrand Russell was to say about physics a century and a half after Kant, “Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.”⁴ Kant’s revolution lay in making the human mind an active, forming participant in what it knows. Understanding, itself, is then constitutive of its world.

In the last half of the nineteenth century, the concept of intentionality was reintroduced by Franz Brentano, whose forceful lectures at the University of Vienna both Freud and Husserl attended. Brentano believed that consciousness is defined by the fact that it intends something, points toward something outside itself—specifically, that it intends the object. Thus, intentionality gives meaningful contents to consciousness.

Though Freud, so far as I know, never mentions Brentano in his writings, it is clear that he was more than just an anonymous auditor at Brentano’s lectures. There is evidence, I am told, of Freud’s active participation in the class, and also that Brentano at one time gave him a recommendation. It would seem to me that the intentionality implicit in Freud’s views is one of the not-too-rare cases of the influence of the ideas of one man on another in such a germane way that they become part and parcel of the second man’s thought and may seem to have always been his. Intentionality is built into the warp and woof of Freud’s approach to free association, dreams, and fantasies. The reason Freud does not mention the concept explicitly may be the same reason it has been left out of other aspects of our academic and scientific psychology; Freud wanted to establish a natural-science form of psychology for his psychoanalysis, and explicit intentionality—the “missing link” between mind and body—makes such a task infinitely more difficult, if not impossible. Take, for example, Freud’s endeavor to make an “economic” theory out of libido, with the significant variable being the changes in the economic quantities of excitation. One can assume a certain force, let us say, of sheer sexual desire, with glandular and neuromuscular correlates in the whole body as well as specific excitation in the sexual organs. But it turns out that a person’s libido is no fixed quantity at all, but rises and falls with the associations he or she has of the loved one and the father, mother, past lovers, et al., and that these symbolic meanings—which are qualitative—have more significance and force as a variable than the quantity of libido. Freud, indeed, was the one who, above all, taught us of these very meanings which destroy his own or any other sheer quantitative interpretation.

Edmund Husserl, the disciple of Brentano who was to become the father of modern phenomenology, extended the concept to the whole of our knowledge. Consciousness, he pointed out, never exists in a subjective vacuum but is always consciousness of something. Consciousness not only cannot be separated from its objective world, but, indeed constitutes its world. The upshot is that “meaning is an intention of the mind,” in Husserl’s words.⁵ The act and experience of consciousness itself is a continuous molding and remolding of our world, self related to objects and objects to self in inseparable ways, self participating in the world as well as observing it, neither pole of self or world being conceivable without the other. This, of course, does not mean that we cannot bracket for the moment the subjective or objective side of the experience. When I measure my house to see how much paint it will take to repaint it, or when I get a report on some endocrinological tests on my child, I bracket for the moment how I feel about it: I want only to understand as clearly as I can these measurements. But then my responsibility is to put these objective facts back into the context in which they have meaning for me—my project to paint my house, or my caring for the health of my child. I believe that one of our serious errors in psychology is to bracket out part of experience and never put it back together again.

Heidegger then took the next step by removing Husserl’s concept “out of the thin air” of Platonic idealism and extending it to the total feeling, valuing, acting human being. He did this by his concept of care (Sorge). Care is constitutive of our world in a sense analogous to Kant’s understanding. Man is the being, Heidegger says over and over again, who is concerned about Being. And when man fails to be, we could add from our therapeutic observations of states of conformism and depersonalization, he loses his being, that is, loses his potentialities. There is a close, inner relationship between caring and intentionality, suggested already by the fact that the root word “tend”—to take care of—is the center of the term intentionality.

A word itself embodies a cumulative, creative wisdom in that it is the product of centuries of molding, forming, and re-forming on the part of an infinite number of people who are trying to communicate something important to themselves and to the fellow members of their culture. Let us see what help we can find in understanding “intentionality” and its related terms “intend” and “intention” by tracking down their etymological sources.

All of these terms come from Latin stem intendere, which consists of in plus tendere, tensum, the latter, interestingly enough, meaning “to stretch,” and from which we get our word “tension.” This tells us immediately that intention is a “stretching” toward something.

