Int J Psychoanal 2003;84:515531

Freedom and forgiveness

Marcia Cavell
1570 Olympus Avenue, Berkeley, California 94708, USA cavell@uclink4.berkeley.edu
(Final version accepted 27 August 2002)

In the history of philosophy and political thought freedom has meant a number of
different things. The author considers several of these meanings and their relevance to
psychoanalytic theory. The general argument against freedom that has been mounted in
the history of thought, and echoed by Freud, is the thesis of causal determinism; but it
is urged here that this in itself is no threat to freedom in the sense of the word
required for moral agency: a free choice is one that is caused to some extent by
reasons and that is relatively unconstrained both by external and internal forces. Yet
because agents are embedded in a causal nexus that includes both the physical world
and other people, agency and freedom can be compromised in innumerable ways.
Neither freedom nor agency is a condition which we absolutely have or lack, but a
matter of degree. Psychoanalytic therapy works toward expanding the capacity for
agency and diminishing the constraints of certain internal forces. In the sense de ned
here, objectivity is an attitude that accepts our embeddedness in the world. With
objectivity may come both forgiveness and self-forgiveness, which in turn promote
agency.
Keywords: freedom, causes, reasons, agency, mindbody irreducibility, forgiveness,
objectivity

It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that
makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived forwards (Soren Kierkegaard).

One mark of a successful analysis, it has been said, is that one comes to see the
inevitability of what she has done. In a sense, that seems right. Someone who remorselessly
regrets not having become a singer or feels guilty for not having taken better care of her
dying father or wishes she had had different parents has probably not yet gone far enough
in the analytic work. It is not the regret itself that makes us suspect this, but its remorseless
character.
The remark is puzzling, however; for if what we did was inevitable, then surely what we will
do is equally so. And in this case, why should we ever consider, re ect, deliberate on, choose,
which course to take? Why not just let nature have its way with us? Yet we do sometimes do
these things, and it would be impossible to convince most of us we should not. Still, it is
sometimes suggested, the belief that we have choice is illusory.
Questions about the protean concept of freedom are old and troubling, beset with persistent
confusions. In what follows I want to consider how psychoanalysis has contributed both to the
confusion and to our subtler thinking about the questions. I shall begin with free will and
determinism.
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Mind, reasons, causality

Freud writes,
are [there] occurrences, however small, which drop out of the universal concatenation of
events . . .? If anyone makes a breach of this kind of determinism of natural events at a
single point, it means he has overthrown the whole Weltanschauung of science (19167,
p. 28).

The concatenation in question is presumably causal. Determinism, here, is the thesis that all
events, including all mental events, are caused by prior events in the natural order of things.
Freud assumes that from this thesis about causality it follows that there is no such thing as freedom:
there are also all the unful lled but possible futures to which we still like to cling in
phantasy, all the strivings which adverse external circumstances have crushed, and all our
suppressed acts of volition which nourish in us the illusion of Free Will (1919, p. 236).

Freud was not alone in thinking that causality and freedom are incompatible. Spinoza,
arguing along lines similar to Freuds, held that men believe themselves to be free only because
they are unconscious of the causes whereby their actions are determined (1955).
Spinoza and Freud are surely right that mental phenomena, like all others, belong to the
natural order, and that all events, including all mental events and all human doings, are caused.
In this sense, determinism holds sway. But a number of philosophers, among them Locke,
Hobbes, Kant, Mill, many others in our own time, even Spinoza himself, about whom I say
more in a moment, have argued in different ways that causal determinism is both compatible
with freedom and a necessary condition for it. Spinozas claimand here too there is a
similarity to an idea in Freud that is however only implicitis that we become more free as we
become more conscious of the causes for our actions. When this happens the causes no longer
move us from outside ourselves but from within: we become more self-ruled or autonomous. I
will follow philosophical tradition in calling such arguments compatibilist, and the arguments
for freedom, whether compatibilist or not, libertarian. Some of my arguments in this rst
section of the paper will overlap with those of other compatibilists, and will brie y rehearse
my own earlier discussion of reasons as a kind of cause (Cavell, 1993). Reasons are a complex
of mental states in which beliefs and desires have a central place. Reasons are themselves
causes and, in so far as our actions are caused by reasons, we are in the domain of choice and
free choice; causality itself is no constraint. Free will refers, I will suggest, to the possibility of
genuine choice. (This is a matter about which we may be self-deceived, not because everything
is causally determined, but because what we thought was a choice in a particular case was
determined by a particular motivational structure that undermines genuine choice. I will
explore this subject later in this paper.) As I speak of them, then, free will, free choice and
genuine choice refer to the same thing, though I should say that, while, in my view, neither
causality nor unconscious causality is itself a constraint on freedom, there always are
constraints of some sort. Freedom, as I see it, is a genuine condition that nevertheless holds
only to various degrees. (Think of wisdom, or love.)
We often explain what people do in a mentalistic or intentionalist language that contains the
concepts of wish, belief, desire, fear, emotion, feeling, motive, reason, intention, and so on,
both conscious and unconscious. Reasons are formed from such mental states and processes,
and together they help specify what we mean by mindI would like to go with you, Do
you remember our trip to Avignon?, I think wed better re ect on this a little more, I deeply

