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AGENCY AS
A PSYCHOANALYTIC IDEA
1
The word will in this paper, or rather, to will (better represented by the verb than
by the noun), refers to the process of self-direction, in particular, to choose, to delib-
erate, to initiate options.
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AGENCY AS A PSYCHOANALYTIC IDEA
T H E C L I N I C A L M AT T E R O F P E R S O N A L A G E N C Y
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Joseph Caston
A Case Instance
The patient, an engineer, began the session with a long prelude praising the value
of teamwork in general, and of his own team players. He spoke appreciatively of
their collective talents and collaborative strengths. They had arrived at a break-
through solution to a long-standing problem in a new product line. It was of
complex magnitude, requiring in the end both a systems approach and discern-
ing glimpses into its microworks, in order to locate the offending technical
flaws. As the story gradually developed, it became evident that his discoveries
had been central. He was going to great lengths to downplay the credit due him.
There had also been other times when the patients modesty seemed over the top.
The situation called for directness: You dont feel free to boastto me, or to
anyone else.
The patient took this in. At first he seemed to be bracing awkwardly or
squirming a little, and was silent. When he spoke, he said that he had first felt
giddy and weird about that comment, then uncomfortable and confused.
Whats that mean, anyway? That its good to boast? Thats a horrible idea! Any
mother would tell you thats not nice! It made him think of how when he was
nine or ten hed tell fish stories.
Well, not fish stories really, they were things I did do, but Id make out that
they were better than they were. So it was true he used to bragit makes him
wince now. But then he recalled that when he entered his teens, maybe a year or
so after his bar mitzvah, he had made a noble commitment, essentially to
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AGENCY AS A PSYCHOANALYTIC IDEA
eschew all affectation. He hadnt thought about this for a long time. It was like
making an oath to no longer go after the limelight or be superficial or phony.
Late in the session he realized that while he said that any mother would scold
you for puffery, his own mother never did. In fact, she did plenty of her own
bragging, much of it about him.
Some failure is visibly operating in the patient: its hard for him to
keep from being overmodest. As observers, we dont have to go very far
to make this judgment, and the patient may eventually observe this in
himself. At this point, however, he is unreflective, claiming that modesty
is his preferred choice, so that, although the analytic setting permits the
possibility of his bragging to the analyst, he will not. And it is fair to sug-
gest that not only will he not, given his frame of mind, but he cannot brag.
He might, if he believes the analyst to be hinting that he ought to brag,
react counterphobically. If he then forces or fakes a boast, that will look
very different clinically. In fact it will shortly become clear that he can
barely tolerate it in the privacy of his mind. Thus, he seems unable to fit
boasting to contexts that feature no reasonable emotional cost. We note
he has no trouble feeling free not bragging. We can even imagine another
person, perhaps like his mother, who can hardly keep herself from being
boastful, given the opportunity. So she is free to do the opposite of our
patient, and both seem free enough to do what they do in one corner of
their own domain, but not what the other does. We might consider it opti-
mal for a person in this context to be able to do eitherbe modest or
brag, given the circumstances.
DOMAINS
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Joseph Caston
will-processes (1947, p. 37; 1958, pp. 7475), but neither he nor Rapaport
could go farther with it.2
We can describe hundreds of domains in everyday lifelittle realms
or contexts of behaviorthat it benefits us to be competent within: to be
able to be close or to distance oneself; to be able to be silent or to speak
up; to be able to make love or to abstain; and so on. These are familiar and
yet moderately complex directions of potential action, and are descrip-
tively polar. The ranges of competent agency cannot fulfill all aspects of
health, but only those relating to domains where choice is possible. More-
over, this larger universe of domains encompasses the ability to work and
love, as Freud defined health, because there are many other species of
action about which we make choices, and because clinical situations demand
a greater specificity of context than these rubrics offer (e.g., working alone,
rather than in collaboration, or by improvisation, or as a leader, a soldier,
etc., within which one may be conflicted or free in one kind of work, but
not another).
