Finding Freedom: Exploring the Relationship Between Agency, Motility, and Aggression

After an overview of the opposed concepts of freedom and psychic determinism, and of the compatibilist reconciliation between the two that is most appropriate for psychoanalysis, the importance of agency as a psychoanalytic idea is considered. In particular, two ways in which the term agency may be used are examined: agency as fact and agency as experience. The former refers to the degree of relative freedom an individual possesses from "inner" constraints, whereas the latter refers to the experience of oneself as having an active impact on the self, other people, and/or the world. Importantly, these two senses are not coextensive. With this distinction in place, it is argued that agency as experience is rooted in the infant's earliest experiences of motility. As an extension of Winnicott's reflections (1950) on the relation between motility and aggression, it is argued that inasmuch as it involves the overcoming of opposition, aggression is integral to the developmental unfolding of the experience of agency. Further developmental conditions needed for a full experience of agency are noted. Ultimately, it is suggested, agency is central to the psychoanalytic project itself.