Tag: authenticity

People Pleasing and Losing Yourself

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People Pleasing and Losing Yourself

You agree to something you do not want, and what makes it painful is that you can hear yourself consenting as it happens. You say yes with a tone that sounds sincere, because part of you is sincere: you want the other person to stay pleased, you want the relationship to stay stable, and you want the moment to pass without consequence.

Then you are alone and the consequence arrives anyway, not as drama, but as something duller and more corrosive: irritation, dread, a low-grade anger with nowhere obvious to go, followed by the familiar question that is not really a question at all. Why did I do that again?

If you recognize this pattern, you have probably been told to set better boundaries. Sometimes that advice is accurate, but it often feels thin because it is aimed at the surface of the problem; it treats people pleasing as a skill deficit when, for many people, it is closer to a way of existing with other people, a posture toward life that can look like kindness from the outside and feel like self-erasure from the inside.

A woman sits solemnly on a bed holding a white mask, surrounded by crumpled tissues, symbolizing emotional vulnerability and hidden identity.

The private aftermath is the truth of the pattern

People pleasing is usually not the presence of generosity. It is the presence of a bargain.

The bargain is rarely stated out loud, which is part of why it keeps operating. It tends to sound like this: if you are disappointed in me, I am not safe; if you are angry, I have done something wrong; if you withdraw approval, I might lose you; if I ask for what I want, I will be exposed in a way I cannot tolerate. When that bargain is running, the yes is not really about your desire, and it is not even about your values; it is about managing the other person’s reaction so you can keep your footing.

Resentment follows for a simple reason. You are spending your life stabilizing the emotional weather around you, and even when you succeed, you succeed at the cost of disappearing. The anger is not a character flaw; it is often the part of you that still knows you traded yourself away for peace.

When kindness becomes self-loss

There is a version of people pleasing that is simply social intelligence, the ordinary tact of living among others. But the kind that leaves you resentful and unreal tends to have a different texture: it feels compulsory, and it keeps widening until it is no longer confined to a few situations. You begin to notice that you adapt before you think, that you apologize for taking up time or space, that you do not know what you want until you are finally alone, that you can sense what everyone else needs while your own desire feels quiet, distant, or embarrassing.

This is the moment many people say, “I don’t know who I am.” It can sound melodramatic until you take it seriously, at which point it becomes a precise description of what has happened: your life has become organized around being acceptable, and acceptability is not the same as being real.

When kindness becomes self-loss

There is a version of people pleasing that is simply social intelligence, the ordinary tact of living among others. But the kind that leaves you resentful and unreal tends to have a different texture: it feels compulsory, and it keeps widening until it is no longer confined to a few situations. You begin to notice that you adapt before you think, that you apologize for taking up time or space, that you do not know what you want until you are finally alone, that you can sense what everyone else needs while your own desire feels quiet, distant, or embarrassing.

This is the moment many people say, “I don’t know who I am.” It can sound melodramatic until you take it seriously, at which point it becomes a precise description of what has happened: your life has become organized around being acceptable, and acceptability is not the same as being real.

Authenticity is not a trait, and it is not a hidden object

From an existential psychoanalytic view, authenticity is not a stable personality feature that you either possess or lack, and it is not a pure “true self” waiting underneath your social roles like a buried treasure. Authenticity is a way of existing, which means it is something you appropriate in the middle of real life, and it is something you can lose again and again, especially when you begin living by public opinion, by others’ expectations, and by the quiet tyranny of what you imagine you are supposed to be.

This matters clinically because it changes what you are trying to do. If you keep waiting to discover a ready-made identity, you may never do the harder work of taking up your own life in the presence of other people, where the risks are real and the consequences are not imaginary.

People pleasing is one of the most efficient ways to avoid that work, because if you become what others want, you never have to find out what you want; you can remain socially successful while privately absent.

A woman appears cheerful as she speaks to her reflection in a shattered mirror, which shows a somber expression, illustrating a divide between outward expression and inner truth.

Winnicott’s false self, or the self that keeps the relationship safe

Winnicott gives language that many people recognize immediately once they hear it, because it names the lived experience rather than offering advice. He described a false self that develops when a person learns, often early, that spontaneity is risky, that certain feelings are not welcome, and that the safest way to stay connected is to present what the other person can tolerate.

This false self is not simply “fake.” At its best, it is protective and socially useful; it helps you navigate a world that requires adaptation. In the best of cases, it can be a means by which a more intimate relationship is reached. The trouble begins when the false self becomes your primary way of being, when it stops serving you and starts running you, because then your life becomes a performance built around maintaining connection and avoiding rupture. However, the connection it affords is a catch 22, the relationship might be stable, but it is based on a lack of intimacy. You may look functional and agreeable while feeling internally strained, resentful, empty, or strangely unreal, as if you are living through a socially acceptable version of yourself while something more alive stays hidden, not because it is mystical, but because it has learned it is safer not to appear.

People pleasing often fits this picture with uncomfortable accuracy. It is compliance in the service of attachment, and it is frequently fueled by the fear that if you stop being good, you will stop being loved.

The paradox of being liked

People pleasing is often praised, and that praise can become part of the trap. If everyone experiences you as easy, reasonable, helpful, thoughtful, then the role hardens into identity, and identity becomes a kind of prison because you start defending the image you have created. You become allergic to disappointing people, not only because you fear their anger, but because their disappointment threatens the self you have built to survive.

The paradox is that the more you specialize in being liked, the harder it is to feel known, and the harder it is to feel real. Being liked can function like an invisibility cloak: you avoid conflict, and by avoiding conflict you avoid the moments that require you to take a stand, to state a preference, to risk being misunderstood, to tolerate someone’s frustration, and to remain present anyway.

Why advice fails, and what therapy changes

Most people pleasers already know the advice. They can recite it, sometimes with impressive sophistication. Yet when they attempt to follow it, something inside them reacts as if a boundary is not a sentence but a threat. That reaction is the point. It tells you that the pattern is not maintained by ignorance, but by fear, and fear does not yield to checklists.

Psychoanalytic and existential therapy take seriously that people pleasing often began as adaptation. It may have been how you kept connection, reduced threat, stayed in good standing, or found a place for yourself in a family or culture where approval felt conditional. Even when your current life is safer, the old bargain can remain in force, and the false self can keep doing its job long after it stops protecting you.

Therapy matters here because the problem is relational, and therefore the work has to become relational too. The impulse to be the “good patient,” to make the therapist comfortable, to hide anger, to soften your language, to say what you think is expected, to stay agreeable at the very moment you are not agreeable, is not a distraction from the treatment; it is often the treatment, because it allows the false self to become visible as it is happening, and it allows you to experiment with a different way of being in a relationship where the stakes are real but the goal is not approval.

In existential work, authenticity is not comfort; it is exposure. It is the willingness to let your desire, your anger, your limits, your grief, and your ambivalence be part of the relationship, not because you want conflict, but because a life without that truth is not a life you can actually inhabit.

Learn more about existential therapy: https://freeassociationclinic.com/existential-therapy/
Learn more about psychoanalytic therapy: https://freeassociationclinic.com/psychoanalysis-therapy/

A woman sits in silence at a table while faded, overlapping figures around her appear engaged in conversation, representing isolation amidst social noise.

Starting at Free Association Clinic

If your yes is keeping the peace while your private life fills with resentment, you do not need a more optimized personality. You need a different relationship to fear, guilt, and responsibility, and you need a place where the part of you that has been managing everyone else can stop performing long enough for something more genuine to appear.

Free Association Clinic offers in-person sessions in San Francisco and telehealth across California.

Request an appointment: https://freeassociationclinic.com/contact-us/
How we work / our staff: https://freeassociationclinic.com/about-us/

Insurance and practical logistics

The clinic is in-network with Aetna, Blue Shield of California, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Optum / UnitedHealthcare, and Cigna / Evernorth. If your plan is not listed, out-of-network reimbursement may still apply, and the clinic can provide a superbill.

Learn about insurance and superbills: https://freeassociationclinic.com/insurance/

Consultation: your first session is free if you choose not to continue. If you decide to move forward, payment is discussed during the meeting.

FAQ

Is people pleasing the same as being kind?
No. Kindness can include honesty and limits, and it can tolerate another person’s disappointment. People pleasing is often organized around safety and approval, which is why it can feel like care on the outside while feeling like disappearance on the inside.

Why do I feel resentful after I people please?
Because the relationship stayed calm, but it stayed calm by costing you something. Resentment is often the aftertaste of self-erasure, especially when you agreed out of fear rather than desire.

Why do I feel guilty when I set a boundary?
Because guilt can be the emotional price of breaking an old rule, even when the rule is destroying your life slowly. Guilt does not always mean you harmed someone; sometimes it means you stopped conforming.

Is people pleasing a trauma response?
Sometimes. Sometimes it is a learned adaptation to conditional approval, volatile relationships, or environments where being low-maintenance was the safest role. The label matters less than understanding what your people pleasing protects and what it costs.

What if I don’t even know what I want?
That is common, and it often makes sense. If the false self has been steering for years, desire can go quiet. Therapy can help you recover it without forcing quick answers, and without treating your life like a self-improvement project.

Schedule a first session: https://freeassociationclinic.com/contact-us/

Psychoanalytic Neutrality in Therapy: Thompson on the Rule of Neutrality

Deception and Trauma in Existential Psychoanalysis: Laing and Freud on Mystification

Neutrality, as psychoanalysis uses the word, is not the absence of care, it is a way of refusing to take over someone else’s experience while still remaining fully present to it.

The trouble begins with the word itself. In everyday speech, “neutral” suggests detachment, evasiveness, even a kind of moral cowardice, as though the clinician were trying to avoid the risks of relationship by hiding behind a technical ideal. Thompson’s point, in his essay on the rule of neutrality, is that this misunderstanding is not a minor semantic problem but a distortion of technique itself, because it subtly encourages two equally familiar caricatures, the analyst who withdraws in the name of neutrality, and the analyst who manages the hour through interpretation, persuasion, or “helpful” direction, while telling himself this too is neutrality.

If you are a patient, the first caricature can feel like being treated as an object of study or, worse, like being left alone with your suffering while someone watches from behind glass. If you are a clinician, the second caricature can look like competence, since it offers the quick relief of taking charge, the relief of being the one who knows what is going on, what it means, and where it should go. Thompson insists that both can be defenses, and that the discipline of psychoanalytic neutrality in therapy exists precisely because the analytic situation reliably pressures the therapist to become either absent or controlling.

psychoanalytic neutrality in therapy in a calm office setting

Why neutrality is so often mistaken for emotional absence

One reason neutrality gets moralized is that it sounds like a moral posture. “Do not take sides” can sound like a refusal to commit, and a refusal to commit can sound like a refusal to care. Yet within the psychoanalytic tradition, neutrality is not primarily a statement about what the analyst feels, nor a rule about how the analyst should appear, but an attempt to describe a mental attitude that protects inquiry, an attitude that must withstand the patient’s provocations, the analyst’s anxiety, and the many subtle invitations to make the work easier by making it smaller.

Thompson notes, in effect, that neutrality is a technical term whose meaning is precarious outside the analytic lexicon, and that it has been repeatedly reduced to an image, the analyst as blank, cold, and withholding. The reduction is tempting because it is simple, and it permits one to confuse a style of interpersonal distance with a discipline of listening. But neutrality, as Thompson reads Freud, is closer to a cultivated openness, one that refuses premature certainty, refuses the seductions of therapeutic ambition, and refuses the gratification that comes from being the decisive author of the patient’s story.

Neutrality as a discipline of attention, not a personality style

Thompson’s most important correction is that neutrality belongs to the analyst’s manner of attending, and this places it immediately in the vicinity of Freud’s technical recommendation of “evenly suspended attention,” a stance that refuses to select too early what matters and what does not. In Freud’s view, the very act of selection is already a theory, already a bias, already a way of deciding in advance what is meaningful, and therefore a way of foreclosing what the material might disclose later.

This is one reason neutrality cannot be reduced to a performance of impassivity. One can be impassive and still be deeply biased, because bias does not require visible emotion, it only requires an interpretive hunger, an impatience with ambiguity, an inability to tolerate the patient’s experience showing itself in its own sequence rather than in the order the therapist would prefer.

Thompson connects this to a phenomenological sensibility that he names directly, the suspension of judgment, epoché, not as an academic ornament but as a clinical requirement: a disciplined bracketing of what one is certain one knows, so that what is present, but not yet articulate, has a chance to come forward. Here neutrality starts to look less like “not caring” and more like a form of restraint that makes room for experience, including the experience that embarrasses our theories and threatens our self-image as helpful professionals.

Three inherited definitions, and how they quietly moralize the technique

Thompson’s chapter becomes especially useful when he refuses to attack caricatures and instead takes seriously three influential definitions of analytic neutrality meaning, showing how each can be clinically sound in one respect and clinically misleading in another.

Roy Schafer’s formulation places emphasis on evenhandedness: no saints and sinners, no favorites, no advocacy for one side of a domestic conflict, and no easy conscription of the patient into the analyst’s personal values. There is real wisdom here, particularly for patients who arrive already looking for an ally, a witness, a judge, or a rescuer. At the same time, Thompson’s worry is that the definition can harden into an axiomatic ideal, a purity standard, as though neutrality were measurable by how consistently it is maintained, rather than by whether it serves the situation that is actually unfolding. When neutrality becomes an abstract criterion of “real analysis,” the analyst can begin to act as though the hour were a series of permissible and impermissible “incidents,” rather than a living relationship in which judgment, discretion, and timing are indispensable.