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regret what I did, Lets take the 11:15 train, I am sad about your leaving, and so on. It is
important to note that belief is a constituent element in many emotions. For example, if you
feel guilty, you believe you have done something wrong. Reason is itself passionate. Should it
turn outa possibility I consider laterthat we are misguided in speaking of beliefs and
desires rather than neurophysiological processes alone, we would also have to give up talk
about the emotions. For brevity I will sometimes speak simply of beliefs and desires but, as
essential constituents of motivation, emotions are included in every reason for action.
In the paradigm case, which I will be outlining in the next few paragraphs, desires interlock
with beliefs to form a reason. I want to see the new ballet by Thomasson, and I want to go to
San Francisco on Saturday because I believe that in doing so I may see this new ballet. Beliefs
and desires interlock in ways that are logical, or rational, in an important sense of the word. For
example, it is reasonable for you to attempt to avoid someone if you believe she is dangerous.
It is reasonable even though the belief may not be true. It is reasonable for you to take an
umbrella, given that you believe it may rain, and so on. Reason is an essentially normative
notion: if you believe that it is reasonable for you, all things considered, to do x, then you
believe that is what you ought to do; and, similarly, if you believe it is right. Only the behavior
of persons, not inanimate objects, is given explanations that are normative in this way. Needless
to say, this is a highly schematic account of reasons.
In the absence of internal con ict and competing reasons, a particular reason becomes your
intention (see Davidson, 1980). It is that on the basis of which you make a choice. And, in the
absence of unexpected obstacles, your intention causes an action. An action, typically
performed in the real, external world, is something done for a reason in this sense. It is not
merely a piece of behavior, like bumping into ones neighbor when the subway stops suddenly,
but behavior that is performed intentionally, on the basis of beliefs and desires, in short,
reasons. Agents are creatures who perform actions, not all, but some of the time. Creatures
who are agents in this sense we call moral agents, in the belief that creatures who do things
for reasons can sometimes be held morally responsible for their actions, responsible not merely
in the sense that they caused the event in question to happen, but that they did so volitionally,
of their own free will, knowing to some extent what they were doing and in possession of moral
standards of some sort, no matter how different in content from our own.
Freud makes clear in Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety (1926) that understanding even
irrational thought depends on the concept of reason or rationality in a general sense. We recall
Freuds early hypothesis that anxiety is what libido becomes when repressed. Yet that did not
square with his conviction that anxiety is a response to perceived danger. He tried to cut
through this dilemma by differentiating normal from neurotic anxiety, the rst a response to
external danger, the second to one that is internal, namely, ones own libido. A problem arose
here, too, since libido can be dangerous, Freud suggested in this same work, only if in con ict
with another desire, which is typically the love and approval of someone one loves and needs.
And since the loss of such a person is as much an external danger as anything else, the
distinction between normal and neurotic anxiety cannot turn on the difference between
outside and inside the organism. At this point in Freuds thinking the concept of inner world
becomes yet more complicated than when he amended the seduction theory in favor of
phantasy and psychic reality.
Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety solves the contradictions in his theory by reversing the
relation between anxiety and repression; in the earlier theory repression causes anxiety; in the
later, anxiety causes repression: the organism is biologically equipped with anxiety as the
response to a perceived external danger, which for the child is abandonment or loss of love.
But inner events such as desires, wishes, phantasies and beliefs can become associated with

