Why Increased Psychological Freedom Should be the Main Goal of Psychotherapy
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This article originally appeared at Mad in America on July 16, 2024.
It’s fashionable to denounce Freudian psychology as far-fetched and out-of-date, but no discussion of psychological freedom would be persuasive without it. Freud famously wrote “where id was, there ego shall be” as the desired objective of psychoanalysis. As Bruno Bettelheim, in his whistle-blowing book, Freud and Man’s Soul revealed, the latinized terms id and ego promulgated by his misguided translators, lose the human flavor that Freud intended with the original German terms Das Ich and Das Es—”The It” and “The I,” or the experience of It-ness and I-ness.
In layman’s terms what did Freud mean by “where id was, there ego shall be?” In essence he was conveying that commitment to “free association” during psychotherapy—or speaking as honestly and freely about inner thoughts and feelings as possible, genuine emotional truth telling—allows for visceral, socially unacceptable urges and emotions to enter our awareness that typically leave a person feeling out of control. Freud was a staunch believer in the liberating effects of practitioners encouraging—if not demanding—clients to speak without pretense in psychotherapy, to think the unthinkable, feel the unfeelable, and say the unsayable.
Vague and simmering primal feelings like envy, lust, rage, sorrow, dread, and pride that typically are frowned upon by society, and get repressed, or get the better of someone, and are acted out in crude ways, causing shame and interpersonal strife, can be talked out and talked through. The visceral, animalistic, murky, awkwardly expressible nature of deep feelings is what contributes to an inner sense of It-ness, leaving individuals feeling like they are subjected to their emotions, rather than the subject of their emotions; feel controlled by, not adequately in control of their feelings; experience emotions as uncomfortable forces to avoid, deny, and make excuses for.
Plentiful receptive occasions to spontaneously tap into and verbally articulate a range of emotions as they arise in story telling about their past and present lives in psychotherapy helps clients feel they are the subject of their emotions, not subjected to them. As the folk saying goes: you gotta name it to tame it. This is one meaning of the Freudian dictum, in the original German: “Where the experience of It-ness was, there the experience of I-ness shall be.” Free from becoming emotionally flooded and overwhelmed, anxiously unsettled, on guard, closed off, the person feels a greater subjective sense of I-ness. Improvements in expressive mastery of a range of emotions acquired over time in therapy fortifies clients’ sense of I-ness, or personal agency, psychologically freeing them up to act from a place of tranquility and true desire, rather than just act impulsively and compulsively.
It should come as no surprise that not only do clients seek emotional intensity from their psychotherapy experience, but some data substantiate the fact that it is a prerequisite for a favorable psychotherapy journey. In a 2019 study published in Psychotherapy, a team of researchers spearheaded by Mick Cooper surveyed a representative sample of laypersons from the U.S. and U.K. about their psychotherapy preferences. They discovered that people seek out emotional intensity, or being coaxed by a therapist to face difficult emotions and express strong feelings. Also, a meta-analysis of 10 psychotherapy outcome studies involving over 400 clients conducted by Antonio Pascual-Leone and Nikita Yeryomenko at the University of Winsor, Canada, found that depth of emotional experiencing is “the most promising client process predictor of outcome.”
Another type of psychological freedom clients seek from their psychotherapy experience—that has a Freudian fingerprint—is freedom from endlessly engaging in the same tired old personal and interpersonal bad habits. A 2020 Psychotherapy Action Network consumer research study reveals that the majority of people considering or pursuing psychotherapy believe that “people should seek therapy when they want to change repeating patterns.” Freud’s concept of the “repetition compulsion” has relevance here. He shed light on the vexing human tendency to get caught up in the same relationship problems, career mishaps, and go-nowhere arguments with partners, parents, friends, siblings, or coworkers, despite years of life wisdom that tells us this is fruitless and our valiant efforts to finally turn things around.
Over my 35 years doing therapy I have been struck by how humbling, if not humiliating, it is for many clients to once again get attracted to lovers who are no good for them; feel like they are an imposter, even though by all accounts they are formidable in their careers; know they are being annoying, but do it anyway; feel entitled to react with rage, when it was a mere misunderstanding; offer a knee-jerk apology, even when they really have done no wrong; overspend, overeat, over imbibe, overtalk, overexercise, and overwork, even though they grasp this monopolizes their state of mind and harms those they love; or, any number of self-defeating habits. Clients ensnared in these struggles lack psychological freedom. They feel puppet-like, propelled by self-defeating invisible forces that act against their own best interests.
How does Freud weigh in here? The answer does not square with your typical quick-fix, get-over-it, buck-up, use-an-App, will-yourself-to-change, journal-your-progress, correct-your-cognitive-distortions, double-down-on-the-CBT-manual, approach to self-improvement and psychotherapy that are popular in the Western world. He basically argues that we unconsciously normalize childhood experiences of mistreatment, neglect, disappointment, and invalidation because we have to adapt to the limitations of parents and caregivers inasmuch as that’s all we know. We simply have to find a way to attach for survival reasons. Loud protests can lead to dangerous loss of needed love and support. As we age, childhood templates for how we should act in relationships and what we should expect from them, invisibly and tenaciously govern our ways of being in the world. These are discouragingly difficult to change.
Psychotherapists who incorporate psychoanalytic thinking into their approach are trained to encourage clients to talk about their childhoods, yielding material to point out similarities between what occurred in the past and how it has shaped self and other expectations in the present: “Your father seemed so charming and laid it on thick with praise about how you could do anything with your life; yet, he was unreliable, uninvolved and frequently disinterested in what you did in your everyday life. Is it any wonder you are attracted to men who “love bomb” you, but fail to make plans, cancel at the last minute, and avoid getting together with you and your friends to have fun times.”
Psychotherapists working with an understanding of the “repetition compulsion” offer insights sourcing the childhood roots of current troubling relationship dynamics, trying to convert the insensible into something sensible, the confusing, into something not so confusing. When insights lead to catharsis, or a burst of emotions about these childhood events, it can bring about a real reckoning with how their family-of-origin experiences hurt them, helping them literally putting the past behind, rendering it less likely to control their present. Indeed, a 2018 American Journal of Psychiatry meta-analysis provides solid empirical evidence for the curative role of insight into connections between present problems and past experiences in psychotherapy.
While insight into the childhood roots of recurring interpersonal problems and better expressive mastery of primal emotions are not the only pathways to greater psychological freedom, we are hard-pressed to deny how much they are cornerstones of effective psychotherapy.