A second definition, from Moore and Fine’s Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts, emphasizes countertransference and value restraint, framing neutrality as the avoidance of unwarranted interference, the refusal to impose personal values, and the effort to let the patient’s needs and capacities guide the work. The formulation also tries to avoid extremes, neither detachment nor overinvolvement, and it describes the analyst’s stance as one of helpful, benign understanding. Thompson’s objection is not to restraint itself, but to the fantasy that benign understanding is simply an “emotional attitude” one can calibrate, as if countertransference could be managed by turning down the volume on one’s feelings. Understanding, on his reading, is not merely a mood but a capacity that can oppose mood, especially when anxiety drives the analyst to act. He also insists, crucially, that treatment goals are always imposed in some sense, even if minimally and tacitly, because treatment without any goal would be purposeless. Neutrality therefore cannot mean the absence of aim; it must mean something like restraint in the way aim is pursued.

The third definition, from Laplanche and Pontalis, makes explicit the breadth of neutrality: neutrality toward religious, ethical, and social values, meaning no directing treatment toward an ideal and no counseling; neutrality toward transference, captured in the maxim “Do not play the patient’s game”; and neutrality toward the patient’s discourse itself. Laplanche and Pontalis then point to Freud’s 1912 recommendations as the clearest statement of what neutrality is meant to be, especially where Freud castigates therapeutic ambition in therapy and educative ambition, and likens the analyst to the surgeon whose single aim is to perform the operation as skillfully as possible. Thompson treats this as a pivot, noting the irony that Freud’s most extensive discussion of the stance later called neutrality occurs before Freud actually introduced the term, since the term appears later, in 1915.
What links these definitions, in Thompson’s hands, is the recurrent danger of mistaking neutrality for an external posture rather than an internal discipline, and of converting a technical principle into a moral identity. Once that happens, neutrality is no longer something the analyst does with his mind, moment by moment, but something he imagines he is, a “neutral” person, which can quickly become a justification for emotional absence, interpretive domination, or both.

Freud’s two injunctions, the surgeon and sympathetic understanding

This is the point at which the familiar accusation, “neutral means cold,” begins to look less like a patient’s misunderstanding and more like a consequence of analysts repeating Freud’s metaphors without hearing Freud’s argument.

Freud’s surgeon analogy is often recited as an endorsement of coldness, yet Freud introduces it to criticize the analyst’s temptation to turn treatment into something else: an educative project, a moral project, a scientific project, a project of proving one’s cleverness. The surgeon metaphor is not primarily about the analyst’s affect but about the analyst’s aim, which is why Freud places it in the context of condemning therapeutic ambition and its cousin, the wish to “set tasks” for the patient. When the analyst’s aim becomes the display of expertise, neutrality collapses, not because the analyst becomes warm, but because the analyst becomes intrusive.

At the same time, Freud is explicit elsewhere, in On Beginning the Treatment, that the therapist’s stance should be one of sympathetic understanding, and that the therapist must not enter the scene as a moralist or become an advocate for one side of a conflict. The apparent contradiction only persists if sympathy is confused with taking sides, or if neutrality is confused with withholding. Freud’s point, as Thompson reads him, is that sympathetic understanding is precisely what allows the analyst to refrain from moralizing, refrain from recruiting, and refrain from replacing inquiry with judgment, so that the patient can speak more fully into the space the analyst is holding.

The deeper issue, then, is not whether the analyst is warm or cool, but whether the analyst can remain open, patient, and ethically restrained while being fully engaged, and whether the analyst can tolerate the anxiety of not resolving the patient’s conflict by adjudicating it.

Neutrality vs abstinence, a clinical dialectic rather than a slogan

Thompson is also careful not to let neutrality be romanticized as pure openness, because openness has consequences, particularly in the transference. If neutrality is rooted in openness, patients will often experience this openness as a kind of love, and in the logic of transference it can feel personal, as though the analyst’s openness were meant for them alone. This is one reason Freud insisted that the treatment must be carried out in abstinence, that the patient’s need and longing should be allowed to persist so that it can become a force impelling work and change, and so that the analyst does not appease those forces through surrogates.

Thompson’s point is that neutrality vs abstinence is not a matter of choosing one slogan over another, but of recognizing that the two rules correct each other. Abstinence moderates how much openness is prudent in a given moment, guarding against seduction and against the quiet transformations of the analyst into lover, rescuer, or benefactor. Neutrality, in turn, guards abstinence from turning into a rigid withholding that inhibits candor, since a stance that is too afraid of encouraging fantasy can easily become a stance that discourages disclosure.

The important sentence in Thompson’s account is almost disappointingly plain: neutrality was never meant to be employed universally. It must be applied with discretion, depending on the forces at play, and discretion, unlike slogans, requires judgment.

rule of neutrality in psychoanalysis symbolized by balance

When neutrality becomes a caricature, permissiveness and interpretive compulsion

If neutrality is treated as universal, the analyst is tempted toward the fantasy of neutrality “full bore,” and Thompson is blunt that such a stance is impossible. Were it feasible, he argues, the analyst’s role would be compromised and reduced to a permissive patron, while the analysis itself would lose tension because patients would inevitably interpret the analyst’s inactivity as agreement. A caricature of neutrality thus becomes a covert form of collusion, not because it takes sides overtly, but because it refuses to take responsibility for the meanings and impacts of its own silence.

But Thompson also targets the opposite caricature, one that is especially common among talented clinicians, namely the interpretive compulsion.
Interpretations, by their nature, undermine cherished assumptions, and thus they often breach neutrality, not because interpretation is forbidden, but because it easily becomes a way of directing the patient, controlling the narrative, or relieving the therapist’s anxiety by producing quick explanatory mastery. Thompson suggests that this dilemma pushed figures like Winnicott and Lacan toward using fewer interpretations, sometimes toward dispensing with them more or less entirely, in order to widen the range of neutrality they could sustain, though he also notes that Freud warned against the opposite error, the abandonment of common sense, and explicitly advocated alternating a neutral frame of mind with an ordinary one, “swinging over according to need” from one mental attitude to the other.

The point is not to idolize silence or idolize interpretation, but to see how both can serve as defenses, and how neutrality, properly understood, is the attempt to keep one’s defenses from becoming the patient’s fate.

What patients experience, what therapists must bear

For patients, the lived experience of psychoanalytic neutrality in therapy is rarely neat. It can feel relieving when one recognizes that the analyst is not trying to recruit one into a worldview, not trying to win an argument about one’s life, and not trying to adjudicate one’s conflicts by declaring one side correct and the other pathological. It can also feel frustrating, since neutrality refuses the fantasy that someone else will finally solve the problem on one’s behalf, and the refusal is not punitive but structural, because psychoanalysis is built on the recognition that freedom and responsibility cannot be outsourced without cost.

Thompson also insists that neutrality should not inhibit friendliness, because neutrality is not a ban on human presence; it is a disciplined restraint in the use of power, a way of bracketing the analyst’s eagerness, morality, and ambition so that the patient’s experience has room to become articulate. When neutrality turns inhuman, it is no longer neutrality but defensiveness masquerading as technique.

For clinicians, especially clinicians in training, the most difficult implication is that neutrality is not something one “applies” once one memorizes a definition. It is a discipline of mind that requires patience, an ability to withstand pressures to do something, to demonstrate signs of success, to reassure oneself by acting. Thompson’s formulation becomes almost paradoxical here: doing nothing can be the principal means of effecting change, not because passivity is virtuous, but because premature action often serves the analyst’s anxiety more than the patient’s inquiry. The measure of analytic efficacy, on his view, is not how much neutrality is used, but whether the analyst knows when it is prudent to remain neutral and when it is necessary to take a position.

In that sense, neutrality is not the renunciation of responsibility but a particular form of responsibility, the responsibility not to steal the patient’s experience by interpreting it too quickly, moralizing it too readily, or rescuing the patient from the burdens that belong to existence itself.

analytic neutrality meaning openness and suspension of judgment.

Conclusion

Thompson’s reading of the rule of neutrality in psychoanalysis clarifies why neutrality has been so easily distorted, and why the distortions matter: neutrality is not a posture of coldness, it is a discipline of openness; it is not the refusal to care, it is the refusal to take over; it is not the absence of aim, but the restraint of aim, especially when therapeutic ambition threatens to turn treatment into persuasion, indoctrination, or performance.

Neutrality, in Thompson’s hands, is best understood as a cultivated capacity to suspend judgment without suspending contact, to listen without selecting too soon, to resist taking sides in therapy without refusing moral seriousness, and to balance openness with abstinence so that the analytic situation neither collapses into seduction nor hardens into inhumanity.

At Free Association Clinic, our work in psychoanalytic therapy and existential therapy is grounded in this tension, and our training program treats it not as a slogan but as an ethic of attention. If you wish to explore whether this approach fits what you are looking for, you can contact Free Association Clinic

James Norwood, PsyD
Associate Director, New School for Existential Psychoanalysis (https://www.freeassociation.us)
Clinical Director, The Free Association Clinic for Existential Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (https://www.freeassociationclinic.com)
Founder/CEO, inpersontherapy.com (https://inpersontherapy.com)

References

Freud, S. (1912/1958). Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psycho-Analysis. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 12, J. Strachey, Ed. and Trans.). Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1913/1958). On Beginning the Treatment. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 12, J. Strachey, Ed. and Trans.). Hogarth Press.
Laplanche, J., and Pontalis, J.-B. (1973). The Language of Psychoanalysis (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Hogarth Press.
Moore, B., and Fine, B. (1990). Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts. American Psychoanalytic Association, Yale University Press.
Schafer, R. (1983). The Analytic Attitude. Basic Books.
Thompson, M. G. (1994). The Truth About Freud’s Technique: The Encounter With the Real. New York University Press.
Thompson, M. G. (2024). Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis: On the Primacy of Authenticity. Routledge.

The Personal Relationship in Psychoanalytic Therapy: Thompson on the Demise of the Person

The Personal Relationship in Psychoanalytic Therapy: Thompson on the Demise of the Person

A Reflection on Michael Guy Thompson’s Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis

In psychoanalytic culture, the word personal often arrives with a faint odor of impropriety, as though it names whatever is left over when the real work is finished, or worse, whatever risks contaminating the analytic situation with ordinary human contact. Thompson begins Chapter 10, “The Demise of the Person in the Psychoanalytic Situation,” by naming a fact that is easy to overlook precisely because it is so mundane: person and personal are not standard technical terms in psychoanalytic nomenclature, and when they appear they usually function as offhand labels for what is “non-transferential” and “non-technical,” which is to say, what is easiest to marginalize.

Once the personal is treated as a conceptual remainder, it becomes possible, even virtuous, to define psychoanalysis by what it excludes. Thompson notes that for many analysts, psychoanalysis is distinguished from its more “user-friendly” cousin, psychodynamic psychotherapy, precisely by the absence of personal engagement, as though the analyst’s personhood were a kind of interference to be engineered out of the room. The consequence is not simply a colder atmosphere, but a tighter ontology: contemporary analysts “of virtually all persuasions,” he argues, increasingly reduce the psychoanalytic process to the analysis of transference, resistance, and enactments, and therefore assume that virtually all reactions to the analyst as a person should be treated as transference manifestations, while the analyst’s significant interventions are governed by whichever technical principles their school prescribes.

Thompson’s point is not that personal contact never happens, since every practitioner knows it does, but that entire training cultures have learned to treat such contact as irrelevant, risky, or analytically illegitimate, and therefore something to be avoided or, when unavoidable, promptly converted into an object of interpretation. The personal does not vanish, it is translated, and in that translation the encounter can become strangely airless, technically busy, and existentially empty.

Why “the Person” Can Disappear in Psychoanalysis

If the personal relationship in psychoanalytic therapy is reduced to an obstacle, then “the person” disappears by a kind of conceptual attrition. Thompson is explicit that this tendency cuts across schools that otherwise disagree on almost everything: he includes Kleinian analysts, American ego psychology (often called “classical Freudian” in this context), and many relational analysts among those who “deconstruct the very notion of a person-to-person engagement out of the psychoanalytic process.” What binds these positions together is not a shared theory of mind but a shared reflex, namely the conviction that the analyst’s personhood is best managed by being factored out.

His example is deliberately contemporary and slightly absurd, which is why it lands. He cites a discussion, originating in a Psychoanalytic Psychology article (Maroda, 2007) and later taken up in the New York Times, suggesting that analysts should not treat patients in a home office because it offers “keyholes” into the analyst’s personal life and may “over stimulate and overwhelm” the patient, as though contact with the analyst’s ordinary reality were inherently unsettling or even harmful. Thompson’s parenthetical aside is doing real work here, because it forces the reader to ask what kind of psychoanalytic imagination is operating when knowledge of a therapist’s personal reality is treated as intrinsically traumatic.

What matters is not whether one agrees with the example, but what it reveals about the background assumption: that the patient can only bear the analyst as a screen, and that the analyst’s person, when it appears, is automatically pathogenic. Thompson insists that this attitude is surprisingly recent in the long history of psychoanalytic writing, which is one way of saying that it is not destiny but fashion, and therefore open to critique.

personal relationship in psychoanalytic therapy in a consulting room

When Everything Becomes Transference: The Deconstruction of the Personal

Thompson describes a climate in which the psychoanalytic literature tends to focus so intensely on transference and countertransference, understood as specifically unconscious functions, that analysts are urged to attend above all to projections and their interpretation, while avoiding “interactions of a personal nature” that are implicitly defined as non-interpretive and therefore irrelevant to unconscious process. At first glance this can appear like rigor, an attempt to keep the treatment anchored in what psychoanalysis uniquely knows how to do; yet the rigor contains a peculiar impoverishment, because it quietly assumes that personal contact does not itself belong to the analytic field.

