We have not far to look for suffering. It's in the streets, fills the air, lies upon our friends. Faces of pain look at us from newspaper, from TV screen. We know them: black man swinging in the warm wind, sealed cattle cars rumbling through the bitter cold, the glare of Auschwitz at midnight, the sweet smell.
And then there's always the suffering inside. But that's different. It may be very bad, this private misery, but different.
For many people pain is imposed, there's no escape. It may be impersonal, unavoidable, as by fire, flood, cancer; or man-made, as in wars, sack of cities, rape of girls. Victims still have choice; there's always a little corner of freedom. They may throw spears at the bombers or bow in prayer, may curse or plead; but they may not choose to suffer or not suffer. That choice has been foreclosed. Starving blacks of Biafra scrounge for roots, fight each other for rats; Vietnamese children with melted flesh wander homeless, orphaned, across a lunar desert.
Many of us have never known this kind of misery, have never felt a lash or club, never been shot at, persecuted, bombed, starved—yet we suffer too. Wealth and intelligence and good fortune are no protection. Having had good parents helps but guarantees nothing; misery comes equally to high-born and low, comes with the gold spoon, to prince and princess and ladies in waiting, to groom and gamekeeper, to the mighty and the humble. We feel our suffering as alien, desperately unwanted, yet nothing imposes it. We eat, often exceedingly well; the roof over our head is timber and tile; deep carpets, thin china, great music, rare wine; a woman looks at us with love; we have friends, families; our needs are met. In some way, unnoticed, unknown, we must elect our suffering, create it. It may be quite intense.
Some of it is public knowledge—madness, suicide, running amuck. Some of it is visible only to a few, to family and friends who see the withdrawal, depression, the sense of rejection, the clawing competitiveness, the bitter frustration, bafflement, and anger, year after year after year. At the concert or opera, walking about in the lobby, they bow, they smile, they glitter—show nothing of the misery inside. And some of our suffering is altogether private, known to no one but him who suffers, not even his wife, is borne with shame as some indescribable awkwardness in living, a kind of disloyalty to be in despair in the lap of plenty.
Imposed suffering has priority over elected suffering, as material needs take precedence over spiritual. “First feed the belly, then talk right and wrong,” says Mac the Knife. Or Sartre: “The exploitation of men by other men, undernourishment—these make metaphysical unhappiness a luxury and relegate it to second place. Hunger—now that is an evil” Imposed suffering, therefore, protects from the elected kind, crowds it out. We simply cannot create despair from subjective roots if we are forced into despair by persecution. In the concentration camp, states of created despair are remembered vaguely, as if from a different life, discontinuous with the present one in which despair issues from the SS truncheons.
To those whose suffering is imposed, elected suffering seems unreal. Lacking in measurable circumstance, in objective explanation, it seems illusory, made up, “in the head.” Victims of the whip feel envy of those so sheltered from pain as to be able to dream up states of misery; contempt when such fortunate ones have the arrogance to elegize their torment; a hateful mirth at existential despair hatching in a nest of IBM stock certificates.
We who compose our own misery are ambivalent toward victims of imposed suffering. We feel a subtle pride—secret, never expressed, unknown often even to ourselves—that our misery is more complicated, spiritual; as if we whispered, “The pain of being hungry, of being beaten, is very bad, we sympathize, will make a contribution to CARE; but it is, after all, a primitive suffering; anyone can feel it; just leave them alone, give them enough to eat, and they'd be happy—whereas only a poet could feel what I feel.” At the same time, more openly felt, more easily expressed, we feel shame, judge our created misery to be petty in comparison.
In fact they are equally bad: depression or starvation is a hard choice; the terror of the ledge ten floors up matches the terror of the firing squad. In felt experience, that is: in worthiness we cannot call them equal. We who compose our own misery are ashamed at Babi Yar, at Nagasaki, on the slave ships from Africa, in the arena at Rome. They were innocent of their suffering, we are guilty of complicity with ours; they had no choice in theirs, we bear responsibility for ours.
Created suffering, except where precluded by imposed pain, affects us all. The well-adjusted lie: listen to them at your risk; listen to them long enough, declaiming the official view, being serious with their slogans, and you lose contact with your own heart. Poets tell the truth: the sadness of Greece and Gethsemane, of Sodom and Gomorrah, of the Pharaohs and their minions and their slaves, was as our own. It's part of being human, we differ from one another only in more or less. A few tranquil ones, with little conflict, suffer less; at the other extreme, stretched by despair to some dreadful cracking point, one goes berserk. In between are the rest of us, not miserable enough to go mad or jump off the bridge, yet never able if we are honest to say that we have come to terms with life, are at peace with ourselves, that we are happy.
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The older I get the less I know, the darker the well of time. The enigma grows more bleak. I seek. I am concerned with suffering and with change, and I write equally for patient and therapist. What one should know will be useful, also, to the other. Here psychotherapy parts company with medicine.
The book for the surgeon is not the book for the surgical patient. One delivers one's ailing body—with its abscess or tumor or broken bone—into the hands of the surgeon, and his most elementary information and skill will transcend anything the patient need know. The patient must cooperate—one green capsule three times a day, keep the leg elevated, force fluids—but need not understand how or why. The responsibility lies with the surgeon, the problem is his, his the accountability for failure, the credit for success. Patient and surgeon do not learn from the same text.
Many patients go to psychiatrists as if to surgeons, and many psychiatrists regard themselves as psychic surgeons. When such a patient comes to such a therapist a relationship of considerable length may result, but little else. For the job can be done, if at all, only by the patient. To assign this task to anyone else, however insightful or charismatic, is to disavow the source of change. In the process of personality change the role of the psychiatrist is catalytic. As a cause he is sometimes necessary, never sufficient. The responsibility of the patient does not end with free-associating, with being on time, with keeping at it, paying his bills, or any other element of cooperation. He is accountable only to himself and this accountability extends all the way to the change which is desired, the achieving of it or the giving up on it.