To center on the competence of personal agency in given domains suits
the wider range of neurotic problems that defy the current DSM catego-
ries, which fail to recognize them as significant targets of therapy. Westen
(1997) and Gabbard (1997) have succinctly criticized this state of affairs.
The target here is how-the-patient-is-doing rather than the what or why
of interpretive depth. Our patient in being unable to boast does not have a
freedom that might realistically be available to him. The analysts com-
ment has brought to light his incapacity to choose against modesty, which
on his own he might not have come to see and experience as a limitation.
In a case reported by Greenson (1967, pp. 9596), by contrast, a circum-
stance rather than an interpretation exposes the patient to a failure in his
own agency. Greensons patient would never come late to sessions, but
always a few minutes early, a feature he saw no point in exploring. He
merely preferred punctuality. One day Greenson forewarned the patient
that he would be arriving ten minutes late, which the patient received
2
Hartmanns and Rapaports concept of ego autonomy, moreover, represents nei-
ther the subjective experience of feeling free nor the individuals capacity to act freely
(Hartmann 1958; Rapaport 1953). Rather, it is a metapsychological account of the egos
relative independence (as an apparatus) from impingement by either the world or the
drives. Whites work (1963) does elaborate an ego psychological / adaptational frame-
work to arrive at concepts of competence and effectance. These concern effective
interaction with the environment in pursuit of goals, however, and are not about an
agents competent freedom to do otherwise (as an aspect of health).
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AGENCY AS A PSYCHOANALYTIC IDEA
without comment. But when it came down to it, the patient still had to
arrive early, and was furious with Greenson for this torture. He acknowl-
edged that in fact hed wanted to come late himself, but felt driven by an
irresistible force to come his usual three minutes early (p. 95).
Some might fuss as to whether overcoming punctuality merits assign-
ment as a therapeutic task. But analytic goals generally include beneficial
changes in activities that one is failing at as an agent, and are worth becom-
ing a competent agent for. In working through the constellation around
boasting, our patient became able to be comfortably proud of himself, and
openly enjoy others admiration. Thus, one small but real element in the
quality of his life improved. When he began treatment, he did not know
that this would be a relevant path.
Aarons (1965), writing on the criteria for healthy change and termina-
tion, proposed that the replacement of conflict by choice marks a suc-
cessful analysis, thus tying failures of agency to neurosis and implying that
unfettered choosing is somehow different from behavior that is conflicted.
But he offers no descriptive criteria to help us. Aaronss position antedates
Brenners very different assertion that all is conflict (1982). The latter
position signals that if we seriously take up the matter of freedom within
clinical analysis, we may be in for trouble. We can expect challenges from
analytic theory, regarding not only determinism or the interminability of
compromise formations, but also the problem of conscious as against uncon-
scious control, the matter of illusion in the sense of ones agency, the con-
troversy over intersubjectivity, and finally the question of the will itself.
Any of these questions may overwhelm the capacity of a psychoanalytic
theory that aspires to an explicit concept of personal agency.
Matters of personal agency are woven into the fabric of everyday life. We
cannot understand, blame, or remember one another without implying
that we hold ourselves and others accountable for things said, promised,
hinted at, or done. Even when we consciously or unconsciously deny or
project any of the foregoing, our denials ground themselves in the assump-
tions underlying such accountability. It is experience-near and begins
early in childhood. We use a rough measure of this dimension, as when
we downgrade our expectations to find the otheror ourselvesless
blameworthy: the younger a person, or the more sleep-deprived, the
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gentler our demands. These matters are about degrees of answering for
that we ordinarily label as responsibility, for which there are two gen-
eral senses: for what one owns, as in my breathing, my bad cold, my
dream of incest, or for actions that are owned, as in what one does, omits,
or could do. What you own resides in yourself and no one else, although
we may cloud this notion through considerations of origin or intersubjec-
tive contribution.3 In 1925 Freud sharply enunciated this ownership in the
case of evil dream impulses: it is a part of my own being . . . [and I stand]
to learn what I am disavowing not only is in me, but acts from out of
me as well (p. 132). Note that Freud paradoxically frames this matter in
terms of the personal responsibility for those contents, even though the
origin of these acts and wishes falls under the determining unconscious
governance of topographic and, later, structural agencies that specify
no personal agent.
