In turning now to therapy, we have a twofold purpose. First, to arrive at some suggestions on how intentionality and will may be used in clinical work with people in psychological difficulty. Second, to see what light the practical examples cast upon the question which is still most important, namely, What are intentionality and will? Psychotherapy should give us a spring of data, the richness and depth of which are unique, on how wish, will, and intentionality are experienced by living, feeling, suffering people.

In our discussion of intentionality, I may have given—against my intention!—the impression that there was an ideal way of willing, a willing by participation, which puts one in harmony with one’s body and world. That is one realm of wishing and willing. But what of the conflict of will? Surely this conflict remains and requires us to push on to another realm. As William James touchingly puts it, the simple, once-born person may have little of it, but the hero and the neurotic have plenty—as he had reason to know. Neurosis can roughly be defined as a conflict between two ways of not fulfilling one’s self. To borrow James’s example, neither staying in bed because it’s warm, nor getting up to demonstrate your own noble character adds a mite to your stature. If James had been my patient and began an hour with a story of such a conflict about getting out of bed, I would have agreed immediately—silently or outspokenly—with his wish: it is nice to lie in a warm bed on a cold morning. Furthermore (and perhaps more to the point), it brings the added satisfaction of demonstrating one’s autonomy by protesting against that rigid society which orders you to be up and working. And perhaps staying in bed expresses both horns of James’s dilemma toward his father—that extraordinary man who loved much but required much. Only by admitting and affirming the immediate wish can we get to the deeper level of what he genuinely wishes—that is, to the events of the day.

Therapy, in clarifying the intentionality of the patient, shifts the fight to the real battlefield. It helps the patient and ourselves to fight the conflict on grounds in which a genuine fulfillment is possible; it shifts the struggle to one between authentic fulfillment and nonfulfillment. The reverie which William James fell into concerning the possibilities of the day, which I have insisted is not a chance “fall,” shows that on the level of intentionality, he was indeed a man who obviously had a profoundly vital interest in living and a dedication to what he could do.

My task as a therapist is to be conscious, as best I can, of what the intentionality of the patient is in a particular session. And if the session is not simply one in a fairly consistent progression but represents some crisis, as many hours do, my task is to draw out this intentionality so that the patient cannot escape becoming aware of it too. And that, very often, is no easy task.

CASE OF PRESTON

The session from which I will now give some verbatim quotations was one which took place in the seventh month of analysis.^* The patient, a writer, one of whose symptoms was a fairly steady and sometimes exceedingly severe “writer’s block,” was a sophisticated and gifted man of forty. He had had five years of previous analysis before coming to me.

The previous analysis had helped him to some extent; he was now able to hold down a job, having before lived off his wife’s inherited income. But he still had severe anxiety, depression, and sexual problems. (For reasons I won’t go into, the previous analyst felt that these could not be cured.) In any case, when he wrote to me a month after breaking off with the previous therapist in a state of painful, almost incapacitating tension and despair, I agreed to see him. My motives for deciding to work with him were partly because of the challenge offered by this kind of person of inner resources and stature who hasn’t gotten help, at least in a basic sense, from his previous analysis. Therapy ought to be able to help persons of this kind, and if it doesn’t, we should know why. The fact that he was a very sophisticated person who knew almost everything about the field is partly why I was more active and challenging during this hour than I would be with some other patients.

If I may state at the outset a conclusion related to our discussion here: I now believe that one reason psychoanalysis doesn’t “take,” doesn’t get to the basis of the problems of persons like Preston in a certain number of cases, is that the intentionality of the patient is not reached. He, therefore, never fully commits himself, is never fully in the analysis, never has a full encounter.

Five months before the session I now report took place, he had arrived at an hour in great perturbation over his struggle, which had gone on for several weeks, to finish writing an important article. In that session, I felt that he desperately wanted help, and —varying my technique, as I often do—I had plunged directly and specifically into the practical problem of his block, asking what went on as he sat down at the typewriter and so on. After that hour, he had gone back to his studio and had written what he judged was the best article he had ever done, a verdict later borne out objectively. I mention this prior incident because it probably had something to do with his conscious intentions in contrast to his intentionality in the hour I am now presenting.

When he came in this hour, he threw himself on the couch and sighed audibly.

