Ch. 7: Willing Flashcards
Japanese proverb
“To know and not to act is not to know at all.”
Early analysts were so convinced that self-knowledge was tantamount to change that they tended to see self-knowledge as the end point of therapy
“Responsibility”
“response” + “ability”, that is the ability to respond.
What is action?
Thought has no external consequences, although it may be en indispensable overture to action: planning, rehearsing, or mustering the resolve for action
- Action extends beyond oneself: it includes interaction with the surrounding world
- Action has two sides: not acting according to habits, not overeating, not exploiting others may be major action
The therapist’s final goal
Analytic model
The therapist’s final goal is action (i.e. change) - although they may on the way pretend to pursue other goals such as insight, self-actualization, comfort
- Unfortunately this isn’t (or wasn’t) taught as much, rather that interpretation and self-awareness will ultimately generate change… leading to people doing therapy for 3,4,5 and even 7-8 years
Therapist’s may find themselves thinking and saying things like “you have to try” and “people must help themselves”
But in this case, who are they talking to? In the analytic model of the mind there is no such psychic agency to which such an appeal can be made
- Freud’s man according to May: “is not driving but is driven”
- However, Freud in The Ego and the Id: “therapist’s task is to give the patient’s ego freedom to choose one way or another”
Even though traditional analytic thought views human behavior as completely determined (split into ego, superego, id; pre-conscious, unconscious, conscious) still it seems necessary to include a core that is not determined
- It’s as if a freely choosing homunculus were placed within one of the parts - May: “but how can a part be free without the whole being free?”
Subjective sense of freedom
Some therapist’s deal with this by saying that we have a subjective sense of freedom, although it’s an illusion
- Similarly, Spinoza: “a self-conscious and sentient stone that was set into motion by an external force would believe itself to be completely free and would think that it continued in motion solely because of it’s wish”
However, this is a corner, because this is entirely incompatible with one of psychotherapy’s overarching values: the quest for truth and self-knowledge!
“Will”
Aristotle
Arendt
Kant
Farber
The analytic model omits something central in every course of psychotherapy: “will”
- The bridge between desire and act
Aristotle: “it is the mental state that precedes action”
Arendt: “It is the mental ‘organ of the future’ - just as memory is the organ of the past”
Kant: “It is the power of spontaneously beginning a series of successive things”
Farber: “It is the seat of volition, the ‘responsible mover’ within”
Conflicting definitions of Will
Yalom: I’d prefer a happier and less controversial word with less conflicting definitions
Schopenhauer in The World as will and Representation: “a nonrational force, a blind striving power whose operations are without purpose or design”
Nietsche in Will to Power: “to will is to command; inherent in will is the commanding thought”
The opponents of the concept have changed over the centuries
Greek philosophers had no term for “free will”, it was incompatible with the belief of eternal recurrence, i.e. Aristotle: “coming-into-being necessarily implies the pre-existence of something that is potentially but not actually”
Stoic fatalist: what ever is or will be “was to be”
Christian theology could not reconcile the belief in divine providence with the claims of free will
Free will also didn’t fit with scientific positivism, with Newton’s and Laplace’s belief in an explicable and predictable universe
Hegelian idea of history as a necessary progress of the world spirit clashed with a free-will ideology that rejects necessity and holds that all that was or is could as well not have been done
Lastly, free will is opposed by all deterministic systems whether they are based on economic, behavioristic or psychoanalytic principles
Perhaps too, the clinician is not certain that he or she wishes to recognize it
“Will” was some time ago replaced by “motive”
- Paranoia is “explained” (that is “caused”) by the unconscious motivation of homosexual impulses and genital exhibitionism is “explained” by unconscious castration anxiety
- Yet to explain behavior on the basis of motivation is to absolve one of ultimate responsibility for one’s actions
- Yalom: “Motivation can influence but cannot replace will; despite various motives, the individual still has the option of behavior or not behaving in a certain fashion.”
“Will” serves the purpose of the book
Despite these many problems, no other term than “will” serves our purpose
- As a verb “will” connotes coalition
- As an auxiliary verb it designates the future tense: a last will and testament is one’s final effort to lunge into the future
- The future tense is the proper tense of the psychotherapeutic change (Hannah Arendt’s “organ of the future” is thus fitting)
- Memory (“the organ of the past”) is concerned with objects; the will is concerned with projects
- Yalom: “as I hope to demonstrate, effective psychotherapy must focus on patients’ project relationships as well as on their object relationships”
THE CLINICIAN AND THE WILL
Exhortative approach
“Will power”
So if will is the “responsible mover” then the therapist’s goal is to influence will. But how?
Exhortative approach is the simplest i.e. just saying: “You are responsible for what happens to you in your life! Etc”
Stems from the idea that if the person knows what’s best for them then they will do it
- Aquinas: “Man, insofar as he acts willfully, acts according to some imagined good.”
- This approach is occasionally effective
However, “will power” is only the outer thin layer of “willing”
- Well-entrenched psychopathology will simply not yield to exhortation - more therapeutic power is needed
- One must actively change if one is to change
Long middle work of therapy
Influencing will
Blind faith
The therapist embarks on the long middle work of therapy
- Particular tactics, strategy, formulated mechanisms, goals
- Interpretation, insight, interpersonal confrontation, trusting and caring relationship, analysis of maladaptive behavior
All of these can influence will (not “create” it - Yalom: “therapist can not create will in the patient, the therapist can liberate will - to remove encumbrances from the bound will of the patient”)
These rits require much patience and much blind faith - in fact, more than many contemporary free-thinking therapists are able to muster
- Yalom will try to separate the mutative steps in psychotherapy (that can influence will in its naked form) from the ritualistic decorative ones
OTTO RANK - WILL THERAPY
The topic requires Rank for he was the person to introduce will into modern psychotherapy.
