A Psychodynamic View of Action and Responsibility

Clinical Studies in Subjective Experience

David Shapiro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351847865
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Psicoanalisi

This new book by David Shapiro, author of the classic Neurotic Styles, throws light, from a clinical standpoint, on a subject of importance, both theoretically and for therapeutic practice, for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, as well as for those with general interests in philosophy or psychology. A Psychodynamic View of Action and Responsibility explores the individual's experience of ownership or responsibility for what he or she does, says, and even believes, and their avoidance of that experience.

David Shapiro considers the self-deception necessary for these disclaimers of responsibility and the surrender of personal conviction and autonomous judgment. With numerous excerpts from therapeutic sessions, he shows these to be self-protective reactions forestalling or dispelling the anxiety of internal conflict and also, as in false confessions, external threat or intimidation. Shapiro presents this important thesis in his usual lucid way and in many contexts. Its recognition, in his view, is critical for therapeutic work. This book demonstrates the central place in psychological dynamics of the subjective sense of personal responsibility or ownership of what one says or does. The subject is nowhere treated with the depth and emphasis on subjective experience seen in these chapters.

A Psychodynamic View of Action and Responsibility will appeal to professionals and students of psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy, as well as clinical psychologists, CBT practitioners, philosophers, and legal scholars.

Chapter 1

Two kinds of responsibility

It is best to begin by sharpening the meaning of the kind of responsibility for personal action that this book is mainly concerned with. That requires clarifying the distinction between two kinds of responsibility, both of them familiar. It happens that the meaning of these two kinds of responsibility and the distinction between them shows itself very clearly in connection with the experience of certain patients in psychotherapy. Let me explain.

People who constantly reproach themselves for mistakes or lapses of one kind or another are usually considered to have an excessive sense of personal responsibility. They feel responsible even for failures or mistakes that are obviously beyond their capacity to avoid. It is generally the aim of psychotherapy to diminish such self-reproach and the exaggerated sense of responsibility it seems to be founded on. Yet psychotherapy is also thought to have a contrary aim. If it is successful, it is supposed to increase the patient’s experience of authorship or responsibility for what he or she does (Kaiser 1955; Shapiro 1989). That expectation for psychotherapy of an increased or enlarged responsibility for personal action refers to the fact that neurotic patients invariably show some degree of estrangement from what they do or feel. They regularly say in psychotherapy that they do things they really don’t want to do, that they continue relationships they get nothing out of, that they somehow don’t do what they’re sure they actually want to do; or, they feel, and say, that their actions are governed not by their own wishes, but by others’ expectations, or by established routine. That is what, for example, one such person had in mind when he likened the way he lived to a train running along a track that has been laid down. As I said in the Introduction, the innovative psychoanalyst Hellmuth Kaiser (1955) was the first to take note of this diminished sense of responsibility, observing it as it appeared in his patients’ speech. He said that they often did not seem to be completely “behind” what they were saying. Their expression of emotion was often forced. They often seemed to lack conviction about what they were saying. These are all reflections of a certain estrangement from the self; it is the sort of thing we psychologists or psychoanalysts mean when we say that the neurotic personality is not well integrated. If psychotherapy is successful, it is said to diminish that kind of self-estrangement, to achieve a greater integration of the personality, so that the individual knows more clearly what he or she wants, and wants to do, in that sense feels more fully represented by it and takes a stronger sense of responsibility for it.

It is evident, then, that there are two different meanings or kinds of responsibility here—the kind that therapy aims to diminish and the kind it aims to enlarge—and two different kinds of subjective experience. The kind of responsibility contained in self-reproach can be called the moral sense of responsibility and for convenience I will call its alternative the psychological sense of responsibility. The moral kind of responsibility refers to an individual’s duty or obligation (“It’s Johnny’s responsibility to take care of that”) and the person is morally accountable. Someone who is reliable in fulfilling moral obligations we call a responsible person. A failure of responsibility of this kind is likely to elicit reproach, sometimes from others and often from the individuals themselves. If it is a serious matter, this will likely include shame, being shamed or shaming oneself. The psychological kind of responsibility, on the other hand, has a meaning quite separate from moral responsibility. It refers simply to the authorship or cause or source of the action (“Robert Moses was responsible for building that bridge”). It can refer to the action of someone else or of course to one’s own action. Objectively, this kind of responsibility is simply a factual matter. But our interest here is in the subjective experience of responsibility, what one might call the person’s attitude toward his own action and its result. That attitude would normally include the sense that what one is doing or has done is what he has wanted or chosen to do. It is a sense, at least a tacit sense, of agency or personal autonomy. But as we shall see, though agency and personal autonomy are objective facts of human action, they are by no means invariably the individual’s subjective experience. The sense of having chosen and intended to do what one has done, the sense of responsibility for it, can be diluted or distorted in many ways, or even be absent altogether.

These two kinds of responsibility are certainly different, but they are not entirely different. The reality of volition and personal choice is central to both ideas of responsibility, but their conceptions of volition and choice are quite different. One is concerned with the moral judgment of choice and personal action, while the other is concerned with the understanding of its reasons. But they are not only different. There is also a definite relation between the two kinds of experience of responsibility, actually a dynamic relation. They are in conflict with one another. To the extent that the one kind of experience of responsibility predominates, the other kind is diminished or even extinguished. To the extent that the person has a sense of his action as an understandable expression of his state of mind or point of view at the time, moral judgment of the action, as in self-reproach, is weakened. Conversely, to the extent that the experience of moral responsibility and, specifically, self-reproach are strong, the experience of an action as an understandable choice is precluded. This exclusionary relation between the moral and psychological kinds of responsibility exists not only in the subjective life of the individual himself; it holds also in any consideration of others’ behavior. We see that, for instance, in considering criminal behavior. Moral reproach obstructs empathic under standing; empathic understanding weakens moral reproach. I want now to look more closely at these two kinds of responsibility, the subjective experience of each, and their relationship. We will then see that relationship demonstrated in a particular case of self-reproach, as it undergoes a change in a therapeutic setting.

