James Donnelly, DSW, LCSW

Abstract

Julia Kristeva states in her opening remarks about freedom, that freedom is not a psychoanalytic concept. Yet the desire for and the quest for freedom … whatever that may mean to each client … is at the heart of most of our clients concerns. Freedom from symptoms, freedom from restrictive and controlling relationships, freedom from the burdens of work and economic limits, there is barely an area of concern that our clients bring to us that does not have at its core a subjective feeling of the restriction of freedom.

Yet, there are all kinds of ways to look at freedom. The ancients valued freedom as freedom of movement. Plato and Aristotle barely mention it. St. Paul and St. Augustine introduced a person divided against him or her self. They struggle with the freedom of choice or free will and its limitations … as they experienced their desire for the good and their failures in that quest. Deterministic philosophies … theological or scientific, raised questions about whether there really is any possibility of freedom at all; i.e. freedom wished for or obtained is basically an illusion. We are driven by forces or fate.

And Freud? The popular conception … or misconception is that freedom is an illusion torpedoed by the reality of our unconscious. Real freedom is that of the ‘drives’ that are in eternal conflict with society. Our wish for freedom is really our wish to disregard whatever gets in our way.  And what of this dance between Eros and Thanatos

In light of her understanding (or misunderstanding) of Freud’s theories, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt was not a fan of psychoanalysis. She saw psychoanalysis as a means to encourage people to adjust to conformity, instead of challenging the restrictive realities of relationships and political oppression. Arendt perceived psychoanalytic theory as an invalidation of the basic human capacity to choose to renew. Psychoanalysis was for her an obstacle to freedom.

In the context of our therapeutic work, what is freedom … what are we really talking about?  Considering the issue of freedom in our work, philosophy and therapeutic theory have an opportunity to talk to each other.

Through a somewhat personal journey with old friends and guides, this paper will attempt to come to grips with this issue of freedom, personal and therapeutic; along with its demands and ultimate paradoxes for us as therapists.

***

The varieties of freedom within therapeutic space.

Freedom is such a powerful word. It stirs emotion. It stirs action. We witness struggles for freedom around the world. We have strong feelings of both hope and foreboding – trying to contain the wellspring of tears rising within us. As psychotherapists, engaging the concept of freedom in our work brings us to the recognition of the essentially political nature of treatment.

But never mind the dramas of the world stage.

We as social workers and psychotherapists are witnesses to the small revolutions of freedom in our clients’ lives. Sometimes after months or even years of listening, the fire bursts through in a client’s life. Something entirely different has occurred.  We know and they know, despite whatever appearances, nothing is the same. It may have been the simplest action. It may have been a dramatic enactment. It may have been an invisible falling away of a lifelong bondage to a concern. Waited for, hoped for, worked for … when it occurs, it is always a surprise!

We celebrate its occurrence. We ponder: what was it? Was it the ‘intervention’?  Was it the quality of ‘therapeutic presence’? Was it their motivation? … Intelligence? … Capacity for ‘insight’?  Was it the correct treatment plan or just the right script of ‘self-talk’ training? Was it pure luck … a whack of life’s Zen master’s stick at the right time and place?

Whatever it was, can we make it happen again? Isn’t that what our business is about? This is a question, the point of which is not an answer; but the discomfort it fosters to drive our capacity to be humble and yet, available.

The mystery of freedom is that it requires us on the one hand, but is beyond our control on the other. The mysteries of freedom hover around the paradoxes of Will. All of us are aware that, whether we call it ‘counter-transference’ or something else, the twists and turns on our own journeys for freedom are at the core of our therapeutic usefulness

As mentioned in the abstract, I have had a number of ‘friends’ from whom I have borrowed and blended liberally – be they from philosophy or therapeutic theory. Through the many conversations on this journey with these ‘friends’ towards an understanding of freedom and its relevance for the heart and spirit of psychotherapy, I have come to realize that the dilemmas and vicissitudes of freedom abide in the sometime whirlpool of separation and differentiation; but I get ahead of myself.

There has been, it seems to me, a parallel process between philosophy and psychotherapeutic theories as they both struggle with the dilemmas of Will, relationship and community; the adventures of philosophy being somewhat longer.