So—consider one who suffers. Perhaps a woman with a warm heart but frigid. What can she do? Perhaps a mother who wants to love her children but does not. Maybe a homosexual living an endless series of hostile transient encounters. Perhaps a man in his middle fifties with a depressive character, normal to his friends, but constantly brushing away cobweb thoughts of suicide, one who is bored, finds no meaning in life, is ashamed. Consider one who suffers—anyone you know well. Consider perhaps yourself.
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II
I live in a desert. Hour by hour feel myself dying. Surely I believe in something. Not much perhaps, but a little. What?
We are what we do . . . Identity is the integration of behavior. If a man claims to be honest we take him at his word. But if it should transpire that over the years he has been embezzling, we unhesitatingly discard the identity he adopts in words and ascribe to him the identity defined by his acts. “He claims to be honest,” we say, “but he's really a thief.”
One theft, however, does not make a thief. One act of forthrightness does not establish frankness; one tormenting of a cat does not make a sadist, nor one rescue of a fledgling a savior. Action which defines a man, describes his character, is action which has been repeated over and over, and so has come in time to be a coherent and relatively independent mode of behavior. At first it may have been fumbling and uncertain, may have required attention, effort, will—as when one first drives a car, first makes love, first robs a bank, first stands up against injustice. If one perseveres on any such course it comes in time to require less effort, less attention, begins to function smoothly; its small component behaviors become integrated within a larger pattern which has an ongoing dynamism and cohesiveness, carries its own authority. Such a mode then pervades the entire person, permeates other modes, colors other qualities, in some sense is living and operative even when the action is not being performed, or even considered. A young man who learns to drive a car thinks differently thereby, feels differently; when he meets a pretty girl who lives fifty miles away, the encounter carries implications he could not have felt as a bus rider. We may say, then, that he not only drives a car, but has become a driver. If the action is shoplifting, we say not only that he steals from stores but that he has become a shoplifter.
Such a mode of action tends to maintain itself, to resist change. A thief is one who steals; stealing extends and reinforces the identity of thief, which generates further thefts, which further strengthens and deepens the identity. So long as one lives, change is possible; but the longer such behavior is continued the more force and authority it acquires, the more it permeates other consonant modes, subordinates other conflicting modes; changing back becomes steadily more difficult; settling down to an honest job, living on one's earnings, becomes ever more unlikely. And what is said here of stealing applies equally to courage, cowardice, creativity, gambling, homosexuality, alcoholism, depression, or any other of the myriad ways of behaving, and hence of being. Identity comprises all such modes as may characterize a person, existing in varying degrees of integration and conflict. The greater the conflict the more unstable the identity; the more harmonious the various modes the more durable the identity.
The identity defined by action is present and past; it may also foretell the future, but not necessarily. Sometimes we act covertly, the eye does not notice the hand under the table, we construe the bribe to have been a gift, the running away to have been prudence, and so conceal from ourselves what we are. Then one day, perhaps, we drop the pretense, the illusion cracks. We have then the sense of an identity that has existed all along—and in some sense we knew it but would not let ourselves know that we knew it—but now we do, and in a blaze of frankness say, “My God! I really am a crook!” or “I really am a coward!” We may then go too far and conclude that this identity is our “nature,” that it was writ in the stars or in the double helix, that it transcends experience, that our actual lives have been the fulfilling of a pre-existing pattern.
In fact it was writ only in our past choices. We are wise to believe it difficult to change, to recognize that character has a forward propulsion which tends to carry it unaltered into the future, but we need not believe it impossible to change. Our present and future choices may take us upon different courses which will in time comprise a different identity. It happens, sometimes, that the crook reforms, that the coward stands to fight.
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. . . And may do what we choose. The identity defined by action is not, therefore, the whole person. Within us lies the potential for change, the freedom to choose other courses. When we admit that those “gifts” were bribes and say, “Well, then, I'm a crook,” we have stated a fact, not a destiny; if we then invoke the leopard that can't change his spots, saying, “That's just the way I am, might as well accept it,” we abandon the freedom to change, and exploit what we have been in the past to avoid responsibility for what we shall be in the future.
Often we do not choose, but drift into those modes which eventually define us. Circumstances push and we yield. We did not choose to be what we have become, but gradually, imperceptibly became what we are by drifting into the doing of those things we now characteristically do. Freedom is not an objective attribute of life; alternatives without awareness yield no leeway. I open the door of my car, sit behind the wheel, and notice in a corner of vision an ant scurrying about on the smooth barren surface of the concrete parking lot, doomed momentarily to be crushed by one of the thousand passing wheels. There exists, however, a brilliant alternative for this gravely endangered creature: in a few minutes a woman will appear with a picnic basket and we shall drive to a sunny, hilltop meadow. This desperate ant has but to climb the wheel of my car to a safe sheltered ledge, and in a half hour will be in a paradise for ants. But this option, unknown, unknowable, yields no freedom to the ant, who is doomed; and the only irony belongs to me who observes, who reflects that options potentially as meaningful to me as this one to this ant may at this moment be eluding my awareness; so I too may be doomed—this planet looks more like a parking lot every day.
Nothing guarantees freedom. It may never be achieved, or having been achieved may be lost. Alternatives go unnoticed; foreseeable consequences are not foreseen; we may not know what we have been, what we are, or what we are becoming. We who are the bearers of consciousness but of not very much, may proceed through a whole life without awareness of that which would have meant the most, the freedom which has to be noticed to be real. Freedom is the awareness of alternatives and of the ability to choose. It is contingent upon consciousness, and so may be gained or lost, extended or diminished.
