R.D. Laing - Free Association Clinic

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

An essay in reading Michael Guy Thompson’s Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis (Chapter 11)

Deception and trauma in existential psychoanalysis are not treated as mere clinical “content” to decode, nor as the private property of an isolated mind. In Michael Guy Thompson’s Chapter 11, they become the ethical problem that quietly governs everything else: the question of what happens to a person’s relation to reality when reality is repeatedly bent, denied, or strategically withheld, and what it demands of a therapist who claims to practice psychoanalysis in the name of truth. Thompson’s wager is that R.D. Laing’s work, so often positioned as psychoanalysis’ rebellious counterpoint, becomes most intelligible when we notice how thoroughly Freud inhabits it, even where Freud is barely named.

This is not only a theoretical matter, and it is not a dispute to be settled by choosing a camp. For therapists, Thompson’s chapter presses on the uncomfortable point that technique is never merely technique, because every technique presupposes an ethic, and the ethic can be betrayed in the very procedures meant to protect it. For patients, it gives language to an injury that often resists language: the peculiar devastation of being made to doubt one’s experience, and of discovering, often too late, that one’s world had been organized around what was concealed. Thompson’s claim is that the trauma at issue here is not simply what “happened,” but what happened to the possibility of believing what happens.

The gulf Laing refused to accept

Thompson begins where existential psychoanalysis often begins, not with a doctrine but with a stance. He portrays the most telling feature of Laing’s clinical technique as a radical effort to eliminate the gulf that customarily hardens between therapists and their patients, so that the patient can feel, in the therapist’s presence, not the impersonal authority of a procedure but “another human being like themselves,” someone who shares the ordinary weight of living and the ordinary capacity for pain. The point is deceptively simple, and it becomes demanding precisely because it deprives the therapist of a familiar refuge: the refuge of role, the refuge of expertise performed as distance, the refuge of a professional posture that can quietly turn the other into an object. In Laing’s hands, the clinical encounter becomes an exposure, because the therapist’s relation to truth cannot be kept outside the room as a private virtue while technique proceeds inside the room as a neutral instrument.

Thompson does not sentimentalize this stance as “niceness,” and he does not treat it as a rejection of analytic discipline. He treats it as a more austere demand: that the therapist’s humanity is not an ornament of the work but one of its conditions, and that the ethical imperative is not an afterthought added to interpretation but the ground on which interpretation can be trusted. The deeper problem, in other words, is not whether a therapist can interpret cleverly, but whether the relationship being formed can bear truth without collapsing into coercion, and whether the therapist can bear the temptation to manage reality, even in the name of improvement.

A contemplative male therapist sits in a chair, hand on his forehead, surrounded by ghostly, cracked images of a screaming woman, a solemn child, and an older man—symbolizing emotional burden, intergenerational trauma, and the lingering presence of the past

Freud’s “Truth and Trauma” and the expansion of reality

If Laing’s technique begins with the abolition of the gulf, Thompson’s argument begins with a different abolition, the abolition of an easy story about Laing’s relation to psychoanalysis. Thompson insists that Freud’s influence on Laing was “pervasive,” though generally omitted, and he goes further, suggesting that Laing saw himself, quietly and without fanfare, as Freud’s intellectual heir, with a style of allusion that makes the inheritance hard to see unless one knows how to listen for it. What matters is not biographical gossip about influence but the alignment of a central preoccupation: deception and its relation to trauma.

Thompson’s route through Freud is precise, because it follows the transformation of Freud’s own theory of trauma. Freud begins, under Charcot’s influence, with a relatively direct idea, that hysterical symptoms follow from traumatic seductions, from sexual experiences imposed on the child, a theory whose apparent concreteness has a certain moral clarity. Yet the theory collapses under contradictory evidence, and Freud’s collapse becomes, for Thompson, one of psychoanalysis’ decisive expansions: if some patients trace symptoms to traumas that did not occur as events, then fantasies have force, and “psychical reality” must be taken into account alongside practical reality. That phrase is not an escape from truth but a widening of truth’s domain, because it names the way the psyche can be organized around scenes that have the status of reality for the person, regardless of historical verification, and because it locates trauma not only in external violation but in the psyche’s own struggle to bear what it anticipates, what it dreads, and what it cannot admit it already knows.

Thompson reads Freud’s later conception as a subtle account of how deception and conflict co-constitute each other. The child, vulnerable to disappointment, can repress what is too painful, replacing an objectionable reality with an inviting fantasy, and thereby “not experiencing” the disappointment in the ordinary sense while still suffering its effects; later, anxiety forms around the fear of discovering what one must not know, which is to say, around the dread of re-encountering something that, in reality, has already happened. Trauma becomes inseparable from concealment, and the psyche’s defenses become, in their own way, deceptions that purchase bearability at the cost of truth. It is in this terrain, where reality is not denied merely because a person is irrational but because reality is unbearable, that Freud’s theory can be extended without being reduced to moral judgment.