According to Hannah Arendt (1958, 1971), our guide who will take us on a philosophical exploration of freedom and Will, the concepts of freedom and Will were not very well defined or evolved in classical Greece. Freedom primarily meant freedom to do or go where one wished without the constraints of tyranny, slavery, misfortunes of birth and gender; or of, in a general sense, freedom from the constraints of the necessities of labor and the struggle to survive. The freemen of Athens were men for whom slaves and women released them from the burdens of necessity; released to be able to meet in the Agora, a space where the councils of that early democracy came to give their opinion, discuss debate and vote on the business of the Polis.

It was in this Athens that Socrates could be found daily in the Agora provoking his fellow citizens to take on the habit of questioning their assumptions. He is the patron saint of philosophy, although he never wrote a word or developed a ‘system’. He lived his life as question – and paid for it with his life. For him, the power of mind was not to speculate but to question. As therapists pondering the meaning of freedom in our practice, we owe a lot to Socrates.

Down the centuries, Socrates’ life has been a model of the free life, despite the consternation of his fellow Athenians. When asked to account for it in his trial, all he could ascribe it to was his obedience to his daemon.

The inner conflicts of the Greeks were not framed around a concept of Will, but as conflict between man’s higher nature, his capacity for reason and intelligence, and his lower nature, the passions and needs of the body. It was only his soul that could grasp the immutable. The needs of his body and unreliability of his senses were only a hindrance. This, of course, was at the heart of Plato’s philosophy and his vision of society portrayed in the Republic (1987). Only those, man or woman, who had gone through the purification of their minds from the needs of the body could be leaders.

Freedom was release into pure contemplation and, therefore, grasping of the truth of the immutable forms. Plato’s Republic is a dictatorship of the enlightened. Plato was perhaps much wounded personally by the execution of Socrates. He turned away from a communal sense of society and replaces it with an organization of individuals – valued only by their function of supporting the enlightened quest for the Truth.

Aristotle, a physician, biologist and a student of Plato, had a more integrated and balanced view of man. He saw man, not only as a rational animal but also as a political animal; as an individual who is in pursuit of the good life and happiness – both of which involve a balanced life as member of the Polis. This is the basis for his Ethic (1953) and Politics (2000).

Freedom was a balanced life, both internally and externally: in medio stat virtus.

Aristotle, however, did introduce a precursor to the concept of Will by identifying in man the faculty of choice: a small space within the human mind – the capacity to choose the means to ends that we take for granted and are not a matter of choice. The “ends”, such as happiness, are inherent to human nature, but one can choose the means.

It was freedom against the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ that was the concern of the Stoics. Epictetus (Lebell, 1995; Long, 2002), a freed slave in the first century Roman Empire and the philosopher upon which Albert Ellis (1997) built his RET approach to treatment, is as radical in his split between mind and body as Plato; but with a different goal in mind. Although not using the concept of Will, it is an extreme of mind over matter philosophy.

Epictetus counsels use of reason to convince oneself that the only thing a man has control over are his own thoughts and emotional reactions. The world, including one’s body and the actions of others, is out of one’s control. However, one can control whether or not one lets events affect you.

Freedom is rational detachment.

This is a philosophy of resignation and complete assent to ‘the way things are’. Not as elitist as Plato, Epictetus has in common with him the belief that the underlying harmony of the universe is perceived and joined through the soul’s implicit link to it; that is by total identification with man’s higher nature, his mind. For Epictetus, in contrast to Plato, this realization is open to all who truly seek it.

Unlike Plato and Epictetus, Aristotle accepts the reality and validity of humans as flesh and blood and seeks to deal with society’s undeniable difficulties through a philosophy of finding balance – and not through avoidance or denial of the reality of the physical world.

All three, however, see people as individuals struggling to deal with the inner and external conflicts that inflict pain and unhappiness. Freedom, whatever method, is seen as primarily a release from these constraints. It is only Aristotle among these three that places the shadow of freedom in some relation to men engaging with each other.

Will, as yet undefined, is not seen as a separate faculty. Rather it is something like the strength of one’s mind.