Now a fact which may be surprising to many readers, as it was to me, is that the first meaning given for “intend” in Webster’s⁶ does not have to do with “purpose” or “design,” as when we say, “I intend to do something,” but is rather, “to mean, signify.” Only secondly does Webster give the definition “to have in mind a purpose or a design.” Most people in our voluntaristic Victorian tradition have tended to skip over the primary and central meaning and to use the concept only in its derivative meaning of conscious design and purpose. And since our psychology soon became able to prove that such conscious designs and purposes were mostly illusions and that we are not at all creatures of these nice, freely-chosen, voluntary plans, we were constrained to throw out the whole kit of “intents” with the caboodle of “intentions.” We had known already that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and we now saw that these intentions, good or bad, were figments of our own self-conceit anyway. But if you change “self-conceit” to “self-concern” and realize that there is no knowledge or act at all without this self-concern—that everything has its concern or intent in it; and that we know our world by virtue of these intents—if you make these shifts from the pejorative to the positive form of the same words, how different the implication is!

The more significant aspect of intention is its relation to meaning. We use this in one form in the legal phrase asking, What is the intent of the law? when referring to its meaning. “Intent” is “the turning of the mind toward an object,” Webster’s tells us in the first definition, “hence, a design, purpose.”⁷ The design and purpose come after the “hence.” That is to say, the voluntaristic aspects of the experience lie in the fact that already the mind is turned toward an object which has a certain import and meaning for us.

All the way through this etymology is, of course, that little word “tend.” It refers to movement toward something—tend toward, tendency. To me, it seems to be the core of our whole quest; its presence there in the center is a perpetual reminder that our meanings are never purely “intellectual” or our acts purely results of pushes from the past; but in both we are moving toward something. And mirabile dictu, the word also means, as we briefly saw, “to take care of”—we tend our sheep and cattle, and we tend to ourselves.

Thus, when Husserl says, “Meaning is an intention of the mind,” he includes both the meaning and the act, the movement toward something. He points out this dual meaning in the German language: the word meinung which signifies either opinion or meaning, has the same stem as the German verb meinen, “to intend.” In pondering the English language at this point, I was surprised—being brought up to think that the objective fact was the epitome of everything and occupied the place next to God if not indeed His Throne itself—to find that we also have that dual import. When I say, “I mean the paper is white,” you take my sentence as giving you merely a statement of fact; it is a unilateral equivalence, “A” is “B.” But when I say, “I mean to turn the corner, but the car skids,” you take my “mean” as my intention, a statement of my commitment and conviction. Only later will we see if I can make it come true.

The conclusion, therefore, to which our argument points is that every meaning has within it a commitment. And this does not refer to the use of my muscles after I get an idea in order to accomplish the idea. And most of all, it does not refer to what a behaviorist might say on reading these paragraphs, “Just as we’ve always said—the consciousness is only in the act anyway, and we might as well study only the muscular action, the behavior, to start with.” No, our analysis leads to exactly the opposite conclusion, that a sheer movement of the muscles, as the larynx in talking, is exactly what you don’t have. You have, rather, a human being intending something. And you cannot understand the overt behavior except as you see it in relation to, and as an expression of, its intention. Meaning has no meaning apart from intention. Each act of consciousness tends toward something, is a turning of the person toward something, and has within it, no matter how latent, some push toward a direction for action.

Cognition, or knowing, and conation, or willing, then go together. We could not have one without the other. This is why commitment is so important. If I do not will something, I could never know it; and if I do not know something, I would never have any content for my willing. In this sense, it can be said directly that man makes his own meaning. Note that I do not say that he only makes his meaning, or that it is not dialectically related at every instant to reality; I say that if he is not engaged in making his meaning, he will never know reality.

My task, so far, has been to define the concept of intentionality. I have emphasized that it contains both our knowing and our forming reality, and that these are inseparable from each other. From the point of view of intentionality, James’s reverie as he lies in bed is entirely sensible, and his sudden act of getting up is not at all a will-o’-the-wisp “lucky instant” or “fortunate happening,” but an understandable and reliable expression of his “connection with the day’s events.” It is his “imaginative participation” in the day and the events of the day, which is reaching out to him, grasping him, that accomplishes the getting up.