Add to these considerations our ample acquaintance with patients whose
capacity to choose is vastly inhibited or undermined by disclaimers, and we
see we have arrived at an area of convergence. Personal choice, action, and
responsibility, a familiar province of philosophy, may as behaviors fall casu-
alty to infelicitous development or experience, or be the beneficiary of good
therapy. Philosophers accounts of moral and prudent action rest on the
notion that while a man could choose to do this or that thing, and does, he
could have chosen to do otherwise. We do read each others agency in this
everyday way. A persons competence to act is therefore framed as a dual
power in a domainto be both able to do something (e.g., be boastful) and
be able not to do it (e.g., be modest). It is local and very much a matter of
degree. Some contemporary philosophers characterize this dimension as
the ability to will, a conception that in their view does not settle the free
will debate, but also need not (Gert and Duggan 1979).
Two general features guide reading people in this way. One is to view
the patient as the protagonist of his own moments, in which his goals
play out through actions and inaction. This is a narrative understanding,
rather than a diagnosing of states or traits (as in this woman is very
3
Schwartz (1984) distinguishes between the personal ownership of ones motives,
unconscious or not, and ones owning the deliberated choices one makes. In his view,
we accomplish the latter on a platform of conscious self-observation, and self-knowledge
of unconscious self-deceptions furthers ones capacity for choosing consciously (a
point close to that of Aarons [1965]; see also Lear [1990]).
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The conceptual registers of the three criteria differ. So long as the features
of each criterion are reliably observable, clinical and empirical matters can
be addressed for causal relation, linkage, or correlation, whether social or
psychological. The three criteria converge and overlap in pertaining to the
assessment of competent agency, but reversibility is the most central and
important.
Reversibility describes the range and character of power over actions
within a domain. It is not an action in itself. Where there are two direc-
tions of choice in a domain, moving toward one pole does not necessarily
serve as a defense against the other. A person may freely clean or freely
soil himself, in contrast to defensively or rigidly cleaning so as not to soil.
Thus, polarity is merely descriptive here, and does not imply dialectical
force, weight, or evolution (after Hegel, or Ogden [1977, 1986], or Hoffman
4
The simplest narratives involve an agent who enters an action or attitude with
respect to something, someone, or oneself, and offer the framework to judge whether
the person is competent or failing in that regard. State and trait diagnoses, by contrast,
do not specify domains. Anxiety, depression, externalization, narcissistic vulnerabil-
ity, and the like do not clarify how much power remains for the person to overcome
such burdens in given contexts; they disclose little of that range, even if they predis-
pose to degrees of agentic failure.
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Joseph Caston
REVERSIBILITY
5
Anton Kriss concept of divergent (vs. classical, or convergent) conflicts (1982),
however, is germane. It invokes polar interest pairs. Kris characterizes a patients posi-
tion toward these aims by its dilemma, and its possibility of being bridged by his tech-
nique. The present project maintains neutral descriptions so that its criteria assess a
full range of agentic competence within a domain, regardless of practice or theory.
6
Context generates this complexity, as when raising ones arm takes place in a
classroom to challenge or to ask a question, and endows arm-raisings with different
meanings. We might then recharacterize the given domain by just such labels (i.e., is
the person free to challenge or hold back, or to raise a question or wait?).
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AGENCY AS A PSYCHOANALYTIC IDEA
bridegroom who speeds to his wedding and yet stops at every green light,
and the woman who, though assured of her lovers devotion, brings a mis-
erable balance to this good fortune by dwelling on romantic rivals out
of the past, or the possibility of tragic fates.