What matters clinically, and existentially, is that the question of truth is no longer reducible to whether something “really happened,” as if the psyche were a courtroom. The question becomes: what has the status of reality for this person, what has been split off in order to survive, and what kind of relationship is required for what has been disavowed to become bearable without humiliation or coercion. Freud’s move toward psychical reality, in this sense, is already an ethical move, because it refuses the contempt implicit in dismissing the person’s experience as mere fabrication, and it binds the analyst to a more difficult fidelity, fidelity to the reality that is lived, even when it is not easily verified.

From psychical reality to social phenomenology

This is the point at which Thompson’s chapter takes its most consequential turn, because he argues that Laing takes Freud’s conception of psychic trauma and applies it to delusional confusion, but does so “in a more dialectical framework,” and this dialectical shift changes the moral topology of the clinical scene. Freud had emphasized fantasy as a way the psyche avoids objectionable realities, and even when Freud attends to interpersonal deceptions, the conceptual center remains intrapsychic conflict. Laing, by contrast, asks what happens when deception is not primarily what I do to myself, but what is done to me, repeatedly, by others, and done in a way that aims not merely at my compliance but at the manipulation of my experience, and therefore my reality.

Thompson names this shift with Laing’s term “social phenomenology,” defined as an “internal critique” of how others affect, and sometimes play havoc with, my experience. The emphasis is decisive: the psyche is not simply a private theater, because the stage itself is partly built by others, and the lines one is forced to speak are sometimes the lines of another person’s denial. Laing’s dialectical dimension, as Thompson describes it, is the tormenting structure of interpersonal reality: what I think you think about me, and what you in fact think but conceal, and the way this concealment invades my capacity to know what is happening, and to trust that what is happening is nameable. When this dialectic becomes chronic, the problem is no longer only repression or wish-fulfillment; the problem becomes confusion as an existential injury.

Thompson’s formulation is stark and, if taken seriously, unsettling. Laing concluded that schizophrenia can be understood as the consequence of deceptions employed on someone who assumes he is being told the truth, and who depends on what the other tells him to be true. The language is careful. It does not romanticize psychosis. It does not reduce it to an abstract “break” from reality. It suggests that what is shattered is the person’s footing in reality, and that the shattering can be precipitated by relational conditions in which truth becomes unstable, where the person is repeatedly forced into the impossible task of sustaining a reality that is denied by those on whom he depends.

This is also where Thompson’s contrast between Freud and Laing becomes clinically useful, because it clarifies two different models of trauma that do not exclude each other but interact. Freud often conceived trauma in terms of frustration that thwarts anticipated pleasure, a model that makes sense for neurosis and for the ordinary compromises of life. Laing envisioned a different form of trauma that could account for psychotic anxiety and withdrawal: states of confusion that follow when one’s reality has been savaged, not through self-deception alone, but through being duped or deceived by another, and the loss of reality becomes more poignant precisely because it compounds frustration with disorientation. In contemporary idiom, one might reach for “gaslighting,” but Laing’s point is more radical than a popular term can hold, because it concerns the conditions under which a person is forced to betray his own perception in order to remain attached, and the way attachment can become the vehicle of unreality.

To say this is not to collapse all psychosis into family dynamics, nor to transform existential psychoanalysis into a single-cause polemic. Thompson explicitly resists simplistic causality. What he insists on, instead, is that reality is not merely a given, it is something that is sustained, confirmed, or subverted between people, and that the clinical task cannot be faithful to experience if it treats relational deception as incidental.

A distressed woman holds her head in anguish while a faded silhouette of a couple whispering looms behind her, split by visible cracks—conveying themes of psychological distress, secrecy, relational conflict, and emotional fragmentation

Mystification in therapy, a vocabulary for interpersonal deception

Thompson’s reading of Laing’s oeuvre sharpens the point further by showing that deception between persons is not a marginal theme in Laing, it is a sustained preoccupation across his most prolific decade. Thompson notes, with some irony, that The Divided Self is the only major work of Laing’s in which interpersonal deception does not play a major role, since it is oriented toward the existential experience of going mad rather than toward the social context that later becomes central. The shift is visible in Self and Others, where Laing turns toward the effect human beings have on one another in the etiology of severe psychological disturbance, and it is here that Thompson locates an important philosophical inflection: Laing’s engagement with Heidegger’s “On the Essence of Truth” and with the pre-Socratic term aletheia, truth as what emerges from concealment. Laing does not simply borrow Heidegger’s notion of truth, he twists it toward the interpersonal, emphasizing the interdependency between candor and secrecy, and thereby locating truth not as a detached property of propositions but as something that appears and recedes within conversation, within the fragile drama of what is disclosed and what is withheld.

This is where mystification becomes more than a provocative term, and becomes instead a conceptual instrument. Thompson underscores that Laing coined a vocabulary, terms such as collusion, mystification, injunction, untenable positions, and did so in order to name how ordinary interactions can distort truth so effectively that they affect each other’s reality, and therefore sanity. Thompson’s claim is not merely that Freud cared about deception and Laing cared about deception, but that Freud lacked this interpersonal vocabulary even where the problem was present, and that Laing supplies what psychoanalysis, in Thompson’s view, too often evaded: the possibility that pathology is not only a private compromise with desire, but also a response to a world in which reality is negotiated through power, denial, and coercive “care.”