Was one of Freud’s first students starting from 1905 but departed in 1929 because of differences
- Highly influential figure in the early development of psychoanalysis, especially as director of the powerful Viennese Psychoanalytic Institute
- However, in US, his works were badly translated and he didn’t gain momentum
- Now, Ernest Becker believes in him a lot and calls him “the brooding genius waiting in the wings”
- Books: Will Therapy and Truth and Reality
Rank’s focus
Rank was concerned more with therapeutic outcome than with the construction of a model of the mind and was convinced that strict psychic determinism was incompatible with effective psychotherapy
- “I understand by will a positive, guiding organization which uses creatively as well as inhibits and controls the instinctual drives.”
- “It’s astonishing how much the patient knows and how relatively little is unconscious if one does not give the patient this convenient excuse for refusing responsibility.”
- “The unconscious is a purely negative concept, which designates something momentarily not conscious, while Freud’s theory has lifted it to the most powerful factor in psychic life. The basis for this, however, is not given in any psychological experience but in a moral necessity, that is, to find an acceptable substitute for the concept of God, who frees the individual from responsibility.”
The development of the Will
Emotions vs Impulses
Will arises in relation to instinctual impulses during parental impulse education when parents try to fit the kid’s impulse life to the community
- Gradually the child begins to exert personal control over the impulses and decides on the basis of love for their parents to curb aggressive impulses
- Thus, will is tied up with impulse: either it controls impulse or it resists outside efforts to control impulse
Emotions are different from impulses: we seek to discharge impulses but to prolong or dam up emotions
- Emotional life is a mirror image of impulse life whereas the will is a separate executive entity in power to the impulse system
3 types of will
3 character types
Rank viewed the parent-child relationship and the entire assimilative process - as well as the therapeutic relationship - as a struggle of wills. He described three
- Counter will: opposition to another’s will
- Positive will: willing what one must
- Creative will: willing what one wants
The goal of child rearing is to develop the first two into the third. The major error is to teach the child that all free impulse expression is undesirable and all counter will is bad, then the child suffers two consequences: suppression of entire emotional life and guilt-laden will
Rank’s three character types were thus based on this approach:
- The creative character has access to emotions and wills what he or she wants
- The neurotic character has a will ensnarled with guilt
- The antisocial character has a suppressed will and is dominated by impulse
The Will and Psychotherapy:
Explaining away “will”
“Two wills clash”
Rank felt Freud and Adler explained away “Will”
Rank felt that Freud had made a mistake by naming it as “resistance” that should be gotten rid of
- That the basic procedure in psychoanalysis requires a state of “will-lessness” - acts to weaken will: “Free association specifically asks to eliminate entirely the little bit of will which your neurotic weakness has perhaps not yet undermined and resign yourself to the guidance of the unconscious”
- Sylvan Tomkins: “psychoanalysis is a systematic training in indecision”
- Allen Wheelis: “knowledgeable moderns put their back to the couch and in so doing may occasionally fail to put their shoulders to the wheel”
Rank thought Freud’s view of resistance was a serious error, instead it should be viewed as a will that can be transformed into creative will
- If the therapist will try to force the patient to do what is “right” the patient will resist and therapy will fail
- If the patient resisted or suggested termination then Rank was careful to point out that he considered these stands as progress: “The neurotic cannot will without guilt. That situation can be changed not by himself but only in relation to a therapist who accepts the patient’s will, who justifies it, submits to it, and makes it good.”
- Rank felt that termination had so much therapeutic power that he attempted a special device of setting, setting a precise “time limit” - this “end setting” thus projected the final phase of therapy forward to the onset of treatment
In therapy, “two wills clash”
The beginning of therapy is “therefore nothing other than the opening of a great duel of wills, in which the first easy victory over the apparently weak-willed patient is bitterly avenged many times!”
The patient engages in a will conflict and wishes both to resist and to submit
LESLIE FARBER - TWO REALMS OF THE WILL
Rank may have overstated the role of will power and willfulness. By and large, patients do not change in therapy as a result of an act of conscious will. What is so often perplexing to the therapist (and maddening to the researcher) is that change occurs at a subterranean level, far out of the ken of either the therapist and the patient
Farber’s two realms of will
The first one is not experienced consciously during an act and must be inferred after an event.
- Auden: “When I look back at the three or four choices in my life which have been decisive, I find that, at the time I made them, I had very little sense of the seriousness of what I was doing and only later did I discover what had seemed an unimportant brook, was, in fact, a Rubicon.”
The second realm is the conscious component. “I can do this to get that.”
- The goal of this realm is known from the beginning
Problems happen when you approach the first with methords of the second
The two realms have to be approached differently (Yalom doesn’t - yet - say exactly how to approach the first), because serious problems happen if you approach the first one with methods of the second - will power, effort, determination:
I can will knowledge, but not wisdom; going to bed, but not sleeping; eating, but not hunger; meekness, but not humility; scrupulosity, but not virtue; self-assertion or bravado, but not courage; lust, but not love; commiseration, but not sympathy; congratulations, but not admiration; religiosity, but not faith; reading, but not understanding.