These concepts overlap and include each other. Inhibition can be viewed
as drivenness not to enter a particular act or engage particular objects;
drivenness to pursue an activity may represent an inhibiting avoidance of a
counterpart object-choice or action; and contradictoriness points up inhibi-
tion to continue on a path, or drivenness to switch. One way or another, these
are instances of people who cant start, or cant stop, or cant continue, or
must start, or must stop, or must continuedisrupting what otherwise might
have been a more competent or optimally flexible unfolding of life circum-
stances. Instead, the resulting narrative pattern shows that an intended flow
of action is impeded.
In the domain of play, Erikson regularly discovered such phenomena in
childrens therapy, calling them play disruptions (1940, 1950). Whenever
a child abruptly shifts the course of smoothly flowing play, or flat-out stops,
or resumes the play halfheartedly, such scenes tell much: something about
the childs intended direction of play has gone wrong, and she is not free
to enter playing that way, given its meaning. Bernfeld (1941) character-
ized similar disruptions in the flow of talk in analytic sessions. Usually the
patient associates or talks on about matters of interest. At some point, how-
ever, she switches subjects, or becomes hesitant, less coherent, grows silent,
slows down, or speeds up. Seasoned clinicians label these changes points of
urgency. Bernfeld saw them as shifts to states analogous to secret-keeping,
or resistance. In agency terms, wed say the patient is now not as free as
he was to say, do, or imagine something. Many analysts intervene at such
a pointif this is effective, the patient opens up (or confesses), returning
to unimpeded conversational flow.
I dont suggest that we can elect to enter any action or state what-
ever. Most certainly, we cannot. We cannot will away the seizure of a
sneeze, a startle, a blink. We may find ourselveswithout plan or
reflectionabout to weep, retch, laugh, or climax. Once triggered, these
actions run their course and emerge not by directed choice; rather, they
are evoked and released by what is meaningfully going on around and
inside of us. These triggerable (or obligatory) actions typify our emotions,
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Joseph Caston
our visceral responses, and various reactions fixed early in our lives.7
They evade our conscious selection, except in a secondary but impor-
tant way: one may pursue or avoid the trigger by choice. We can choose
to re-enter the places that we know make us drowsy, inspired, or
excited. We can revisit the memory or grave or melody that brings us to
tears. Nonetheless, we can be neurotically conflicted to pursue these
secondary ends, or not.
A woman early in her second year of analysis revealed for the first time how
she would for years, to her huge embarrassment, become powerfully and inex-
plicably overcome by tears as a spectator at parades and other performances.
The period between Halloween and Christmas ushered in a rash of pageants in
her family life, pushing the tears anew and commanding a strong focus in the
analytic lens for both of us. It did so again the following year. The crudity of
this experience was singular. It overtook hershe had not initiated it; it made
no sense, and so she felt childish and inappropriate; she could self-observe the
event but not its meaning; it felt peremptory, even though she opposed the
emotion.
Our analysis of many associational fragments during the next two years
contributed to our understanding this repeated experience. Central were screen
memories in which the patient, as a little girl, stands very close to her mother at
military parades. Her baby sister is there with an aunt, and not her big brother.
The mother meanwhile enthuses at the grand spectacle. Inasmuch as the patient
would find herself in the present breaking into tears to explain a pageant to her
own child, we infer a probable tie to her experiences with her own mother.
But the patients passionate contempt for and disidentification with her
mother in the present had nevertheless impeded a full understanding. Early in the
work, she readily voiced rage and disappointment at the mother for having given
birth to her baby sister, and for having glorified the older brother.
Yet late in the analysis, dreams and other material began to illuminate early
experiences of her mother as young and beautiful. It became clear that she had
then been in love with her mother and felt her to be central to her life. She began
to realize that weeping at pageants represented not sadness alone: it was tapping
a yearned-for and relived joy from her childhood romance with her mother.
These insights brought her to a turning point. I felt surprise when, after all this
time, the patient began to permit herself to positively identify with her mother
in attitudes, and in cooking and clothing styles.
7
We note here that the clinically colloquial terms flexibility and rigidity charac-
terize the bandwidth of less-to-more-neurotic actionwhich is the proper realm of
therapeutic intervention. Yet they do not encompass the fullest range of failed agency,
that is, when we would like to choose and actually cannot. Accordingly, reversibility
serves here as the general covering term, for its greater compass.