To dramatize the consequence, Thompson returns to a “slave metaphor” and claims that in certain relational formulations both analyst and analysand become “equally enslaved” by their unconsciouses, trapped in an “endless” intersubjective oscillation that tends toward infinite regress. The language is severe because the predicament is severe: once every vestige of the personal relationship has been transformed into transference and countertransference and placed under systematic interpretation, the human encounter no longer functions as a ground from which interpretation emerges, but as a surface upon which technical scrutiny must constantly operate.

From a more traditional angle, he argues, the problem does not disappear, it merely changes costume. If transference is conceived as a rarefied, trance-like regression that places the patient in a one-down position from which they cannot extricate themselves because they are always “in” the transference, then the analysand is implicitly treated as never fully the author of their experience, never fully a proper adult in an I–Thou relationship, but an “effect” of unconscious forces to which only the analyst is privy. One begins to see why some patients, especially thoughtful patients, report that analysis can feel depersonalizing: not because the analyst is unkind, but because the patient’s address is persistently converted into symptom, and the analyst’s response is persistently converted into technique.

Thompson sharpens the critique further by suggesting that transference itself can become a defense, not for the patient, but for the analyst, a way to withdraw from the “realness” of the person in treatment whenever proximity becomes too impacting. In that posture, closeness or informality is not explored as a human event that might matter, but interpreted preemptively as seduction or “transference,” which is another way of saying that the relationship is not allowed to become a relationship except as an object of analysis.

The Unconscious Without a Subject, and the Loss of Agency

It is tempting to say that Thompson is “defending the real relationship,” but the deeper issue is what kind of subject psychoanalysis is willing to recognize. If both parties are framed as governed by unconscious process, and if the only legitimate speech in the room is speech that can be converted into technical categories, then agency becomes difficult to locate without sounding naïve. Thompson’s worry is that psychoanalysis, when it becomes too enamored of its own conceptual apparatus, risks producing an unconscious without a subject, a drama of forces in which no one is answerable and no one can be addressed.

This is why the phrase “author of his or her experience” is so central in his description of what gets lost. To treat the patient as the effect of unconscious forces, and to treat the analyst as the privileged interpreter of those forces, is to generate a relationship that is, in principle, asymmetrical in authority even when it claims to be collaborative, and asymmetrical in personhood even when it claims to be relational. The patient is spoken about, perhaps even empathically, but not necessarily spoken with as a subject whose speech is an address to another subject.

Thompson’s discussion of Greenson helps clarify why this problem persists even when analysts try to reintroduce “the real relationship.” Greenson distinguishes a “real” relationship from transference, yet Thompson notes that such descriptions often emphasize the patient’s experience of the analyst while neglecting the analyst’s relationship with the patient, and because the dyad is not symmetrical, the “correlation between their respective positions is not identical.” What tends to happen, then, is that the patient’s side is described in the language of transference gradations, while the analyst’s side is described in the language of technique, a circumscribed set of behaviors epitomized by interpretive strategies, with countertransference increasingly defined as the totality of the analyst’s experience, including what used to be called “personal” reactions, now subsumed under technical oversight. The personal does not return, it is annexed.

For therapists, this is where Thompson’s critique becomes uncomfortably intimate, because it is not only a theoretical dispute about models, it is a question about what it means to remain a person while occupying a professional role, and whether our theories, however elegant, sometimes function as alibis for avoiding the impact of the other.

psychoanalytic relationship and reflective clinical writing

The Specifically Personal Dimension: Being Oneself Is Not a Technique

A predictable response to the “demise of the person” is to prescribe personhood, to turn genuineness into a technique, self-disclosure into a method, and warmth into a protocol. Thompson is unsparing about this move as well, because it repeats the original problem in a new register. He uses the example of Renik to make the point: even if a clinician insists they are not elevating their personal style into technique, the moment they advocate that manner of working as something all analysts should do, it becomes, by definition, technique, no longer a character trait but an intervention others are instructed to adopt.

Here the argument turns quietly existential, because Thompson is less interested in whether the analyst discloses, converses, or stays silent than in whether the analyst’s way of being is contrived. He writes that the problem with conceptualizing personal engagement as technique is that genuineness requires being true to one’s actual personality traits and behavioral characteristics, and therefore conducting oneself naturally, spontaneously, and “without guile.” In the same passage he names a complaint many patients make, not as a moral accusation but as a phenomenological report: analysts who rigidly conform to classical technique are often experienced as lacking genuineness. Yet the aim of analytic work, he adds, includes increasing the patient’s capacity for genuineness in relation to others and to themselves, which means the analyst cannot plausibly demand from the patient what the analytic situation structurally discourages in the analyst.

This is the paradox that Thompson crystallizes in a line that resists paraphrase: “Being oneself is, by definition, personal.” What follows is equally important for clinicians who want rules, because Thompson refuses them: there cannot be universal standards for how an analyst uses personality in treatment, it cannot be codified, and what counts as personal varies with the analyst, with the patient, with the time of day, with mood, with the phase of work. If this sounds unsatisfying, it is because it denies us the comfort of believing that personhood can be guaranteed by correct technique.

Conversation, Self-Disclosure, and the Question of Genuinenes

If being oneself is not a technique, then the personal relationship in psychoanalytic therapy does not appear as a prescribed behavior so much as it appears as a mode of presence, and Thompson locates its most common manifestation in something deceptively simple: conversation. For the personal relationship to be spontaneous, unpredictable, and authentic, it must be free of contrivance and subterfuge, “a manner of being” that, as he puts it, “comes from the heart.” From there, he notes that spontaneous conversations evolve between analyst and patient, sometimes including self-disclosures but not necessarily, because the point is not disclosure as performance but the recognition that not everything the analyst says should be limited to interpretation, data elicitation, or other technical considerations.

Thompson’s critique becomes especially sharp when he compares how different schools metabolize conversation. Classical analysts, he says, tend to reject it on the grounds that “conversing” has no discernible role in the analytic process, while relational analysts may reduce conversation to a technique, which can be experienced as contrived or manipulative. What is being lost in both cases is not chatter but humanity, because conversation can be restrained by abstinence without being abolished, and its abolition often feels artificial for analysts who are, like Freud and Ferenczi, naturally conversational.

He then gives a clinically recognizable scene that is also, in its own way, philosophical. There are times when patients want to muse about ideas, philosophical, literary, spiritual, and ask their analyst to reciprocate; the analyst may participate without needing to reduce the exchange to transference and analyze it accordingly, and Thompson suspects such extra-analytic exchanges can have a profound impact on both the relationship and the outcome of treatment, even if we cannot determine their effect moment to moment. This is not an argument for informality, but an argument that the medium of psychoanalysis is not interpretation alone, it is speech addressed to another, which is why psychoanalytic relationships cannot finally avoid personal contact, because “conversation is the essence of their professional activities.”

In other words, the personal relationship in psychoanalytic therapy is not a sentimental addition to the method, it is the condition under which the method can remain human.

“entering psychoanalytic therapy and the question of personhood

Character, Virtue, and the Analyst’s Presence

Once the personal is admitted as unavoidable, the question that follows is the one psychoanalytic institutes often prefer not to ask directly: what about the analyst’s character? Thompson insists that the character or person of the analyst is of “critical importance” to how patients experience and benefit from the relationship, and while he acknowledges that this cannot be empirically substantiated, he nonetheless claims, without hedging, that for some analysts the role of character matters more than technique. This is not an anti-technical position, since in the same passage he affirms that technical principles are indispensable, but it is a refusal of the fantasy that technique can substitute for who the analyst is.

He also observes that psychoanalysis has historically pathologized the notion of character, treating it primarily as embedded structures that compromise gratification or adaptation, and he notes that Freud used the term in two distinct ways: occasionally as virtue, more often as psychopathology. In contemporary analytic language, virtue tends to appear only in offhand, non-technical speech, even though in ordinary moral life we still speak of strong character as integrity, courage, honesty, and the like. Thompson’s provocation is that psychoanalysis has no coherent way to speak about these qualities without either moralizing or reducing them to structure, and yet the patient experiences them immediately, long before any interpretation “works.”

This returns us to training, where Thompson makes a claim that is modest in tone but radical in implication. Because character is hard to measure and depends on subjective judgment, institutes have tended to omit it from admissions considerations in the effort to make processes more democratic, and ironically this has allowed the relationship between character and technique to recede into the background. Even if personal virtue cannot be taught, he argues, it can and should be included in curricula, not as an ideal to impose, but as an object of awareness, a way of seeing how frustrations, preferences, limits, and attitudes shape what we call theory and what we call technique.

His conclusion is neither romantic nor permissive. He argues that the capacity to acknowledge a personal relationship with one’s patients, and to engage it freely in a manner that complements the needs of each treatment situation, lends genuineness and authenticity to the relationship, and that this has profound implications not only for how analysis is experienced but even for how technical principles are applied, adding that most analysts know this intuitively even when they do not articulate it.

Conclusion

Thompson’s Chapter 10 can be read as a critique of psychoanalysis at the moment it begins to confuse rigor with evacuation, as though the safest way to practice were to make the analyst disappear behind technique. Yet his argument is not a plea for a new orthodoxy of warmth, nor a demand that analysts disclose more, converse more, or sound more “human” in some standardized way, because the moment one tries to standardize personhood, one has already turned it back into technique. What he insists on, instead, is the simple and difficult claim that psychoanalysis is conducted by persons, not by methods, and that the personal relationship in psychoanalytic therapy is not what happens when the analysis fails, but what makes it possible for analysis to be addressed to someone rather than performed upon them.

At Free Association Clinic, our work in psychoanalytic therapy and existential therapy takes seriously the depth of unconscious life while refusing to lose the person in the process. Clinicians interested in a more existentially grounded approach can explore our training program and psychoanalytic training, and prospective patients can contact Free Association Clinic to inquire about treatment.

James Norwood, PsyD
Associate Director, New School for Existential Psychoanalysis (https://www.freeassociation.us)
Clinical Director, The Free Association Clinic for Existential Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (https://www.freeassociationclinic.com)
Founder/CEO, inpersontherapy.com (https://inpersontherapy.com)

Source

Thompson, M. G. (2024). Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis: On the Primacy of Authenticity. Routledge.

Unconscious Experience in Psychoanalysis: Being, Meaning, and the Limits of “Knowing”

Unconscious Experience in Psychoanalysis: Being, Meaning, and the Limits of “Knowing”

A Reflection on Michael Guy Thompson’s Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis

There is a particular kind of sentence that appears in the consulting room, not as a report of something that happened, but as a disclosure that alters what is happening now. The patient hears themselves, perhaps with embarrassment, perhaps with relief, and what comes into the room is not a new fact so much as a new relation to the facts, as if the same life has shifted its lighting, and a meaning that had been operative all along becomes suddenly difficult to deny.
This is one of the ordinary ways psychoanalysis earns the right to speak of “the unconscious,” though what is striking, if we are willing to linger with it, is how quickly the term tempts us into spatial metaphors and mechanical explanations, as if the person before us were divided into regions and agencies whose dealings we can map like a household with locked doors. Thompson’s Chapter 9, pointedly titled “Is the Unconscious Really All that Unconscious?,” begins by pressing on a deceptively simple problem: does it even make sense to speak of “experiencing” the unconscious if the concept refers to what is, by definition, beyond experience, and what could it mean to say someone suffers “unconscious experiences” if they are not aware of the experiences they are presumed to be suffering.

The force of the question is that it unsettles a habitual compromise in analytic speech, the compromise by which we treat experience as something like knowledge, and then treat the unconscious as a kind of unknown knowledge, a content that is hidden but nonetheless already there in the way a thought is there, waiting to be retrieved. Thompson’s dissatisfaction is not merely philosophical, because he explicitly characterizes the psychoanalytic endeavor in experiential terms: analysis aims at “bringing those aspects of consciousness that lie on the periphery of experience to experience,” to the degree that such a movement is feasible in each case.

Once this becomes the guiding thread, the problem of the unconscious cannot be handled as a scavenger hunt for contents. It becomes a question of how something can be effective in a life, shape desire, symptom, and relation, and yet remain un-lived in the fuller sense of being experienced as mine, in time, with the burden of implication that such ownership entails.

Freud’s psychic reality, and why “facts” are not enough

Thompson begins, as he must, with Freud’s first topography, and he emphasizes something that contemporary caricatures of Freud often forget: Freud’s earliest use of the term “unconscious” is inseparable from the problem of fantasy, precisely because fantasies may be conscious or unconscious and yet can be experienced as real, irrespective of whether they are factually true. What follows from this is not an invitation to relativism, as if facts do not matter, but a clinical claim about where meaning lives, because the meanings that govern a symptom are not identical with the historical accuracy of a memory, and analysis cannot be reduced to a forensic reconstruction of events.

Thompson sharpens this by invoking Freud’s distinction between psychical reality and factual reality, and by quoting Freud on guilt: what lies behind the sense of guilt are “psychical realities and never factual ones.” If we allow ourselves to hear what this implies, we can see why existential psychoanalysis is not a rejection of Freud, but a demand that we take Freud at his own most radical word. To speak of psychical reality is to admit that the human being suffers and acts on the basis of meanings that are lived as real, even when they do not correspond to the world’s objective record, and it is to admit that the analytic task cannot be accomplished by correcting the record alone, because the record is not what is suffered.