Thompson’s account of Laing and Esterson’s family studies makes the clinical stakes concrete without collapsing them into accusation. In Sanity, Madness and the Family, Laing and Esterson demonstrate families in which massive forms of trickery and mystification are employed against the identified patient, sometimes with chilling casualness, and Thompson recounts the case of “Maya,” where parents deny to their daughter what they have openly admitted when she is absent, a denial that functions not simply as lying but as a systematic twisting of the child’s hold on reality. Thompson is careful to note the controversy that follows, and he observes that Laing did not claim that such incidents conclusively “cause” schizophrenia, only that they were ubiquitous in the families studied, leaving readers to draw their own conclusions. He also insists that mystification is not unique to “pathological” families, because it is inherent in the hypocrisy of everyday life, and the difference is often one of degree, persistence, and consequence.

Laing’s later work extends the analysis to other relational fields, including couples. Thompson’s discussion of Interpersonal Perception is striking because it presents the book as “radical even now,” precisely insofar as it exposes how duplicity and deception can be woven into love relationships through confused communication patterns that resemble, in magnified form, what occurs in families of schizophrenics. Laing’s “politics of experience” then names the wider terrain: how others confirm or disavow my experience, how they determine what my experience is permitted to be, and how severe disturbance is not only an internal defect but can be the consequence of human deviousness, sometimes unwitting, sometimes masked as altruism. Thompson’s point, again, is not that the world is nothing but cruelty, but that truth is always vulnerable to being politicized, and that psychic life cannot be understood without acknowledging this vulnerability.

If “mystification in therapy” is to mean anything, then, it cannot mean only that patients lie, resist, or distort. It must also name the more uncomfortable possibility that therapy itself can become a site of mystification when the therapist uses interpretation to override experience, or uses technique as a way of winning, or treats the patient’s reality as raw material to be managed. Thompson’s Laing is not simply warning against bad clinicians, he is exposing a structural temptation within the therapeutic situation: the temptation to convert an encounter into an operation, and thereby to reproduce, under the banner of help, the very distortions that have injured the person’s relation to reality.

Truthfulness in psychoanalysis, not as virtue, but as condition

Thompson’s chapter culminates where it began, with ethics, though the ethics here is not an external code but the condition under which psychoanalysis remains psychoanalysis. He argues that if we hope to resolve the dilemma of living amid disappointment and betrayal, the first step is not to explain the person away but to have one’s experience of the past confirmed rather than dismissed as “pathology.” The clinical rationale is existential, because the wound is often compounded by the denial that the wound exists, and the denial becomes a second trauma, a forced estrangement from one’s own perception.

From this vantage, the ethic of truthfulness in psychoanalysis is not a moral ornament, and it is not reducible to the therapist’s sincerity. It is the scaffolding of the analytic relationship, and it binds the therapist as much as the patient. Thompson notes that therapists, in their zeal to effect change, can resort to questionable tactics and transform therapy into a contest where the clever protagonist “wins,” a perversion of the work that is especially insidious because it can masquerade as clinical effectiveness. Laing’s technique, Thompson suggests, can be reduced to a single preoccupying concern, how honestly therapists are behaving with their patients, and how honest they are capable of being, a concern he links explicitly to Freud’s “fundamental rule,” the pledge exacted from the patient to be candid about what comes to mind.

Thompson then refuses the easy fantasy that the fundamental rule is simply a compliance instruction. Freud discovered that patients are loathe to disclose, because disclosure threatens their secrets and what those secrets might reveal about themselves. Laing adds a different emphasis, that many patients have learned, through experience, that it is wrong to think or feel as they do, so that concealment is not merely defensive but historically instructed, and the person may have “forgotten” what they think and lost the sense of who they are. In that context, truthfulness is not an order one can give. It is a relationship one can slowly make possible, if and only if the therapist’s neutrality is not coldness but a form of acceptance, and if the encounter is grounded in mutual respect rather than coercion.

Thompson ends the chapter with Freud’s blunt warning, the line that is easy to quote and harder to live: “psychoanalytic treatment is founded on truthfulness,” and it is dangerous to depart from that foundation. The point is not sanctimony. It is that psychoanalysis, when it is faithful to itself, cannot proceed by lies and pretenses without betraying its own authority, because the authority at stake is not social status but the credibility of the relationship in which truth can be spoken.

For existential psychoanalysis, this returns us to the first problem, the fragility of reality. If psychotics are not only anxious but confused, then the imperative is to understand the nature of their confusion and to avoid doing or saying anything that increases it, which means that deception, whether in the family, in the culture, or in the consulting room, cannot be treated as peripheral. Thompson recounts Laing’s insistence that victims of duplicity can be devastated when truth is discovered after long concealment, because they can feel as though their reality has been taken from their grasp, leaving them lost between the world they thought was real and the world that is suddenly thrust upon them. In that light, therapy is not the imposition of a “correct” story but the slow repair of a person’s relation to reality, which is also the slow repair of a person’s capacity to trust experience without surrendering it to someone else’s authority.

