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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
Kennett, J., and S. Matthews. 2003. The unity anddisunity of agency. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psy-chology 10, no. 4:305312.
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Phillips, J. 2003. Psychopathology and the narrativeself. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10, no.4:313328.
Sass, L. 1994. Madness and modernism: insanity inthe light of modern art, literature, and thought.
Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.Sass, L. 1995. The paradoxes of delusion: Wittgen-
stein, Schreber, and the schizophrenic mind. Ith-aca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Sass, L., and J. Parnas. 2001. Phenomenology of self-disturbances in schizophrenia: some research find-ings and directions. Philosophy Psychiatry Psy-chology 8, no. 4:347356.
Wells, L. 2003. Discontinuity in personal narrative:
some perspectives of patients. Philosophy, Psychi-atry, & Psychology 10, no. 4:297303.
Woody, J. M. 2003. When narrative fails. Philosophy,Psychiatry, & Psychology 10, no. 4:329345.
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