Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology

The problem of free will, or freedom of action, is important to both philosophers and clinicians. One goal of each has been to identify and foster behaviors which express an individual's will or intention—as much as possible—neither coerced nor constrained by forces outside, and, also, neither distorted nor driven by nonrational biases or impulses, inside that person. Philosophical discussions have tried to characterize the defining or essential features of action (Davidson 1982), or to consider whether action is possible within the physical world, where events presumably happen according to deterministic laws (Kim 1998). Clinicians have attempted to help patients to identify more accurately when and why they act (Gray 1994; Schafer 1976), and to remove or lessen the many psychological obstacles that interfere with effective, intentional action, including guilt, other inhibitions, and various forms of cognitive distortion.

The psychiatric, and, in particular, the psychoanalytic literature, has long emphasized that obstacles to effective action are often internal to the individual him- or herself, and not only imposed from without. For example, to the extent that our ambitions and projects may, at least in part, express wishes and fantasies that are seen by us as threatening or forbidden, we may fail to endorse them as our own, and, thereby, fail to pursue them directly and successfully. Even in our moment-to-moment interactions with others, we censor our thoughts and the expressions of our thoughts, because we believe them to be too critical, too aggressive, or, in other ways, inappropriate or dangerous. The focus on such moment-to-moment inhibitions of action has recently become an important touchstone for psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic work that focuses on "the analytic surface," particularly as that surface is disturbed by censored hostile thoughts about the therapist (Gray 1994).

Now, Waller has drawn our attention to two additional, internal obstacles to effective action—to the effective exercise of one's autonomy or free will. The first obstacle is an excessively external locus of control. This is the belief—whether implicit or explicit—that important areas of my life are not, to use Richard Moran's phrase, "up to me" (2001). The person who, for example, believes that he has no choice but to remain in an abusive relationship because his partner would become furious and retaliate violently were he to leave may believe this falsely, and may, in fact, be able to leave if he could only think it within his power to do so (of course, unfortunately, he may also be entirely correct). More subtly, someone who is enthralled by what she perceives as another person's strength and self-control, and who sees herself as unable to "break the spell and move on," or sees such a break only as defeat and a sign of weakness, may falsely attribute power to the other, fail to appreciate her own gifts, and fail to recognize or attend sufficiently to the processes of idealization and devaluation in which she is engaged. [End Page 119]

The second internal obstacle to free will that Waller discusses is a lack of self-efficacy. By this he means a lack of competency: one cannot be free if one truly lacks the competency to exercise freedom in a given situation. Thus, the person in an abusive relationship may in fact lack important financial and social skills, as well as resources, that would allow him to leave. He may even lack basic cognitive skills that would allow him to make the break. Decision, after all, involves an elaborate "machinery" (Austin 1956/1957): attention to detail, judgment and tact, intelligence and planning, and appreciation of the facts. Various cognitive limitations may interfere with effective action at any point. Someone who idealizes another person and devalues herself may simply find an interpretation to the effect that she is "distorting the facts" incomprehensible. For, consider what such an interpretation demands, cognitively: it demands that one hold in mind a true picture of the other as well as one's distorted image of him; it also demands that one formulate and consider a corresponding true picture of oneself, alongside one's distortions; one then needs to weigh...