Through Paul of Tarsus and Augustine of Hippo – two centuries later – an articulated concept of Will, freedom, as well as a different concept of society enter into the stream of Greek and Roman philosophical thought – to become the dominant philosophies of the West.  Paul, in bringing Christianity to the Gentiles, introduced a Hebrew anthropology, a different sense of time and history, as well as an understanding of human beings and their relation to community and reality.

In Judaism there was a developed concept of Will that was intrinsically a part of a personal relationship between the community and each person in the community. with a single transcendent God. Torah or the Law was not, as with the Greeks and Romans, a constitution and a set of agreed upon rules for society. It was part of a covenant, a mutual agreement between God and his people. A covenant built upon fidelity to a promise. The conflicts of Will were not between man’s rational and physical nature, but of obedience/disobedience, acceptance/rejection. Will was the capacity to freely say both no or yes in a personal relationship. Internal conflicts were between these to aspects of Will.

For two more centuries, the Greek and Hebrew streams of thought interacted through the struggles of the early Christian churches to reconcile Christian beliefs with Greek Philosophy. A pivotal point of this integration comes to us through the philosophy of Augustine (1950, 1960). His writing strives to integrate these two streams. It was a struggle to reconcile his experience of the dilemmas of Will. Augustine laid much of the foundation for later European philosophies and introduced fundamental concepts upon which much of therapeutic thinking was to be based. Augustine laid a foundation for subsequent philosophies of person

The Greeks speculated about man within a cyclical concept of time and history. Augustine approached the issue of man and his Will within the linear framework of biblical time. In biblical time there is creation, a definitive beginning from nothing, and a definite end. Time does not begin in the universe of creation until there is a unique being, man, who has the capacity to know that he begins in the unique event of his birth, and he will end in death. It is with that awareness that time becomes possible. Time for Augustine is not simply the measure of motion as per Aristotle. Time is intrinsically linked to man’s capacity for memory

Time is an inherent function of narrative, both individual and communal.

Each person, unique by virtue of his or her beginning through birth, enters into the ongoing narrative of all those before him or her. That is the non negotiable context for everyone. The question for Augustine of what is man and his will is set within this framework. The stage is set for the development of a radically different, complex and ‘interior’ anthropology.

Augustine may be the first philosopher of ‘the person’.  Looking at what he considered the three major aspects of the mind: intellect, memory and will, he did not see them as separate isolated functions that were in conflict with each other.  Rather he saw them as three distinct aspects of a unified whole … i.e. that within us that always abides despite the vicissitudes of perception, thought and desire. Further, he saw the Will as that aspect of the person that was the integrator and also the faculty through which the person relates to and acts upon the world. Will is the intrinsic instrument of relationship.

The essential characteristic of the Will according to Augustine is its attentiveness. The Will attends to the world and selects what it allows to come into memory as the interior part of the person. It is only these admitted aspects of the world allowed by Will that can be considered and processed by intellect. Will is not simply a separate function; it is the center of this integrated whole, the person.

The primary capacity of the Will to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’, to accept or reject, is the freedom to both shape one’s self and introduce something new within the context of this ongoing narrative that is the world. But this does not in itself resolve for Augustine the “monstrosity” that is the dilemma of the Will that is always split between what I want (velle) and what I don’t want (nolle).

How to get beyond the ever present dilemmas of compliance/resistance inherent in the Will? It is the same dilemma posed by Paul in his letter to the Romans: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but do the very thing I hate.” (7:15). For Paul, the resolution was only through Grace. For Augustine, who had come to a realization of the possibility of diversity within a unity – an insight he used to integrate the various faculties of the mind – resolves the dilemma of the Will though a transformation of the Will itself into an enduring delight in the act of loving.

Augustine describes Love as ‘the weight of the soul’, the specific gravity that centers the soul outside the turbulence of a divided Will. To understand this, he applies the concept of diversity within a unity. Although different and representing a unique beginning in each person, there is a unity of being in all men based upon the biblical concept of all having been created in the “image and likeness of God”. The dilemma of Will is not resolved through any object of the Will or any decision about an object. It is resolved rather by a transformation of the Will in the allowance of loving; an allowance made possible by a perception of a meaningful whole and a fundamental gratitude for the fact of existence.

In Augustine’s words: Amo: Volo ut sis, I love: I will that you be.

