Freedom and self-ownership: An emergence theory of free will

ABSTRACT

Perspectives on freedom, liberty, agency, creativity, and free will have a rich and varied history in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and psychoanalysis. Central to psychoanalysis, we want nothing for our patients, nor from our patients, if not the expansion of their personal freedom, agency, individuality, creativity, and self-ownership. What is freedom, exactly? What does it mean to have and to exercise free will? What does it mean to be truly creative? Do we have true choices, or are we overdetermined puppets faltering under the illusion of self-generated acts of freedom? Does feeling free to choose, and then perhaps acting to choose, equate with actual freedom? These perspectives and questions are examined in light of how we think about emotional health and the phenomenology of therapeutic action. This article explores an emergence theory of free will and the centrality of self-ownership in understanding and experiencing freedom of choice. A clinical example is offered in the spirit of what it might look like and what it might mean to enable authentic free choice.

KEYWORDS:

• Complexity
• emergence
• freedom
• free will
• self-ownership

Acknowledgments

I wish to extend my deepest gratitude to John Riker, Marcia Dobson, George Hagman, and Robert Stolorow, without whom this article would not have been possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ As Chun (2006) reminds us, “freedom and liberty have significantly different etymologies and histories…the Old English frei meant dear and described all those close to the head of the family,” whereas “…libertas denoted the legal state of being free versus enslaved” (p. 9). For her, “[t]o have liberty is to be liberated from something; to be free is to be self-determining, autonomous” (p, 10).

² For a thorough explication of the necessity and utility of distinguishing these two dimensions of discourse, see Coburn (2014).

³ Melville’s Ahab exemplifies this intellectual quagmire when he asks: “Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm?”

⁴ Harris (2012) argues that free will is an illusion, stating that “thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control” (p. 5).

⁵ For example, see the work of Benjamin Libet et al. (1999; 2004) and the concept of epiphenomenalism, in which he found unconscious neuronal activity leading up to a subject’s conscious awareness of an act began approximately a half second prior to the subject’s awareness of the act. Some researchers thus presume that free will was not implicated in the decision to act and was thus an illusion. Clarke (2013), for example, refutes these claims as specious, including the fact, among others, that Libit’s subjects were not making reflective, moral judgements over extended periods of time.

⁶ If Freud taught us nothing else, he certainly conveyed the motivational power of the unconscious, which in some respects has a “mind of its own,” and thus might be exercising a form of free will as best it can, on its own terms.

⁷ In his On the Freedom of the Will, Schopenhauer (1839) stated, “You can do what you will, but in any given moment of your life you can will only one definite thing and absolutely nothing other than that one thing.”

⁸ Unlike other types of systems, such as closed or even chaotic systems, complex systems are considered indeterministic in that they exhibit the characteristics of nonlinearity, unpredictability, and emergence—the “something from nothing” phenomenon of which complexity theorists speak.

⁹ Nicolai Hartmann (1882–1950), a proponent of “critical realism,” was one of the first modern philosophers to write on emergence, terming this a categorial novum (new category).

¹⁰ Parenthetically, the notion that something cannot come from nothing is questioned, depending on how one defines “nothing,” by grasping the dynamics and properties of complex systems. Yes, life on earth didn’t exactly come from nothing, but it didn’t come from “life” either.

¹¹ See Brandchaft (1993, 2007) for a thorough exploration and explication of the phenomenon of pathological accommodation.

¹² Why is the dimension of self-ownership so salient to our understanding of and endeavors toward free will, free choice? This is a tricky matter, given that so much of who we are was originally constituted and originally emerged out of relations with others. Ultimately what is me and what is you in me? Elsewhere I (2019) have addressed the paradox of individuality, following the work of Louis Sander. There is so much of the relational field from the onset of life, how does one come to know oneself apart and separate from others? Can one? To paraphrase Merleau-Ponty (1968), we can no longer say, this is mine and this is yours. This is quintessential intersubjectivity and complexity in action viewed from the dimension of explanation, not necessarily from that of the phenomenological. Sartre (1948) was quite attuned to the degree that others make of us, or try to make of us, what we otherwise would not wish to be. Probably at the level of explanation, we can never attain an answer to what is true individuality. Where might that leave us?

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Notes on contributors

William J. Coburn

William J. Coburn, Ph.D., Psy.D. is a psychoanalyst and licensed clinical psychologist based in Los Angeles. He is Founding Editor Emeritus of Psychoanalysis, Self and Context (formerly the International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology), Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and an Editorial Board Member of Psychoanalytic Inquiry. He is a Faculty Member and Training and Supervising Analyst at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles and is a Founding Council Member Emeritus of the International Association for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology (IAPSP).