This was said in a lackadaisical, disinterested voice, his mouth barely open as he talked. After sighing considerably he went on:

During the first fifteen minutes of this hour, I was almost entirely silent, trying to hear, naïvely and simply, what he was doing in these communications. What does he want? What is he after this morning? Is he asking for help, as was the case in the similar hour five months ago? When I heard his lackadaisical tone, I did not think so. We cannot conclude that he wishes help with the problem of writing in the face of all these remarks, “I’m not interested in it,” and “Somehow it would write itself.” Nevertheless, he is very upset; this is obvious and genuine. Does he want some magical intervention to do it for him? There is certainly an element of this in Preston’s style of life: the first dream he had reported in the analysis, which had come in the second week, was of his being in a hospital and being given a truth serum. At first it didn’t work; then he felt dizzy, and he and the attendant believed it was working; but he then, at the end of the dream, was afraid that “what would come out would not be what they wanted to hear.” I believed there was an element of this present today, and that he needed to make himself “dizzy” in a masochistic way to “receive the magic.” But I did not think this was the main thing going on. Besides, there is that arresting sentence in the early dream—that he was afraid what would come out would not be what they wanted to hear. This is a striking way of saying that the magic is not the issue, but “what would come out”—his concealed attitude and feelings toward the “they” (including centrally me, the giver of the serum in the dream). This is his intentionality, as we have been using the term here. And the fact that this came up in a dream, and, therefore, under less conscious distortion, made me take it with special concern.

As I was trying to hear what was going on today, I then recalled his manner of walking in and throwing himself on the couch at the beginning of the hour. I had picked up the feeling, without my being consciously aware of it at that time, that he seemed to be angry. This was now supported by his way of talking, his mouth mostly closed, emitting words between clenched teeth. My hypothesis, accordingly, was that what was going on was anger, or more specifically, rage at me.

Should I interpret to him what I sensed? If I had, he probably would have nodded his head, agreed, and nothing would have happened, except that he would retreat a little more solidly behind his stockade, possibly showing some half-covert irritation. Or he would say that I was simply wrong, and again we’d be at the same point. If the intentionality is anger or is in other ways negative, rational discussion is ruled out by definition. We cannot draw out intentionality by a verbal interpretation as such. Preston makes the point more than clear for us by that marvelous symbol, “I’m a self-seal tire.” Whatever prick he is given will affect him no more than it would such a tire, and he will be sealed right up again.

I must, rather, make him experience his anger with me, get him to live out with me what he is doing. It is arrogant for me, as therapist, to think that the patient goes through all these writhings and sufferings just for my benefit: but I happen to be the other person in the room with him at the moment, the personal embodiment of his interpersonal world. Thus I am the one the intentionality is directed toward, played out with, regardless of all the genetic transference elements in it. I am with him here both as a real person in my own right and as a representative of the world of persons in relation to whom he can experience and live out his conflicts in his intra and interpersonal world.

After the first quarter of an hour, the following exchanges then took place between us.

I felt this reference to “no center in his life,” which could well have come out of some of my own writing which he had read, was bait to hook me into a discussion with him. I responded merely, “Yup.”

What I want to do by bringing out that he is “dumping it in my lap” will be obvious to the reader: I am making him confront his fiction that “it will write itself,” he “has nothing to do with it.” I am spotlighting his intentions in order to make him experience the conflict between those and his intentionality. He came this morning assumedly with the intention of getting help with the problem of his writing block. But we saw at the very beginning of the hour the clear contradiction between his lackadaisical attitude and tone of voice and the fact that he is really suffering and up against a serious problem. These two themes are contradictory on the level of intention; but they must have some unity and be both encompassed in whatever is his intentionality. This whole part of the hour can be seen as this conflict between intention and intentionality coming into the open and inescapably experienced with whatever affect goes along with it (in this case, rage). When I say, “If there’s no man at the typewriter, who’s going to write it?” the obvious answer from him would be, “You, May, will write it for me” (cause it magically to be written). But when this is drawn into the open, it is so patently absurd that he doesn’t say it. When the conflict does come out clearly, Preston then utters that fascinating statement about will. If I had discussed this with him, what would have turned out would be useless intellectualization and we’d miss the point: but if we take it in the context, we find him beautifully stating the contradition between what he thought he wanted consciously (intention) and his “underlying will” (intentionality). Intelligent persons like Preston, in the heat of affect in psychoanalysis, often utter quite amazing insights without any realization of the import of what they are saying. I think his sentence, “Will is all unconscious anyway” is such a statement.

