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Finding Freedom: Exploring the Relationship Between Agency, Motility, and Aggression
1Assistant Professor, Psychology Department, Golden Gate University.
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association
|March 16, 2018
Summary
Psychoanalytic agency, the sense of impacting the world, develops from early motility and aggression. Understanding agency as experience, distinct from freedom from constraints, is key to psychoanalysis.
Area of Science:
- Psychoanalytic theory
- Developmental psychology
- Philosophy of mind
Background:
- Explores the tension between psychic determinism and freedom.
- Introduces compatibilism as a framework for psychoanalysis.
- Highlights the significance of agency within psychoanalytic thought.
Purpose of the Study:
- To examine the concept of agency in psychoanalysis.
- To differentiate between agency as fact and agency as experience.
- To explore the developmental origins of the experience of agency.
Main Methods:
- Conceptual analysis of freedom, determinism, and agency.
- Extension of Winnicott's ideas on motility and aggression.
- Exploration of developmental pathways for agency.
Main Results:
- Agency is conceptualized as both a fact (freedom from constraints) and an experience (active impact).
- Agency as experience originates in infant motility and aggression.
- Aggression, by overcoming opposition, is integral to developing agency experience.
Conclusions:
- The distinction between agency as fact and experience is crucial.
- Early motility and aggression are foundational for the experience of agency.
- Agency is fundamental to the psychoanalytic project.
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