A man in a suit stares at his reflection in a shattered mirror, his expression tense and searching. The broken glass distorts his face, suggesting inner conflict, identity fragmentation, and the painful journey of self-confrontation. Books behind him, including Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, hint at psychoanalytic themes

Conclusion

Chapter 11 is not merely a comparison of Laing and Freud, and it is not a rehabilitation of Laing through Freudian credentials. It is a meditation on deception as an existential force, on trauma as what happens when reality becomes unstable, and on truthfulness in psychoanalysis as the ethical core without which technique becomes, at best, empty, and at worst, an instrument of mystification. Thompson’s contribution is to show that Laing’s work does not stand outside psychoanalysis as an ethical protest, but stands inside it as a demand for fidelity to experience, and as a warning about what happens when care becomes a vehicle for disconfirmation.

At Free Association Clinic, this question remains central to our understanding of depth psychotherapy, whether the struggle presents as anxiety, depression, relational deadlock, or the more diffuse suffering of not having one’s experience believed. If you want to learn more about our psychoanalytic therapy and existential therapy services, or about how these questions appear in the work of couples therapy, you can also contact us when you are ready for a conversation.

References

Thompson, M. G. (2024). Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis: On the Primacy of Authenticity. Routledge.
Freud, S. (1914/1957). On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement (J. Strachey, Ed. & Trans.). Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1915/1958). Observations on Transference-Love: Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis III (J. Strachey, Ed. & Trans.). Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1924/1961). The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis (J. Strachey, Ed. & Trans.). Hogarth Press.
Heidegger, M. (1977). On the Essence of Truth. In Basic Writings (D. F. Krell, Ed.). Harper & Row.
Laing, R. D. (1960). The Divided Self. Pantheon Books.
Laing, R. D. (1969). Self and Others (2nd rev. ed.). Tavistock Publications.
Laing, R. D., Phillipson, H., & Lee, A. R. (1966). Interpersonal Perception: A Theory and a Method of Research. Tavistock Publications.
Laing, R. D., & Esterson, A. (1964/1971). Sanity, Madness, and the Family: Families of Schizophrenics (2nd ed.). Basic Books.
Laing, R. D. (1967). The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise. Penguin.

The Crisis of Experience in Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Returning to Lived Experience

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

Thompson’s Chapter 6 names a problem that tends to hide in plain sight: many contemporary forms of psychoanalysis risk losing the very phenomenon they claim to treat, the patient’s capacity to have experience, to undergo it, to recognize it, and to speak it as one’s own. This is what he calls the crisis of experience in contemporary psychoanalysis: not a shortage of theories about psychic life, but a growing difficulty, culturally and clinically, in remaining answerable to lived experience in therapy itself.

People often come to psychoanalysis because something in their life is no longer coherent, not only because they suffer, but because their suffering has become strangely impersonal. They can describe what is happening with impressive clarity, sometimes even with moving candor, and yet they leave the hour with the faint suspicion that nothing has truly happened. Insight has been produced, but experience has not been reclaimed. Thompson’s wager is that this is not accidental. It is a consequence of how psychoanalytic technique and interpretation can drift, almost imperceptibly, toward commentary about experience, until the patient is asked to live in explanations rather than to re-enter what is being lived.

A therapist and patient sit in a dim, abstract room where experience seems to dissolve into swirling uncertainty.

Experience is not a concept, it is something you undergo

Thompson begins with a philosophical warning that becomes clinical the moment you take it seriously. Adorno suggests that experience is not simply a private event inside the head, but “the union of tradition with an open yearning for what is foreign,” and then adds the more disturbing thought: “the very possibility of experience is in jeopardy” (Adorno, 1992; discussed by Thompson, 2024).

What makes this relevant to the consulting room is that Adorno’s point is not merely that people are distracted, or that culture is superficial, but that experience itself can be thinned out until it becomes difficult to locate where, and in whom, it is happening. Thompson, drawing on Jay, underscores the conceptual difficulty that follows when “experience” becomes an empty password that everyone uses and no one can define without reducing it to something else, as though definition were always already a kind of betrayal (Jay, 1998; Adorno, 1992). In that light, the therapeutic risk comes into view. If experience cannot be defined without shrinking it, then a clinical method that treats experience as raw data to be processed will tend, despite itself, to process the life out of it.

Thompson’s etymological gesture makes the same point from another angle. “Experience” is linked to peril and to trial, to something tested and undergone rather than possessed, which means that experience is never guaranteed by the mere fact that something happened. It can be embraced or resisted, submitted to or evaded, and therefore it always implies risk, a willingness to be changed by what is encountered (Thompson, 2024). If you hold that thought and then listen to patients, you begin to hear why so many symptoms are not only expressions of pain but strategies for avoiding the peril of feeling what one’s life is doing.