EXAMPLES FROM PSYCHOANALYSIS

I wish now to give some examples from psychoanalysis of the problem of intentionality. Take the fascinating instances of a patient who cannot perceive some obvious thing not because anything is wrong with his eyes or his neurological functioning or anything of that sort, but because the intentionality in which he is trapped makes it impossible for him to see it.

A patient of mine presented data the very first session that his mother tried to abort him before he was born, that she then gave him over to an old-maid aunt to raise the first two years of his life, after which she left him in an orphan’s home promising to visit him every Sunday, but rarely putting in an appearance. Now if I were to say to him—being naïve enough to think it would do some good—“Your mother hated you,” he would hear the words but they might well have no meaning whatever for him. Sometimes a vivid and impressive thing happens—such a patient cannot even hear the word, such as “hate,” even though the therapist repeats it. Suppose my patient is a psychologist or psychiatrist. He might then remark, “I realize all of this seems to say my mother didn’t want me, didn’t love me, but those are simply foreign words to me.” He is not prevaricating or playing a game of hide-and-seek with me. It is simply a fact: the patient cannot permit himself to perceive the trauma until he is ready to take a stand toward it.

This experience is surely not foreign to anyone: we sense that we shall be fired from our job, that someone we love will die imminently. But what goes on is a curious inner conversation with ourselves, “I know I will be able to see this later on, but I cannot see it now.” This is simply a way of saying, “I know it is true, but I cannot yet permit myself to see it.” The world can be too overwhelming if we are not able to take a stand toward a traumatic happening but also are unable to escape seeing it. Schizophrenia is one reaction to such a dilemma. Sometimes the therapist makes the mistake of setting out to drum into the patient’s head an obvious truth which the patient has not been able to admit—for example, telling a woman that she does not love her baby. What often happens then is that the patient, if she does not quit therapy, develops some other, probably worse, block between herself and reality.

Intentionality presupposes such an intimate relationship with the world that we would not be able to go on existing except if we could block the world out at times. This should not be called simply by the condemnatory term “resistance.” I do not doubt the reality of resistance, as Freud and others elucidated it, but I am emphasizing here a broader, structural phenomenon. That is, “every intention is an attention, and attention is I-can,” as Merleau-Ponty puts it.⁸ We are, therefore, unable to give attention to something until we are able in some way to experience an “I-can” with regard to it.

The same principle is evident, also in exceedingly interesting ways, in memory. Patients often need one or two years of analysis before they can remember some obvious event in their childhood. When they suddenly do recall the event, has their memory gotten better? Of course not. But what has happened is a change in the patient’s relation to his world, generally by way of his increased capacity to trust the therapist and, accordingly, himself, or there is a reduction of his neurotic anxiety for other reasons. His relation to intentionality—in contrast to his mere conscious intention, which was assumedly there to begin with—has changed. Memory is a function of intentionality. Memory is like perception in this regard; the patient cannot remember something until he is ready to take some stand toward it. “Recovery of childhood memories,” Franz Alexander puts it, “is not the cause but the result of analysis.”⁹

All of this hinges on the inseparability of knowing and willing, of cognition and conation, which we see nowhere more clearly than in psychotherapy. Patients come for therapy because they are aware that they cannot act in their lives because they don’t know—aren’t aware of drives from their “unconscious,” don’t know their own mechanisms, have never become conscious of the childhood genesis of these mechanisms, and so on. But if this is the only approach, the patient will lie there on the couch for eight or nine years, never acting because he doesn’t yet know enough; and psychoanalysis, in the words of Silvan Tomkins, becomes “systematic training in indecision.”

But it is also an error for therapy to reach in the opposite direction, as several schools have done of late, and insist that the function of the therapist is to clarify “reality” for the patient and get him to act accordingly. This makes the therapist the psychic policeman of the society, whose job is to help the patient conform to the mores of our particular historical period—about which it can only be said that, if they are still viable at all, they are of exceedingly dubious merit. Our only way to avoid both errors is to move the problem to the deeper plane of intentionality.