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Modern psychiatry found its image in the course of dealing with symptoms experienced as alien. A patient so afflicted seeks no alteration of character or personality, would be offended if the physician suggested such or pretended to any competence in that area. Nothing is felt to be wrong with the patient as a person, his self is not presented for examination or treatment. He is a patient only because he's sick, and his sickness consists of an ailment of which he wishes to be relieved. If the trouble is of recent onset and condenses a specific conflict of impulse and inhibition the medical model may be tenable: insight may function as medicine and dispel the symptom. On those exceedingly rare occasions when we still see such a case, we can be real doctors again and cure someone. The following is an example.
A thirty-five-year-old woman suddenly, and for the first time in her life, develops a spasm of the right foot and a left-sided migraine. Brain tumor is suspected but neurological examination is normal. On psychiatric consultation it is learned that she has been married fifteen years, no children, is devoutly religious, cannot tolerate hostile feelings, but in fact despises her alcoholic husband. At a party, on the evening before her trouble began, she went upstairs looking for a bathroom and chanced upon her husband with a woman on his lap, the two of them in deep, prolonged kissing. She watched for a few moments, then backed out without being seen. On leaving the party, as her husband was drunk, she drove the car. Reaching home he stumbled out to open the garage door and for a moment was caught in the headlights. Just beyond him was a concrete wall. The motor was idling fast. She felt dizzy, passed a hand over her face. Upstairs, a few minutes later, her right foot began to twitch; during the night she waked up with a headache.
In this case, properly prepared, the interpretation, “You wanted to kill your husband,” may effect a cure. No will is necessary, no action, no change in being. Insight is enough.
Most psychiatrists know such cases only from reading examples like this one. The patients who actually appear in their offices—whatever their symptoms—suffer problems of being. When the symptom is migraine it has occurred not once but hundreds of times, over many years. It is not the somatic expression of a specific conflict, but a response to any conflict, any tension, a way of running from whatever seems too much; it has become a mode of being in the world. The patient may feel it as alien, want to be rid of it, but it has become useful in a thousand unnoticed ways; its removal would not be simple relief but would expose the patient to conflicts which he has no other way of handling. The symptom does not afflict the patient, it is the patient.
This headache will not dissolve with insight, and here the medical model breaks down. What is called for is not cure of illness but change in what one is. Insight is not enough. Effort and will are crucial.
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The most common illusion of patients and, strangely, even of experienced therapists, is that insight produces change; and the most common disappointment of therapy is that it does not. Insight is instrumental to change, often an essential component of the process, but does not directly achieve it. The most comprehensive and penetrating interpretation—true, relevant, well expressed, perfectly timed—may lie inert in the patient's mind; for he may always, if he be so inclined, say, “Yes, but it doesn't help.” If a therapist takes the position, as many do, that a correct interpretation is one that gets results, that the getting of results is an essential criterion for the correctness of an interpretation, then he will be driven to more and more remote reconstructions of childhood events, will move further and further from present reality, responding always to the patient's “Yes, but why?” with further Teachings for more distant antecedents. The patient will be saying, in effect, “Yes, but what are you going to do about it?” and the therapist, instead of saying, as he should, “What are you going to do about it?” responds according to his professional overestimate of the efficacy of insight by struggling toward some ever more basic formulation. Some patients don't want to change, and when a therapist takes up the task of changing such a one he assumes a contest which the patient always wins. The magic of insight, of unconscious psychodynamics, proves no magic at all; the most marvelous interpretation falls useless—like a gold spoon from the hand of a petulant child who doesn't want his spinach.
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An anguished woman enters our office, sits down, weeps, begins to talk, and we listen. We are supposed to know what's up here, what the problem really is, and what to do about it. But the theories with which we have mapped the soul don't help, the life she relates is unlike any other. We may nevertheless cling to our map, telling ourselves we know where we are and all is well, but if we look up into the jungle of her misery we know we are lost. And what have we to go on? What to cling to? That people may change, that one person can help another. That's all. Maybe that's enough.
The suffering is a given, but the problem is a choice, is subjective and arbitrary, rests finally upon nothing more than the patient's will, upon his being able to say “This . . . is what I want to change.”
Those psychiatrists who regard themselves in the manner of medical men would disagree, would hold that a psychic problem—homosexuality, for example, or compulsivity—is objectively verifiable, that a panel of competent therapists would concur. This view would hold that the problem “emerges” from the “material,” is recognized and defined by the therapist who then presents it to the patient along with his recommendation for treatment.
But since the problem is something for which a solution is sought, only the patient can designate it. The therapist may perceive that a certain conflict leads regularly to such and such situations which cause suffering. But a cause of suffering is not a problem unless it is taken as such by the patient.
Likewise the goal of treatment must be determined by the patient. The only appropriate goal for the therapist is to assist. If the therapist cannot in good faith help to the end desired he is free to decline, but he cannot reasonably work toward goals of his own choosing. Even so benign a therapeutic aim as to “help the patient realize his potential” may be too much. It is too much if that is not what the patient wants. Sometimes, indeed, the patient may want the opposite, may feel that his trouble comes from having begun to realize incompatible potentialities, and that he must now turn away from some of them.
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III
Freedom is that range of experience wherein events, courses of action, attitudes, decisions, accommodations, are seen as elective. It may be more or less, so we need to ask how much we want. In small things we always want choice. What color to paint the house? buy an Olds or a Buick? go to the Bergman film or the Ozawa concert? It would be onerous to be constrained here. In deeper matters we want to be held back. We might choose to live or die, but prefer not to choose, want to believe rather that we have to live. A kind man does not ponder becoming a sadist, an honest man does not consider whether to become a bandit; we prefer to consider such matters settled, removed from choice and hence from freedom.
In between such minor and major issues lies the middle ground of decision and action wherein some find freedom and choice while others find constraint and necessity. One man sees himself inextricably stuck in a marriage, a career, in obligations to children, relatives, colleagues, bound to his way and place of life, unable to change. Another in the same circumstances finds it possible to resign as judge of the circuit court, divorce a Philadelphia Mainline wife after twenty-four years of marriage and three children, move to Italy, live with an actress, take up painting. If we forgo the moral condemnation we generally visit upon those of greater scope and daring than ourselves, we are likely to discover great envy.