If the reader accuses me of “trapping” the man, I would answer, Yes, that’s exactly what I am trying to do—or, more accurately, trapping the conflict, and thus forcing it into the open. If my hypothesis is wrong—that is, if I misread what was going on and it was not anger at me—these sentences would simply fall like seeds on stone: he would not react. Or he would simply tell me that I’m wrong and perhaps then point out what was going on; or he might react with greater despair and hopelessness. If the therapist is wrong about the intentionality, the upshot is that the therapeutic exchanges simply don’t work.

When this patient experiences the full impact of the conflict in consciousness, he turns in an accusing rage on me—I haven’t helped him at all; he’s just as bad as when he came to me. This rage is certainly to be expected: we see it in prototype in Oedipus’ rage at Tiresias, when Tiresias was the voice by which Oedipus’ conflict came into full consciousness.

The tapescript goes on from that last interchange:

After this rage experienced in the encounter with me, my statement, “What do you want me to do?” is, I think, very important. It is one of those questions—“What do you wish from me today?” or the slightly more shocking one, “Why did you come today?”— which I often ask, and not infrequently when the patient directs a hostile question at me. It is a direct way of bringing out his intentionality. If I had tried to do this before he fully experienced his rage, he would have sloughed it off with a platitude: isn’t it obvious that he wants me to help him with his writing block? But now that the question cannot be avoided, the first real despair of the hour emerges.

At this point of despair, I make a summary interpretation.

His tone of voice, which of course isn’t conveyed in the type, is entirely different in the next response from the lackadaisical, do-my-bidding-god-damn-you tone of the first part of the hour. He speaks now with an open mouth and with earnestness, wanting to communicate.

This illustrates what was said in the previous chapter, that the therapist takes the patient in terms of the “I can” behind his “I can’t.” I don’t imply, of course, that our verbalizing to the patient the “I can” side is going to help, or even that we necessarily should verbalize it; it may take a long time before the “I can” is a practical possibility and can be realized by him. My point is that the patient can discuss and talk about the “I can’t” from now till doomsday without the talk being viable at all, or having power to change him or even to give him emotional relief, unless the “I can” is part of the polarity. It is the “I can” that makes talking about the “I can’t” dynamic, makes it hurt, and draws upon some motivation to change. Otherwise “I can’t” is resignation, and may have, at first, a kind of bittersweet, nostalgic, and romantically cynical satisfaction, but soon becomes merely empty and mocking.

When the patient is genuinely helpless and despairing, I would not challenge him in this way, for obvious reasons—the chief one being that he would not need it. What is important here is that the “I can’t write” is used by Preston as a strategy to crack the whip over my head. It is a cover for the real “I can’t,” which is not “I can’t write,” but “I can’t afford to get well, or I’ll be turned out, abandoned, unloved,” as he later puts it. It is a serious threat to patients when you believe in their “I can,” even though you don’t do this at all exhortatively or moralistically, but simply as a realistic belief stemming from knowledge (and some healthy faith) that people do change and grow. The reason it is a threat is not simply that it makes him responsible; it is the more subtle and profound threat that he has no world to which he can orient himself. My not fitting into the world he has continuously built for himself all his life severely shakes his self-world relationship.

Later in the hour he goes on, most of this part of the session crying:

In the remainder of the session, he brings out the feelings he has had about people loving him only because of his fame, and his contradictory fear that if he becomes more famous, he will not be loved. His own inner conflict—the intrapsychic aspect which comes out when the interpersonal encounter is engaged—is well expressed in the following sentence taken from this last part: “I function like a mirror—two persons, one in one direction, one in the other.”

How shall we summarize what is occurring here? There is first the conscious intention of the patient. It was, so far as he was aware of it, “I find myself blocked in my task of writing; I feel like hell over being blocked.” He was not aware that the feeling-like-hell is anger and resentment over the fact that he should be up against such a problem to begin with, but would feel it as a generalized upset with the resulting intent, “I shall make an emergency appeal to get Dr. May to do something about this.”