Erfahrung and Erlebnis: being experienced and having an experience

Thompson’s Chapter 6 names a problem that tends to hide in plain sight: many contemporary forms of psychoanalysis risk losing the very phenomenon they claim to treat, the patient’s capacity to have experience, to undergo it, to recognize it, and to speak it as one’s own. This is what he calls the crisis of experience in contemporary psychoanalysis: not a shortage of theories about psychic life, but a growing difficulty, culturally and clinically, in remaining answerable to lived experience in therapy itself.

Why phenomenology matters for psychoanalysis

Thompson’s argument is ultimately a defense of phenomenological psychoanalysis, not as an academic specialization, but as a necessary correction to a drift in psychoanalytic practice. He is explicit that what he has been describing “sounds a lot more like phenomenology than psychoanalysis,” and his response is telling: psychoanalysis is phenomenological, at least in the way Freud conceived it, insofar as it attends to experience as it is lived and spoken, rather than treating the patient as a specimen whose inner life must be inferred from a theoretical grid (Thompson, 2024).

The tension, of course, is that Freud’s unconscious can be read in a way that becomes nonphenomenological, as though something were happening “in” the mind that the person can never experience, as though the unconscious were a parallel theatre whose drama the patient does not witness. Yet Thompson insists that awareness and experience are interdependent phenomena, and that even when a person is “unaware,” what is at stake is often not the existence of a second life but a failure of listening, a failure of being present to one’s own thinking as it occurs (Thompson, 2024).

Here Thompson introduces an important reframing of “unconscious experience.” From a phenomenological angle, the unconscious can be understood less as a hidden content that the analyst discovers and more as a mode of consciousness the patient is not experiencing as consciousness, because the patient did not “hear” themselves thinking it when it occurred. The analytic task becomes reacquainting the patient with that dimension of Being that is typically concealed, so that experience becomes claimable precisely through speech, through free association, through hearing oneself for the first time (Thompson, 2024).
This is where the crisis begins to sharpen. If psychoanalysis forgets that its object is experience as lived and suffered, then it will inevitably become tempted by a different object: correctness, explanation, interpretive authority, and technical mastery.

Interpretation that deepens experience, not explanation that replaces it

In Thompson’s framing, the point is not to abolish interpretation, but to return interpretation to its phenomenological vocation. If speech can deepen experience, then interpretation should participate in that deepening, not by supplying the patient with a superior explanation of what is “really” going on, but by drawing the patient back toward what is being lived and avoided in the act of speaking. When interpretation becomes primarily explanatory, it can function as a defense, not only the patient’s defense but the analyst’s defense against the anxiety of not knowing, against the discomfort of remaining with what is ambiguous, conflicted, or still in the process of taking shape.

This is also where Thompson’s language about degrees of experience matters. Experience is not all-or-nothing; there are levels, and those levels depend on whether we are prepared to undergo the suffering involved in determining what our experience is (Thompson, 2024). In the clinic, this means that the most decisive moments are often not those in which an interpretation is accepted, but those in which a patient, sometimes with surprise, realizes that they have begun to feel what they have been saying, and that feeling is now theirs, not simply a theory about themselves.

The crisis of experience in contemporary psychoanalysis: when technique outruns lived reality

Thompson’s critique is sharp because it is internal. He argues that not everyone approaches Freud’s conception of the unconscious phenomenologically, and that, as a result, psychoanalysis has “unwittingly contributed” to the broader cultural crisis of experience that has been unfolding since the close of the last century (Thompson, 2024). What is striking is his insistence that even earnest efforts to incorporate phenomenology into psychoanalytic theory have largely “fallen short” of reframing practice along phenomenological lines, which would require a more sustained emphasis on what experience itself entails as a psychodynamic event (Thompson, 2024).

His conclusion is uncompromising: the mainstream of psychoanalysis has, in effect, factored the phenomenological notion of experience out of existence, and even the turn to intersubjectivity in psychoanalysis often retains an empiricist account of experience rather than a phenomenological one (Thompson, 2024).

For patients, this is not an abstract dispute. It names a recognizable disappointment: the feeling of being spoken about, explained, even brilliantly interpreted, while one’s own experience remains strangely out of reach, as though the self were something the therapist can see more clearly than the person living it. For clinicians, it names a temptation that arrives precisely when a treatment becomes difficult, when the analyst begins to prefer the security of the conceptual apparatus over the vulnerability of staying with what is happening.

A solitary figure sits in a quiet room facing a hazy horizon, evoking reflection and ambiguity.

“Unconscious experience” and the problem of parallel lives

To make the crisis concrete, Thompson turns to Kleinian theory and to Susan Isaacs’ explication of “unconscious experience,” which he treats as a revealing contradiction: if something is unconscious in the strict sense, then in what sense can it be called experience at all (Thompson, 2024)? He follows Laing’s critique in Self and Others, where Isaacs is presented as implying that each person lives two parallel lives, one conscious and one unconscious, and that the unconscious life is never available to awareness (Thompson, 2024; Laing, 1969/1961).

