Ivan’s Reviews > How People Change: A Serious Psychological Work on Human Transformation > Status Update

When in therapy a life story is told in such a way that what the patient knows and remembers and can reason from, is systematically discounted, while significant causality is located in those unconscious forces postulated by the therapist, ... taking a story which must have contained elements of freedom and responsibility and selling it in terms only of causes lying outside awareness and hence beyond control

"I" which therefore cannot choose, cannot do what it "wants," but is held to an alien course. As though she were saying, "I do not here preside over internal conflict, do not listen to contending claims within myself to arrive finally at an anguished, fallible decision, but am coerced by a mandate beyond my jurisdiction. I yield to necessity."

Freedom is that range of experience wherein events, courses of action, attitudes, decisions, accommodations are seen as elective. It may be more or less, so we need ask how much we want. In small things we always want choice. What color to paint the house? buy an Olds or a Buick? go to the Bergman film or the Ozawa concert? It would be onerous to be constrained here. In deeper matters we want to be held back.