This is also why Thompson insists that fantasies and symptoms are not merely distortions, but are meaningful communications, and why he describes interpretation, in this early Freudian context, as the attempt to understand fantasies as “disguised messages” whose source is not straightforwardly available to the patient. Yet the moment we grant the symptom the dignity of meaning, the philosophical pressure arrives, not as an academic exercise, but as a clinical unease: if the symptom is meaningful, who, precisely, is doing the meaning, and what does it mean to attribute intention to a person who disclaims it.

To put it in the existential register Thompson keeps returning to, psychoanalysis risks either dissolving the person into mechanisms, which preserves the analyst’s explanatory confidence at the cost of the patient’s subjectivity, or it risks refusing mechanisms and falling into moralism, as if the patient were simply lying. The task becomes to find a language that can account for how a person can be implicated in meanings they do not yet experience as their own, without inventing a second “person” inside them.

unconscious experience in psychoanalysis, emergence into awareness

Primary and secondary processes, and the question of the thinking subject

Freud’s solution to this problem, or at least his most influential attempt, is bound up with the distinction between primary and secondary processes, a distinction that becomes the backbone of a developmental story about how the psyche learns reality by abandoning hallucinated satisfaction. Thompson’s point is not to dismiss this distinction, but to show how Freud’s developmental narrative begins to wobble under its own metaphors, because Freud often writes as if a “psychical apparatus” decides to abandon hallucinatory satisfaction, forms a conception of external circumstances, and endeavors to alter reality, even though the very distinction Freud draws seems to leave no subject capable of making such a decision at that stage.

Thompson highlights the fictional quality of Freud’s picture of infancy, the fantasy of an infant entirely helpless and cut off from reality while the mother alone is in touch with it, and he notes a critique, associated in his discussion with Rycroft, that even very early life already involves a primitive form of communication and adaptation, which means the infant is not a pure wish-machine but participates, however rudimentarily, in a shared world. The significance of this, for Thompson, is not developmental trivia, because once one concedes that a rudimentary relation to reality is present from the start, Freud’s sharp partition between a pleasure-bound primitive system and a reality-bound mature system begins to look less like a natural history and more like a theoretical imposition designed to solve the problem of agency.

At this point Thompson makes what, in an existential frame, becomes the decisive shift: he suggests that the issue is not whether primary processes exist, but how we conceptualize them. He proposes that what Freud calls “primary” can be understood as conscious but pre-reflective, and therefore “not experienced, properly speaking,” whereas secondary processes correspond to reflective awareness, which is what allows a person to take up a meaning as theirs, to recognize themselves in it, and to stand in relation to it.

This is a subtle move that deserves more than a passing paraphrase, because it changes the phenomenology of analytic listening. Instead of imagining the unconscious as a sealed repository of contents, we begin to imagine a dimension of living that is already there in the person’s gestures, choices, evasions, and forms of speech, and yet is not owned as experience because it has not been gathered into reflective time. In that sense, the problem is not that the person does not know what they are doing, as if knowledge were the missing ingredient, but that the person is living a meaning without being able to live it as theirs, which is to say without being able to experience it in a way that makes them answerable to it.

This also begins to clarify why “unconscious experience” may be a misleading phrase. If experience means what is lived as lived, then whatever is pre-reflective is not “unconscious” in the sense of absent, but it is not yet experience in the sense that matters most for analytic transformation, namely the sense in which a life becomes narratable, inhabitable, and ethically binding.

Sartre’s critique of the unconscious, and the paradox of the censor

Thompson’s turn to Sartre is often misunderstood by clinicians as a flirtation with philosophy for its own sake. In fact, Sartre appears because he attacks psychoanalysis at the point where clinicians are most likely to smuggle metaphysics into technique, namely in the presupposed conception of consciousness that makes Freud’s model intelligible. Thompson notes that there is surprisingly little analytic attention paid to the conception of consciousness that Freud’s unconscious presupposes, even though psychoanalytic discourse is saturated with epistemological terms like truth, knowledge, and understanding.

Sartre’s famous objection, as Thompson renders it, centers on the censor in Freud’s topographical model. If the censor regulates what is permitted into consciousness and what is repressed into the unconscious, then the censor must be aware of both sides; yet because the ego is unaware of the censor, the model effectively posits a “second consciousness,” a hidden knower who becomes the de facto subject of analysis while the analysand disclaims knowledge of the whole affair.

The clinical relevance of this objection is not that Sartre “debunks” repression, but that he exposes the danger of turning analysis into a drama of inner bureaucracies, where meanings are processed by quasi-persons who are neither the patient nor the analyst. Thompson’s way of keeping Sartre close is to emphasize Sartre’s distinction between pre-reflective and reflective consciousness. Sartre can say that a feeling is conscious at a pre-reflective level even when the person lacks reflective knowledge of it, and in that sense the feeling can be lived without being grasped as an object of awareness.

This distinction allows Thompson to name what clinicians encounter daily, namely that the patient may be conscious of a wish, a dread, a hatred, or a longing in the sense that it is enacted and effective, while simultaneously resisting the reflective recognition that would make it speakable and ethically charged. Thompson describes Sartre’s point in a formulation that helps keep the discussion from becoming scholastic: it is possible to be conscious of something, and yet not possess knowledge of it, because to know it would be to apprehend it as mine, which is precisely what resistance works to prevent.

At this point one can see why the question of “unconscious experience” is not a mere terminological quibble. The concept becomes a way of speaking about time, about the gap between living and owning, because reflective consciousness is where the person gathers what they do into the form of a self-account, and the refusal of reflective ownership is one of the most basic ways a life becomes split against itself.

Heidegger: why the question becomes ontological

If Sartre keeps us within the architecture of consciousness, Heidegger, as Thompson reads him, relocates the entire problem. Heidegger’s movement from epistemology to ontology leads him to abandon concepts like consciousness and even intentionality, at least in their Husserlian form, in order to focus on our relationship with Being and the way it is disclosed in the immediacy of everyday experience. This is why Thompson can say, in a strictly Heideggerian perspective, that psychoanalysis is already concerned with our manner of Being, because people enter analysis not satisfied with the manner of Being they embody and wanting to change it, and because to determine what our manner of Being is about we have to give ourselves to it through experience.

It is at this juncture that the existential psychoanalytic sensibility comes into focus as something more than a theoretical preference. Thompson argues that psychoanalysis gives us the opportunity to give thought to our experience by taking the time needed to ponder it, and he aligns this with Heidegger’s distinction between two fundamental types of thinking, calculative and meditative, a distinction that avoids both Freud’s and Sartre’s conceptual confusions around conscious and unconscious systems.

The point of this distinction, in Thompson’s hands, is not to romanticize “depth” or to disparage rationality, but to name something clinicians recognize: patients resist thinking about certain topics because they are distressing, and one manner of thinking is inherently comforting while the other is more likely to elicit anxiety or dread. Thompson writes that we tend to avoid thinking the thoughts that make us anxious, and instead abandon ourselves to fantasies that are soporific, and he frames the task of analysis as nudging our thinking into those areas we typically avoid so that we can access a region of existence we are loathe to explore, though it lies at the heart of our humanity.

Here the unconscious is no longer a hidden container. It is the lived structure of avoidance, the way a life organizes itself around what cannot yet be borne. If we still use the word “unconscious,” it begins to mean not an absence of consciousness but an absence of experienced ownership, a refusal to dwell in what is most disclosive and therefore most frightening.

Thompson then makes the Heideggerian move that is perhaps the most clinically fertile, because it gives a language for what interpretation is doing when it is doing more than producing insight. He explains Heidegger’s “ontological difference,” the distinction between beings, understood as entities and objects of scientific investigation, and being, understood as the disclosed significance of entities in time. Beings become being when they are experienced through interpretation, because interpretation is how temporal flux becomes meaningful for a particular person.

Thompson’s clinical translation is explicit: psychoanalysts already “temporalize” the patient’s experience when they interpret its historical antecedents, but the aim is not merely to help the patient “understand” themselves better. The aim is to help them experience who and what they are, essentially, so that the patient’s world comes alive again, and Thompson names this as what Heidegger calls doing “fundamental ontology.”

If we take this seriously, “unconscious experience” can no longer mean an experience that is experienced unconsciously, which is near nonsense, but rather a region of life whose being has not yet been disclosed in time, and whose disclosure requires interpretation not as translation into theory but as the opening of a world.

layers of experience in psychoanalysis

Laing’s language of experience, and what cannot yet be said

Thompson’s inclusion of Laing is not an eccentric historical gesture. Laing appears because he pushes the experiential stance to its ethical edge, and because he exposes how psychoanalytic theory can proliferate abstractions that attribute motives and experiences to patients who disclaim them, while leaving unasked the basic question: what is the person’s experience of themselves, and of the other, in the encounter that is actually happening.

Thompson connects this to Laing’s social phenomenology, but the point that matters most for the present question is how Laing describes conflict. In the language of psychic conflict, Laing agrees with Freud that people who suffer conflicts are essentially of two minds, struggling against the intrusion of a reality too painful to accept on one hand while harboring a fantasy incapable of being realized on the other, and he adds a claim that is both simple and uncompromising: their lives are held in abeyance until they can speak of their experience to someone willing to hear it with benign acceptance, without a vested interest in what that experience ought to be.

This matters because it reframes the unconscious not as a thing, but as a condition of speech and listening, and therefore as an ethical condition of the analytic situation itself. What cannot be said is not merely unknown; it is unlivable under the present conditions, and the analyst’s task is inseparable from the creation of a space in which the person can risk letting what is pre-reflectively lived become reflectively speakable.

Laing’s preference, as Thompson notes, is to avoid terms like consciousness and unconscious and to situate the discussion in the language of experience and the way experience determines perception of world and self. One could read this as an anti-theoretical move, but Thompson’s chapter suggests something more unsettling: perhaps the deepest theoretical fidelity is precisely a fidelity to experience, which forces us to treat theory as a secondary construct rather than the primary reality.

What changes in analysis, if not merely knowledge?

One can now see why Thompson’s chapter ends with an argument that is at once skeptical and oddly hopeful. He states that Freud’s models are “scientific” only to the degree that psychoanalysis is a theoretical science that presumes to explain what is inaccessible to experience, and that, as theoretical constructs, such models cannot be proved or disproved, which helps explain the proliferation of competing psychoanalytic theories.

But the existential pivot is sharper than skepticism about theory, because Thompson then says that from Heidegger’s ontological perspective the unconscious is not a theoretical construct “in” my head, but “out there, in the world, a dimension of being,” apprehended as an enigma that appears and disappears, and accessible to us only through interpretation in the sense of giving things name and significance in the ongoing movement of life.

The consequence is that the unconscious is never simply unconscious for me, but a living presence in my world, and this is why, Thompson concludes, the purpose of analysis is not finally to “know” the unconscious, but to return the patient to the ground of an experience from which they have lost their way, so that the patient can claim it as their own.

If we keep the initial question in view, we can now answer it without the usual evasions. “Unconscious experience” is a phrase that collapses under scrutiny if it is meant to designate an experience that is experienced while remaining unconscious, because experience implies some form of ownership, however faint. Yet the phrase can be rescued, existentially, if it is treated as a pointer toward what is lived without being lived as lived, toward pre-reflective involvement that has not been gathered into reflective time, and toward a dimension of being that remains concealed not because it is locked away somewhere, but because it has not yet become bearable enough to be spoken, remembered, and carried.

For patients, this reframes the unconscious away from the fantasy of an inner monster or a hidden vault of secrets, and toward the more intimate, more unsettling possibility that what is “unconscious” is often what you are already doing and suffering, but cannot yet experience as your own without anxiety. For therapists, it reframes interpretation away from the delivery of explanatory knowledge and toward the temporalization of experience, the slow work by which a world becomes newly disclosed, and by which the patient’s life ceases to be held in abeyance by what cannot yet be said.

At Free Association Clinic, this orientation grounds our understanding of depth work, whether one arrives through existential therapy or through psychoanalytic psychotherapy, because the task is not to impose a theory onto a life but to make room for experience to enter language and time with the seriousness it demands.

existential psychoanalysis and lived experience in the therapy room

James Norwood, PsyD
Associate Director, New School for Existential Psychoanalysis (https://www.freeassociation.us)
Clinical Director, The Free Association Clinic for Existential Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (https://www.freeassociationclinic.com)
Founder/CEO, inpersontherapy.com (https://inpersontherapy.com)

Sources

Freud, S. (1953–1973). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (24 vols; J. Strachey, Ed. & Trans.). Hogarth Press.
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). Harper & Row.
Laing, R. D. (1965). The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. Penguin Books.
Sartre, J.-P. (1956). Being and Nothingness (H. Barnes, Trans.). Washington Square Press.
Thompson, M. G. (2024). Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis: On the Primacy of Authenticity. Routledge.

Authenticity in Psychoanalytic Therapy: The Vicissitudes of Being Real

Authenticity in Psychoanalytic Therapy: The Vicissitudes of Being Real

A reflection on Michael Guy Thompson’s “Vicissitudes of Authenticity in the Psychoanalytic Situation,” in Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis: On the Primacy of Authenticity (Thompson, 2024).

Introduction, why authenticity matters in psychoanalytic therapy

“Two chairs in a therapy room representing authenticity in psychoanalytic therapy

Authenticity in psychoanalytic therapy is rarely announced as the explicit aim of treatment, partly because the word itself has been worn thin by culture, and partly because psychoanalysis has historically preferred to speak in a technical idiom, as if what matters most can be safeguarded by speaking in concepts that keep the moral imagination at bay. Yet Thompson proposes that the analytic relationship, when taken seriously, is better characterized as a quest for authenticity than as the mere cultivation of insight, adaptation, or symptom relief, and he makes that proposal precisely because the consulting room is one of the few places where a person can discover, in a lived way, what it costs to tell the truth about themselves without converting that truth into a performance (Thompson, 2024).