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the original danger and trigger defensive, emergency behavior and thought processes (among
them, repression). In the case of Little Hans, to which Freud reverts in this work, the child fears
castration in the belief that his father may castrate him for his incestuous desires. The symptom
is not the anxiety itself, but its displacement on to horses.
Given my concerns here, two points stand out in this new theory. First, the persons and
relationships that gure in trauma are not merely internalideas, phantasies or objectsnor
merely the derivatives of drive, as Freuds earlier theory had it; they are also external.
Anxiety, perhaps not even registered in consciousness, and embroidered by the childs
imaginative constructions, is the response to a perception of real danger in the world: an injury
to the child and the loss of the fathers love. Second, irrational fear, in this case the phobic
fear of horses, may at one time have had a more or less rational base. Given his vulnerability,
together with the beliefs and desires which might appropriately be motivating him in a
particular developmental period, the childs desires are rational, or surely intelligible. But to
understand this rationality in any particular case requires putting oneself as much as possible in
the childs shoes. It is possible, yet dif cult, since we are no longer children, no longer
vulnerable, in fact, to the dangers peculiar to childhood, and we are often unwilling to
acknowledge the extent to which we nevertheless still feel we are. There is a culture of
childhood that may not be readily apparent to the grown-up; Freud was its rst anthropologist.
The concept of reason, Freud is assuming, is indispensable to our explanations of human
behavior. Even irrational behavior has its reasons, which allow us to understand it in a way
peculiar to human behavior. Neurotic anxiety is irrational in that it is displaced; or a holdover
from an earlier time; or the external danger has been distorted by internal phantasies; or one
has trouble distinguishing past from future, so that, in Freuds famous phrase, instead of
remembering the past one acts it out (1914); or situations reminiscent of past traumas trigger
old responses that are inappropriate now. Freud pioneered the exploration of such forms of
irrationality, but understanding the Ratman or Little Hans, Freud also showed, rides to some
extent on the same familiar concept of rationality that carries all our interpretations of anothers
mind and behavior.
How are reasons, or beliefs and desires, connected to intention, or choice? If one intends to
do something, then, to some extent at least, one wants or desires to do it, and one has beliefs,
implicit or explicit, on the basis of which those desires are formed and carried out. But these
are not suf cient conditions. An intention is not just any wish or desire that you have, but the
one on which you will act if nothing gets in your way. In a certain sort of ideally rational case,
the intention has been considered; competing desires and troubling consequences have been
weighed. Furthermore, an intention is something you believe it is possible to carry out: if you
believe it is impossible to y, you cannot intend to y, though you may wish you could. You
may even form the intention to change the world so that ying becomes possible.
Wish and choice differ, in that choice, ideally at least, takes into account ones own
competing wishes, together with some relatively realistic assessment of the ways of achieving
what one wants, and some of the likely consequences. Often we see that something we wish
for, or want, is discordant with other desires that are stronger. In such a case, we may wish to
do something we do not want to do on the whole, that we have no intention of doing, and that
we do not do. Between wish and desire, wish and choice, there is a categorical difference that
no discussion of agency can ignore. Choice is then a particular complex of emotion, belief and
desire; it is a species of motivational structure.
Because it requires cognitive and emotional sophistication, choice enters our explanatory
vocabulary later than wish and want. A baby wants to have the rattle; she doesnt choose to
have it, even though she may look at two rattles and go for one rather than the other. A 2-year-