Necessity is that range of experience wherein events, courses of action, attitudes, decisions are seen as determined by forces outside ourselves which we cannot alter. A bored woman says, “I'd like to take a job, but can't leave home because of the children.” With that “can't” she alleges necessity: staying home or leaving home is not open, the decision is imposed, runs counter to her wants; she designates her children's need as her necessity. Her prerogative to do this is clear, is granted, but it must be noted that nothing external to herself requires this view. Certainly her children's needs do not require it: within the same block other mothers manage somehow with babysitters and so hold jobs. The necessity that constrains her does not constrain them; it is of a different order from that which would derive from locked doors and barred windows.
The realm of necessity, therefore, must comprise two categories: the subjective or arbitrary, and the objective or mandatory. Mandatory necessity—like natural law which cannot be disobeyed—is that which cannot be suspended. It derives from forces, conditions, events which lie beyond the self, not subject to choice, unyielding to will and effort. “I wish I had blue eyes,” “. . . wish I were twenty again,” “. . . wish I could fly,” “. . . wish I lived in the court of the Sun King.” Such wishes are irrelevant, choice is inoperative; the necessity impartially constrains. And since it cannot be put aside there's not much arguing about it. “If you jump you will fall—whether or not you choose to fly.” There is consensus, we don't dwell on it, we accept.
Arbitrary necessity derives from forces within the personality, but construed to be outside. The force may be either impulse or prohibition: “I didn't want to drink, but couldn't help it.” That is to say, the impulse to drink does not lie within the “I.” The “I,” which is of course the locus of choice, does not “want” to drink, would choose otherwise, but is overwhelmed by alien force. “I want to marry you,” a woman says to her lover, “want it more than anything in the world. But I can't divorce my husband. He couldn't take it . . . would break down. He depends on me. It would kill him.” Here it is loyalty, caring for another's welfare, which is alleged to lie outside the deciding “I,” which therefore cannot choose, cannot do what it “wants,” but is held to an alien course. As though she were saying, “I do not here preside over internal conflict, do not listen to contending claims within myself to arrive finally at an anguished, fallible decision, but am coerced by mandates beyond my jurisdiction; I yield to necessity.” The issue is not one of conscious versus unconscious. The contending forces are both conscious. The issue is the boundary of the self, the limits of the “I.”
Arbitrary necessity, therefore—like man-made law—is that which may be suspended, disobeyed. When dealing with ourselves the constraining force seems inviolable, a solid wall before us, as though we really “can't,” have no choice; and if we say so often enough, long enough, and mean it, we may make it so. But when we then look about and observe others doing what we “can't” do we must conclude that the constraining force is not an attribute of the surrounding world, not the way things are, but a mandate from within ourselves which we, strangely, exclude from the “I.”
The lady who “wants” to marry her lover but “can't” divorce her husband might here object. “When I said ‘can't,’” she might say, “it was just a way of speaking, a metaphor. It meant that staying with my husband represents duty, not desire, that's all. In a theoretical way I could choose . . . I know that. But it's just theoretical. Because . . . you see, the conflict is so terribly unequal, the considerations that make me stay, that absolutely demand I stay with my husband . . . they're so overwhelmingly strong, there's really no choice. That's all I mean.”
We make serious record of her objection. In passing we note with surprise that the inequality of the conflict leads her to conclude there is “really no choice,” whereas this same circumstance would have led us to say rather that the choice is easy, one she might arrive at promptly, with the conviction of being right.
It's only a metaphor, she says. In some theoretical way, she says, she is aware of choice. Perhaps. But we have doubt. In any event we must point out that she specifically denies this choice for which she now claims oblique awareness, that she locates the determining duty outside the “I” and its “wants.” And we might add that if she continues such metaphorical speech long enough she will eventually convince even herself; her “theoretical” choice will become more and more theoretical until, with no remaining consciousness of option, it will disappear. She then will have made actual something that may once have been but a metaphor. Nothing guarantees our freedom. Deny it often enough and one day it will be gone, and we'll not know how or when.
Objective necessity is not arguable. My lover dies, I weep, beat my fists on the coffin. Everyone knows what I want; everyone knows that nothing will avail, no prayer, no curse, no desperate effort, nothing, that I shall never get her back. When there is argument about necessity, the alleged constraint is arbitrary, subjective. A house in flames, a trapped child, a restraining neighbor: “You can't go in! It's hopeless.” I see it differently: I can go in—if I have the nerve. There may be a chance. It's not clear whether the situation permits or proscribes; the difference of opinion indicates that the necessity at issue is arbitrary. My neighbor's statement is more plea than observation; he asks me to perceive that the contemplated action is precluded, to see that there is no choice. By so deciding I can make it so. If I agree it is impossible, then—even if mistaken—my having arrived at that judgment will, in a matter of moments, make it true. Our judgments fall within the field of events being judged, so themselves become events, and so alter the field. We survey the course of history and conclude, “Wars are inevitable.” The judgment seems detached, as if we observed from a distant galaxy; like all judgments, it may be mistaken. In any event it is not inert, it has consequences, shapes actions, moves interest and behavior from, for example, the politics of dissent to the connoisseurship of wine; it chips off one more fragment of the obstacle to war, and thereby makes more likely the war which, when it comes, will vindicate our original judgment and the behavior which issued from it. So we create the necessity which then constrains us, constrains ever more tightly day after day, so vindicating ever more certainly our wisdom in having perceived from the outset we were not free. Finally we are bound hand and foot and may exclaim triumphantly how right we were!
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The areas of necessity and of freedom vary in proportion to each other and in absolute measure. They vary, also, from person to person, and, within the same person, from time to time. Together they comprise the total extent of available experience the range of which is a function of awareness and concern.