This is not a romantic claim about “being yourself,” as though the self were a stable possession waiting behind the curtain, nor is it a recruitment slogan for therapy; it is closer to an existential claim about what it means to bear reality when one can no longer hide behind the small dishonesties that make life feel manageable. If psychoanalysis has an ethical gravity, it may be found less in the therapist’s values, and more in the peculiar demand that the situation makes on both people, namely that they meet one another under conditions where evasion becomes increasingly difficult to sustain.

Introduction, why authenticity matters in psychoanalytic therapy

Patients rarely arrive saying, “I want authenticity,” and when they do, it is often because they have already tried to purchase that feeling through other means, through reinvention, through disclosure without consequence, through the curated honesty of social media, through the moral certainty of an identity that never needs to be questioned. More often, what arrives is distress, the fog of anxiety or the bluntness of depression, an unnameable dissatisfaction in love, or the weary sense of living at a distance from one’s own life, and yet, if one listens without rushing to interpret, a quieter wish can be heard beneath the presenting problem: the wish to become less divided, less strategic, less coerced by fear into living a life that does not feel like one’s own.

For therapists, that same wish appears in a different register, not as a “goal” to be delivered, but as the atmosphere that slowly develops when a patient senses that the hour is not organized around being managed, corrected, or recruited into optimism. In that atmosphere, what begins to matter is whether speech can become more than reporting, whether the patient can risk saying what is true enough to disturb their familiar self-understanding, and whether the therapist can tolerate the consequences of that disturbance without turning the work into reassurance or technique-as-theater.

Why psychoanalysis rarely names authenticity directly

Thompson’s first move is deceptively simple: he points out that authenticity is not a conventional technical term in psychoanalysis, even though what he means by authenticity has “pervaded psychoanalysis from its inception,” and he treats that mismatch as more than a historical curiosity (Thompson, 2024). When something is central yet unnamed, the unnamed thing tends to reappear in distorted forms, sometimes as ideology, sometimes as sentimentality, sometimes as the brittle insistence that one’s technique is “neutral” while one’s practice is quietly organized around fear.

Philosophy, culture, and the discomfort of ambiguity

The word authenticity enters the psychoanalytic bloodstream through existential philosophy, and Thompson notes that this alone creates resistance, since many analysts are temperamentally and institutionally averse to philosophical reading, even when the clinical situation forces philosophical questions upon them (Thompson, 2024). He also locates a cultural divide: European sensibilities have more readily treated suffering as a source of strength and character, whereas American sensibilities are more inclined to treat suffering primarily as trauma and psychopathology, and authenticity sits uneasily at precisely that interface because it refuses to promise comfort as the criterion of truth (Thompson, 2024).

What makes the term especially difficult, however, is not simply its philosophical pedigree but its ambiguity, since authenticity cannot be stabilized as a measurable outcome without being falsified by that very stabilization. Thompson suggests that the pragmatic, market-oriented description of psychoanalysis as increasing “work and love” becomes, in this context, a kind of defensive simplification, because it allows the field to speak in terms that sound sellable while avoiding the darker and more demanding question of what a person is willing to face about their own existence (Thompson, 2024).

Authenticity is not a moral checklist

One of Thompson’s most clarifying claims is that authenticity has “no specific moral agenda,” and that the absence of an inherent moral program is precisely what many clinicians find disturbing (Thompson, 2024). In a culture that alternates between moral exhibitionism and moral cynicism, it is tempting to make authenticity mean “doing the right thing,” or “saying the honest thing,” or “being transparent,” but psychoanalysis becomes unrecognizable when it is reduced to character education, and existential thought becomes kitsch when it is reduced to a lifestyle. Even Charles Taylor’s influential effort to rehabilitate authenticity within a moral frame, whatever its virtues, illustrates the ease with which authenticity is pulled toward moral discourse and away from the clinical texture of the hour (Taylor, 1991).

In the analytic situation, authenticity is less a set of correct statements than a stance toward one’s own evasions, a willingness to see how one uses speech to hide, seduce, attack, or manage, and a willingness to notice how the other person is being recruited into that same familiar drama. It is not, therefore, a doctrine of disclosure, since disclosure can be used defensively, and it is not a doctrine of emotional intensity, since intensity can be theatrical; rather, it concerns the slow collapse of contrivance, which is why it is so often accompanied by shame, fear, and the temptation to flee into theory.

What Thompson means by authenticity in the analytic situation

Thompson restricts authenticity, for the purposes of his argument, to a few elementary attributes that are clinically useful because they resist the sentimental uses of the word: authenticity tends to involve the road less traveled, it tends to be more arduous and therefore potentially more rewarding than the easier path, and it is genuine in a way that resists generalization because it is context-specific and characterized by an absence of subterfuge or contrivance (Thompson, 2024). That final attribute matters clinically because it immediately places authenticity inside relationship rather than inside private conviction, and it implicitly aligns authenticity with psychoanalytic efforts to name what is “real” or “honest” in what he calls the extra-transference dimension of the treatment relationship (Thompson, 2024).

Unconventional, difficult, and strangely rewarding

To call authenticity “unconventional” is not to romanticize rebellion, but to notice that the patient’s deepest evasions are rarely idiosyncratic; they are usually culturally reinforced, often rewarded, and sometimes identical with what the patient thinks of as their character. The analytic demand, then, is not a demand for novelty but for a different kind of fidelity, fidelity to what is actually happening, including the parts that the patient has learned to speak around, and including the ways the patient tries to make the therapist into a collaborator in their avoidance.

This is why authenticity is arduous. When a patient begins to abandon familiar defenses, what they lose first is not misery but protection, and what replaces protection is not immediate freedom but exposure, and exposure is experienced as danger long before it is experienced as liberation. The analytic situation makes room for that danger without rushing to annul it, and in that sense it becomes one of the few relational spaces where a person can discover that they are capable of bearing what they previously treated as unbearable.

A winding path symbolizing the difficult but rewarding path of authenticity in therapy

Context-specific truthfulness, not a “one size fits all” stance

Because authenticity is context-specific, it cannot be codified as a stable therapeutic posture, and this has implications for technique: if the therapist tries to apply authenticity as a rule, the therapist will inevitably become inauthentic, because the “application” will be driven by the therapist’s need to be a certain kind of clinician rather than by responsiveness to what is actually happening between two people. Thompson is explicit that analysts may emphasize some dimensions of authenticity and neglect others, and he notes that Freud, Winnicott, Bion, and Lacan had markedly different clinical styles while still exemplifying something essential about authenticity, which should caution us against confusing authenticity with any single school’s technical identity (Thompson, 2024).

The practical implication is not eclecticism for its own sake, but humility: the question becomes less “What would an authentic analyst do?” and more “What is being demanded of us, here, if we are not to lapse into contrivance?” That question is not answered once, because the analytic situation does not stop changing, and neither do the ways the patient tries to manage closeness, fear, desire, and disappointment.

Authenticity and suffering, what analysis does (and does not) promise

If authenticity is made into a therapeutic slogan, it will be used to smuggle in rescue fantasies, and Thompson’s argument is partly an argument against rescue, not because he is indifferent to suffering, but because rescue fantasies are themselves among the most tenacious forms of inauthenticity. Psychoanalysis does not promise happiness, and when it pretends to, it becomes indistinguishable from those cultural forces that deny the inevitability of disappointment by selling solutions.

Freud’s “common unhappiness” and the end of rescue fantasies

Thompson recalls Freud’s austere line about the aim of analysis, “to transform hysterical misery into common unhappiness,” and he reads it not as cynicism but as a demand for honesty about the human condition, including the reality that the end of neurosis is not the end of suffering (Breuer & Freud, 1893–1895/1955; Thompson, 2024). The phrase becomes clinically useful when it is heard not as a lowering of expectations but as a refusal to lie, because what many patients experience as despair is often the dawning recognition that no other person, no perfect love, and no correct interpretation will exempt them from the burdens of being a finite human being.

Thompson presses this further with a Lacanian theme that he treats as existentially significant: the fantasy that someone will appear and solve one’s problems, like a parent who arrives just in time, is not relinquished by reasoning or coercion, but through the day-to-day experience of bearing disappointment while simultaneously trying to understand one’s resistance to it (Thompson, 2024). The rescue fantasy is not a childish error to be scolded; it is a form of hope that has become fused with dependency, and letting it go feels, at first, like letting go of life itself, which is why it requires a setting where disappointment is not humiliating but metabolizable.

Winnicott and Bion, becoming a “sufferer,” and why fear belongs

Thompson’s use of Winnicott is similarly stark. He cites Winnicott’s claim that “If we are successful [as analysts] we enable our patients to abandon invulnerability and become a sufferer,” and he treats this as a description of what authenticity demands, namely the renunciation of invulnerability as a way of living (Winnicott, 1989; Thompson, 2024). The language is jarring only if one assumes that the goal of treatment is to eliminate suffering; if one assumes instead that the goal is to make suffering bearable without distortion, then becoming a sufferer sounds less like a defeat and more like a recovery of basic human capacity, the capacity to feel what is real without collapsing or retaliating.

Bion’s contribution, as Thompson presents it, is even less consoling: Bion suggests that analyst and patient should both be experiencing fear, and that if they are not, they have no business being there, a formulation that treats fear not as a symptom to be neutralized but as a sign of proximity to what matters (Bion, 1974; Thompson, 2024). This is not an endorsement of intimidation, and it is not a claim that therapy should be frightening, but it is an insistence that authentic work approaches what the patient has organized their life to avoid, and avoidance, when it begins to fail, is experienced as danger.

Technique in service of authenticity

In Thompson’s frame, technique is not discarded, but it is stripped of its defensive uses. Technique exists to protect the analytic situation from the seductions of comfort, control, and mutual collusion, and when technique is understood in that way, its ethical dimension becomes clearer: it is not primarily about being correct, it is about refusing the forms of dishonesty that both patient and analyst will tend to prefer.

Free association as an honesty practice

Thompson’s earlier work on honesty makes explicit something that is often treated as a historical artifact: the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis is, at its core, a pledge, a contract in which the patient agrees to be candid, to say what comes to mind and to try not to lie about it, even though Freud discovered that this is precisely what patients are loath to do because they fear what their secrets reveal about themselves (Thompson, 2004). When this is taken seriously, free association is not a quaint ritual; it is the difficult practice of speaking beyond the edited self, and the therapist’s task becomes not to reward eloquence but to keep faith with the premise that what is most important is what the patient least wants to say.

In that sense, free association and honesty in therapy are not reducible to confession, because confession often seeks absolution; free association seeks exposure, not exposure to the therapist’s judgment, but exposure to oneself, which is why it so often produces ambivalence and resistance. Thompson emphasizes that the analytic encounter is inherently conversational, even when classical technique tries to deny this, and that conversation, when it is not merely gratifying but intelligently restrained, becomes a humanizing tool that can deepen free association rather than dilute it (Thompson, 2024).

FNeutrality, “evenly suspended attention,” and “erasing memory and desire”

Neutrality becomes corrupt when it is mistaken for emotional absence, because emotional absence is not neutral, it is a stance, and often a stance organized around the analyst’s fear of being affected. Thompson’s account of neutrality, both in The Ethic of Honesty and in his reading of Freud, emphasizes something closer to “not knowing,” a disciplined openness that empties the mind of preconception so that the patient’s experience can appear as it is, rather than as the analyst needs it to be (Thompson, 2004). Freud’s phrase “evenly suspended attention” and Bion’s phrase “erasing memory and desire” point in the same direction, not toward blankness, but toward the courage required to listen without forcing the hour into the analyst’s preferred narrative (Freud, 1915/1958; Bion, 1967; Thompson, 2024).

Thompson treats this as a feature of authenticity because it demands that the analyst relinquish the small dishonesties of certainty and mastery. If neutrality is real, it is felt by the patient not as coldness but as the unsettling experience of not being managed, which can provoke rage and longing precisely because it interrupts the patient’s habitual strategies of control.

Notebook and pen symbolizing free association and honesty in psychoanalytic therapy

Abstinence and the courage to disappoint

Abstinence, in Thompson’s rendering, is not a synonym for cruelty, and the confusion between abstinence and aloofness has done immense damage to the public understanding of psychoanalysis. He quotes Freud’s admonition that the analyst should treat transference love “like no other emotional relationship,” while also never returning it, rejecting it, or demanding it, which is a formulation that places abstinence in the service of protecting the analytic space from seduction and retaliation rather than in the service of moral superiority (Freud, 1915/1958; Thompson, 2004).

In Thompson’s chapter on authenticity, this theme converges with Lacan’s stark insistence that the analyst abandon the wish to be helpful when help is asked, give up the fantasy of miracles, and even relinquish the hope of ending treatment with gratitude. Thompson’s summary is brutal and clarifying: “The goal of analysis is to disappoint,” and disappointment is painful, often unappreciated at the time, and yet potentially liberating because it undermines the patient’s investment in rescue fantasies (Thompson, 2024; Schneiderman, 1983). If abstinence is practiced with intelligence rather than sadism, it becomes one way of protecting the patient from the therapist’s wish to be needed, which is one of the most common sources of inauthenticity in clinical work.

Transference and countertransference, and the real relationship

If there is a point in Thompson’s chapter that should unsettle therapists, it is his insistence that the concept of transference can itself become a defense, not for the patient but for the analyst, a way of refusing the impact of proximity by translating whatever is human into something that can be interpreted away.