My thesis here is that the function of psychoanalysis should be to push “intention” toward the deeper, wider, organic dimension of intentionality. Has it not been always the function of psychoanalysis to demonstrate that there never is a purely conscious intention, that we—whether we literally are murderers or not—are always pushed by the “irrational,” daimonic, dynamic forces of the “dark” side of life that Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, as well as Freud, talked about? Freud dethroned deliberation as the motive for actions. Whatever we do, infinitely more than our “rational” reasons and justification is involved. Psychoanalysis gives the data that makes the necessary distinction, as well as the necessary connection, between intention and intentionality.

We must now pause to distinguish intentionality from “purpose” or “voluntarism.” Intentionality is a form of epistemology, which neither purpose nor voluntarism are. Intentionality involves response, which neither purpose nor voluntarism do. Not solipsistic, intentionality is an assertive response of the person to the structure of his world. Intentionality gives the basis which makes purpose and voluntarism possible.

A patient’s voluntary intention, so far as he is aware of it, may be to get to his hour with me on time, to tell me this or that important thing that has happened to him, to relax and be completely honest. But his unconscious intentions, in contrast, may well be to please me by playing the role of the “good patient,” or to impress me with how brilliant his free associations are, or to force my unconditioned attention by describing what catastrophic things he may do to himself and others. Intention is a psychological state; I can set myself voluntarily to do this or that. Intentionality is what underlies both conscious and unconscious intentions. It refers to a state of being and involves, to a greater or lesser degree, the totality of the person’s orientation to the world at that time. And what is most interesting is the times in psychotherapy when strong voluntary intention—correlated with “will power”—blocks the way to the person’s intentionality, and is just what keeps the patient from communicating with the deeper dimensions of his experience. Our William James, struggling there in bed with his Victorian will power and remaining paralyzed for as long as he struggled, is an engaging example. And as long as he struggled in that way, we could be sure that he would remain paralyzed.

Intentionality, as I am using the term, goes below levels of immediate awareness, and includes spontaneous, bodily elements and other dimensions which are usually called “unconscious.” This has positive as well as negative implications. For example, my intention at this moment is to put these ideas, which seem important to me, into readable form and to finish this chapter in the not-too-distant future. But unless I am participating in an intentionality which is more than that—i.e., unless I am committed to writing as good and true a book as I can—I shall accomplish only a pedestrian job. I shall produce nothing of genuine significance or originality. For in my pressure to get the chapter done, I will be blocking off new ideas which might well up in me, new insights and forms emerging from the preconscious and unconscious dimensions of experience. Intention goes with conscious purpose. But the gift of psychoanalysis is the depth dimension, a contribution which vastly enlarges intention, and indeed pushes it from a conscious purpose to the more total, organic, feeling and wishing man, the man who is the product of his past as well as moving toward the future. Psychoanalysis will not let intention rest as simple intention, but pushes it to the deeper, wider, organic plane of intentionality.

We have said that intentionality gives the underlying structure for wishing and willing. Speaking psychoanalytically, intentionality gives the structure within which repression and the blocking off of conscious intentions takes place. Freud made it undeniably clear, in his use of “free association,” that associations which seem merely random are not at all random. In free association, the thoughts and memories and fantasies take their form, their pattern, their meaningful theme (which the patient, or any one of us engaging in free association not on the couch but in normal thinking and creativity, may not at all catch at the moment) from the fact that they are his fantasies, his associations, coming out of his way of perceiving the world and his commitments and problems. It is only afterwards that the person himself can see and absorb the meaning that has been in these apparently random, disconnected things he is saying. Free association is a technique of going beyond mere conscious intention and giving one’s self over to the realm of intentionality. It is in the basic, more inclusive realm of intentionality that these deeper meanings lie; but it is also here where we find the patient’s reasons for his repression in the first place. I believe that the long-run impact of Freud and psychoanalysis will be to deepen and enlarge our understanding of intentionality.