Adolescence, traditionally, is the time of greatest freedom, the major choices thereafter being progressively made, settled, and buried, one after another, never to be reopened. These days, however, an exhumation of such issues in later life has become quite common, with a corresponding increase in freedom which makes life again as hazardous as in youth.
Throughout our lives the proportion of necessity to freedom depends upon our tolerance for conflict: the greater our tolerance the more freedom we retain, the less our tolerance the more we jettison; for high among the uses of necessity is the pursuit of tranquility. What we can't alter we don't have to worry about; so the enlargement of necessity is a measure of economy in psychic housekeeping. The more issues we have closed the fewer we have to fret about. For many of us, for example, the issues of stealing and of homosexuality are so completely buried that we no longer have consciousness of option, and so no longer in these matters have freedom. We may then walk through Tiffany's or go to the ballet without temptation or conflict. For one to whom these are still live issues, and for whom the choice depends upon a constantly shifting balance of fallibly estimated rewards of gain or pleasure as against risks of capture or shame, such exposure may cause great tension.
Tranquility, however, has risks of its own. As we expand necessity and so relieve ourselves of conflict and responsibility, we are relieved, also, in the same measure, of authority and significance. When a crisis arises which does not fall within our limited routine we are frightened, without resources, insignificant.
For some people necessity expands cancerously, every possibility of invention and variation being transformed into inflexible routine until all freedom is eaten away. The extreme in psychic economy is an existence in which everything occurs by law. Since life means conflict, such a state is living death. When, in the other direction, the area of necessity is too much diminished we become confused, anxious, may be paralyzed by conflict, may reach eventually the extreme of panic.
The more we are threatened, fragile, vulnerable, the more we renounce freedom in favor of an expanding necessity. Observing others then who laugh at risk, who venture on paths from which we have turned back, we feel envy; they are courageous where we are timid. We come close to despising ourselves, but recover quickly, can always take refuge in a hidden determinism. “It's all an illusion,” we say, “it looks like their will and daring as against my inhibition and weakness, but that must be illusion. Because life is lawful. Nothing happens by chance. Not a single atom veers off course at random. My inhibition is not a failure of nerve. We can't see the forces that mold us, but they are there. The genetic and experiential dice are loaded with factors unknown, unknowable, not of our intending, are thrown in circumstances over which we have no vision or control; we are stuck with the numbers that turn up. Beware the man who claims to be captain of his soul, he's first mate at the very best.”
The more we are strong and daring the more we will diminish necessity in favor of an expanding freedom. “We are responsible,” we say, “for what we are. We create ourselves. We have done as we have chosen to do, and by so doing have become what we are. If we don't like it, tomorrow is another day, and we may do differently.”
Each speaks truly for himself, the one is just so determined, the other is just so free; but each overstates his truth in ascribing his constraint or his liberty to life at large. These truths are partial, do not contend with each other. Each expresses a quality of experience. Which view one chooses to express, to the exclusion of the other, better describes the speaker than the human condition.
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In every situation, for every person, there is a realm of freedom and a realm of constraint. One may live in either realm. One must recognize the irresistible forces, the iron fist, the stone wall—must know them for what they are in order not to fall into the sea like Icarus—but, knowing them, one may turn away and live in the realm of one's freedom. A farmer must know the fence which bounds his land, but need not spend his life standing there, looking out, beating his fists on the rails; better he till his soil, think of what to grow, where to plant the fruit trees. However small the area of freedom, attention and devotion may expand it to occupy the whole of life.
Look at the wretched people huddled in line for the gas chambers at Auschwitz. If they do anything other than move on quietly, they will be clubbed down. Where is freedom? . . . But wait. Go back in time, enter the actual event, the very moment: they are thin and weak, and they smell; hear the weary shuffling steps, the anguished catch of breath, the clutch of hand. Enter now the head of one hunched and limping man. The line moves slowly; a few yards ahead begin the steps down. He sees the sign, someone whispers “showers,” but he knows what happens here. He is struggling with a choice: to shout “Comrades! They will kill you! Run!”—or to say nothing. This option, in the few moments remaining, is his whole life. If he shouts he dies now, painfully; if he moves on silently he dies but minutes later. Looking back on, him in time and memory, we find the moment poignant but the freedom negligible. It makes no difference in that situation, his election of daring or of inhibition. Both are futile, without consequence. History sees no freedom for him, notes only constraint, labels him victim. But in the consciousness of that one man it makes great difference whether or not he experiences the choice. For if he knows the constraint and nothing else, if he thinks “Nothing is possible,” then he is living his necessity; but if, perceiving the constraint, he turns from it to a choice between two possible courses of action, then—however he chooses—he is living his freedom. This commitment to freedom may extend to the last breath.
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IV
Sometimes in therapy profound change occurs spontaneously, without effort or intention. It is a rare experience—anytime, anywhere—to be known and understood without being judged, to be regarded with affection and respect, without being used. No therapist can feel this way about all his patients, though he must try. When he does genuinely so feel, he creates a nurturing context in which the patient may take in and make his own the therapist's way of thinking about problems, a certain reflectiveness about suffering, a tendency to hold conflicting motives in suspension while looking for connections, meanings, significance.
Such identification leads to slight, subtle, often unnoticed changes in action and behavior, in one's way of dealing with one's self and others; and over a period of time these changed actions may achieve a change of being. One then feels one's self to be profoundly different without knowing how or why. If one is asked, “Well, what did you learn? What was the main insight?” one may stumble about, fabricate some inadequate answer, yet may know certainly that one is a better person, more able to love.
This sort of change is rare. We can't count on it, can't make it happen; when it occurs it is great good fortune, a bonus. Usually change—when it occurs at all—follows long and arduous trying.