Then, as I see it, we arrive at his intentionality, his way of relating to me as a whole, which was present when he came in, though on a level of unawareness. It consisted of anger and resentment against me, an aggressive cracking of the whip, which he unwittingly reveals to us in that nice symbol, “I’m a theater director here.” It took the form of a struggle to get me to take over, to put the writing on my shoulders, and so on. I liken this to the demands of a small child in bed; the Prince commanding the adults to serve him and being enraged, meanwhile, that his promise (which assumedly he got from his mother) is not fulfilled. The rage which comes out is, on one side, rage that he should be in such a block, a humiliating insult added to injury since the Prince should be able to wave his wand, the pen, and turn out great writing. He could not have verbalized what I have just described if I had asked him at the beginning of the hour; yet I would hesitate to call it “unconscious.” It was being lived out, present in the language of his bodily movements, spoken symbolically in his way of relating to me. It is the bridge connecting varying levels of awareness and consciousness.

But then something comes out which can properly be called unconscious—the repressed element in his saying that the play he saw the night before had nothing to do with his upset. When I refuse to go along with “I can’t,” the repressed memory comes out. In my judgment, only after the encounter with me could one break through this repression. He was then able to remember that the play he saw did have a good deal to do with his conflict, and no doubt much to do with why he had the severe block this particular morning. (“If I write well and succeed, father won’t love me.”)

In the last third of the hour, the problems of intrapsychic conflicts appear. His anger has under it a yearning to be loved, the fear of being thrown out and abandoned; the only way one can be loved, especially by women, is by being sick, in need, a failure. These have a great deal to do with genetic factors, his childhood experiences, and so on, which are the proper area of psychoanalysis and which I do not neglect but are not our area of inquiry here. But these realms cannot be reached without the exploration of wish and will—that is to say, without the intentionality first coming into the open.

Some readers may be asking in the course of our discussion of intentionality, What is the difference between this and “acting out” in therapy? And they might press the point with the question, Does not the emphasis on the act as an inseparable part of the intent amount to a recommendation of “acting out”?

“Acting out” is a transmuting of an impulse (or intent) into overt behavior in order to avoid insight. To see the full implications of a desire or intention, to get insight about its meaning, typically upsets one’s self-world relationship more and is, therefore, more anxiety-creating and painful than to act out the desire physically, even if one gets rebuffed or hurt in the latter process. At least, if one can keep the whole problem on the level of muscular behavior, one doesn’t have to face the more difficult threat to his self-esteem. This is why “acting out” is rightly associated with infantile, psychopathic and sociopathic character types. Acting out occurs not on the level of consciousness, but on the level of “awareness” which, as I shall indicate in the next section, is the capacity that the human being shares with animals, the more primitive developmental level prior to consciousness. In adult patients, acting out is generally an endeavor to discharge the desire or intention without having to transmute it into consciousness. It is not easy to live with intentionality without acting it out; to live in a polarity of intent and act means to live with one’s anxiety. Hence, if patients cannot escape into the act, they try to avoid the tension by doing the opposite, by denying the whole intention itself.

The sophisticated patient uses the method—and this seems to me to be the usual method nowadays—of intellectualizing the intention and thereby denying its affect, emasculating and draining off the whole experience. Nowadays, when the patient experiences a hatred for and a desire to kill his father, he generally knows that he does not have to get a gun and do it. But if he then detaches himself from the whole thing by reminding himself, “Everybody gets such thoughts in psychoanalysis; it’s simply part of the Oedipus complex,” talking about it forever will do no good and will only solidify his defenses against working through whatever real problem he has with his father. What such a patient is doing is precisely taking the intentionality out of the experience. He emasculates it so that he really doesn’t intend anything, doesn’t move toward anything, and discusses a detached idea. Detachment and psychopathic acting out are the two opposite ways to escape confronting the impact of one’s intentionality, the former being the method of the intellectualizing, compulsive-obsessional type, and the latter being the method of the infantile, psychopathic type.

What we want the patient to do is to genuinely experience the implications and meaning of his intention; and “to experience” includes the act but defined in the structure of consciousness and not physically. When we emphasize that the intention has its act within the structure of consciousness, two things are implied: one, that the act must be felt, experienced, and accepted as part of me along with its social implications; and two, that I am thereby freed from the need to act it out physically. Whether or not I do act it out behaviorally in the world is a problem on a different plane. If I have faced my intentionality, I can hope to make the decision in the outside world.