PERCEPTION AND INTENTIONALITY

On the desk before which I sit lies a sheet of paper. If I have in mind to make some notes on the paper for my manuscript, I see the sheet in terms of its whiteness; has it already been scribbled upon? If my intention is to fold it into a toy plane for my grandson, I see the paper in its sturdiness. Or if my intent is to draw a picture on it, I see the rough, coarse-grained texture of the paper inviting my pencil and promising to make my lines more interesting. It is the same piece of paper in each case, and I am the same man responding to it. But I see three entirely different pieces of paper. It makes no sense, of course, to call this “distortion”: it is simply an example of the infinite variety of meanings a given event, a given pattern of stimulus and response, can have.

An intention is a turning of one’s attention toward something. In this sense, perception is directed by intentionality. This can be illustrated by the fact that consciousness consists of a figure-ground constellation. If I look at the tree, the mountain is a background; if I look at the mountain, the reverse is the case: the mountain then becomes the figure and the rest the foreground. The selective, either/or character of perception is one aspect of intentionality: I cannot look at one thing at this instant without refusing to look at another. To say “yes” means for that moment I must say “no” to something else. This is one example of how conflict is of the essence of consciousness. The conflict, which is part and parcel of intentionality, is the beginning of volition, and the beginning of volition is present in the structure of consciousness itself.

But we must now hasten to say that this selecting process—I look here rather than there—is not at all simply a using of neck and eye muscles to turn the head and line of vision in my picking out the object to which I attend. A more intricate and much more interesting process is occurring. It is the inner process of conceiving the object so that I can perceive it. Such is the amazingly intimate interrelation of my subjective experience with what goes on in the objective world: I cannot perceive something until I can conceive it. Professor Donald Snygg has reminded us of that memorable event when the people in a primitive society were unable to see Captain Cook’s ship when it sailed into their harbor because they had no word, no symbol, for such a ship.¹⁰ What they did perceive I do not know—possibly a cloud or animal; but at least it was something they did have a symbol for. Language, or the symbolizing process, is our way of conceiving that we may perceive.

The word “conceive” is used in our society to mean to become pregnant, and the analogy is not inappropriate. For the act of perceiving also requires the capacity to bring to birth something in one’s self; if one cannot, or for some reason is not yet ready, to bring to birth in himself some position, some stance toward what he is seeing, he cannot perceive it. From our examples in psychoanalysis, it is clear that the patient cannot get insights, perceive truths about himself and his life, until he is ready to take some stand toward the truth, until he is able to conceive them.

The stem of both perceive and conceive is the Latin capere, which means to take, to seize. Even the word “apprehend” has the same active rather than passive quality, coming as it does from prehendere, to seize with the hand. (How far removed this is—the wisdom inhering in the evolution of these words—from the passive picture most of us had learned about perception, namely, of a stimulus occuring and making an imprint upon the retina!) The sexual as well as the pregnancy analogy is not out of place: both perception and conception are an active forming of the world that goes on in the intercourse between the living being, man, and the world to which he is related. The new idea is born, the new view of Cézanne’s trees is created, the new technical invention is made. Consciousness creates in the sense that it conceives its knowledge; but this is a continuous reciprocal, attracting and counter-attracting, responsive relationship between subject and object, not unlike sexual intercourse. It is not the mere relation between master and slave. If we take the time-honored metaphor of the sculptor and his clay, we must see that the clay also forms the sculptor; the clay conditions what he does, limits and even changes his intentions, and, thus, also forms his potentialities and consciousness.

If intentionality is a significant process in perception, as I believe it is, more is the misfortune that the dimension has been left out of consideration in psychological studies. Instead of leaving it specifically out of the picture—which I think in itself has contaminated our work—we ought to figure intentionality directly in. This means taking account of the experimenter’s bias. Robert Rosenthal has already demonstrated how the expectations, the “intentions” of the experimenter, do influence the results.¹¹ We should also figure in the intentionality of the human subjects in any experiment. What underlies the intentions of your colleagues in participating in your experiment? What is the intentionality of the subjects in the classroom to whom you are giving the Thematic Apperception Test? It has been amazing, indeed, that we have seemed to believe that these things would not make any difference.