Neurotic suffering indicates inner conflict. Each side of the conflict is likely to be a composite of many partial forces, each one of which has been structured into behavior, attitude, perception, value. Each component asserts itself, claims priority, insists that something else yield, accommodate. The conflict therefore is fixed, stubborn, enduring. It may be impugned and dismissed without effect, imprecations and remorse are of no avail, strenuous acts of will may be futile; it causes—yet survives and continues to cause—the most intense suffering, humiliation, rending of flesh. Such a conflict is not to be uprooted or excised. It is not an ailment, it is the patient himself. The suffering will not disappear without a change in the conflict, and a change in the conflict amounts to a change in what one is and how one lives, feels, reacts.
Personality is a complex balance of many conflicting claims, forces, tensions, compunctions, distractions, which yet manages somehow to be a functioning entity. However it may have come to be what it is, it resists becoming anything else. It tends to maintain itself, to convey itself onward into the future unaltered. It may be changed only with difficulty. It may be changed from within, spontaneously and unthinkingly, by an onslaught of physiological force, as in adolescence. It may be changed from without, again spontaneously and unthinkingly, by the force of unusual circumstance, as in a Nazi concentration camp. And sometimes it may be changed from within, deliberately, consciously, and by design. Never easily, never for sure, but slowly, uncertainly, and only with effort, insight, and a kind of tenacious creative cunning.
Personality change follows change in behavior. Since we are what we do, if we want to change what we are we must begin by changing what we do, must undertake a new mode of action. Since the import of such action is change, it will run afoul of existing entrenched forces which will protest and resist. The new mode will be experienced as difficult, unpleasant, forced, unnatural, anxiety-provoking. It may be undertaken lightly but can be sustained only by a considerable effort of will. Change will occur only if such action is maintained over a long period of time.
The place of insight is to illumine: to ascertain where one is, how one got there, how now to proceed, and to what end. It is a blueprint, as in building a house, and may be essential, but no one achieves a house by blueprints alone, no matter how accurate or detailed. A time comes when one must take up hammer and nails. In building a house the making of blueprints may be delegated to an architect, the construction to a carpenter. In building the house of one's life or in its remodeling, one may delegate nothing; for the task can be done, if at all, only in the workshop of one's own mind and heart, in the most intimate rooms of thinking and feeling where none but one's self has freedom of movement or competence or authority. The responsibility lies with him who suffers, originates with him, remains with him to the end. It will be no less his if he enlists the aid of a therapist; we are no more the product of our therapists than of our genes: we create ourselves. The sequence is suffering, insight, will, action, change. The one who suffers, who wants to change, must bear responsibility all the way. “Must” because as soon as responsibility is ascribed, the forces resisting change occupy the whole of one's being, and the process of change comes to a halt. A psychiatrist may help perhaps crucially, but his best help will be of no avail if he is required to provide a kind or degree of insight which will of itself achieve change.
Should an honest man wish to become a thief the necessary action is obvious: he must steal—not just once or occasionally, but frequently, consistently, taking pains that the business of planning and executing thefts replace other activities which in implication might oppose the predatory life. If he keeps at it long enough his being will conform to his behavior: he will have become a thief. Conversely, should a thief undertake to become an honest man, he must stop stealing and must undertake actions which replace stealing, not only in time and energy, and perhaps also excitement, but which carry implications contrary to the predatory life, that is, productive or contributive activities.
If a homosexual should set out to become heterosexual, among all that is obscure, two things are clear: he should discontinue homosexual relations, however much tempted he may be to continue on an occasional spontaneous basis, and he should undertake, continue, and maintain heterosexual relations, however little heart he may have for girls, however often he fail, and however inadequate and averse he may find himself to be. He would be well advised in reaching for such a goal to anticipate that success, if it be achieved at all, will require a long time, years not months, that the effort will be painful and humiliating, that he will discover profound currents of feeling which oppose the behavior he now requires of himself, that emerging obstacles will each one seem insuperable yet each must be thought through, that further insight will be constantly required to inform and sustain his behavior, that sometimes insight will precede and illumine action, and sometimes blind dogged action must come first, and that even so, with the best of will and good faith and determination, he still may fail. He should beware of beckoning shortcuts, such as drug therapy or hypnosis. They falsify the reality with which he must most intimately deal, that of his own thought, feeling, drive; they undermine his commitment of internal resources by encouraging him to feel that there is an easier way. There is no short-cut, no safe conduct, no easier way. He must proceed alone, on nerve. He is not entitled to much hope—just that he has a chance. He may take some bleak comfort only in knowing that no one can be sure at the outset that he will fail, and that it is his own unmeasured and unmeasurable resources of heart and mind and will which have most bearing on the eventual outcome.
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This is self-transcendence and is not to be confused with a type of coercive treatment in which the therapist acts as agent for society, and the goal is adjustment. Punishment, brainwashing, and lobotomy fall in this category. Less extreme varieties are known variously as operant conditioning, behavior therapy, or conditioned reflex therapy. All such treatment takes the person as object and seeks to achieve the desired change by manipulation. The alcoholic may be so rigged with wires as to receive an electric shock each time he takes a drink. The homosexual man may be provided with male partners who insure that sexual experiences will be exceedingly unpleasant, while concurrently gently seductive ladies, without demands of their own, introduce him to the delights of polarized sexuality. Such things may be arranged for a fee.
We are in no position to comment on the efficacy of behavior therapy as generally practiced, but in principle we know it works. People may indeed be treated as objects and may be profoundly affected thereby. Kick a dog often enough and he will become cowardly or vicious. Men who are kicked undergo similar changes; their view of the world and of themselves is transformed. The survivors of Hitler's concentration camps testify that the treatment received did have an effect. Nor do we find any reason to doubt the alleged results of Chinese thought-control methods. People may indeed be brainwashed, for benign or exploitative reasons.