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AGENCY AS A PSYCHOANALYTIC IDEA
Moreover, the weeping had now become precious. She announced she had
a desire to go to parades and pageants, welcoming them as opportunities for
triggering the eruption of tears. She now knew what they were all about. It was
as if weeping re-created her as a little girl engaged with her Mom. She no longer
disparaged the child she still was, but she was also the adult who could choose.
We again note that, once begun, triggered tears still run their course,
beyond the reach of choice except in a secondary way. How the patient
came to bring these strands together inside herself demonstrates the harmo-
nious mesh that is possible between the creature of will and the machine
that she is and that we arewhen we have come to act more freely.
S E L F - O B S E R VAT I O N
Second is the question whether personal action falls or can fall within the
range of self-observation, rather than out of reach.
Self-observation of the ownership of ones personal attributes, prod-
ucts, and actions serves to maintain competent agency. Treatment moves
to uncover the irrational dangers that hinder this competence. When I rec-
ognize that I have been obstructed or defensive out of unconscious defer-
ence, guilt, vengefulness, or greed, I may be enabled to act more freely
and competently in a relevant domain.
Looking at oneself involves more directed attentiveness than does raw
and passive everyday experience. Beyond sensing or feeling things, we
can think about the noticing itself. This focus often attends decision-making,
in whichusuallywe deliberate with our eyes open, until and unless the
chosen action enters an automatic repertoire. Deliberating calls past choices
into the theater of awareness so that we may consider an imagined future.
Failure there, otherwise, renders the governance of new action unreliable.
And when it happens that we choose well but yet are not able to act, that
predicament evokes a singular self-scrutiny.
Analytic self-observation is heir and cousin to looking inward in its
three generic aspects. Looking inward involves reading the contents that
are thought or experienced; reporting what is read, whether to oneself or
others; and the possibility of a practice, privately developed or recom-
mended by others, as to how, when, and what one should target within the
introspectable world. Self-observation is more regularly and vigorously
pursued in psychoanalysis than in any other discipline, including Eastern
meditative ones.8 Analytic technique adds free association and its contents
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Joseph Caston
8
Insight, in contrast to self-observing actions, is an end-result rubric, a frame of
mind devolving from multiple channels, such as self-discovery, received interpretation
in words, or significant unworded communications from others or social context.
9
In Sterbas view (1934), interpretations beget the patients self-reflectiveness
(p. 123)as though it had not already been operative, causing the latter to split off
from an originally nonreflective, experiencing ego.
10
Gray (1994) noted this deemphasis and sought to redress it, elevating self-observation
as an instrument that serves autonomy, rationality, and potential for unneurotic functioning.
In Grays approach, one does not interpret an unconscious derivative directly, but first leads
the patient to review what has just unfolded in live experience.
11
Fonagy et al. (2002) apply the term mentalization to the imaginative capacity to
interpret and understand others mental states (intentions) and ones own. They have
extensively studied its development in relation to the individuals early secure or inse-
cure attachment to primary caregivers. In brief, optimal mentalizing correlates with
secure attachment history, while insecure attachment contributes to its defensive inhi-
bition and crippling. Conscious self-observing (as in the interpreting of implied desires
and beliefs in oneself) clearly falls within the broader scope of Fonagys term.
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AGENCY AS A PSYCHOANALYTIC IDEA
A P P R O P R I AT E N E S S
12
For instance, analytic process that arrives at and shows a conflicted domain free-
ing up toward greater flexibility (e.g., increased tolerance/expression of previously
unconscious/inhibited hostility toward x), can be retrospectively evaluated for the con-
ditions under which such change occurscomparatively, in clinical passages with dis-
tinct styles (e.g., minimal interventions; close process monitoring after Gray; active
interpretation of unconscious/transferential hostility). Ultimately, however, creative
research methodologies (following Waldron et al. [2004] or Joness psychoanalytic
Q-sort [2000; Jones and Windholz 1990; Caston 2004]) applied to taped transcripts
can offer clearer tests of this question, provided they also employ domain-specific
agency criteria (or can be shown to be agency-relevant).