Psychoanalysis ought to be the place par excellence of experiencing intentions and their implied actions and meaning—the “playground of intentionality,” to borrow Freud’s phrase about transference—without the patient’s having to transform this into overt behavior. To be sure, therapists are taking some risk that harmful acting out may occur since whenever the patient genuinely experiences something, there is risk. But when the patient gets emotionally upset at becoming conscious of his desire to kill his father, the affect can and ought to be used in the service of changing his relationship to his father. Such hatred and desire to kill, when present in adult life, generally turn out, in my experience, to be expressions of dependency on the father. The normal, constructive outcome is that through insight into the meaning of the experience as well as abreacting the affect, he will “kill” his own excessive tie to his father and thereby gain greater emotional independence. This illustration, no doubt, sounds oversimplified, but I hope it shows the distinction between experiencing the intention and its implications in consciousness, and psychopathic acting out. Both the psychopathic and the detached types are struggling to escape confronting the meaning of their intentionality. The whole import of what we have been trying to do in these chapters on intentionality is to restore and make central this meaning of the act. Thus, the concern with intentionality can be the genuine undermining of acting out in psychoanalysis.

Another point needs to be made here. Intentionality is based upon a meaning-matrix which patient and therapist share. Every person, sane or insane, lives in a meaning-matrix which he, to some extent, makes—i.e., it is individual—but he makes it within the shared situation of human history and language. This is why language is so important: it is the milieu within which we find and form our meaning-matrix, a milieu which we share with our fellow human beings. “Language is every man’s spiritual root,” says Binswanger. By the same token, we state that history is every man’s cultural body. The meaning-matrix comes before any discussion, scientific or other, since it is what makes discussion—as in psychotherapy—possible. We can never understand the meaning-matrix of a patient, or anyone for that matter, by standing purely objectively outside it. I must be able to participate in my patient’s meanings but preserve my own meaning-matrix at the same time, and thus unavoidably, and rightfully, interpret for him what he is doing—and often doing to me. The same thing holds true in all other human relationships as well: friendship and love require that we participate in the meaning-matrix of the other but without surrendering our own. This is the way human consciousness understands, grows, changes, becomes clarified and meaningful.

STAGES IN THERAPY

The process of therapy with individual patients involves bringing together the three dimensions of wish, will, and decision. As the patient moves from one dimension to the next in his integration, the previous dimension is incorporated and remains present in the one that follows. Intentionality is present on all three dimensions.

We discussed wish, will, and decision earlier in this book. It is now significant that we return to them after our discussion of intentionality. For intentionality is essential for the complete understanding of wish, will, and decision. We shall now show more fully the meaning of our problem by describing practical therapy on all three levels.

The first dimension, wish, occurs on the level of awareness, the dimension which the human organism shares with animals. The experiencing of infantile wishes, bodily needs and desires, sexuality and hunger, and the whole gamut of infinite and inexhaustible wishes which occur in any individual is a central part of practically all of psychotherapy from that of Rogers on one hand to the most classical Freudian on the other. For the human being, experiencing these wishes may involve dramatic and sometimes traumatic anxiety and upheaval as the repressions which led to the blocking off of the awareness in the first place are brought out into the open. On the significance and necessity of unmasking repression—dynamic aspects which are beyond the scope of our present discussion—various kinds of therapy differ radically; but I cannot conceive of any form of psychotherapy which does not accord the process of awareness a central place. The conditioning therapies, of Wolpe and Skinner for example, do not aim to bring out these aspects of awareness. I would not call them psychotherapy, however, but rather what their name implies, behavior therapy—reconditioning, re-education, retraining of habit patterns.

The experiencing of wishes may come out in the simplest forms—the desire to fondle or be fondled, the wishes associated originally with nursing and closeness to mother and family members in early experience. In adult experience, wishes may vary from sexual intimacy to the touch of the hand of a friend or the simple pleasure of wind and water against one’s skin; and it goes all the way up to the sophisticated but naïve experiences which may come in a dazzling instant when one is standing near a clump of blooming forsythia and is suddenly struck by how brilliantly blue the sky looks when seen beyond the sea of yellow flowers. This immediate awareness of the world continues throughout life at a hopefully accelerating pace, and is infinitely more varied and rich than one would gather from most psychological discussions.

This growing awareness of one’s body, wishes, and desires—processes which are obviously related to the experiencing of identity—normally also bring heightened appreciation of one’s self as a being and a heightened reverence for being itself. It is at this point that the eastern philosophies, like Zen Buddhism, have much to teach us.