Behavior therapy is not, therefore, being contrasted to self-transcendence in terms of efficacy; the contrast is in terms of freedom. If one's destiny is shaped by manipulation one has become more of an object, less of a subject, has lost freedom. It matters little whether or not the manipulation is known to the person upon whom it acts. For even if one himself designs and provides for those experiences which are then to affect him, he is nevertheless treating himself as object—and to some extent, therefore, becomes an object.
If, however, one's destiny is shaped from within then one has become more of a creator, has gained freedom. This is self-transcendence, a process of change that originates in one's heart and expands outward, always within the purview and direction of a knowing consciousness, begins with a vision of freedom, with an “I want to become . . . ,” with a sense of the potentiality to become what one is not. One gropes toward this vision in the dark, with no guide, no map, and no guarantee. Here one acts as subject, author, creator.
Sometimes a process of character change may proceed with increasing momentum and finality to solid completion. The honest man becomes the complete thief; the thief becomes the completely honest man. When character change proceeds to such radical conclusion it is likely, not only that the old way of life has been given up, but also that a new way of life, directly opposite in implication, has been adopted. Such a change is experienced, not as a deflection of course, but as an absolute turning around, a conversion, may even call for a change of name. Saul of Tarsus had such an experience on the road to Damascus and—having been the chief persecutor of Christianity—became its greatest exponent. Malcolm X had such an experience in prison with the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, and changed not simply from thief to non-thief, but from thief to social reformer; the completeness and finality with which he transcended the old identity owed as much to his having undertaken to correct injustice with passion and commitment as it did to his giving up stealing. Had he simply “learned his lesson,” decided not to steal any more, and taken an indifferently-regarded job as gas station attendant, he might never have altogether ceased being a thief. Some of the temptation, bitterness, and envy, something of the way of thought, the attitude, and outlook of a thief might have remained.
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Such change as occurred in Saul or Malcolm X is rare, seems so far beyond anything we might achieve by our own efforts that, when it occurs, we usually ascribe credit—to a mystic force, to a revelation, to the hand of God. The changes we achieve with ourselves, with or without therapy, are likely to be partial and provisional. The homosexual gets married, has children, but never feels entirely safe with women; the frigid woman becomes capable of climax, but not easily and not always; the impotent man becomes able usually to make it, but can never be sure; the depressive character can work, may occasionally feel glad to be alive, but is not likely ever to be described as of sunny disposition; the phobic woman becomes less anxious, no longer has to decline invitations, but always has sweaty palms at cocktail parties. Such changes must be counted success; for more frequent in outcome, even with considerable effort, is no change at all. He who undertakes to transform himself, therefore, should think not of all or none, sick or well, miserable or happy, but of more or less, better or worse. He should undertake only to do what he can, to handle something better, to suffer less. The kingdom of heaven need not concern him.
When the thief takes a job and determines to go straight, when the homosexual gets a girl and renounces sexual relations with men, he does so with a vision of what he will become. Rarely may such direct action, in the course of time and of great effort, succeed without further insight and with no change of plan. More often the course upon which one has embarked entails so much anxiety, uncertainty, confusion, that reappraisal becomes necessary. One finds that his entire self was not known, that submerged aspects of self now rise up in terror, threat, and subversion, screaming outrage, demanding revocation. One is forced to a halt, sometimes driven back. The whole issue has to be rethought. “What I'm giving up is more important than I knew.” “Maybe I don't want to change.” “Am I going at it the wrong way?” Newly emerging feelings and reactions must be explored in relation to other known elements and to one's now threatened intention.
Here therapy may offer insight into bewildering experience, help with the making of new connections, give comfort and encouragement, assist in the always slippery decision of whether to hang on and try harder or to look for a different way to try. That person gains most from therapy, and gains it most quickly, who has the heart and will to go it alone in the event that therapy does not help; whereas he who clings to therapy as drowning man to ship's timber is more likely to burden therapy with a weight it can't support, and so take himself and therapy down together.
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Sometimes we suffer desperately, would do anything, try anything, but are lost, find no way. We cast about, distract ourselves, search, but find no connection between the misery we feel and the way we live. The pain comes from nowhere, gives no clue. We are bored, nothing has meaning; we become depressed. What to do? How to live? Something is wrong but we cannot imagine another way of living which would free us.
Yet there must be a way, for no sustained feeling can exist as a thing in itself, independent of what we do. If the suffering is serious and intractable it must be intimately and extensively connected, in ways we do not perceive, with the way we live. We have to look for such connections. Sometimes there is nothing to be done until they are found.
Therapy may help. One may discover, for example, a simmering hatred of one's wife, not consciously felt, not expressed, but turned against one's self, experienced as depression. Such a finding may still not indicate what one should do; for that will depend on yet other feelings, connections, implications. Should one begin to express the anger? Perhaps, if the grievance is reasonable and if there is also affinity and love. Should one get a divorce? Perhaps, if there is not even that minimum affection necessary for trying to work out differences. Sometimes there is no love, and good reason for hatred, and still one does not want a divorce: then one must be struck by this curious thing, that one clings to a source of frustration and torment, must ask why, and perhaps only then may begin to uncover a profound dependence which has been both well hidden by, and fully expressed in, the hostile tie. One hates her but can't leave her because one is afraid. Afraid of what? And why? What one should do may come to be known only after this dependence is examined in its relations with various other feelings and experiences. Sometimes there is no grievance and much love, and so, gradually, one may learn that he scapegoats his wife and may realize that he must, therefore, need to feel hatred, that he is using it for ulterior purposes—perhaps to cover up feelings of inadequacy, so avoiding the awareness of what he might want to do if he weren't afraid.
Much of our suffering is just so obscure as this. Frigidity, social anxiety, isolation, boredom, disaffection with life—in all such states we may see no correlation between the inner feeling and the way we live. Yet no such feeling can be independent of behavior; and if only we find the connections we may begin to see how a change in the way we live will make for a change in the way we feel.