Although freedom is anchored in the Will’s capacity for each person to initiate something completely new in the context of the world conversation, freedom beyond the dilemmas of yes and no is in the act of transformation of the Will into being as love.

To quote Arendt

“… the Will’s redemption cannot be mental and does not come by divine intervention either; redemption comes from the act which – often like a “coup d’etat”, in Bergson’s felicitous phrase –  interrupts the conflict between velle (I wish) and nolle (I do not wish). And the price of the redemption is, as we shall see, freedom” (1958, 1978).

From this journey though the early European philosophies, Arendt has gleaned a number of concepts that were central to her own philosophy, and that were adopted by some of the later psychoanalytic thinkers.

First, taken from the Agora of the Greek city states, was the concept of a ‘space between men’ where each was free to bring one’s unique perspective in the process of open debate and discussion. This concept was central to her political philosophy. This created space was the arena of action through speech, in contrast to the violence of a forceful imposition of arbitrary will.

Secondly, in conjunction with the above, was the concept taken from Augustine that each individual represented a ‘new beginning’ which comes into the ongoing world through each person’s power to act. New beginnings are possible when men meet in common space where they act and speak freely. She describes this aspect of the human condition as “natality”.  The correlate to this, based on the uniqueness of each individual person as a “new beginning” is her concept of “plurality”. Plurality highlights the realty that there is no such thing as Man. That’s an abstraction. There are only men, each one unique, who live together in societies. It is out of recognition and/or disregard of these two essential aspects that leads to very different political arrangements in society. The acknowledgment and addressing of the value of individual difference and diversity is at the heart of her philosophy. .

Thirdly, is her concept of power.  Real power is beyond the imposition of Will, the latter of which results in violence. Power is the action of men who allow free speech in a created space between each other. This concept has for her its roots in Augustine’s philosophy of the transformation of Will into the act of loving (Arendt did her doctoral dissertation on the concept of Love in St. Augustine). Within the structure of an in-between space where each is free to give his or her perspective, there is the possibility of a ‘new beginning’ to arise. This structure, and the free and authentic speech that occurs within it, allows for a genuine undefined ‘gap’ between ‘past’ and ‘future’; a gap that allows the entering into the given world a new possibility.

In Arendt’s philosophy, when men “act”, the consequences are essentially unpredictable and out of the control of the initiators. Each act initiates an unpredictable sequence of events. History is not ‘made’; history occurs and unfolds. Efforts to impose a plan on history lead to such violent social disasters as the regimes of Hitler and Stalin.

Fourth, and last, there are two concepts taken from biblical tradition that she feels are consistent with the above. They are, “promise” and “forgiveness”. Promise anchors the reliability and dependability of a person’s word; dependability arrived at through negotiation and dialogue. Without that there would be chaos and terror.  This tends to anchor stability in the reliability of speech.

Forgiveness, on the other hand, allows for something new to occur. Because action once risked cannot be undone, the consequences are unpredictable and essentially out of our control. Forgiveness is not a passive acquiescence to injustice. Forgiveness is the surrender of vengeance. Given the inevitable harm consequent to any action, vengeance blocks the possibility of new beginnings and reinforces captivity to the past.  Forgiveness allows for a gap between past and future, and thus introduces change in the narrative of history

It is a paradox, or perhaps an irony, that I and others have found in Arendt’s philosophy such an inspiring and friendly home for deepening our understanding of our therapeutic work.  It is ironic, because Arendt took a dim view of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. She believed that psychoanalysis reduced the individual to the vicissitudes of the unconscious – stripping a person of their individuality and reducing them to the drives common to all. In doing so, she felt, the importance of each person’s uniqueness and difference was diminished. Her perception was that psychoanalysis fostered adjustment and compliance rather than the intrinsic value of personal difference and the exercise of a different perspective

The point, I believe, that Arendt missed about the development of Freud’s concept of the unconscious was that the unconscious was not simply a pool of repressed and forbidden desires and memories, but is in fact a unique pre-verbal narrative and the foundation of language and meaningful speech.

As it turned out, however, her philosophy offered to some a structure and a new frame for the riches of Freud’s discoveries.

