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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

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.

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.