Since freedom depends upon awareness, psychotherapy may, by extending awareness, create freedom. When in therapy a life story of drift and constraint is reworked to expose alternatives for crucial courses of action, asking always “Why did you do that?,” attaching doubt to every explanation which is cast in the form of necessary reaction to antecedent cause, always reminding the patient that “Even so . . . it was possible to have acted otherwise”—in all this one is rewriting the past, is taking the story of a life which was experienced as shaped by circumstance and which was recounted as such, and retelling it in terms of choice and responsibility. As a court may remind a defendant that ignorance of the law is no excuse, so a therapist may remind a patient that blindness to freedom does not justify constraint. And insofar as it may come to seem credible to rewrite one's life in terms of ignored choice, to assume responsibility retrospectively for what one has done and so has become, it will become possible likewise to see alternatives in the present, to become aware that one is free now in this moment to choose how to live, and that what one will become will follow upon what he now does.
When, however, in therapy a life story is reworked to expose the forces which “drove” one to do as he did, emphasizing traumas which twisted him and shaped defenses, hidden constraints, situational and libidinal, which required that he react in the way he did and in no other—in all this, too, one is rewriting the past, is taking a story which must have contained some elements of freedom and responsibility and retelling it in terms of causes lying outside one's control, so teaching the patient to see himself as the product of inner and outer forces. Where he feels himself to be the author of action, his analysis will reveal him as an object being acted upon. He then comes to regard himself as being lived by unknown and largely unknowable forces. As consolation prize he may acquire the capacity to guess at the nature of those obscure forces that move him. But only guess. He must not attempt seriously to bear witness to that which, by definition, he cannot know. He must remain forever the dilettante, making modest conjecture at the gusts which blow him this way and that. He becomes not only an object but opaque, most necessarily to himself.
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A “completely analyzed” person is one who has been treated for many years by an orthodox analyst. When such a one breaks down and is hospitalized we are surprised; if he is himself a psychoanalyst we are shocked. Our reaction bespeaks the assumption that thorough analysis resolves all serious inner conflict, that thereafter—though one may expect times of sadness, uncertainty, and unrest—these will derive from reality conflicts and so will not lead to breakdown. There is little to support such a view; indeed, the most cursory glance at three generations of analysts leaves it in tatters. The surprise we feel when a “well analyzed” person breaks down derives from the wish to view man as a machine. Very delicate and complicated, to be sure, like a fine watch, and liable therefore to subtle, tricky problems of adjustment which may require the lengthy services of an expert; but when finally we get rid of all the bugs we may expect smooth and reliable function. Such an image of man is at odds with what we know life to be. If we seriously regard our private thought and feeling, our visions at night when the wind blows, when rain falls on a deserted island, then—though fine adjustments have been made by a great watchmaker—we find so much conflict, misery, confusion that we know we are never through and never safe. The suffering and the danger cannot be left behind. They are what we are.
In reconstructing a life story truth is necessary but not sufficient. Truth does not demarcate, cannot determine whether we should dwell upon cause or choice. Two histories of the same life may be radically different, yet equally true. If we have failed an examination we may say, “I would not have failed if the teacher had not asked that question on Cromwell—which, after all, had not come up in class,” or “I would not have failed if I had studied harder.” Both statements are addressed to the same experience, in the same effort to understand; both claim to answer the question “Why did I fail?” and both may be true. Truth does not here provide the criterion for selection; the way we understand the past is determined, rather, by the future we desire. If we want to excuse ourselves we elect the former view; if we want to avoid such failures in the future we elect the latter. (If we believe our aim to be the passing of such exams in the future, and if we nevertheless elect the former view of the present failure, then we are confused.)
Likewise in addressing ourselves to the failure of a lifetime, and asking why, we may arrive at answers significantly different but equally true. In the life most free and most aware, so much defining action still occurs without choice that it is always feasible to compose an accurate and cogent account in terms of genes, drives, and circumstance. Conversely, in the life most crushed by outside force, there nevertheless exists the potentiality for actions other than those in fact taken. With the noose around our neck there still are options—to curse God or to pray, to weep or to slap the executioner in the face.
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Of two equally true accounts of the same life the one we choose will depend upon the consequences we desire, the future we intend to create. If the life is our own or one of our patients', if it involves suffering and there is desire to change, we will elect a history written in terms of choice; for this is the view that insists upon the awareness of alternatives, the freedom to make one's self into something different. If the life in question is one we observe from a distance, without contact or influence, for example a life which has ended, we may elect a history written in terms of cause. In reconstructing a life that ended at Auschwitz we usually ignore options for other courses of individual behavior, locate cause and responsibility with the Nazis; for our intent is not to appraise the extent to which one person realized existing opportunity, but to examine and condemn the social evil which encompassed and doomed him. In considering the first eighteen years in the life of Malcolm X few of us would find much point in formulating his progress from delinquency to rackets to robbery to prison in terms of choice, holding him responsible for not having transcended circumstance; most of us would find the meaning of his story to lie in the manner in which racism may be seen as the cause of his downward course.
Conflict, suffering, psychotherapy—all these lead us to look again at ourselves, to look more carefully, in greater detail, to find what we have missed, to understand a mystery; and all this extends awareness. But whether this greater awareness will increase or diminish freedom will depend upon what it is that we become aware of. If the greater awareness is of the causes, traumas, psychodynamics that “made” us what we are, then we are understanding the past in such a way as to prove that we “had” to become what we are; and, since this view applies equally to the present which is the unbroken extension of that determined past, therapy becomes a way of establishing why we must continue to be what we have been, a way of disavowing choice with the apparent blessing of science, and the net effect will be a decrease in freedom. If, however, the greater awareness is of options unnoticed, of choices denied, of other ways to live, then freedom will be increased, and with it greater responsibility for what we have been, are, and will become.