Let us glance again at the case of Helen, the patient we described in our chapter on wish and will, who used “where-there’s-a-will-there’s-a-way” as a reaction-formation against her powerful yearning to be encircled in her mother’s arms. We noted that this yearning seemed to originate in her first two years of infancy when her depressed mother had been taken away to a mental hospital. At the beginning of therapy, Helen was not aware that she had these wishes for her mother’s love and tenderness and for being enclosed in fondling arms (though she got it promiscuously from the various men she slept with). She was aware only of generalized depression, sadness, and grief under the hurried, driven surface of her life. Her emerging awareness and acceptance of these infancy wishes, her experiencing them in the therapeutic hours, brought out some overt anger, a good deal of resentment, helplessness, and feeling ashamed of her “weakness,” accentuated passivity for a time, alternating with rage, and so on, down the line. I mention these things to show that bringing to awareness these important, long-denied wishes is not at all easy, not at all a childish game of wishing. It is typically traumatic and can be highly upsetting. Hence, we find the regression that often occurs in psychoanalysis. Nor do we bring into consciousness these wishes merely for the sake of “letting off steam,” or “getting the affect out”—though I think the genuine experiencing of the affects is essential, along with the inevitably attending sadness, grief, and mourning for the lost past. But the fact, more significant than the sheer affect-release, is that the wishes point to a meaning. Helen began to discover the relation between her frustrated love for her mother and what she wanted to get from the endless line of boy friends; her use of sex and intimacy as oral gratification; and her defiant, competitive needs. (“If mother and father won’t give me love, I’ll show them how I can get it!”) And this, in accordance with the usual development of rage and resentment in a neurosis, will be a way which, among other things, will make the parents very angry.

There is, however, a further stage that is not infrequent in our culture: a more structuralized form of the above, in which the patient has developed the goal of “not wanting,” a kind of cynical or despairing aim of not wishing for anything. In my experience, this goes with obsessional, compulsive personality types. The person lives by the formula “It is better not to want,” “To want exposes me,” “To wish makes me vulnerable,” “If I never wish, I’ll never be weak.” Our culture plays up to this in a curious, backhanded way. On one hand, the society seems to promise that all our wishes will be granted—avalanches of advertising guarantee to make one a blonde or redhead overnight and have one out of her stenographer’s chair and on a jet bound for Nassau by the weekend. The Horatio Alger myth has long since been destroyed, but not the myth that all things will be given to us. But there also seems to be in our culture a curious cautiousness—“You’ll get these abundant gratifications only if you don’t feel too much, don’t let on you want too much.” The result is that, instead of conquering the world like Alger, we should wait passively until the genie of technology—which we don’t push or influence, only await—brings us our appointed gratifications. All of this is a part of the rewards which go with belief in the vast myth of the machine in the twentieth century.

However one may interpret this culturally, the upshot is the same: people carry within them a great number of wishes to which they react passively and which they hide. Stoicism, in our day, is not strength to overcome wishes, but to hide them. To a patient who, let us say, is interminably rationalizing and justifying this and that, balancing one thing against another as though life were a tremendous market place where all the business is done on paper and tickertape and there are never any goods, I sometimes have the inclination in psychotherapy to shout out, “Don’t you ever want anything?” But I don’t cry out, for it is not difficult to see that on some level the patient does want a good deal; the trouble is he has formulated and reformulated it, until it is the “rattling of dry bones,” as Eliot puts it. Tendencies have become endemic in our culture for our denial of wishes to be rationalized and accepted with the belief that this denial of the wish will result in its being fulfilled. And whether the reader would disagree with me on this or that detail, our psychological problem is the same: it is necessary for us to help the patient achieve some emotional viability and honesty by bringing out his wishes and his capacity to wish. This is not the end of therapy but it is an essential starting point.

We note that the body is particularly important in wishing. A number of times the word has come up as we discussed this dimension—wishing for fondling of the body, awareness chiefly as a bodily enterprise, and so on. The body is important in this stage of therapy as a language. Wishes, and the intentionality underlying wishing, are expressed in subtle gesture, ways of talking and walking, leaning toward or away from the therapist—all of which comprise a language that, because it is unconscious, is more accurate and honest than what the patient consciously articulates. This is the general reason the body needs to be accepted, aye exulted in, lusted in, loved, and respected. Conflicts will emerge as the “bodily armor” is undermined, in Wilhelm Reich’s phrase; they will always be there as part of bodily expression. But conflicts can be met constructively, while nothing at all will occur positively if the body remains walled off.