In any case, may I emphasize that time and again, when reading psychological studies, I have the conviction that the psychologist is studying something different from what he thinks he is studying. He will not actually know what he is getting unless he can clarify on the level of intentionality the situation of the participating persons.

This takes us to the threshold of the relation of the body to intentionality. But before we cross that threshold, however, we must clear up a common misunderstanding. Intentionality is not to be confused with introspection. It is not a looking into or at ourselves to find such and such. It is not a looking that transforms me into an object. It does not have to do with “spection,” as Paul Ricoeur points out, or splitting me into a “spectator” and “actor.” The common tendency to connect intentionality with introspection is another comment on how difficult it is in our day to get over the habit, after Descartes’ original dichotomy, of making everything into object or subject. Intentionality is shown in the act itself. By my act I reveal myself, rather than by looking at myself. The imputation that is correlated with intentionality is not a speculative matter, but an act which, because it always involves responding, is responsible.

THE BODY AND INTENTIONALITY

Victorian man used his will to push down and suppress what he called “lower” bodily desires. But one surely cannot be a man of decision without taking bodily desires into consideration. Our discussion of wish in the previous chapter indicates that bodily wishes must be brought into integration with will, or else the one will block the other. The body consists of the muscular, neurological, and glandular correlates of intentionality, such as increased adrenalin secretion when we are enraged and want to strike something, increased speed of heart beat when we are anxious and want to run, engorgement of the sexual organs when we are sexually excited and want to have intercourse. In therapy, when a patient in a given hour is blocked off from his wishes and intentionality in general, a good place to start is for the therapist simply to help the patient become aware of his bodily feelings and his bodily state at that moment.

William James was very much concerned with the body. We can see this in his staunch insistence on the importance of sensations and on his view of emotions as the perception of inner bodily changes. There is a parallel in the preoccupation of that other Victorian, Freud, with sex and instinct. In each of these men, we see the Victorian’s endeavor to come to terms with a body from which their culture had alienated them. Each dealt with the body as a tool, an instrument, unaware that this is an expression of the very alienation he sought to overcome.

When I was ill with tuberculosis two and a half decades ago, I found that my inherited “will power” was strangely ineffective. In those days, the only cure was bed rest and carefully graduated exercise. We could not will ourselves to get well, and the “strong-willed,” dominating type of person sick with TB generally got worse. But I found that listening to my body was of critical importance in my cure. When I could be sensitive to my body, “hear” that I was fatigued and needed to rest more, or sense that my body was strong enough for me to increase my exercise, I got better. And when I found awareness of my body blocked off (a state similar to what patients have in analysis when they say they are not “with it”), I got worse. This may seem like a poetic and “mystical” viewpoint for someone seriously ill to be indulged in, but actually it was a hard-rock, empirical issue of whether I would live or die. As far as I could judge, this was true for the other patients as well. This bodily awareness sometimes comes spontaneously, but by no means necessarily so. “Will is a listening,” Pfanders states,¹² which brings to mind particularly the “listening” to the body. In our society, it often requires considerable effort to listen to the body—an effort of sustained “openness” to whatever cues may come from one’s body. In recent years, the work of the body re-educationalists, the teachers of exercise and of Yoga, have brought out the significant interrelation between the capacity to listen to the body and psychological well-being. The presence of volition is betrayed in the phrases we use, such as I “accept” fatigue, I “agree” to rest, I “consent” to follow my physician’s (or teacher’s) recommendation, I “adopt” a regimen. There is, therefore, a willing which is not merely against bodily desires but with the body, a willing from within; it is a willing of participation rather than opposition.

“Will moves through desire,” said Aristotle. The fact that my desires are felt and experienced in my body, with all the glandular changes that go therewith—the fact that they are embodied desires—means that I cannot escape taking some stand in regard to them. That is to say, if I have a wish, I cannot avoid willing about it, even if only to deny that I have the wish. Pure detachment works only if we can disengage our bodies. Hence, the outright denial of awareness of wishes generally involves doing violence to one’s body.