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13
The work of sociologists for whom actors agency is a central theoretical inter-
est (Garfinkel 1963, 1967; Goffman 1974; Heritage 1984) informs this account. They
focus on the observable, necessarily consciousness-centered regularities of peoples
outward social behavior and talk. Adding the dimension of unconscious dynamics sig-
nificantly extends this picture. I am indebted to Nancy Chodorow for indicating the
relevance of such studies to my own thinking.
14
Almond describes reporting and editing; transferring and containing; thinking
about oneself and about the analyst; regressing and listening/self-observing; initiating
trial action and mediating inner states.
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C L I N I C A L LY T R A C K I N G A G E N C Y I N
A DOMAIN: A BIRDS-EYE VIEW
15
Or, as Goffman puts it, misframe. See Goffman on ambiguity in frames of
experience (1974).
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16
This patient entered treatment because of uncontrollable episodes of crying and
anguish, evoked as she would begin to rock her healthy six-month-old. She herself was
the second of four children. When she was two and a half, a baby brother had fallen ill
and died. Within the first two years of her adolescence, a seven-year-old brother had died
in an accident; her depressed older sister had become pregnant (and married) though still
in high school; her mother was hospitalized for psychosis; and the parents divorced. The
patient, the more intelligent and favored of the surviving children, remained with her
father, but was no longer as bubbly and extroverted as she had once been.
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AGENCY AS A PSYCHOANALYTIC IDEA
such change.17 Most important, Blacker concluded that the differences that
represent this therapeutic movement appear to be noticeable at manifest
levels without much deeper interpretation of meaning.
The clinical beauty of these systematically collected sequential excerpts
is that they allow one to illustrate progress over time in this one domain.
At first the patient could not fully own her own desire, instead prefer-
ring that she not be the active, originating source of wanting to be su-
perior, favored, victorious, or admired. She preferred to think she was
influenced by others or by circumstance. Inappropriateness was evident in
early past rejections of friends so as not to hurt them. By the end of ther-
apy she was able to pursue the goals of being superior, winning, or achiev-
ing, and even bragging about it in an unconflicted way. Her ability to
self-observe within this domain also evolved: from a vague, hard-to-articulate
awareness of discomfiture early on, to the later conscious recognition of
herself-as-source, though this came with guilt and pain. She later became
able to see and accept this pattern in other sectors of her life. As Blacker
notes, this shift did not necessarily reflect positive changes in other, con-
temporaneous neurotic sectors. At the beginning of treatment the clinical
account shows how, at the other pole of this domain, she would enter into
options to be lesser than others without hesitation, and usually did so in
a driven way. The memorys drama itself permits us to conjecture that the
same failure to be free, within this domain, marked her past.
Blackers own formulation, essentially an ego psychological one,
viewed this patient as neurotically burdened by different aspects of her
aggression, in which he considered Rapaports treatment of the problem
of activity and passivity particularly pertinent. Rapaport (1953) had strug-
gled to clarify activity and passivity within a metapsychological rather than
clinical framework, but with no criteria to clinically distinguish and estab-
lish his claims. To my mind, he never resolved it. Quite remarkably, Margaret
Brenman advised Rapaport that the real issue he was dealing with was the
metapsychological considerations of the freedom of the will, and he
acknowledged he could not take that further (pp. 534, 535n, 557). Indeed,
Rapaports discussion implies that the general nature of passivity is path-
ological, in that it in one way or another represents a dynamic failure or
17
A simple correlation meets this test in that the true sequential order of the excerpts
can be statistically compared with the judges rank ordering. Blacker reports that an
experienced analysts judgments correlated at .80, a housewifes at .65. A prcis of
each excerpt can be reviewed in Blacker (1975).