When “transference” becomes a defense against proximity

Thompson argues that post-Freudian technique, particularly the versions that advertise themselves as “classical,” often redefines the analytic relationship by eliminating the personal or real relationship and expanding technique to cover what Freud treated as personal engagement, a shift that robs the relationship of genuineness in ways patients can feel and often complain about (Thompson, 2024). He is blunt: transference can become “a vehicle of defense against the realness of the person of the patient,” especially when it is convenient for the analyst to remove themselves from the impact of closeness (Thompson, 2024).

This is not an argument against transference interpretation. It is an argument against hiding behind transference interpretation. When every sign of warmth is interpreted as seduction, when every moment of closeness is treated as regression, and when the therapist’s own fear of intimacy is masked as technique, the analytic situation becomes a theater of avoidance that calls itself depth.

The personal relationship, credibility, and the ordinary negotiations of treatment

Thompson does not romanticize the personal relationship, and he is clear that it cannot be codified, since it varies with analysts, with patients, with stages of treatment, and with the moods and limits of both people (Thompson, 2024). Yet he insists that analysts inevitably talk to patients about ordinary matters, whether the analysis is working, whether the couch should be used, disagreements about frequency, absences, fees, and the simple question of what is being asked of each person, and these matters are resolved not by theory but by credibility, by the patient’s sense that the analyst is speaking without guile (Thompson, 2024).

He also makes a claim that many clinicians privately know but publicly avoid: the patient’s love for the analyst, not merely as projection but as something real that emerges through sustained proximity, is often the very condition that makes the trials of analysis endurable, and the field’s reluctance to speak of love is itself a symptom of its discomfort with authenticity in the therapeutic relationship (Thompson, 2024). To acknowledge this is not to abolish boundaries, it is to refuse the lie that the work occurs without human impact.

Conclusion, authenticity requires courage from both people

Thompson’s conclusion is not a celebration of authenticity as an ideal, but an insistence that change is necessarily painful and requires sacrifice, and therefore cannot be demanded from the patient by an analyst who insists on remaining safe behind detachment. If the patient must bear disappointment, fear, and the loss of protective fantasies, then the analyst must also bear sacrifice, not as martyrdom but as participation, since authenticity cannot be “applied” as technique from the comfort of evacuation, but must be suffered repeatedly as an act of courage throughout the treatment (Thompson, 2024).

In that sense, authenticity in psychoanalytic therapy names something like an ethic without moralism: a commitment to a relationship that is continually tempted toward contrivance, and yet capable, under the pressure of the work, of becoming more honest, more real, and therefore more alive.

James Norwood, PsyD
Associate Director, New School for Existential Psychoanalysis
Clinical Director, The Free Association Clinic for Existential Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis
Founder/CEO, In Person Therapy

References

Bion, W. R. (1967). Notes on Memory and Desire. In J. Lindon (Ed.), Psychoanalytic Forum (Vol. 2, pp. 271–280). Science House.
Bion, W. R. (1974). Bion’s Brazilian Lectures-1. Imago Editora Ltda.
Breuer, J., & Freud, S. (1893–1895/1955). Studies on Hysteria. Standard Edition (Vol. 2, pp. 1–305). Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1915/1958). Observations on Transference-Love: Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis III. Standard Edition (Vol. 12, pp. 157–171). Hogarth Press.
Heidegger, M. (1962/1927). Being and Time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). Harper and Row.
Mitchell, S. A. (1992). True Selves, False Selves, and the Ambiguity of Authenticity. In N. J. Skolnick &S. C. Warshaw (Eds.), Relational Perspectives in Psychoanalysis. Analytic Press.
Nietzsche, F. (2002). Beyond Good and Evil (J. Norman, Trans.). Cambridge University Press.
Safranski, R. (1998). Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (E. Osers, Trans.). Harvard University Press.
Schneiderman, S. (1983). Jacques Lacan: The Death of an Intellectual Hero. Harvard University Press.
Taylor, C. (1991). The Ethics of Authenticity. Harvard University Press.
Thompson, M. G. (1994). The Truth About Freud’s Technique: The Encounter With the Real. New York University Press.
Thompson, M. G. (2004). The Ethic of Honesty: The Fundamental Rule of Psychoanalysis. Editions Rodopi.
Thompson, M. G. (2024). Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis: On the Primacy of Authenticity. Routledge.
Winnicott, D. W. (1989). Psychoanalytic Explorations (C. Winnicott, R. Shephard, & M. Davis, Eds.). Harvard University Press.

Will vs Desire in Psychoanalysis: Why Willpower Is Not the Whole Story

Will vs Desire in Psychoanalysis: Why Willpower Is Not the Whole Story

A reflection on Michael Guy Thompson’s “What Is the Will? On the Role of Desire in Psychoanalysis” (Chapter 4 of Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis)

Most people who arrive in psychotherapy do not need to be told what the “right” decision is, at least not in the thin, everyday sense of rightness, because they have usually rehearsed it for months or years, sometimes with impressive discipline and a kind of grim fidelity to self-critique, and what brings them in is the humiliating discovery that knowing what one should do is not the same thing as being able to do it.

That discovery is often moralized too quickly. When effort fails, the default explanation is characterological: not enough willpower, not enough motivation, not enough discipline. Yet the consulting room, if it is honest, keeps exposing a different structure of the problem, one in which “willpower in therapy” names less a solution than a confusion about what kind of creature a person is, and what actually moves, or obstructs, the movement of a life.

In Chapter 4 of Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis, Michael Guy Thompson asks the question with a deceptively ordinary bluntness: what is the will, and what is its relation to desire? What follows is not a technical footnote, because once the will is treated as mysterious rather than obvious, the whole modern moral economy of “just try harder” starts to look like a defense against something more disturbing, namely that desire and the unconscious do not politely wait for conscious plans, and that our experience of agency is more fragile, and more complicated, than the willpower story suggests.

Willpower in therapy and the experience of being stuck

The will is often imagined as an inner executive, a rational manager who surveys options, selects a course of action, and then commands the self to comply, as if the person were a well-designed machine that occasionally needs firmer leadership. Thompson sketches this familiar definition precisely in order to show how seductive it is, and how quickly it collapses when we take lived experience seriously, because it assumes that will is not only conscious but also controllable, always “at our disposal,” as though the mind were a hand that could simply grip more tightly when life becomes difficult.

Therapy, however, is full of phenomena that make that model feel naïve, not because patients are irrational, but because they are human. People decide and do not follow through. They achieve what they once wanted and find the achievement strangely empty. They sabotage a relationship they claim to value, not as a theatrical act of self-destruction, but with the eerie feeling of watching oneself do it anyway. They speak as if two voices were competing in the same body, one insisting on what is proper and one pulling toward what is forbidden, or feared, or simply alive.

If we stay at the level of discipline, we reduce this division to a defect. If we stay at the level of existential psychoanalysis and agency, we begin to hear it differently, as a conflict about desire and about what desire would require, and as a conflict that is not solved by pressure but by understanding, because pressure is so often the very instrument by which the self tries to suppress what it cannot admit it wants.

Will vs desire in psychoanalysis, the question beneath “try harder”

Thompson’s decisive reversal is stated in a line that deserves to be read slowly, precisely because it attacks a cherished modern fantasy, that we are autonomous choosers who can simply select our wants the way we select our clothes: “My desires choose me. I do not choose my desires.”

This is the pivot of will vs desire in psychoanalysis, and it is also the point where the moralism of “motivation vs discipline” becomes inadequate, because the question is no longer how to force compliance with a decision but how to understand what, in fact, has already been decided at another level, one that is not fully reflective, and that does not announce itself as a decision at all. Thompson even treats will itself as potentially non-conscious, which is to say that the very faculty we enlist to control desire may already be entangled with it, recruited by it, or turned against it.

When “trying harder” fails, the more existential question is not whether you lack strength, but what you are actually protecting yourself from by clinging to the language of strength. The willpower story offers a simple moral drama: I should, therefore I must. Desire interrupts that drama with a different disclosure: I do not, and the reason matters. The unconscious, in this sense, is not a basement full of irrational impulses, but the place where our real commitments, fears, and longings are already operative before we can dignify them with conscious reasons.

will vs desire in psychoanalysis, choice and agency

Two traditions of the will, and the moral burden we still carry

Thompson traces two opposed conceptions of will that still haunt contemporary therapy culture, even when their philosophical origins are forgotten. One tradition ties will to virtue, and therefore to self-mastery and goodness, while the other tradition treats will as synonymous with desire, and therefore as largely unconscious.

In the virtue tradition, Aristotle becomes a key point of reference, because the will is imagined as something that can be cultivated through wisdom and self-mastery, and the person who “chooses rightly” is not merely effective but admirable. Thompson’s point is not to dismiss this tradition, since its moral seriousness still animates many people’s sense of what a life ought to be, but to show how easily it becomes punitive when imported into psychotherapy as an expectation that one should be able to master oneself simply by deciding to.

Augustine intensifies the moral weight even further by naming will “the mother and guardian of virtue,” which quietly installs the idea that failure of will is not merely failure of action but failure of goodness, a shift that helps explain why willpower discourse so quickly turns into shame.

What follows in modernity is a further confusion, because the debate about “free will” often assumes that freedom means control, as if being free were identical with being able to override whatever one feels in the name of reason, and as if the presence of anxiety, grief, craving, ambivalence, or fear were simply obstacles to be conquered rather than experiences to be understood. Thompson notes how early modern thinkers questioned the very distinction between “will” and “free will,” and how the discussion opens directly into the problem of consciousness, of what it means to call something free, and of how ethics is entangled with that freedom.

Clinically, the cost of this confusion is predictable. If freedom is mistaken for control, then every failure to control oneself becomes proof that one is not free, and the person oscillates between omnipotent fantasy and helpless despair, between “I should be able to” and “I cannot,” without ever arriving at the more difficult possibility, that freedom may not look like mastery, and that responsibility may not look like self-condemnation.

Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, when desire chooses us

Thompson locates a decisive rupture in the nineteenth century, when Schopenhauer situates will in the unconscious and explicitly equates it with desire, a move that makes the old executive model feel suddenly untenable.

Schopenhauer’s free-will quote is famous for a reason, because it offers a hard clarity that most people recognize immediately in their own lives, even if they dislike its implications: “You can do as you will, but you cannot will as you will.”

Thompson emphasizes the clinical sting: if desire is primary, then knowledge is often recruited after the fact, in the service of what is already wanted, and the demand to “choose better wants” becomes not only unrealistic but cruel, because it frames unconscious life as a moral defect rather than a human condition. Schopenhauer, on Thompson’s reading, abandons the fantasy that will is an executive function and places it in “a maelstrom of feelings, desires, and inclinations,” which is another way of saying that willpower is not a separate instrument we can simply pick up, but part of the very life we are trying to control.

Nietzsche receives Schopenhauer’s disruption without adopting his pessimism, and Thompson’s interpretation is worth lingering on because it reframes the usual popular caricature of Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s “Will to Power,” Thompson suggests, can be read less as domination than as “Desire to Passion,” a striving toward a life that is not merely compliant but intense, engaged, and willing to risk itself in living.

Whether one agrees with every nuance of that gloss, the clinical point is sharp: the opposite of health is not simply weak will, but deadened desire, a life organized around safety, approval, and self-suppression. In that condition, the will can still function, sometimes brilliantly, producing careers, achievements, and outward success, and yet the person suffers a quieter collapse of vitality, the feeling that one is living someone else’s life, or living one’s own life as if it belonged to a stranger.

Freud’s ego and id, the rider and the horse

Thompson’s chapter becomes especially clinically legible when it moves into Freud, because Freud offers a vocabulary that many therapists already carry, even if they no longer use it explicitly, and that vocabulary is still useful for thinking about how “will” can become both ally and adversary. Thompson summarizes Freud’s position in a way that also satisfies the familiar SEO phrase, the Freud ego and id rider-and-horse metaphor: Freud situates will in the ego, while desire is lodged in libido, or the id, and the relation between them is “analogous to a rider on a horse,” where the horse “knows where it wants to go” and the rider tries, with mixed success, to guide it.

The important word here is not guidance but compromise. Freud, in Thompson’s rendering, is neither a moralist of reason nor a celebrant of impulse; he is a realist about conflict. The “happy person” is not the one who conquers desire, but the one who has “come to terms with his desires” and therefore does not waste life fighting an internal civil war, while the neurotic “doesn’t trust his desires” and suppresses them “out of fear.”

From this angle, symptoms do not arise because desire exists but because desire is treated as dangerous, shameful, or intolerable, which is why the will, when enlisted as a weapon against desire, so often becomes an agent of repression rather than an agent of freedom. The will can either serve desire, by not getting in its way, or it can become the instrument by which a person tries to extinguish what is most personal, and then wonders why life feels impersonal.

Freud rider and horse metaphor, ego and desire in therapy

Why change is indirect, Sartre, Laing, and the limits of willpower

The question that naturally follows is one that matters equally to patients and to clinicians: if will is not sovereign, and if desire cannot simply be commanded, how does change happen at all, and what exactly is therapy doing when it is not simply coaching better discipline.
Thompson’s answer proceeds through the existential tradition. He invokes Sartre in a way that brings the ethical stakes into view, since Sartre suggests that neurosis can be understood as a kind of fundamental choice, made at an unconscious and pre-reflective level, which means that our suffering is not only a consequence of what happened to us but also a meaningful way we have taken up what happened, and therefore something for which we remain implicated.

This is the point where Sartre’s freedom and responsibility in therapy become psychologically relevant, because responsibility is not reduced to self-blame, and freedom is not reduced to control, but both become ways of naming that a person is not merely the passive object of forces, whether those forces are called trauma, drives, or pathology.
Yet Thompson is equally clear about the limit: “If I cannot will myself to health, then how does change come about?” He reports that when he asked R.D. Laing this question in supervision, Laing answered with one word, “indirectly.”