FROM WISH TO WILL

The second dimension is the transmuting of awareness into self-consciousness. This is correlated with the distinctive form of awareness in human beings—consciousness. The term consciousness, coming etymologically from con and scire, means “knowing with.” Strictly speaking, self-consciousness, in the normal sense in which we are using the term here, is a redundancy; consciousness itself includes my awareness of my role in it. On this level, the patient experiences I-am-the-one-who-has-these-wishes. This is the dimension of accepting one’s self as having a world. If I experience the fact that my wishes are not simply blind pushes toward someone or something, that I am the one who stands in this world where touch, nourishment, sexual pleasure, and relatedness may be possible between me and other persons, I can begin to see how I may do something about these wishes. This gives me the possibility of in-sight, or “inward sight,” of seeing the world and other people in relation to myself. Thus, the previous bind of repressing wishes because I cannot stand the lack of their gratification on one hand, or being compulsively pushed to their blind gratification on the other, is replaced by the fact that I myself am involved in these relationships of pleasure, love, beauty, trust. I then have the possibility of changing my own behavior to make them more possible.

The generic term for self-conscious intentions is for our use, will. This term reflects the active flavor and self-assertiveness of such intentional acts.

On this dimension, will enters the picture not as a denial of wish but as an incorporation of wish on a higher level of consciousness. The experiencing of the blue of the sky behind forsythia blossoms on the simple level of awareness and wish may bring delight and the desire to continue or renew the experience; but the realization that I am the person who lives in a world in which flowers are yellow and the sky so brilliant, and that I can even increase my pleasure by sharing this experience with a friend, has profound implications for life, love, death, and the other ultimate problems of human existence. As Tennyson remarks when he looks at the flower in the crannied wall, “…I could understand what God and man is.” This is the dimension on which human creativity emerges. The human being does not stop with the naïve delight, but he paints a picture, or he writes a poem, which he hopes will communicate something of his experience to his fellowmen.

WISH AND WILL TO DECISION

The third dimension in the process of therapy is that of decision and responsibility. I use these two terms together, with some redundancy, to distinguish them both from will. Responsibility involves being responsive to, responding. Just as consciousness is the distinctively human form of awareness, so decision and responsibility are the distinctive forms of consciousness in the human being who is moving toward self-realization, integration, maturity. Again, this dimension is not achieved by denying wishes and self-assertive will but incorporates and keeps present the previous two dimensions. Decision, in our sense, creates out of the two previous dimensions a pattern of acting and living which is empowered and enriched by wishes, asserted by will, and is responsive to and responsible for the significant other-persons who are important to one’s self in the realizing of the long-term goals. If the point were not self-evident, it could be demonstrated along the lines of Sullivan’s interpersonal theory of psychiatry, Buber’s philosophy, and other viewpoints. They all point out that wish, will, and decision occur within a nexus of relationships upon which the individual depends not only for his fulfillment but for his very existence. This sounds like an ethical statement and is. For ethics have their psychological base in the capacities of the human being to transcend the concrete situation of the immediate self-oriented desire and to live in the dimensions of past and future, and in terms of the welfare of the persons and groups upon whom his own fulfillment intimately depends.

Professor Ernest Keen formulates this, my third dimension of decision, as follows:

HUMAN FREEDOM

Our final question is the relation of man’s will to his freedom. William James was entirely correct in pointing out that this is an ethical, not a psychological, question. But the question, as James also saw, cannot be avoided. Some answer is always presupposed in everyone’s life and work, and it is only the mark of honesty to make this clear.

The impact of Freud and the new psychology has been to vastly increase the sphere of determinism or necessity. We see as never before how much we are creatures of conditioning and how much we are driven and molded by our unconscious processes. If our freedom is only to choose in the areas which are left over, the negative space that remains when determinism has taken over the rest, we are lost indeed. Freedom and choice shrink and become only the crumbs from the table thrown to us temporarily until new determinisms are discovered. Man’s will and freedom then become childish absurdities.