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Joseph Caston
weakness of ego structure vis-vis the drives. In contrast, the project pre-
sented here argues that the polar freedoms of being either passive or
active together carry the possibility of health, and also that these freedoms,
or their lack, observably reside in the person rather than in an ego
apparatus.
The DSM
First, diagnostic systems call for general classes of disorder: the ancient
Greeks located four dark temperaments for us, while the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual designates a few hundred assembled as state and trait
rubrics. Because an agency perspective more specifically encompasses
health problems domain by domain, it can easily posit several thousand
trouble spots in intentional human activity. This may not be the best thing
for nosology, but it certainly suits the clinical practice of tracking the
patients points of difficulty and progress. Second, an agency approach
lays out capacities as action narratives, while the DSM focuses on states.
Third, the latter attributes wellness by default, losing agency-informed
richness. We need to know: in what context, for what ends, and for whom,
does a persons flexibility bring off optimal performance?
The PDM
18
The PDM, a collaborative effort undertaken by organized psychoanalysis, com-
plements the DSM in that it reaches beyond the latters shortcomings, in multifaceted
psychodynamic directions. Based on scholarly contributions from neuroscientific and
empirical outcome studies, the PDM expands the diagnostic spectrum to include health,
restores psychoanalytic categories of psychopathology, and develops observable criteria
in three converging dimensions. These include the P Axis, which describes personality
patterns and disorders; the S Axis, which addresses the subjective range of symptom
experience; and the M axis, which systematizes such capacities as emotional functioning,
information processing, maintenance of relationships, self-regulation, and so on.
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AGENCY AS A PSYCHOANALYTIC IDEA
T H E E M P I R I C A L S T U DY O F A G E N C Y
19
These studies, though intended to apply across wider targets, yield findings per-
tinent to personal agency.
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2001; Kernberg, Chazan, and Normandin 1997, 1998; Chazan 2000, 2002).
Good to very good reliability of all these variables was established (Kernberg,
Chazan, and Normandin 1998). I summarize aspects pertinent to agency
criteria as follows:
Reversibility. A childs capacity to begin, end, become engrossed, or
move smoothly into new play demonstrates her power to start, stop, or
continueor not, when she cant get into or deserts itsatisfying the
criterion of reversibility in this play domain. Kernbergs team distin-
guishes these variations with 100 percent agreement. Normal and neu-
rotic children often drive the scripts of their play, spontaneously directing
or narrating the action, and bring their tales to an end or into smooth
transitionsuntil something conflicted intervenes. Then we may see reluc-
tance, withdrawal, outbursts, or shifts away from topic. Borderline and
traumatized children tend to be seized by sudden break-offs, or distrac-
tions, and depressed children often get stuck, never quite entering actual
play (Kernberg 2001; Chazan 2002).
Self-observation. How can we notice that a child is knowingly in a state
of play? Pretending requires that one is able to attribute intentions (to self,
others, objects) in the playat willthat would be very hard to do without
knowing it. Clues include a childs opening with lets play/pretend, alerting
the therapist to notice or explain something in the play narrative, or correct-
ing the therapist who slips out of an assigned role. Play tied to concrete vs.
imagined depictions suggests less self-awareness.
Appropriateness. Play that diverges from expected age, gender, or
cultural standards, or that is idiosyncratic, bizarre, or cryptic (rather than
merely magical) raises the question of pathology and inappropriateness.
Other distinctions relate to how stable the child remains in character.
To undertake a role other than oneself without threat to identity (using
oneself, an object, or the therapist as a vehicle) requires that attributions
of intentions to these others be stable. One switch of roles may be
expected to occur under voluntary control, while fluid role-changes
are viewed as involuntary. Sometimes a child, having begun in one
role, becomes surprised or frightened by these switched roles erupting
within him, and cannot end the story comfortably. Not only does such a
child choose inappropriately, but we are led to infer that he is not choosing
with awareness: when a child can flexibly initiate, sparingly reshuffle,
and not foreclose pretended roles, she performs optimally as a playing
agent.
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20
See fn. 23 below.