That single word, and the way Thompson elaborates it, cuts through the false alternative between helplessness and voluntarism. He writes that one cannot will oneself to overcome the fear of intimacy, to love more generously, to behave more compassionately, or to feel more alive, and yet these dilemmas often improve as a consequence of the endeavor to know oneself, even if the mechanism of that change remains mysterious.

This is also where Thompson’s critique of certain modern therapies becomes precise rather than polemical. He notes that behavioral psychology, and later CBT, often equate will with volition, assume that choices are driven by rationality rather than desire, and treat willpower as the capacity to commit to a course of action by correcting irrational thought.

Thompson does not deny that people sometimes improve, but he offers a deeper explanation for why improvement happens when it does: according to Laing, what probably helps CBT patients change is not willpower at all but desire, and specifically the desire that emerges through the relationship with the therapist, “not willfully but indirectly,” which is to say unconsciously.

If we take that seriously, the contemporary contrast between motivation vs discipline looks like a displacement. Discipline can sometimes produce behavior, but therapy is concerned with the conditions under which a person can want, and can tolerate wanting, and can bear the risk that wanting entails. That is not a slogan, and it is not a technique in the narrow sense. It is an encounter with freedom that does not flatter us with fantasies of control.

“I should” versus “I want,” where shame disguises fear

One of the more clinically illuminating sections of Thompson’s chapter turns on a simple linguistic difference that both patients and therapists know, even when they do not name it: the difference between “I should” and “I want.” The “should” voice has moral force, and it often has the tone of an internalized authority, while “want” risks sincerity, which is precisely why it often feels more dangerous.
Thompson illustrates this through addiction, not in the flattened, behavioral sense of a bad habit, but as a conflict about desire itself. The addict may feel he should stop because his life is being destroyed, yet “unless he genuinely wants to, he will fail,” because the will is an executive function that can serve desire or oppose it, and when it is in opposition the person becomes divided against himself.

Here Thompson’s language is intentionally provocative, and it is clinically accurate enough to be unsettling: the addict tells himself he must get “in control,” as if a force of will could steel him against desire, but this refusal to genuinely want is sustained by an “introjected mommy” that tries to make him do what he does not actually want to do, and Laing, as Thompson reports him, believes this never works.

The deeper point is not confined to substances, because the structure appears wherever the will is mobilized to suppress the pain of desire, which is also to say the pain of living, the pain of risk, and the pain of possible failure. Thompson writes that at bottom the addict wants to be free of the pain elicited by desire, and therefore medicates the pain, yet “you can never kill your desire, you can only redirect it,” because desire entails risk and the possibility of disappointment, which the addicted person cannot tolerate.

In this light, what looks like weak will is often a more complex drama, where will is recruited as a defense against desire, or where will becomes the instrument of fear. One can live in that arrangement for a long time, even successfully by external standards, and Thompson makes the point with a bleak irony: you do not even need drugs to reduce anxiety, because “your will can do it for you,” and will and desire are often at cross purposes regarding how much risk we allow ourselves.

This is a difficult claim to hear, especially for conscientious people, because it suggests that the will is not automatically the ally of growth, and may in fact “resist change,” which is why moral exhortation so often produces the opposite of what it intends, namely a tightening of defenses and a deepening of shame.

Thompson’s own clinical implication is precise and, in its way, austere. Genuine change comes about when we want to change, not because we need to or should, and therapy’s function is not to coerce desire into propriety but to use our capacity for reflection, which he identifies here with will, to assess why we get in the way of our desires and to put defenses into question. We cannot will ourselves to let go of defenses, but inquiry can lead to change even when we have no control over the matter.

For clinicians, this reframes technique as something less like intervention upon a patient and more like participation in a process of clarification, where the patient’s ambivalence is not treated as noncompliance but as meaningful conflict, and where the therapist’s task is not to win an argument with resistance but to help make the patient’s resistance intelligible, which is a different kind of respect. For patients, the same reframing can be experienced as a release from the moral theater of discipline, because it suggests that the problem is not that one is defective, but that one’s desire is conflicted, feared, or hidden, and that truthfulness about that conflict is already a movement toward freedom.

“I should” versus “I want,” where shame disguises fear

One of the more clinically illuminating sections of Thompson’s chapter turns on a simple linguistic difference that both patients and therapists know, even when they do not name it: the difference between “I should” and “I want.” The “should” voice has moral force, and it often has the tone of an internalized authority, while “want” risks sincerity, which is precisely why it often feels more dangerous.
Thompson illustrates this through addiction, not in the flattened, behavioral sense of a bad habit, but as a conflict about desire itself. The addict may feel he should stop because his life is being destroyed, yet “unless he genuinely wants to, he will fail,” because the will is an executive function that can serve desire or oppose it, and when it is in opposition the person becomes divided against himself.

Here Thompson’s language is intentionally provocative, and it is clinically accurate enough to be unsettling: the addict tells himself he must get “in control,” as if a force of will could steel him against desire, but this refusal to genuinely want is sustained by an “introjected mommy” that tries to make him do what he does not actually want to do, and Laing, as Thompson reports him, believes this never works.

The deeper point is not confined to substances, because the structure appears wherever the will is mobilized to suppress the pain of desire, which is also to say the pain of living, the pain of risk, and the pain of possible failure. Thompson writes that at bottom the addict wants to be free of the pain elicited by desire, and therefore medicates the pain, yet “you can never kill your desire, you can only redirect it,” because desire entails risk and the possibility of disappointment, which the addicted person cannot tolerate.

In this light, what looks like weak will is often a more complex drama, where will is recruited as a defense against desire, or where will becomes the instrument of fear. One can live in that arrangement for a long time, even successfully by external standards, and Thompson makes the point with a bleak irony: you do not even need drugs to reduce anxiety, because “your will can do it for you,” and will and desire are often at cross purposes regarding how much risk we allow ourselves.

This is a difficult claim to hear, especially for conscientious people, because it suggests that the will is not automatically the ally of growth, and may in fact “resist change,” which is why moral exhortation so often produces the opposite of what it intends, namely a tightening of defenses and a deepening of shame.

Thompson’s own clinical implication is precise and, in its way, austere. Genuine change comes about when we want to change, not because we need to or should, and therapy’s function is not to coerce desire into propriety but to use our capacity for reflection, which he identifies here with will, to assess why we get in the way of our desires and to put defenses into question. We cannot will ourselves to let go of defenses, but inquiry can lead to change even when we have no control over the matter.

For clinicians, this reframes technique as something less like intervention upon a patient and more like participation in a process of clarification, where the patient’s ambivalence is not treated as noncompliance but as meaningful conflict, and where the therapist’s task is not to win an argument with resistance but to help make the patient’s resistance intelligible, which is a different kind of respect. For patients, the same reframing can be experienced as a release from the moral theater of discipline, because it suggests that the problem is not that one is defective, but that one’s desire is conflicted, feared, or hidden, and that truthfulness about that conflict is already a movement toward freedom.

desire and willpower in existential psychoanalysis

Conclusion

The ordinary language of willpower promises dignity through control, and when control fails it offers shame as an explanation, as if shame were the missing fuel that will finally make a person comply with what they already know they “should” do. Thompson’s chapter quietly dismantles that arrangement by refusing to treat the will as a simple command center, and by insisting that will vs desire in psychoanalysis is, at bottom, a question about what we are, about how desire and the unconscious constitute our agency, and about how fear turns the will into a defensive instrument.

If desire chooses us, and if the will is not always conscious or controllable, then therapy cannot be reduced to motivation, discipline, or self-management. It becomes, instead, an indirect process in Laing’s sense, grounded in the slow work of reflection and the capacity to question defenses without pretending we can simply abolish them by command, and oriented toward the more existential aim of becoming less divided against oneself.

Free Association Clinic offers psychoanalytic therapy and existential therapy. If you would like to begin a conversation, you can contact Free Association Clinic.

James Norwood, PsyD
Associate Director, New School for Existential Psychoanalysis (https://www.freeassociation.us)
Clinical Director, The Free Association Clinic for Existential Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (https://www.freeassociationclinic.com)
Founder/CEO, inpersontherapy.com (https://inpersontherapy.com)

Sources

Aristotle. (1915). The Works of Aristotle, Vol. IX: Ethica Nicomachea (W. D. Ross, Trans.). Oxford University Press.
Augustine. (2010). Augustine: On the Free Choice of the Will, On Grace and Free Choice, and Other Writings (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy). Cambridge University Press.
Laing, R. D. (1979). Personal communication.
Nietzsche, F. (2001). Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (J. Norman, Trans.). Cambridge University Press.
Schopenhauer, A. (2012). The World as Will and Representation (E. F. J. Payne, Trans.). Dover Publications.
Thompson, M. G. (1994). The Truth About Freud’s Technique: The Encounter with the Real. New York University Press.
Thompson, M. G. (2020). Existential psychoanalysis: The role of freedom in the clinical encounter. In A. Govrin & J. Mills (Eds.), Innovations in Psychoanalysis: Originality, Development, Progress. Routledge.
Thompson, M. G. (2024). Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis: On the Primacy of Authenticity. Routledge.

Heidegger’s View of Language in Psychoanalysis: Logos, Truth, and Creativity

Heidegger’s View of Language in Psychoanalysis: Logos, Truth, and Creativity

A Reflection on Michael Guy Thompson’s Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis

Reflection:

In a culture saturated with messaging, podcasts, headlines, and constant explanation, it is easy to assume that language is mainly a tool. We use it to report, to persuade, to clarify, to manage. Consider even the recent advent of AI which furnishes answers rather than questions, and certainty rather than thinking (even when it’s wrong!). Then you step into therapy, and something stranger happens. A sentence that sounded simple in your head becomes hard to say out loud. A familiar story suddenly feels uncertain. Silence has weight.

In Chapter 3 of Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis, Michael Guy Thompson turns to Martin Heidegger to explore Heidegger’s view of language in psychoanalysis, and why the “talking cure” is not primarily about exchanging information (Thompson, 2024). It is about truth, creativity, and the rare experience of letting words reveal what we did not know we were protecting ourselves from.

“To undergo an experience … means that this something befalls us, strikes us, overwhelms and transforms us.” (Heidegger, 1971, p. 57)

Heidegger’s view of language in psychoanalysis, a quiet therapy room

Heidegger’s view of language in psychoanalysis: from representation to revelation

One of Heidegger’s central objections is that we often treat language as if it were a neutral system of labels. On this view, words simply “stand for” things. They are signs, and the real world sits behind them like an object behind glass.

Thompson suggests that this representational approach is not only philosophically thin, it can become clinically misleading (Thompson, 2024). If language is merely a container for facts, then therapy becomes a hunt for the right explanation. The goal becomes a correct report about the past, a correct diagnosis, a correct insight.

Heidegger points in a different direction. Language is not only something we use. It is also the place where we live our lives with others, and where we become intelligible to ourselves (Heidegger, 1971; Thompson, 2024). In that sense, language is not simply descriptive. It is disclosive.
This matters in the consulting room, because what brings people to therapy is rarely a simple lack of information. Many people already know the “facts” of their history. The difficulty is that the facts are relegated to information that is not experienced. The person can speak about what happened, but they cannot yet speak from within what happened. The difference is subtle, and it is often the difference between reciting and revealing.

Undergoing an experience with language: why therapy is not just communication

Thompson highlights a distinction in Heidegger that resonates with psychoanalysis: the difference between using language functionally and actually experiencing language (Thompson, 2024). We can speak all day without being touched by what speech is doing.
In everyday life, language is often practical. We schedule. We negotiate. We summarize. Even when we describe feelings, we can do so in ways that keep those feelings safely at a distance.

Heidegger argues that an experience with language, the form that involves an undergoing, is not automatic. It is something we can resist, and something that can overwhelm us when we stop resisting (Heidegger, 1971; Thompson, 2024). In a psychoanalytic setting, this becomes recognizable. Patients are invited to speak with no particular aim in mind, a stance closely associated with Freud’s conception of free association. The point is not to produce the “right” story. The point is to make room for what language brings forward when we stop forcing it to behave.

This also helps explain why therapy can feel oddly risky, even when the topic seems ordinary. Words can carry more than we intend. We can discover that our usual explanations have been serving as a shield. And when that shield loosens, what appears is not just information, but a new kind of contact with ourselves.

language as self-disclosure in psychoanalytic therapy

Logos, listening, and the difference between conversation and chatter

Thompson follows Heidegger into the older meanings of logos, tracing how the word is connected to gathering, arranging, and being heard (Thompson, 2024). This is not just linguistic trivia. It is a way of getting to the roots of what language most essentially is.
In this view, speaking is not simply transmitting content. It is a kind of gathering, a bringing-together of a life into words. A story is not only a report. It is an attempt to make experience hold together.

But Heidegger also warns that much of what passes for talk is a defense against genuine dialogue. Thompson emphasizes Heidegger’s critique of what he calls idle chatter, the kind of speech that circulates without depth, without risk, without real listening (Thompson, 2024). We talk about things, but we do not truly speak to one another.

In the consulting room, this distinction becomes clinically significant. Many people arrive with highly practiced ways of speaking. They can describe their relationships, their work, their symptoms, their childhood. Yet something in the speech feels curiously untouched, as if the person is narrating from a distance.

The shift is not something the therapist “listens for” like a technician. It is something that happens to the person speaking. A familiar account can suddenly lose its polish. Words that used to feel like a report begin to press back on the speaker, and the speaker is forced to endure what is being said.
When that occurs, the analytic hour is no longer about describing life from a distance. It becomes one of the places where life is actually lived. There is a different kind of closeness here, not sentimental intimacy, but the seriousness of being encountered by what is real, in the presence of another person.