But this is a naïve and primitive view of will and freedom and must be discarded. One thing which is clear since Freud is that the “first freedom,” the naïve freedom of the Garden of Eden before the “fall” into consciousness or the infant before the struggle to achieve and enlarge consciousness, is a false freedom. The present struggle with the machine is the same question all over again. If our freedom is what is left over, what the machine can’t do, the whole issue is lost to start with: we are doomed when, in some future day, a machine can be invented to do it. Freedom can never be dependent upon a suspension of necessity, by God or science or anything else. Freedom can never be an abnegation of law, as though our “will” operated only in a temporary margin of relief from determinism. But the planning, the forming, the imagination, the choosing of values, the intentionality are the qualities of human freedom.

Freedom and will consist not in the abnegation of determinism but in our relationship to it. “Freedom,” wrote Spinoza, “is the recognition of necessity.”² Man is distinguished by his capacity to know that he is determined, and to choose his relationship to what determines him. He can and must, unless he abdicates his consciousness, choose how he will relate to necessity, such as death, old age, limitations of intelligence, and the conditioning inescapable in his own background. Will he accept this necessity, deny it, fight it, affirm it, consent to it? All these words have an element of volition in them. And it should, by now, be clear that man does not simply “stand outside” in his subjectivity, like a critic at the theater, and look at necessity and decide what he thinks of it. His intentionality is already one element in the necessity in which he finds himself. Freedom lies not in our triumphing over objective nature, or in the little space that is left to us in our subjective nature, but in the fact that we are the men who experience both. In our intentionality, the two are brought together, and in our experiencing both, we already change both. Intentionality not only makes it possible for us to take a stand vis-à-vis necessity, but requires us to take this stand. This is illustrated ad infinitum in psychotherapy, when the patient argues rigid determinism, generally when he is discouraged or wishes to escape the meaning of his intentions. And the more he is “determined to be a determinist”—the more he argues (which already is intentionality) that he has nothing whatever to do with the fate that is bearing down upon him—the more he is making himself in fact determined.

Nietzsche spoke often of “loving fate.” He meant that man can face fate directly, can know it, dare it, fondle it, challenge it, quarrel with it—and love it. And though it is arrogance to say we are the “masters of our fate,” we are saved from the need to be the victims of it. We are indeed co-creators of our fate.

Psychoanalysis requires that we should not rest with intentions, or conscious rationalizations, but must push on to intentionality. Our consciousness can never again be the simple one, based on the belief that because we think something consciously, it is necessarily true. Consciousness is an immediate experience, but its meaning must be mediated by language, science, poetry, religion, and all the other aspects of the bridges of man’s symbolism.

We share with William James the perplexity of living in a transitional age, he at the beginning and we, it is hoped, near the end of it. One thing he was clear about: even though a man can never know for certain and even though there are no absolute answers and never will be, man has to act anyway. After the five years in his late twenties and early thirties, when he was paralyzed with his own depression and scarcely able to will the simplest thing, he decided one day that he could make an act of will to believe in freedom. He willed freedom, made it his fiat. “The first act of freedom,” he writes, “is to choose it.” He was convinced afterwards, that this act of will was what enabled him to deal with and transcend his depression. It is at least clear in his biography that at that point, the highly constructive life which continued right up to his death at sixty-eight began for him.

This fiat became an integral part of the Jamesian view of will. Among the many sensations greeting us, the many stimuli affecting us, we have the power to throw our weight on this possibility rather than that. We say in effect, “Let this be the reality for me.” The fiat “Be it so!” is James’s leap; it is his statement of commitment.

He knew that in an act of will a man was doing something more than what met the eye; he was creating, forming something which had never existed before. There is risk in such a decision, such a fiat, but it remains our one contribution to the world which is original and underived. I have been critical of James’s theory of will in that he omits intentionality, the heart of the problem. But in the human act of will, in which every man starts at the beginning and can only say with Socrates in his decision to drink the hemlock, “I do not know, but I believe” and take the leap, James is still great indeed. Since his words ring with the sincerity and power of one who has hammered them out on the anvil of his own suffering and ecstasy, we can do no better than to quote him:

“Will you or won’t you have it so?”…we are asked it every hour of the day, and about the largest as well as the smallest, the most theoretical as well as the most practical things. We answer by consents or non-consents and not by words. What wonder that those dumb responses should seem our deepest organs of communication with the nature of things!…What wonder if the amount which we accord of it be the one strictly underived and original contribution which we make to the world!³