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old may want to become a physicist like her father, but she cannot choose to do so because she
cannot know what achieving these ends would mean. A slightly older child may wish to burn
down the house, and choose to play with matches, but she is not capable of choosing to burn
down the house because she is incapable of envisioning many of the likely consequences; she
may wish to kill her brother, even choose to give him a push, but she is not capable of choosing
to kill him until she has the concept of death.
A number of psychoanalysts have been using a different concept of agency from mine. Stern
(1985) attributes the sense of agency to infants, by which he means something like the sense
of being a source of movement. Sander writes, The data indicated that this [the infants sleep
awake rhythms] depended on the role played by the agency of the neonate to self-organize its
own sleepawake rhythmicity within the larger system in which it is embedded (2001).
Agency in this use of the word does not require cognitive and conceptual maturity, language,
the concepts of cause and effect, time, self and other, the objective world.
The range of volitional doings that is open to a creature depends on what the creature is
capable of envisioning and understanding, the descriptions that are available to her under
which she sees the world. Oedipus is guilty of murder because he intended to kill the man at
the crossroad, though the circumstances of the killing might lead us to say that it was not rstdegree murder, not premeditated. But in any case he did not know, and could not have known at
the time of the killing, that the man he killed was his father, so he did not intentionally commit
patricide (whether or not he might he might have phantasized doing so). The range of
descriptions available to any of us at any time determines how wide the doors of perception
may open, how richly meaningful the world can be and what intentions it is possible for us to
have. The claim we sometimes hear that language cuts us off from world overlooks the ways in
which, on the contrary, language and cognitive development in general vastly expand the range
of possible perceptions, the myriad ways in which we can see what we see.
Little children in general cannot choose because their conceptual repertoire, their grasp of
reality, time and consequence, are too insecure; in this sense they are still in the Garden of
Eden. And so we dont hold the child who sets the house on re, or kills her baby brother,
morally responsible. Even when a child is able to make some choices, her range of choice is
limited by her ability to imagine means to end and the consequences of getting what she wants.
Infants only gradually become agents, and as we mature we become agents with regard to an
ever-widening array of actions. It is tempting to think we must choose between saying that
either we can name the precise spot where choice and agency enter the developmental picture,
or that there must be agency all the way down. I dont think we must or can make such a
choice: we are stuck with the uncomfortable pair of ideas that to begin with there is no choice
for the human creature, and that somewhere along the way there is.
What is the relation between choice and cause? A partial answer is that choices are caused;
they are caused, in part, by reasons. Among the causes of Janets giving this concert is her
choice to do so, which is itself the result of earlier choices she has made, for example, to
practice, to go to Julliard, not to become a doctor. Choice in turn is the effect of perceptions,
beliefs and desires, which reach back in time. For some of these beliefs and desires there are in
turn reasons, both conscious and unconscious. The wish to become a concert pianist may have
its causal roots in Janets earlier desire to please her father, her fear that were she to follow his
profession she would jeopardize their relationship, her wish to take her mothers place, and so
on. What to say about unconscious reasons is a question I postpone for the moment.
A great many causes are external events, like Aunt Janes encouragement, Janets fathers
promises and threats, her tyrannical teacher, all of which are external to Janet even though their
effect on her depends in part on how she understands them. Other people can do things that