If that is your theory of the psyche, then the technical consequences are almost unavoidable. You must infer what is going on “in” the unconscious, because the patient cannot experience it, cannot confirm it, cannot claim it. Isaacs, as Thompson presents her, insists that the unconscious has aims and motives that cannot become conscious and therefore cannot be experienced in the sense under discussion, which means that unconscious fantasy is treated as determining what can be consciously experienced (Thompson, 2024).

Laing’s protest, which is as ethical as it is conceptual, is that things become impossible when someone tells you that you are experiencing something you are not experiencing. As he puts it, “Things are going to be difficult if you tell me that I am experiencing something I am not experiencing” (Laing, 1969/1961; quoted by Thompson, 2024). The point is not that unconscious life is unreal, but that “unconscious experience” becomes a formulation that licenses a particular kind of interpretive sovereignty, in which the patient’s lived experience is treated as a disguise and the analyst’s inference is treated as reality.

Countertransference and projective identification: when the analyst becomes the arbiter

This is where Thompson’s critique of technique becomes especially pointed, because it touches the contemporary fascination with countertransference and projective identification. He argues that the Kleinian conception of projective identification has displaced repression as the prototypical defense, and in doing so has “virtually inverted” conventional notions of transference and countertransference, altering them so radically that they become “virtually unrecognizable” (Thompson, 2024).

The decisive shift is epistemic. Following this line, Bion concludes that the only means available to determine the patient’s unconscious experience is through the analyst’s experience of countertransference, a position that effectively relocates the evidence for the patient’s experience into the analyst’s experience (Bion, 1959; discussed by Thompson, 2024). Thompson quotes Bion describing how the analyst feels manipulated, as though made to play a part in someone else’s fantasy, and he presents this as a crystallization of the problem: psychoanalytic knowledge becomes increasingly grounded in what the analyst feels, rather than in what the patient can come to experience and claim.

None of this requires dismissing countertransference, nor denying that projective processes occur. The question is what kind of authority is created when the analyst’s felt experience becomes the privileged route to the patient’s truth, and what happens to the patient’s subjectivity when their own account is treated as secondary, suspect, or structurally incapable of reaching what is most real. The crisis of experience shows itself precisely here, where intersubjectivity in psychoanalysis can turn into a quiet conquest: the analyst becomes the one who experiences the patient’s life more fully than the patient does. Thompson’s insistence on phenomenology is, in this sense, a defense of the patient’s right to be the subject of their own experience, even when that experience is conflicted, defended against, or only barely speakable.

Two figures sit closely as their shared thoughts rise into a glowing form, symbolizing the intimacy and complexity of lived experience.

Returning therapy to experience: what changes in the consulting room

Thompson’s most concise description of psychoanalysis’ purpose deserves to be read slowly. The aim is “to return the analytic patient to the ground of an experience,” so that the patient can finally claim the experience as their own in the act of recounting it (Thompson, 2024). Once you take this seriously, the consulting room changes, not because technique disappears, but because technique is subordinated to the patient’s capacity to undergo, recognize, and speak what is happening, rather than to merely receive interpretations about what is supposedly happening.

In practice, this return to lived experience in therapy often looks deceptively simple, because it is less about dramatic interventions and more about a discipline of attention. The analyst stays close to the texture of what the patient is actually living in language, noticing where speech becomes a way of not feeling, where explanation substitutes for contact, and where a word is spoken with the body absent from it. Interpretation, when it arrives, is offered less as a verdict and more as a way of pressing experience downward, toward what Thompson calls the gravity of circumstances, toward the place where a patient cannot merely agree but must either encounter or resist what is being said.

For patients, the difference is often felt as a change in atmosphere: one is not treated as an object to be decoded, but as a subject being asked to re-enter one’s own life. For therapists, the difference is felt as a constraint on one’s own ambition to know too quickly, to be right, to do something impressive, because the analyst’s task becomes protecting the possibility that the patient might finally hear themselves, and be changed by what they hear.

If you are looking for this orientation in clinical work, Free Association Clinic offers psychoanalytic therapy and existential therapy grounded in these phenomenological questions, where interpretation is kept in the service of experience rather than allowed to eclipse it.

What this chapter asks of clinicians in training

Thompson’s chapter does not flatter the clinician, and that is part of its value. The crisis of experience is not only a theoretical failure, it is also a temptation that lives inside training and practice, because uncertainty is hard to tolerate and theory offers a ready-made refuge. When the analyst begins to rely on speculative certainty, especially certainty grounded in their own countertransference as proof of what the patient “really” experiences, the analytic relationship risks becoming a place where experience is taken away from the patient under the guise of explaining it.

For clinicians in formation, this is not a call to abandon psychoanalytic knowledge, but to remember what psychoanalytic knowledge is for. It is for returning the patient to experience, and therefore it demands a kind of humility that cannot be simulated: a willingness to remain with not-knowing; to let the patient’s speech unfold without rushing to translate it; to hold one’s own experience as meaningful but not sovereign; and to keep asking, in every interpretive movement, whether the patient is being returned to the ground of their experience or being displaced from it by a more elegant account.

