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Unity of Agency and Volition: Some Personal Reflections

Weiner, Stephen.

Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, Volume 10, Number 4,

December 2003, pp. 369-372 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/ppp.2004.0027

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WEINER / UNITYOF AGENCYAND VOLITION 369

2004 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stephen Weiner

Unity of Agency and

Volition: SomePersonal Reflections

THEISSUESOF unity of agency, self-as-narra-

tive, and more generally, volition are high-

ly personal to me. Indeed, I would say I

have frequently been obsessed with them. I am

52 years old, and date the onset of my psychiat-

ric symptomsmy long-term miseryvery spe-

cifically: 11:00 PM Pacific Standard Time, August

28, 1965. At almost precisely that time, I started

obsessing that I was homosexual and, in fact,

turning into a girl. Within days, derealization

followed: for instance, the houses in my neigh-borhood seemed one-dimensionalthey seemed as

though they were painted, as though I could stick

my hand or an object through them. Colors seemed

less bright as wellbut I hardly had words for

all this at the time: it was an overwhelmingly

preverbal feeling, but I found some words for it.

I was also depressed, and knew I was de-

pressedthat is, I was worried, had trouble sleep-ing, and had suicidal thoughts and feelings. Within

weeks, I asked my parents if I could see a psychi-

atrist, and I did. I remember asking my psychia-

trist if he ever thought about the possibility thateverything might be an illusion, and he quoted

the refrain from Row, Row, Row Your Boat:

merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a

dream. But just asking him produced a chilling

feeling that he did not exist and, largely for this

reason, I did not mention unreality feelings again

to therapists for another 20 years.

So, like Dr. Wells patient Edward, described

by James Phillips (2003), I was in trouble; like

Edward, I was starting to construct a narrative. I

started feeling that I had to tell my story at

about this timebefore then, I had not felt a

need to do that. That may be partly because

young children take life for granted (at least, Idid), and it may be partly because suffering, by

its very nature, demands explanation; both rea-

sons were probably operatingcertainly, both

my parents told me years later that I had seemedemotionally distressed as a child, and my mother

told they would have given me Ritalin if it had

been available. So, to other people (my parents

and my teachers) I was mentally ill in some sense,

and I have some pretty clear memories of what I

now recognize as depression, especially in the

second and third grades; but I did not think of

myself as sick and I did not think of myself as

sufferingand I did not experience the duality

(at least) of selves that I started to experience

almost immediately in August 1965.

Phillips further points out that the futureEdward could look back in his narrative, at a

later age, and reconstruct his history either as

someone with a continuing mental illness, or as

someone who had attained a secure, healthy adult-

hood and saw his experience as adolescent pain

in the service of ultimate adult health and inte-

gration. I see my story, I am sorry to report, as

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370 PPP / VOL. 10, NO. 4 / DECEMBER 2003

one of unremitting basic pain but with the posi-

tive dimension that I was able to go on, obtain a

good education, work a good deal in my adult

life, and father a child. But my narrativeand

am I not, as a highly verbal person, almost con-

strained to think of my life as a narrative?hasbeen one, as Phillips (following Kleinman) realiz-

es, of suffering. It is, above all else, an illness

narrative. I find the approach of J. Melvin Woody(2003)of privileging performing and perform-

ing arts and spatial metaphors over storyless

relevant and true to myself, although I see no

reason to argue with Marys preference for such

forms. It may be that the temporal discontinui-

ties she has experienced predispose her to see

herself in such termsmay, in fact, necessitate

doing so. I am not exactly sure why, but it prob-ably has to do with acting, with trying on and

performing one role after anotherspatially, with

the limits of one self bumping up against, ending

against, another.

My experience involving what Kennett and

Matthews (2003) term the social and moral good

of unity of agency (I agree with their assessment)

is not, like those of Mary, Joanne, and Dr. Jones

described by Lloyd Wells (2003), an experience

of discontinuities and disharmonies of self/selves

over time. However, I have, for 38 years, experi-

enced a disharmony between two selves withinmyself: a primary self that experiences, utterly

passively, emotional pain and feelings of unreali-

ty, and always and at the same time a secondary

self that makes plans, interacts with others, and

accomplishes goals. I think my situation/experi-

ence may be best captured by the theories of Sass

and Parnas (2001) about schizophrenic self-ref-

erentiality. I have been persuaded by Sasss dis-

cussion in The Paradoxes of Delusion (1995) of

Schrebers solipsism that I have experienced some-

thing of the same, minus the hallucinations. For

years, I had no word for my solipsism, just thefeeling itself; I remember that, in college, I de-

scribed my feelings to my girlfriend, and she

taught me the word. But for years, I had no

conceptual terms for my feeling, and, indeed,

mostly avoided studying philosophy in college

for fear that I would be confronted with ontolog-

ical terms. I was phobic about the very word

beingand all forms of the verb to be; needless to

say, I could not avoid these wordsto be, in all

its conjugations, is probably the most commonly

occurring verb in the English language. In any

event, as I have become familiar with Sasss work,

both in Paradoxes and in Madness and Modern-

ism (1994), I have seen the resonances between

what I have experienced and what he describes.