Self-reproach is punishment for having done or not done something. Its message is: I shouldn’t (or should) have done that. But self-reproach is not merely regret, and its aim is not simply correction; correction would be superfluous where the one to be corrected is also the one who corrects. The aim of self-reproach, as I said, is punishment and, consistent with that aim, its tone is aggressive; it is often accompanied by explicit denunciation (“I shouldn’t have run away! I’m a coward!”). Like most accusations and charges aimed at punishment, self-reproach is likely to exaggerate transgressions. It is a corollary of that exaggeration that the person who reproaches himself usually does not believe all of the accusations he makes against himself. His aim, after all, is not to consider the facts, but to inflict pain. But the accusations and the repentant admission (“I shouldn’t have done that”) do constitute an acceptance of moral responsibility.

The premise of self-reproach is not only that one should or shouldn’t have done something but, also, that one might at that moment have chosen to do otherwise. That premise—we shall discuss it at greater length later in Chapter 5—presents a problem not just for philosophers, as it has, but, in a way that is special, for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists. For psychoanalysts and psychotherapists are accustomed to assuming that what their patients have done had its reasons in the point of view and the circumstances of the ones who did it, whether they were clearly conscious of those reasons or not, and that those reasons were decisive. This is more than a logical assumption; it reflects a certain interest and an attitude. It is fundamental to any therapeutic method interested in understanding, as opposed to correcting, behavior. It is for that matter fundamental to understanding any behavior, whether in the psychologist’s office, the court room, or the friend’s kitchen table. The attitude of self-reproach, however, and for that matter the attitude of moral reproach in general, whether directed at oneself or others, is not friendly to an empathic understanding of a transgressor’s point of view. It is not well disposed toward an interest in the circumstances, as they seemed to him, that might account for his transgression. The one who reproaches himself, or someone else, is not interested in reasons or psychology. Those reasons and that psychology are irrelevant to the assignment of moral responsibility.

The focus of moral reproach is the evaluation of the act itself, the transgression. The act is evaluated according to some principle or personal ideal (bravery, generosity, perhaps what an admired or imagined figure would have done). Such general principles or ideals define what should have been done, and, it is presumed, might have been done by anyone. Only in certain exceptional cases of obvious incapacity might this presumption be overlooked. It is this presumption that any choice is available to anyone that justifies moral evaluation and, specifically, self-reproach and the punishment, the shame, it entails.

Actually, of course, an empathic understanding of the transgressor’s reasons and point of view is not only irrelevant to the assignment of moral responsibility and the attitude of reproach or self-reproach. It weakens and undermines them. Understanding evokes sympathy. The maxim is: to understand is to forgive, even ourselves. Understanding empathically the point of view of the one who acts ultimately makes his action seem necessary or even, at least as it seemed to him, reasonable. That is to say, necessary and reasonable for this person, at that time, in those circumstances. Not perhaps for someone else, even in the same circumstances, but with a different point of view, but for him. In effect, an empathic understanding recognizes that this act by this person in these circumstances was inevitable. This does not mean that this person had no choice. It means, rather, that the choice that he made, from among the possibilities that were defined by his point of view, was bound to seem to him the one to make.

But while it is true that a recognition of the limitations and tendencies of an individual’s point of view weakens self-reproach and undermines the basis of moral responsibility or accountability, it is also true that it expands an experience of responsibility of a different kind. It sharpens the person’s awareness that he chose to do what he did, that he chose to do it for his own reasons, reasons that can be understood, that what he did promised some kind of satisfaction or, if not satisfaction, at least some relief from what was no longer bearable, or, if neither of those, then the escape, however costly, from some prospect that threatened to be even costlier. In short, that what one did made sense, at that time, from the standpoint of this person. Thus the weakening of one kind of experience of responsibility is at the same stroke the strengthening of the experience of the other kind. This new sense of responsibility consists of the awareness that what was done was not a failure of one’s will, but an expression of one’s will, not a lapse of judgment, but an exercise of judgment, not an act that was “against my aims and values,” but only against what I imagined my aims and values to be, not “unlike me” at all, unlike only my image of myself.

It is the realization, for example, by the young woman who thinks that she wants to get out of a troubled relationship, but somehow “can’t,” that she only thinks she should leave, but doesn’t want to. Or the husband’s realization that it is not, as he thought, that he just “lost it” and “didn’t really mean to hurt” his wife, but rather that his manly pride had been wounded and its repair required that he “teach her a lesson.” Or even the realization, by the man who says he “can’t shake” the terrible obsessive thought that he might rape his daughter, that he has, without realizing it, been afraid of not examining his mind for that very thought, believing that if such a thought exists without his awareness, he might actually lose control and do it. Each of these initial disclaimers of responsibility, though sincere, will, as spoken, have lacked confidence or complete conviction. Each...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Two kinds of responsibility
• 2 The psychology of self-deception
• 3 Two kinds of conscientiousness
• 4 The self-control muddle
• 5 Will, willpower, free will
• 6 Neurotic styles
• 7 Schizophrenia
• 8 Saying something is doing something
• 9 Voluntary surrender of responsibility
• Afterword: Action and responsibility
• Index