21
Two judges independently located and tabulated such instances. The analyst
wrote notes without adding clinical commentary.
22
+.73, p < .001 (Weiss et al. 1986, p. 203).
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reflection of that trend. (Horowitz et al. 1978, p. 558 n.2; Weiss et al.
1986, p. 338).
23
Conflictedness was one target of an analytic formulation reliability study (other
targets were defense-impulse configurations, transferences, wish structures, and his-
torical antecedents). Judges, grounded in the first five verbatim sessions from the Mrs.
C. case and biography, assessed randomized excerpts from the first hundred hours in
the given tasks. Mrs. C. had sought treatment for difficulties with pleasure, sexual
responsiveness, esteem, timidity, and emotional constriction (the treating analyst was
outside the research). This case has been diversely investigated (see, e.g., Weiss et al.
1986; Jones and Windholz 1990; Bucci 1988).
24
For example, the action the patients leading a man on at a party occurs in
session 3: And this is sometimes, I mean no situation has really occurred when weve
been anywhere like cocktail parties, but just with morality being what it is today, or
things happening as they are today, Ive sometimes been kind of worried again that I
might, in a situation, where people have had too much to drink, lead some somebody
on beyond where hell stop, and thenand I wont realize Ive been doing it con-
sciously, although maybe unconsciously I do and, and, I might be in a real situation
(Caston and Martin 1993, p. 519).
25
Spearman rho correlations p < .001 for Conflictedness in the historical moment
.61 (with Q-sort method, .74), and Conflictedness in telling it to the analyst .64 (with
Q-sort method, .72). Agreements on magnitude also obtained chi-squares for both,
p < .01. These two variables correlate at zero with each other, thus demonstrating diver-
gent validity with no halo effect.
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AGENCY AS A PSYCHOANALYTIC IDEA
The SPC
26
The SPC served as one background source for the PDMs Profile of Mental
Functioning, or M Axis.
27
Agency, in my view, forms its very backbone. Robert Wallerstein concurs on
this point (personal communication).
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Joseph Caston
reversibility. Fixity marks the fourth and most troubled level of function-
ing, labeled severe, in which subscale descriptions often refer to rigidity,
drivenness, inhibition, inappropriateness, and imperviousness. At this level,
assistance does not help a person attempt a less disabling path: she is unable
to reverse or self-correct, and is deeply unaware.
CONCLUDING COMMENTS
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AGENCY AS A PSYCHOANALYTIC IDEA
demonstrates this power by switching tracks under your very eyes, and that
much is within his compass. But he must do the opposite, compelled to react
rather than be free to agree or resist, as a dual capacity. It takes us as observ-
ers (and perhaps the boy himself later in life) to recognize that significant
fact. In contrast, note how much more reliable is the experience of ones
own failed agency, as seen in Greensons patient (1967) who wanted to
come late to his session and could not, or Freuds patient (1893) who was
unable to breastfeed, furious at her inability, against which she had strug-
gled with all her strength and could only do so following hypnosis.
These comments hardly complete the discussion. The criteria I pro-
pose can be usefully applied in reviewing the agency literature in psycho-
analysis, evaluating clinical conundrums, and reviewing developmental
research of the infant as an emerging personal agent. It can help us con-
sider, from a clinicians vantage, what cognitive and philosophical studies
have regarded as illusional in choice-making.
This way of presenting things brings to light that once we become
optimally unconflicted in a given areareaching freer range of choice
there, stably or temporarilywhat is achieved is a power. But however
psychoanalyzed we become, that transformation still does not tell us what
to do: whether to move to the Oregon mountains or the Bronx, whether
to become pregnant now or after training, or whether to exclude some-
one from our club or from the life raft at sea. The what remains as much
an existential problem for practical and moral choices after we have grown
in our capacity to choose, consequent to therapy or other endeavors, as
before. We seek to enlarge this power, and find it a goal in treatment and
daily living: that a person become as optimally passionate, dispassionate,
and compassionate as one can, in appropriate contexts and the circum-
stances of life.
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