Sass and Parnas in my view rightly emphasizeissues of tacit awareness and ipseity, and the

subtle yet pervasive ways in which a person can,

when all is said and done, simply not be at home

in his or her self, long before interpersonal issues

arise or, indeed, anyone else notices that any-

thing is wrong. I am glad that they insist on the

subtle nature of this reality, but I am quite con-

vinced that in this case subtle does not meanmild. The tacit wrongness of my self-experience

is so subtle that I sometimes wonder whether I

am really so different after all from my normal

friends, but the severity of what seems wrong to

me, even though silent and invisible to others, is

so harsh that I become persuaded again that I am

different after all.

My point is that, in reference to Kennett and

Matthews, unity of agency is not eroded only by

discontinuities of the self over time. I completely

agree with their view that the reconstitution or

original formation of a relatively unified selfshould be a goal of therapy, but we would all do

well to keep in mind that there are different ways

for unity of agency to be lost or lacking, and

successful therapy can undoubtedly take a num-

ber of different forms. In my case, unity of agen-

cy/purpose was eroded, I must repeat, not by

temporal discontinuities but by the experience of

watching myself watching myself ad infinitumand by the accompanying despairing feeling that

there is nothing in the outside world truly there

to be watched.

Sass and Parnas (2001), following Blanken-burg, discuss the sense of amazement patients

have before that, which would seem to be most

self-evident. Nothing could better describe what

I have experienced since the age of 13, and noth-

ing ever has been harder to describe both to

clinicians and laypeople, includingespecially

includingclose friends and family members. For

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WEINER / UNITYOF AGENCYAND VOLITION 371

me, those things that could be most self-evident are

my body/mind and the existence of external ob-

jects, and with these things I experience the sense

of amazement they describe. Kimuras concept of

simultaneous reflection, as distinguished from

other types of more normal self-consciousness, mayoffer a strong clue to what I have been experienc-

ing all these years, and may help to explain why

my type of self-consciousness is apparently im-mutable. I have never outgrown it, and cannot. I

cannot rise above it in certain situations.

In terms of therapy, it would probably be a

great step forward if clinicians were at least made

aware of the material pointed to by Sass and

Parnas, and were trained to be aware of the

possibility of multiplicity of selves (or self-per-

ceptions) in the context of solipsistic feelings (ifnot firm belief). If I had seen a therapist who did

that early on for me (in a gentle manner), I might

have started the process of verbalizing my fears

and thus gaining some mastery over them (I say

that because talking about them, even joking

about them, has helped to desensitize me over

the last couples of decades and made my life

easier in some ways).

The degree of attention given to Mary, the

Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) sufferer,

seems to me to be an epidemiologically suspect

diversion from the realities of mentally ill people.DID may or may not be on a continuum with

other dissociative states. It may or may not be a

somewhat paradigmatic case of disunity of agen-

cy. It seems to me, however, that the disvalue that

Kennett and Matthews rightly attribute to Marys

state, and dissociative states in general, also ob-

tains with all mental illness, by definition. I cer-

tainly feel that my experience of derealization

has had great consequences for my ability to

make plans and carry them out, not because I

slide into incongruous and discontinuous ego

states, but because the worth of any endeavor isalways being called into question by my strong

feeling of solipsistic despair. This feeling has al-

most, I must admit, attained the status of a firm

conviction, that because nothing truly exists, all

effort is futile.

Somewhat like Dr. Jones, I have sought treat-

ment over the years because of fear of my poor

judgment, flowing not from mania (as in his

case) but from the presence of a self within me

that is not only depressed, but cannot take the

worlds existence as a given enough to act in my

own (and others?) best interests.

Doctor Phillips points our attention to therole and essential nature of historicity in self-

formation. My explicit sense of myself as a per-

son in the present making choices based on apast created both by my choices and by the

external worlds constraints and impositions

and making plans for a future at least partly

coherently resulting from a coherent present self

has been impaired by a sense that I am the eter-

nally present universe and not a person at all. I do

not know how to put it more succinctly than that.

For years, I have had the strong sense that thepsychiatrists and psychologists I have seennear-

ly all of whom genuinely seemed to like me and

wish me wellsimply did not get my experience.

In many cases, they simply did not have all the

information; I was too terrified to speak about

much of this. In many cases, they explicitly be-

lieved what Sass, for instance, argues against:

that my fear/belief that I could cause earthquakes,

for instance, was a result of an eruption of prim-

itive thought processes. None of my therapists, I

now think, knew about the painful and crippling

way I was experiencing my selves. If they thoughtabout unity of agency issues at all, it was usually

to cheerlead me to strengthen my socially ap-

proved goals: to work, plan for the future, and

all that that involves. All of them implicitly and

explicitly believed that unity of agency is a value,

but they had very little way of knowing what

was constantly eroding mine. Discussions like

those in these pieces, if they make their way into

the curriculum and training process, will almost

surely help clinicians of the future have a better

idea what is occurring withindare I say it?

people like myself. That will ultimately be theirreal value.

References

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Sass, L. 1994. Madness and modernism: insanity inthe light of modern art, literature, and thought.

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