Perhaps, as therapists, we might look at Freud as our Augustine … although I doubt he would either invite or approve of such a comparison. However, in terms of our history, Freud introduced an original theory of mind … in many ways much more complex than Augustine; but not any less ground breaking. Freud set in motion … and not always to his liking … investigations and theorizing about human nature and the complexity of our minds and emotions that ultimately could look back at the efforts of Augustine with a sense of historical continuity and pride in contributing such depth to the work Augustine had initiated.

On first pass, Freud’s conceptualizations remind us of the early Greeks. It is highly focused on the individual; an individual who is divided within himself and who is over against society. A person is essentially a compromise formation between drives, unconscious forces, and desires along with the interiorizing of society’s mores and proscriptions. The structural theory, although it continuously underwent transformations and changes, is a bit reminiscent of the Greek conflict between the higher/ lower man, mind/body split and never gets beyond the yes/no dilemmas of Will.

Early psychoanalytic theory talks about drives and desires with the Ego as a mediator, but there is no real concept of Will or Person. It seems, at first, that Ego could be the integrator; but the Ego is unconscious and is primarily the bundle of capacities. It was the work of later theorists that led to a broader understanding of Ego, clearer issues of self image, identity and, ultimately, to concepts of the Self

The true genius of Freud, however, was not simply in the originality of his speculations on the structure of mind. It was in the discovery of his method. It is through his psychoanalytic method that we have access to a radically new and profound understanding of the meaning of freedom at the core of the person.

Like Hannah Arendt’s act, that initiates sequences of events unforeseen and beyond the control of the initiator, Freud’s discovery of the unconscious and creation of relationship grounded on free association and free floating attention completely revolutionized our understanding of the power and depth of the human encounter.

His discoveries revealed the psychic depth and transformative power of authentic dialogue. This method, which evolved into the discovery of transference and counter-transference, was the fountain out of which sprung object relations theory, clarification of the concept of Self, the discovery of the self-object dynamics of all relationships and the centricity of language and not simply speech in human development. Freud brought into our world an unprecedented insight into how actually we come to know ourselves and each other.

Christopher Bollas (1999, 2009a, 2009b) quoting from Freud’s Two Encyclopaedia Articles uses Freud’s own words to highlight the radical nature of his method. It very directly posits a therapeutic relationship that transcends the dilemmas of Will.

“Experience has shown that the attitude that the analyst physician could most advantageously adopt was to surrender himself to his own unconscious mental activity in a state of evenly suspended attention, to avoid as far as possible reflection and the construction of conscious expectations, not to try to fix anything he heard particularly in his memory, and by these means to catch the drift of the patient’s unconscious with his own unconscious.“ [italics mine] (Freud, 1923)

Freud’s instruction to his patients to adopt an attitude of free association in their speech, basically leads to the same attitude of free floating attention to their own minds as a means of awareness of their unconscious – an attitude that disrupts the hold of the current frame for speech. This was a radically new element to any previous understanding of dialogue. It was a concept of dialogue beyond speech, but anchored in the very foundations of language in the semiotic unconscious.  Out of this practice came the clarification of dynamics of transference and counter-transference and, ultimately, an awareness of the permeable and undefined boundaries of the Self through the challenge to current meanings.

For the first time, this was an exposition of the profound depths of relationship as the in between space between men in dialogue, and consequently an understanding of therapeutic space. This space provided a setting or structure of relationship in which the ‘new possibility’ revealed between men is nothing other than the capacity for a mutual transformation of the Self – in the shared challenge to current meanings.

Freud’s discovery opened the floodgates to further explorations of this experience leading to a breakdown of the individual/isolate concept of man to one of intrinsic relation. The developments in psychoanalytic theory and practice have added profound dimensions to our understanding of human relationships and development … particularly to a realization of our inner interdependence. This understanding adds both clarity and complexity to any consideration of freedom.

The philosophical struggles with the dilemmas of Will and the problem of freedom lacked the means to explore much beyond the borders reached by Augustine.

Freud’s method has led to the discovery of an undefined ‘space between men’ that allow for those who have been wounded in their development to rediscover and recover the capacity to authentically present themselves in relationships; a space where it is possible and permissible to venture safely to the fringes of the undefined self and discover new realities in themselves and the world – while still abiding in a sense of connection.