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cause one pain and that one reads, perhaps incorrectly, as punishment; but other people can
also be truly perceived as punishing. They seduce, betray and abandon. In an actual rape, one
not only feels raped; one is. Psychic reality is not where the inner object world begins. This was
the point of Winnicotts distinction between need and wish, the maternal holding environment,
and the babys wishes which arise within it. I take it to be an implication also of Freuds view
that the human biological organism is equipped to perceive real external threats to its welfare.
Choices are not uncaused events, but events among whose causes are reasons.
The skeptic about freedom may say: Ill grant that among the causes of Janets giving this
concert are mental events like choice itself, belief, desire, and so on. But choices are enmeshed
in a material world which always helps determine the choices we make and which we have not
chosen.
This is so. But how does it deny choice? Enmeshment tells us, on the contrary, that to
exercise choice fully in any instance, an agent must be able to appraise the world as she nds it,
relatively free of illusion, delusion, self-deception and reactions to the present that are
triggered by old, outdated alarms. Perhaps there is no person such that she is always fully an
agent. But there are degrees. Some adults may be so psychologically damaged that they have
virtually no agency; this is fortunately not the case for a great many of us, but probably for us
all there are areas in which agency is impaired.
The skeptic pursues: a free choice is one that was itself chosen. Since this de nition
generates an in nite regress such that choice could not even get started, the de nition must
hide some confusion. The idea of a free choice might seem to require an unmoved, uncaused
chooser behind the choice; but on re ection one sees that a conception of freedom which
divorced it from motivation would empty not only the concept choice of meaning, but also the
concepts of action, agent and agency. Without my past, my character, my upbringing, my
culture, my habits, beliefs and desires, all of them causal factors that have helped construct my
motives, who would I be? (The acte gratuit, the arbitrary act, which de ned freedom for some
of the existentialist authors, like Gide, in fact, obliterates the agent.) So Hume argued in
distinguishing what he called liberty of indifference from liberty of spontaneity (1951).
Liberty of indifference would obtain were there uncaused events, which is not the case. But
this empty sense of liberty, Hume went on to say, is not the one we need to anchor moral
agency. That presumes, rather, liberty of spontaneity, or the ability to do what we want to do.
This liberty we sometimes have.
Think about the nature of belief, and the role of belief in choice. In the absence of belief
there can be no choice, no agency or responsibility. But to the extent that we are rational, our
beliefs are to some extent determined not by what we want but by what we nd. Beliefs that are
caused by wishes are what Freud calls illusion. They are caused, in part, by things outside of
us. Wiggins writes, the libertarian ought to be content to allow the world to dictate to the free
man . . . how the world is (1987, p. 271). And Wolf:
Since human agents live within a world of facts already established, knowledge of the
world, and therefore knowledge necessarily shaped by the world, in which they must act is,
for the most part, promotive of freedom and responsibility rather than inimical to it (1990,
pp. 11920).

Again, the skeptic: free choice, choice, it doesnt matter. I believe that instead of choice we
will one day be talking only about genes, neurotransmitters, hormones, and so on. Those will
be our basic explanatory concepts for human behavior. Granted, we dont know how to make
the translation now, but the odds are that some day we will, and then we will see that the

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language of mind, to which the concept of choice belongs, has been merely a temporary
expedient. This is the sense in which choice is an illusion.
The skeptic has now pushed me toward the mindbody problem, a certain view of which is
often the hidden assumption in the skeptics position on free will. If the skeptic could establish
that there are no mental events (processes, experiences), it would follow that there are no
choices, for choice is a meaningful concept only in a world which includes creatures with
minds. Molecules combine, leaves fall, volcanoes erupt, mosquitos transmit malaria, but not by
their choice. And though neurotransmitters are involved in choice, it would be a category
mistake to speak of neurotransmitters themselves as agents of choice. The concept of choice is
essentially tied to the concept of mind, such that, were reason found to be super uous as an
explanatory concept, all choice would in that sense be illusory.
The skeptic about free will is not apt to argue openly that there are no mental events. She
argues instead that everything we now say in the language of mind will one day be better
saidreducible to the language strictly of body. This is, I believe, the hidden assumption in
Freuds argument against free will. He speaks as if the problem were causality, but causality is
a problem only if mental sorts of things, like reasons, cannot be causes. This is why I began
with the reasoncause distinction. The issues of mind body reducibility are complex and
much rehearsed: I will deal with them here only super cially.
A century ago, we would have heard the claim that there are minds, and that minds are not
merely bodies, as a metaphysical claim about the numbers and kinds of substances there are in
the world. It is the claim we now call Cartesian dualism. Few philosophers these days are
dualists of that sort. We believe that all mental events have bodily, neurophysiological
substrates. Contra Descartes, mind is not a special kind of entity in the world. Nevertheless,
some bodily entities are minded in the sense that to adequately describe and explain what they
do requires a mentalistic as well as a physicalist language. Our understanding of human
behavior requires two mutually irreducible languages: a language of body, or matter, and a
language of mind (Davidson, 1980b). The world for which the language of mind is indispensable
is the world in which people marry, tell lies, play chess, feel guilt, perform a ronde de jambe, try
to avoid prophecies, wish they hadnt done what they did, and so on. All these descriptions are
short-hand for a large number of more speci c activities to which the concepts of thought, belief
and desire are indispensable. For example, if someone can accurately be described as
performing a ronde de jambe, she must know something about ballet, have the concept of that
particular movement and want to be doing just that. The language of mind is needed not only for
our explaining a lot of human behavior, but also for describing it.
Sometimes the explanation has nothing to do with reasons, conscious or conscious. But
sometimes it does. In the area of mind body connections, research is teaching us about the
effects of things like hormonal de ciency, genes, and neurotransmitters, on mood and thought,
of constitutional disposition on emotion, of emotion on cognition, about the effects of
unconscious registrations on what we think and do. In describing the effect of emotion on
behavior, the relations between conscious and unconscious mental events, the distinction
between the articulable and the mute, we see a slide where before we saw a chasm.
Undoubtedly we are on the threshold of many more discoveries about what we sometimes call
mindbody interactions. Furthermore, we may think someone is an agent with regard to a
particular deed, and later nd out we were wrong. But from the fact that we often make
mistakes about agency, it does not follow that we are always in error. Both in scope and
vocabulary, particular psychological, explanations will almost certainly change, but mind,
conceived as mind, understood in the language that reason uniquely makes possible, is here to
stay.