My body is an expression par excellence of the fact that I am an individual. Since I am a body, separate from others as an individual entity, I cannot escape putting myself on the line in some way or other—or refusing to put myself on the line, which is the same issue. One may try to conform to someone else psychologically, be an imprint of the other in ideas; but Siamese twins bodily are very rare. The patient who cannot experience himself as bodily separate from another, say his mother, is generally representative of a serious pathological illness, often of the schizophrenic kind. The fact that my body is an entity in space, has this motility and this particular relation to space which my movements give it, makes it a living symbol of the fact that I cannot escape in some way or other “taking a stand.” Will, as Paul Ricoeur emphasizes, is embodied will. Thus, so many words having to do with will refer to our physical place—“taking a position,” accepting a “viewpoint,” choosing an “orientation.” Or we say that someone is “upright,” “straight,” or the opposite, “prone,” “cringing,” “ducking,” all referring to will and decision as shown through the position of the body. Peer Gynt in Ibsen’s play could never become an individual self so long as he followed the spirit of the Boyg and went “around,” walked “crooked” he achieved some selfhood only when he walked “straight through,” as Ibsen expresses the stance of the man of single-minded will.

Even more interesting is the body as a language of intentionality. It not only expresses intentionality; it communicates it. When a patient comes in the door of my consulting room, intentionality is expressed in his way of walking, his gestures; does he lean toward me or away? Does he talk with a half-closed mouth; and what does his voice say when I stop listening to the words and listen only to the tone? Not only in the therapeutic hour but in real life as well our communication has, much more than we are aware of it, the subtle character of the dance, the meaning communicated by virtue of the forms we continuously create by our bodily movements.

In their research at Wisconsin with schizophrenics, Carl Rogers and his associates give some vivid pictures of intentionality and the body with patients who could not or would not communicate, at least for some months, except through the language of the body. Eugene Genlin tells, for example, of coming to the ward to do therapy with a hostile patient who would never speak.¹³ At first, the patient immediately ran away at Dr. Genlin’s coming. Then, the patient remained longer before running, and finally stood there for the hour while Genlin stood beside him. In his fugitive flutter of his eyes at moments of fear, in the tremor of his mouth hovering on the verge of crying or smiling, in all these expressions, there is a language which can be more significant, and is surely more eloquent, than most spoken words. Obviously, it communicates much more than the bright intellectualized talking of the sophisticated patient who chatters for months in order to avoid awareness of his own underlying feelings.

WILL AND INTENTIONALITY

In one of his sonnets, Shakespeare writes of his going to bed at night weary with the day’s travel. He continues,

In this use of the word intend, Shakespeare has the act already present in the intention. In our day, we would say “intend to make a zealous pilgrimage to thee” we see the act as separate, as something which must be brought in explicitly, something added after you’ve put your mind to it, made a decision. Shakespeare wrote when English, as is always the case with languages in their classical periods, had a special vitality and power which was characterized by the inseparability of intent and act. Our later language reflects the dichotomy between mind and body: we assume that the intent and act are separate as a matter of course; we have to state the “making” by itself. The emphasis in this chapter has been that Shakespeare’s usage represents not only the more poetic but the more accurate version psychologically. It is what we experience prior to the artificial abstraction. The separation of intention and act is an artificial posture and does not accurately describe human experience. The act is in the intention, and the intention in the act.

Professor Paul Ricoeur offers the following example.¹⁵ I am taking a trip. The trip is not just an objective matter—i.e., as seeing myself already there. It is also to be done, a project to be done by me. It is a possibility for realization by me as much as lies in my power. Ricoeur points out that in this projecting of a trip, we are dealing with future structures, but it is not accurate to say disparagingly that this is “just” subjective. It is not less objective because it has to do with the future, with nonresolved structures. It is an unjustified reduction on the part of Wittsgenstein and the positivists—and the behaviorists are to be included at this point—to make the world only out of objective facts. “I can” is part of the world. This point is particularly important in therapy, for patients come to us because they cannot say “I can,” but only “I can’t.” In order to understand the “I can’t,” we must also see the “I can” behind it, of which it is the negation.