Winnicott’s work, of course, comes immediately to mind in his campaign against the compliant ‘false self’, his stressing the essential necessity of the ‘spontaneous gesture’ and the intrinsic value of play (1965, 1971). Winnicott’s essential human being is found in the capacity to be alone in the presence of the other … together in a shared undefined space.

This is the experience of the freedom to be … in relation.

In our daily lives and in our work with clients, we all deal with the compliant/resistant dilemmas in relationships; as Winnicott, so Kohut (1984), Balaint (1968) and many others in their work and theories (Fairbairn, 1994; Grotstein and Rinsley, 2000; Guntrip, 1969). However, it has been Julia Kristeva (1991, 1999, 2000, 2002) and Christopher Bollas (1987, 1999, 2003) that have explored this issue, focusing on its impact and importance for the development of language.  Both, having backgrounds in literary criticism, linguistics and philosophy, have used the philosophical framework developed by Arendt to highlight requirements of language at the center of development and understanding of the Self and  of each person’s unique relationship to himself and to others,

Bollas (1987, 2003) explores the pre verbal language and conversation between the infant and the parenting environment held in the unconscious and expressed as each person’s unique “idiom”. This is his understanding of character. Without words, the structure of that language in the “unthought known” has rules and content. It is largely the language of proceedings and lays the ground rules for the terms of engagement. To what degree the capacity to be one’s own with another and yet take in the reality of the other is established and held in this unspoken arena. For Bollas, the radical and paradoxical nature of Freud’s method, and its fostering of free floating attention, is the power that can access and unbind the inhibiting rules in the unthought known.

Kristeva’s work on depression, Black Sun (1989), describes how a severe break in the mutuality of the terms of engagement leaves the scar of a longing for what was never there;  an attachment to a  longing – being alone without the other – prevents the achievement of speech with meaning. This is separation without the opportunity for a mutual articulation within a shared reality – separation without differentiation. Much of her writing focuses on the dilemmas and paradoxes of the compliant/rejecting aspect of Will and the requirements of risk in this struggle if there is to be a sense of meaning (2000, 2002).

With both Bollas and Kristeva – particularly Kristeva (1999) – they face the dilemma of freedom and Will which, beyond spontaneous action, still remains caught in the bind of compliance/rejection – I will/I will not. Their resolution is found in their addressing the requirements for language to be meaningful. The  experiences revealed in binding and release from the transferences of the therapeutic dialogue demonstrate that the essence of meaningful language, which is at the core of the Self, is only preserved in reference to a community of shared but undefined reality. An experience of community is grounded in the inherent fact that there is no Self outside of relation. The actual realization of relation is only possible through meanings in language that are continuously open to revision.

It is in that realization of diversity within a lived and open unity that both Kristeva and Bollas define the essence of freedom of the person.

The dilemmas of I will or I won’t are only transcended by a lived realization of a wider unity of shared meaning implicit in meaningful language. That realization occurs when one’s difference and separateness is experienced as within a shared discourse of meaning. The freedom experienced in the therapeutic encounter is this revelation:  the validity of one’s different being contributes to the ongoing conversation with others – family, community, world – thus providing specific psychological content to Augustine’s definition of love

To quote Kristeva (1999):

“Thus we have two models of freedom: freedom-adaptation and freedom-revelation. This other freedom (freedom-revelation) has to do with the revelation of the self in the presence of the other through speech.

I would say only that if this freedom-revelation, as opposed to freedom-adaptation, has more than a speculative existence, it would be in the transference-countertransference experience that it is actualized. Free associating in the transference, the subject confronts both the unspeakability of the instinctual drives, her desires, and their traumas, and also the injunction that is imposed by the very fact of language (the capacity to symbolize) as well as the place of the analyst. The subject constitutes herself within herself for the other, and in this sense he reveals herself; in the strong sense of the word, she frees herself.”

To place freedom outside the limitations of drive and doing and locate it in the center of the self in the development of language requires a paradigm shift from an energy based metaphor in development to the articulation of meaning. To anchor speech in the living reality of our capacity for language, meanings that have already been articulated (personal stories, history, family and community mores, etc.) need always be open to revision. The allowance of a new perspective and possibility contributed by each person’s unique experience of themselves and others in relation requires the acknowledgement of a space of meaning between us without definition

Augustine called this Love, his “weight”, a center of gravity against the turmoil of I will and I won’t.