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I am arguing for a kind of explanatory dualism on the mindbody question that might look
like what Mark Solms calls dual-aspect monism, about which he says:
Dual-aspect monism accepts that we are made of only one type of stuff . . . but it also
suggests that this stuff is perceived in two different ways. The important point to grasp
about this otherwise straightforward position is that it implies that in our essence we are
neither mental nor physical beings . . . that brain is made of stuff that appears physical
when viewed from the outside (as an object) and mental when viewed from the inside (as
a subject) (2002, p. 56).

The mindbody dualism, Solms concludes, is an artifact of perception.

This is not my view: I think the distinction Solms draws between inside and outside is
untenable. For one thing: my perception of you as attempting to seduce me, or to get into
graduate school, or to save your mothers reputation, is a view from outside; but these
thoroughly mentalistic descriptions of your behavior may be accurate, and irreducible to others
that are not mentalistic.
The explanatory dualism about mind and body that I am urging does not imply that mind
and body are merely linguistic entities. Rather, there is a real world in which we live and with
which we are in touch, some of whose characteristics require us to use the language of mind;
for some events the language of body alone will do. In the development of the universe as a
whole, body almost certainly came rst, as I believe it does also in the development of every
individual human being. But this does not mean that body, or the language of body, is
metaphysically privileged. It doesnt mean that really, objectively, we are only bodies in
motion, and minds only from our subjective point of view. Where would we have to be standing
to make that claim? The claim that there are minds is then as much a conceptual as an
empirical issue, in that no discoveries, I am suggesting, could persuade us to abandon mind
as fundamental to our explanatory schemes.
What about freedom? Might there be advances in psychophysiology which, as Isaiah Berlin
suggests, would convince us some day that determinism is true, and libertarianism false? He
grants that if such advances took place, they would require a change in our conceptual scheme
that exceeded any which has gone before. Praise and blame would no longer be based on the
presumption that the agent could have acted differently, but would only have the pragmatic
goal of changing her future behavior; predicates like brave, generous, virtuous, which now
imply something about the kinds of choices the person has made, would be transformed into
descriptions on the order of pretty, muscular, agile; our current talk of choosing,
intending, deciding, would have to be replaced by a repertoire of concepts it is impossible now
to imagine (Berlin, 1998). This in itself is no argument against determinism, Berlin remarks,
but a consequence of which its proponents may not be aware.
But it strikes me that, in elaborating how extensive these conceptual changes would have to
be, Berlin is, in fact, presenting an argument against determinism. I would put it this way: if no
empirical discoveries could persuade us to abandon the concept of mind, then, because of the
conceptual links between freedom and mind, freedom, too, is ineliminable. The domain of
reasons is also, and necessarily, the domain of agency: what we ought to do if we believe p
and we want x; what we ought to choose given that we value y. There cannot be any general
considerations of a metaphysical nature that would rule out freedom altogether any more than
there can be general conditions for ruling out mind, though particular circumstances may
lessen freedom and mitigate moral responsibility. Reason and reasons, mind, belief and desire,
choice, freedom, moral agency and moral responsibility are all of a piece; banish one and out
go the others. Where we presume of another creature that she has a mind something like our