It cannot have escaped the reader’s attention, as it has not mine, that all through this chapter the word “will,” in connection with intentionality, is also the same word we use for the future tense in English. Will and intentionality are intimately bound up with the future. Both meanings—simple future, something will happen; and personal resolve, I will make it happen—are present in varying degrees in each statement of intentionality. “I will come to New York in September” may have very little of resolve and be almost entirely a simple statement of the future. But “I will get married” or “I will write a poem” are much less a comment on the future and mostly a statement of a resolve. The future does not consist of simply a state of time which is going to occur, but contains the element, “I will make it so.” Power is potentiality, and potentiality points toward the future: it is something to be realized. The future is the tense in which we promise ourselves, we give a promissory note, we put ourselves on the line. Nietzsche’s statement, “Man is the only animal who can make promises,” is related to our capacity to posit ourselves in the future. We are reminded here also of William James’s fiat, “Let it be so.” The hopelessness of many patients, which may be expressed in depression, despair, feelings of “I can’t,” and related helplessness, can be usefully seen, from one point of view, as the inability to see or construct a future.¹⁶

It is in intentionality and will that the human being experiences his identity. “I” is the “I” of “I can.” Descartes was wrong in his famous sentence, “I think, therefore, I am,” for identity does not come out of thinking as such, and certainly not out of intellectualization. Descartes’s formulation leaves out, as we have previously indicated, exactly the variable that is most significant; it jumps from thought to identity, when what actually occurs is the intermediate variable of “I can.” Kierkegaard mocked Hegel’s similarly oversimplified and intellectualistic solution that “potentiality goes over into actuality” when he proclaimed that potentiality does go into actuality, but the intermediate variable is anxiety. We could rephrase it, “potentiality is experienced as mine—my power, my question—and, therefore, whether it goes over into actuality depends to some extent on me—where I throw my weight, how much I hesitate,” and so on. What happens in human experience is “I conceive—I can—I will—I am.” The “I can” and “I will” are the essential experiences of identity. This saves us from the untenable position in therapy of assuming that the patient develops a sense of identity and then acts. On the contrary, he experiences the identity in the action, or at least in the possibility for it.

I have elsewhere pointed out that anxiety and potentiality are two sides of the same experience.¹⁷ When potentiality for sexual intercourse emerges at adolescence, the young person not only feels zest and self-worth at his new powers, but also normal anxiety, since these powers will now involve him in a complex pattern of relationships, some potentially very important, in which he will have to act. Normal, constructive anxiety goes with becoming aware of and assuming one’s potentialities. Intentionality is the constructive use of normal anxiety. If I can have some expectations and possibility of acting on my powers, I move ahead. But if the anxiety becomes overwhelming, then the possibilities for action are blotted out. Thus Paul Tillich points out that pronounced neurotic anxiety destroys intentionality, “destroys our relationship to meaningful contents of knowledge or will.” This is the anxiety of “nothingness.” Without intentionality we are indeed “nothing.”

Tillich goes on, interestingly enough, to relate intentionality to vitality, and then to courage:

Overwhelming anxiety destroys the capacity to perceive and conceive one’s world, to reach out toward it to form and re-form it. In this sense, it destroys intentionality. We cannot hope, plan, promise, or create in severe anxiety; we shrink back into a stockade of limited consciousness hoping only to preserve ourselves until the danger is past. Intentionality and vitality are correlated by the fact that man’s vitality shows itself not simply as a biological force, but as a reaching out, a forming and re-forming of the world in various creative activities. The degree of one’s intentionality can thus be seen as the degree of one’s courage. Tillich describes the Greek concept of arête, meaning a combination of strength and value, and the Roman virtus, having a similar union of masculine strength and moral nobility. “Vitality and intentionality are united in this ideal of human perfection, which is equally removed from barbarism and from moralism.”¹⁹

Taking a final lead from the origin of the word itself, we can go further and relate intentionality to “intensity” of experience, or to the degree of “intentness” in life. There have been a number of attempts to identify what we mean by vitality in the psychological sphere: such words as “aliveness” and so on are used, but without anyone’s having much conviction that he has said anything. Does not intentionally give us a criterion for defining psychological vitality? The degree of intentionality can define the aliveness of the person, the potential degree of commitment, and his capacity, if we are speaking of a patient, for remaining at the therapeutic task.