FAC’s training program in existential psychoanalysis is oriented around exactly these questions, because the point is not to produce technicians of interpretation, but clinicians capable of phenomenological listening, clinicians who can bear the anxiety of experience without replacing it with theory.

Conclusion

The crisis of experience in contemporary psychoanalysis is not primarily a complaint that psychoanalysis has become too intellectual, nor a nostalgic wish for a more “human” therapy. It is a more exacting claim: that psychoanalysis risks reproducing, in the consulting room, the same impoverishment of experience that contemporary culture already encourages, replacing the dangerous vitality of lived experience with commentary, explanation, and interpretive mastery. Thompson’s insistence on phenomenology is therefore not a philosophical ornament, it is a clinical ethic. It asks whether psychoanalysis will remain faithful to the patient’s experience, including what is painful, resistant, and difficult to undergo, or whether it will trade that fidelity for a more comforting kind of knowledge.

If you want to explore therapy where lived experience in therapy is treated as primary, not as an afterthought, you can contact Free Association Clinic.

References

Thompson, M. G. (2024). Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis: On the Primacy of Authenticity. Routledge.
Adorno, T. W. (1992). Notes to Literature, Volume 1 (S. Weber Nicholsen, Trans.). Columbia University Press.
Jay, M. (1998, November 14). The Crisis of Experience in a Post-Subjective Age (public lecture). University of California, Berkeley.
Laing, R. D. (1969/1961). Self and Others. Pantheon.
Bion, W. R. (1959). “Attacks on Linking.” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis.

Will and Desire in Existential Psychoanalysis: Rethinking Willpower in Therapy

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

Most of us have tried to change something about ourselves through sheer effort. We make a plan, set a rule, tighten our grip, and then watch ourselves do the very thing we swore we would not do.

It is easy to call this “a lack of willpower.” It is also easy to feel ashamed when willpower does not deliver.

In Chapter 4 of Michael Guy Thompson’s Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis, the question becomes more interesting, and more clinically useful. When we look closely at will and desire in existential psychoanalysis, “the will” is not simply the engine of change. Often it is the strategy we use to keep desire contained, especially when desire feels risky

The familiar proverb, and the hidden question behind it

“Where there is a will there is a way” sounds comforting. It suggests that a strong enough inner force can override fear, conflict, and ambivalence.

Thompson opens the chapter by quietly challenging that assumption. The proverb is not exactly wrong, but it hides a deeper question: what do we mean when we say “will” in the first place?

Because in actual human life, will is rarely just a clean, rational lever. It carries mood, morality, and history. It can sound like duty. It can sound like threat. It can also sound like a parent’s voice that we have learned to speak to ourselves with.

For people seeking therapy, this matters. Many forms of suffering come with an exhausting internal dialogue: I should be different. I need to be better. I have to get control.

Will as virtue, will as “free choice,” and why this history still matters

Part of Thompson’s point is that our modern idea of will did not appear out of nowhere. The “will” has a long philosophical lineage, and it often arrives dressed in moral language.

In very broad strokes, classical ethics tends to link the will to character formation and self-mastery. Religious philosophy tends to link the will to responsibility, temptation, and virtue. Even if we have never read Aristotle or Augustine, many of us have inherited a worldview where willpower is treated as proof of goodness, and failure of will is treated as a personal flaw.

In therapy, those inherited meanings show up as guilt and self-judgment. People do not simply want to change. They often feel they must change in order to deserve care, belonging, or respect.

Existential psychoanalysis does not dismiss responsibility. But it is suspicious of the way “responsibility” becomes a weapon turned inward.

will and desire in existential psychoanalysis, choice and risk

Schopenhauer, and the will we cannot simply command

Thompson turns to Schopenhauer for a remark that lands with a kind of cold clarity: “You can do as you will, but you cannot will as you will.”

It is a short sentence, but it reorganizes the problem. We may be able to force certain behaviors, at least for a while. But we cannot simply choose what we want, or stop wanting what we want, by issuing ourselves a command.

Schopenhauer’s view pushes the will down below the level of conscious intention. The will becomes something more like an underlying drive, closer to desire than to “decision.” If that is true, then “willpower” is not the same as the will. It is more like an executive function, a manager that tries to direct what is already moving.

Clinically, this is one reason a person can “know better” and still repeat the pattern. The knowledge is real. The intention is real. But desire is also real, and it often carries more force than our conscious plans.

Nietzsche and the hunger for a fuller life

Thompson also brings in Nietzsche, especially the riddle of “will to power.” In pop culture, this phrase can sound like domination. But Nietzsche’s point is often closer to vitality than tyranny.

If Schopenhauer emphasizes the way desire operates beneath the self’s proud claims, Nietzsche emphasizes the way desire moves toward intensity, toward aliveness, toward a more fully lived existence.

In therapy, this can be a helpful reframe. Sometimes the “problem behavior” is not merely a failure of control. Sometimes it is a distorted attempt to recover feeling, to break through numbness, to escape the flatness of life lived only through duty.

That does not make every desire wise. But it does remind us that desire is often the place where the person is trying to live.