Creativity as revelation: what art teaches the analytic hour

A striking move in Thompson’s chapter is the bridge from language to creativity. He draws on Heidegger’s claim that art is not simply decoration or self-expression. Art is a site where truth happens (Heidegger, 1971; Thompson, 2024).

This is a challenging idea, and it becomes easier to grasp if we think of creativity less as talent and more as revelation. A work of art can show something real about human existence, something we did not have words for, until we encountered it. In that sense, creativity is not a luxury. It is one of the ways reality becomes visible.

Thompson suggests that psychoanalysis has a parallel structure (Thompson, 2024). The point is not to manufacture clever interpretations. The point is to let something concealed become unconcealed through speech, through association, through the slow formation of meaning over time.

This is why psychoanalysis is sometimes described as a creative process. Not because it asks patients to be artists, but because it asks them to participate in an unfolding. As language gathers experience, new connections appear. Not all at once. Not on command. Often indirectly.

In that way, the analytic hour can be understood as a kind of work, a living act of making sense. The creativity is not in inventing a prettier narrative. The creativity is in allowing a truer one to take shape.

Poetry and dwelling: making room for what wants to be said

Thompson returns to Heidegger’s deep interest in poetry, and to a famous line associated with Hölderlin: “poetically, man dwells” (Thompson, 2024). For Heidegger, poetry is not an escape from reality. It is a way of dwelling with reality, of staying close to what is most difficult to say.

This offers a quiet critique of contemporary life. In the information age, we often treat words as consumable, and we treat meaning as something we can quickly acquire. Thompson echoes Heidegger’s concern that modern culture can become numbing, full of stimuli that mimic insight without requiring transformation (Thompson, 2024).

Therapy can be a counter-space. A place to slow down. A place where the pressure to perform coherence relaxes, and where it becomes possible to sit with experience long enough for it to speak back.

Thompson also makes a clinical point that can feel almost subversive: the more the therapist tries to get ahead of language with rigid plans and strategies, the more language becomes estranged, and the less likely the patient is to find their own way through suffering (Thompson, 2024). This does not mean therapy lacks structure. It means that the structure is meant to protect a certain kind of openness, an openness where words can arrive from somewhere deeper than intention.

truth and creativity in Heidegger’s philosophy of language

What this means for clients and clinicians in training

This chapter has a simple but demanding implication: language in therapy is not just a vehicle, it is part of the treatment.

For prospective clients, that can be reassuring. You do not need to arrive with the perfect narrative. You do not need to know what is “important” before you speak. Often what matters most is what you keep skipping over, what you say too quickly, what you cannot quite put into words, and what you feel tempted to turn into a joke.

For clinicians in training, Thompson’s reading of Heidegger is not an invitation to collect “listening skills” or to watch for cues like a technician. It is an invitation to take seriously the way language usually withholds itself and then, at certain points, breaks through.

Much of ordinary speech is functional, managerial, explanatory. It keeps experience organized at a safe distance. But when someone is actually undergoing what they are saying, that functional surface can begin to fail. Words arrive that feel inconvenient, embarrassing, too sharp, or too intimate. The person speaking may hesitate, lose the thread, repeat themselves, or fall silent. None of this needs to be treated as a trick to decode. It is often the very place where language, no longer merely used, begins to be endured.

And meaning, in this sense, is not something imposed from above. It gathers over time. A phrase recurs. A topic is reliably avoided. A familiar story keeps returning but changes its shape. Slowly, the hour collects its own vocabulary, until the person can finally speak from within what they have been saying all along.

If you are a clinician interested in developing this kind of listening, our training program in existential psychoanalysis is designed to support that depth of clinical work.

Conclusion

In Chapter 3, Thompson uses Heidegger to clarify why psychoanalysis takes language so seriously. Words are not only carriers of information. They are events. They reveal, they conceal, they gather, they disrupt, and sometimes they transform (Thompson, 2024). Logos, in this sense, is not a theory to apply, it is something to listen for.

When therapy is at its best, it offers a rare form of conversation, one that moves beyond idle chatter toward truthfulness and mutual recognition. It also treats creativity as part of healing, not creativity as performance, but creativity as the slow emergence of what is real.

At the Free Association Clinic, our work in psychoanalytic therapy and existential therapy makes room for this kind of careful dialogue. If you would like to explore whether this approach fits what you are seeking, you can contact the Free Association Clinic.

James Norwood, PsyD
Associate Director, New School for Existential Psychoanalysis (https://www.freeassociation.us)
Clinical Director, The Free Association Clinic for Existential Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (https://www.freeassociationclinic.com)
Founder/CEO, inpersontherapy.com (https://inpersontherapy.com)

References

Heidegger, M. (1971). On the Way to Language (P. D. Hertz, Trans.). Harper & Row.
Heidegger, M. (1971). Poetry, Language, Thought (A. Hofstadter, Trans.). Harper & Row.
Thompson, M. G. (2024). Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis: On the Primacy of Authenticity. Routledge.

James Norwood, PsyD
Associate Director, New School for Existential Psychoanalysis (https://www.freeassociation.us)
Clinical Director, The Free Association Clinic for Existential Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (https://www.freeassociationclinic.com)
Founder/CEO, inpersontherapy.com (https://inpersontherapy.com)

Heidegger, M. (1971). On the Way to Language (P. D. Hertz, Trans.). Harper & Row.
Heidegger, M. (1971). Poetry, Language, Thought (A. Hofstadter, Trans.). Harper & Row.
Thompson, M. G. (1985). The Death of Desire: A Study in Psychopathology. New York University Press.
Thompson, M. G. (1994). The Truth About Freud’s Technique: The Encounter with the Real. New York University Press.
Thompson, M. G. (1998, January). The Fundamental Rule of Psychoanalysis. The Psychoanalytic Review, 85(1).
Thompson, M. G. (2024). Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis: On the Primacy of Authenticity. Routledge.

Freedom and Responsibility in Existential Psychoanalysis: Sartre’s Influence on Clinical Practice

Freedom and Responsibility in Existential Psychoanalysis:
Sartre’s Influence on Clinical Practice

A Reflection on Michael Guy Thompson’s
Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis

The relationship between psychoanalysis and existentialism has long been marked by tension. Psychoanalysis, particularly in its Freudian form, delves into the unconscious, focusing on hidden drives and repressed desires that shape behavior. In contrast, existentialism centers on consciousness, freedom, and personal responsibility. As Michael Guy Thompson (2016) highlights in Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis, existential psychoanalysis diverges from traditional psychoanalysis by emphasizing the individual’s conscious engagement with life and their ability to choose. This philosophical divide has created an ongoing dialogue between the two disciplines, but it has also led to misunderstandings.

Sartre, perhaps more than any other existential philosopher, has had a complex relationship with psychoanalysis. While his ideas have not deeply influenced clinicians in general, existential psychoanalysts have found his work crucial for rethinking the foundations of therapeutic practice. Sartre’s existential critiques, especially his thoughts on freedom and responsibility, have provided a unique perspective that informs how existential psychoanalysts understand their patients and guide therapy (Thompson, 2016).

Sartre’s Influence on Existential Psychoanalysis

Jean-Paul Sartre’s influence on existential psychoanalysis is both deep and personal. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre lays out a framework for understanding human freedom that has profoundly impacted existential psychoanalysts. Sartre believed that human beings are fundamentally free, and much of our psychological suffering stems from our refusal to confront this freedom. Unlike Freud, who emphasized unconscious drives that control behavior, Sartre focused on the choices we make and the responsibility for those choices (Thompson, 2016).

Thompson (2016) explores how Sartre distinguishes between reflective and pre-reflective consciousness, a central component of Sartre’s critique of the unconscious. Pre-reflective consciousness refers to the immediate, lived experience of our actions and feelings, where we are aware of our choices but have not yet reflected on them. Reflective consciousness, on the other hand, involves stepping back to evaluate or acknowledge these choices. For Sartre, much of human behavior operates at the pre-reflective level, meaning that individuals are aware of their actions, but may not explicitly acknowledge or examine them.

This distinction helps Sartre challenge Freud’s notion of the unconscious. Freud posited that repressed, unconscious forces drive much of our behavior without our awareness. In contrast, Sartre argued that people are always aware—at least pre-reflectively—of their choices and actions. According to Sartre, what Freud called the unconscious is not truly unconscious; rather, it consists of choices or actions that we avoid acknowledging in order to evade responsibility. Sartre’s concept of bad faith describes this avoidance, where individuals deceive themselves to escape the weight of their freedom and responsibility (Thompson, 2016).

Freedom and Responsibility in Therapy

Sartre’s concept of freedom is central to existential psychoanalysis. According to Sartre, we are “condemned to be free,” meaning that we are constantly making choices, whether we like it or not. This freedom, however, comes with responsibility—a responsibility that many people try to evade. In Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis, Thompson (2016) explores how Sartre’s understanding of freedom challenges traditional psychoanalytic approaches, which often see patients as victims of unconscious forces. Instead, existential psychoanalysts, drawing on Sartre, focus on helping patients recognize their freedom, even when that freedom comes with existential anxiety.

While Sartre believed that individuals must confront their tendency to avoid responsibility through bad faith, he did not specifically advocate for therapy as the primary means to achieve this. Instead, Sartre saw the recognition of one’s freedom as a philosophical and existential challenge. Therapy, from an existential perspective, can help patients engage with this task, but its role is to support patients in understanding their choices rather than offering solutions (Thompson, 2016).

The Influence of R.D. Laing on Existential Psychoanalysis

One of the most significant figures to integrate Sartre’s ideas into clinical practice was R.D. Laing, a Scottish psychiatrist whose work on schizophrenia revolutionized the field in the 1960s and 1970s. Laing viewed mental illness not simply as a biological disorder, but as a reflection of an individual’s struggle with their own freedom. According to Thompson (2016), Laing’s The Divided Self can be seen as an integration of Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis with object relations theory.

Laing’s approach marked a departure from traditional psychoanalysis, as he emphasized understanding the subjective experience of those with mental illness. Like Sartre, Laing believed that even individuals experiencing extreme psychological distress must be understood in the context of their relationships and choices. His work serves as an example of how Sartre’s existential philosophy can be applied in a therapeutic setting, encouraging clinicians to focus on the patient’s experience of freedom and responsibility (Thompson, 2016).

Sartre’s Critique of Freud’s Unconscious

A key aspect of Sartre’s critique of Freud’s theory of the unconscious lies in his rejection of the idea that there are multiple agencies, such as the id, ego, and superego, controlling human behavior. Sartre challenged the notion that anything other than the individual is responsible for their actions. He argued that positing separate psychic agencies implies that behavior is caused by something other than the person themselves. Sartre believed that people are fully responsible for their choices, even when they avoid acknowledging them.

Thompson (2016) explains that Sartre’s distinction between reflective and pre-reflective consciousness is crucial to understanding this critique. Pre-reflective consciousness refers to our immediate awareness of choices and actions, even if we don’t explicitly reflect on them. Sartre argued that what Freud referred to as the unconscious is not a separate, hidden force, but rather choices and actions that we fail to acknowledge because doing so would confront us with our freedom and responsibility. Sartre’s concept of bad faith—the idea that individuals deceive themselves to avoid facing the truth of their freedom—underscores his rejection of the idea that any unconscious agency drives human behavior (Thompson, 2016).

This critique ultimately reframes what Freud called the unconscious. Rather than assuming that human beings are driven by repressed, unknown desires, Sartre argues that we are aware of our motivations on some level but choose to ignore or suppress them through bad faith. For Sartre, psychoanalysis must engage with these pre-reflective choices, helping individuals recognize and take responsibility for their actions (Thompson, 2016).

Freedom and Change in the Therapeutic Process

Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis provides a powerful framework for understanding change in therapy. As Thompson (2016) notes, Sartre’s focus on freedom encourages patients to confront how they avoid responsibility in their lives. However, Sartre did not suggest that therapy alone can help individuals live more authentically. The role of therapy in existential psychoanalysis is to guide patients toward recognizing their freedom and taking responsibility for their actions, rather than trying to unearth hidden drives or uncover a “true self,” a concept that Sartre rejected. For Sartre, we constantly create and recreate ourselves through our actions; there is no fixed essence or predetermined “self” to be discovered (Thompson, 2016).

Conclusion

The relationship between existentialism and psychoanalysis has not always been smooth, but thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre and R.D. Laing have shown how these two fields can come together to offer a deeper understanding of the human condition. Sartre’s emphasis on freedom and responsibility provides existential psychoanalysts with a framework for helping patients confront the choices they make and the responsibility they carry for their lives. At the Free Association Clinic for Existential Psychoanalysis, we draw from these rich philosophical traditions to guide our therapeutic practice, helping patients explore their freedom and engage more authentically with their lives.

James Norwood, PsyD

Associate Director, New School for Existential Psychoanalysis
Clinical Director, The Free Association Clinic for Existential Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis
Founder/CEO, inpersontherapy.com

Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). Harper & Row.
Husserl, E. (1982). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy (F. Kersten, Trans.). Martinus Nijhoff.
Kierkegaard, S. (1980). The Sickness Unto Death (H. V. Hong & E. H. Hong, Trans.). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1849)
Laing, R. D. (1965). The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. Penguin Books.
Nietzsche, F. (1966). Beyond Good and Evil (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Vintage Books.
Sartre, J.-P. (1956). Being and Nothingness (H. Barnes, Trans.). Washington Square Press.
Thompson, M. G. (2016). Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis. Routledge.