We call it freedom.

We have learned, rooted in the discovery of Freud’s method and the elaborations of all those after who have contributed to a deeper understanding of what it means to be human, that this “revelation”, as Kristeva calls it, never occurs in isolation, but only through our engagement with each other through speech. The risks to our definitions inherent in working through the transference are risks required if the language of our relations with each other is to make sense.

Freedom, like love and like forgiveness, occurs in that paradoxical space where Will surrenders to its transformation. Will surrenders to simply attending to the inclusion of a yet to be articulated ‘We’ between I and You.

On that, Freud, his legacy and Augustine agree.

That is what we hope to attain in our offerings of a therapeutic space.

Amo: Volo ut sis.

I love: I will that you be.

***

REFERENCES

Arendt, Hannah (1958). The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

_____________(1978). The Life of the Mind. Harcourt: New York.

Aristotle (1953). The Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by J.A.K. Thomson. London: Penguin Books.

_______ (2000). Politics. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. New York: Dover Publications.

Augustine. (1950). The City of God. Translated by M.  Dods. New York: Modern Library.

________  (1960). The Confessions.  Translated by J. K. Ryan. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.

Balint, M. (1968).  The Basic Fault: Therapeutic aspects of regression. Evanston, Illinois:

Northwestern University Press.

Bollas, Christopher (1987). The Shadow of the Object. New York: Columbia University Press.

________________(1999). The Mystery of Things. New York: Routledge.

________________(2003). Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and self experience. New York:

Routledge.

_______________  (2009a). The Infinite Question. New York: Routledge.

______________   (2009b). The Evocative Object World. New York: Routledge

Buber, M. (1958).  I and Thou. Translated by Ronald Gregor Smith. New York: Charles

Scribner’s Sons.

Ellis, A. and Harper, R. (1997). A Guide to Rational Living. Chatsworth: Willshire Book Co.

Freud, S. (1923). Two encyclopaedia articles, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud XVIII. London: Hogarth Press.

Lebell, S. (1995). The Art of Living: Epictetus. San Francisco: Harper.

Long, A. A. (2004). Epictetus: A stoic and Socratic guide to life. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Fairbairn, W.R.D. (1994). Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. Hove and New York:     Brunner-Routledge.

Grotstein, J. S. and Rinsley, D. B. ed. (2000).  Fairbairn and the Origins of Object Relations. New York: Other Press.

Guntrip, H. (1969). Schizoid Phenomena, Object-Relations and the Self. New York: International   Universities Press, INC.

Kristeva, J.  ( 1989). Black Sun: Depression and Malancholia. New York: Columbia University Press.

__________ (1991). Strangers to Ourselves. New York: Columbia University Press.

__________ (1999). Psychoanalysis and Freedom. Canadian Journal of Psychoanlysis. Vol. 7. No 1.

_________   (2000). The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt: The power and limit of psychoanalysis, Volume 1. New York: Columbia University Press.

__________ (2002). Intimate Revolt: The power and limit of psychoanalysis, Volume 2. New York: Columbia University Press.

Kohut, Heinz (1984). How Does Analysis Cure? Chicago: The University of Chicago Press

Plato (1987). The Republic. Translated by Desmond Lee. London: Penguin Books.

Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment. New York: International University Press.

________________.(1971).  Playing and Reality. London: Travistock.

***

The Thou MEETS ME THROUGH GRACE –

it is not found by seeking.

But my speaking of the primary word to it

is an act of my being.

It is indeed the act of my being.

The Thou meets me.

But I step into direct relation with it

Hence the realization means:

being chosen and choosing, suffering and action in one;

just as any action of the whole being,

which means the suspension of all partial actions

and consequently of all sensations of actions grounded only in their particular limitation,

is bound to resemble suffering.

The primary word I-Thou

can be spoken only with the whole being.

Concentration and fusion into the whole being

can never take place through my agency,

nor can it ever take place without me.

I become through my relation to the Thou;

as I become I, I say Thou.

All real living is meeting.”

Martin Buber

I and Thou

For thoughts and comments, please send to: jdonnellydsw@gmail.com

© 2012 James Donnelly, DSW.LCSW

All rights reserved

South Garden Press, New York