Why “trying harder” can work, and why it often does not

Modern psychotherapy has many approaches that treat change as a function of volition. In the best versions, this is not simplistic. It can be deeply compassionate. It helps people identify patterns, practice skills, and build stability.

It can also work, especially when someone needs structure, containment, or immediate relief.

Thompson’s critique is not that volition is useless. It is that volition becomes misleading when it is treated as the core of psychic change. A willpower model tends to imagine the self as a commander standing above desire.

Existential psychoanalysis leans in a different direction. It asks: what if the “commander” is itself part of the conflict? What if the manager is not neutral, but frightened? What if “control” is sometimes the price we pay to avoid risk?

This is one reason desire and change are so closely linked. Desire almost always implies exposure. It implies the possibility of disappointment. It implies that we cannot fully guarantee the outcome.

willpower vs desire in therapy, finding direction

Laing, Sartre, and the problem of changing because you “should”

Thompson draws on R.D. Laing to make a sharp clinical observation: people often attempt change because they “should,” or because they “need to,” but change becomes durable when they genuinely want it.

Laing’s view, as Thompson presents it, is that our selfhood is located in desire rather than in ego or character traits. In that frame, the will has a limited role, it can synthesize, and it can repress.

This matters in the clinic because “the will” is frequently recruited as a defense.

A clear example in the chapter is addiction, but the point extends beyond substances. Many people try to force themselves out of a pattern using an internal voice of obligation, a kind of “introjected parent” that demands compliance. The person fights their desire while also protecting it. They go back and forth, and the struggle becomes a way of life.

Thompson’s deeper point is not moral judgment. It is existential. When we are terrified of the pain that desire brings, we will do almost anything to silence it.

When the will suppresses the pain of desire

Near the end of the chapter, Thompson offers a line that is easy to recognize if you have ever been stuck in a high-functioning version of suffering.

Sometimes the will is what remains when desire has gone quiet. A person can keep going, keep performing, keep achieving, all while feeling that something essential has been buried.

In that condition, willpower can look impressive from the outside. It can lead to success. It can also produce a life that feels strangely empty.

Thompson notes another uncomfortable truth: you do not always need a substance to reduce anxiety. The will can do it. You can tighten down, numb out, and survive. The cost is that desire, which often requires risk, gets treated as dangerous.

When will and desire are at cross purposes, will often wins, at least in the short run. But the victory is rarely satisfying.

And there is a further twist: the will frequently resists change. If the will has become the tool we use to stay safe, it is not eager to surrender its job.

existential psychoanalysis and the role of desire in change

Conclusion

One of Thompson’s most clinically useful suggestions in Chapter 4 is that meaningful change often arrives indirectly. Genuine change comes when we want to change, not because we should, and not because we are trying to force ourselves into compliance.

The function of therapy, in this view, is not to shout louder instructions at the self. It is to use reflection, a form of will, to examine why we repeatedly obstruct our own desire, and to put those defenses into question. We cannot simply will ourselves to drop our defenses, but sustained inquiry can loosen what once seemed rigid.

If you find yourself stuck between duty and desire, or caught in cycles of self-control followed by collapse, this is the kind of work we explore in depth at Free Association Clinic through both psychoanalytic therapy and existential therapy. Clinicians in training who want to engage these questions clinically can also learn more about our training program. 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)
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.

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

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.

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.

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

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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.

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

The gulf Laing refused to accept

Freud’s “Truth and Trauma” and the expansion of reality

From psychical reality to social phenomenology

Mystification in therapy, a vocabulary for interpersonal deception

Truthfulness in psychoanalysis, not as virtue, but as condition

Conclusion

The Crisis of Experience in Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Returning to Lived Experience

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

Experience is not a concept, it is something you undergo

Erfahrung and Erlebnis: being experienced and having an experience

Why phenomenology matters for psychoanalysis

Interpretation that deepens experience, not explanation that replaces it

The crisis of experience in contemporary psychoanalysis: when technique outruns lived reality

“Unconscious experience” and the problem of parallel lives

Countertransference and projective identification: when the analyst becomes the arbiter

Returning therapy to experience: what changes in the consulting room

What this chapter asks of clinicians in training

Conclusion

References

Will and Desire in Existential Psychoanalysis: Rethinking Willpower in Therapy

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

The familiar proverb, and the hidden question behind it

Will as virtue, will as “free choice,” and why this history still matters

Schopenhauer, and the will we cannot simply command

Nietzsche and the hunger for a fuller life

Why “trying harder” can work, and why it often does not

Laing, Sartre, and the problem of changing because you “should”

When the will suppresses the pain of desire

Conclusion

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

Willpower in therapy and the experience of being stuck

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

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

Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, when desire chooses us

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

Sources

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

A Reflection on Michael Guy Thompson’sEssays in Existential Psychoanalysis

Sartre’s Influence on Existential Psychoanalysis

Freedom and Responsibility in Therapy

The Influence of R.D. Laing on Existential Psychoanalysis

Sartre’s Critique of Freud’s Unconscious

Freedom and Change in the Therapeutic Process

Conclusion

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

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