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own, we also presume that she is an agentthough both presumptions are, to an extent,
defeasible. The revision in our conceptual scheme Berlin has in mind would not be the sort
that makes understanding between different human cultures particularly dif cult. It would not
require a change from one conceptual scheme to another, but, impossibly, evacuating ourselves
from the domain of concepts, of reason, altogether. No one would be left to argue about free
will.
Some years ago Strawson famously argued for a version of libertarianism along similar
lines. About ourselves and each other we know that we sometimes have intentions and do what
we do deliberately. We also know that we often make mistakes, have accidents, do things that
have harmful consequences which we didnt intend, take aim at the right person but hit the
wrong one because we werent careful enough, aim at the wrong person mistaking her for the
right person, save the persons life who later murders our friend, and so on. When someone has
harmed us and we assume it was intentional, we are, quite naturally, angry and resentful. But if
we discover it was unintentional in some way, we often forgive.
But sometimes we judge a person to be so mentally de cient or otherwise incapacitated that
we think it inappropriate to hold her responsible at all: she is not subject to moral judgement;
she is not an agent, we implicitly say. There are degrees of agency, and no clear line to be
drawn between innocence and guilt. But to the degree that we nd someone totally
incapacitated in this way, we take towards her what Strawson calls a non-reactive, objective
attitude; we do not blame, resent or forgive (1974, p. 83).
Could this always be our attitude towards other persons? Strawson asks. Can we seriously
imagine adopting such an attitude as a result of a conviction that determinism is true? Is it
possible for us to nd evidence suf cient to persuade us that a non-reactive attitude would be,
in all cases, the rational stance? We cant answer this without considering what we mean by
rationality. The unfortunate division that has often been made in the history of western thought
between reason and passion suggests an ideal of reason as cold, uninvolved, impersonal. But
this is reason denatured. Rationality is a feature of human beings, who are by nature bound
together by ties of need, love, obligation, commitment, responsibility. Never to have a reactive
attitude towards others would mean not treating anyone fully as a person, able to engage with
oneself in the special ways that people do with each other. It would entail an intolerable
isolationto try to regard oneself with such non-reactive objectivity, I might add, as someone
who never makes choices, never acts intentionally, with generosity or sel shness, courage,
kindness or cruelty, would be self-annihilating. Strawson concludes,
When we do in fact adopt [a non-reactive] attitude in a particular case our doing so is not
the consequence of a theoretical conviction which might be expressed as Determinism is
the case, but is a consequence of our abandoning, for different reasons in different cases,
the ordinary inter-personalattitudes (p. 83).

This is a different way of putting my earlier argument: the language of mindwhich is presumed by the moral conceptsand a strictly physicalist language are mutually irreducible;
both are required for the living of our human lives and for the explanations of human action.
Now my skeptic takes a different tack altogether: Might we not be able one day to make
machines so much like us that wed have to attribute to them everything we do to ourselves:
belief, desire, emotion, choice? This question is empirical, I believe. But if we made such
machines it would follow not that we do not have minds, but that they do.
In summary, choice, will, free choice exist where there are certain complex combinations of
other mental states and processes. They are compatible with determinism, understood as the
thesis that every event has a cause. They are not only compatible with causal determinism, they

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also presume it. I am arguing for freedom not merely as a subjective feeling, as Knight (1946)
claims, but as marking out a domain within which choices and actions are free, relatively free:
every action is performed under some constraints, one of which is the fact that every causal
sequence initiates in things that were not chosen; choice shades off into non-choice, as the
capacity for moral agency emerges slowly in creatures who are not moral agents to begin with.
Before going further, I need to make a quali cation in my discussion about reasons that will
become relevant later when we come to forgiveness. Since we can give reasons for our own
behavior as we can for that of others (and for that of others as for that of ourselves), talk of
reasons might misleadingly suggest that only the third-person point of view is relevant in the
descriptions and explanations of human action. This is not the case, for the rst-person point of
view adds something crucial, namely the way a situation feels and looks to the agent, its
subjectivity. The concept of reasons does not exhaust that of intelligibility: we often nd
someones behavior intelligible even though we judge it irrational (Goldie, 2000). Understanding, in short, calls for empathy, my felt imagination for what it might be like to be in your
shoes, or mine. It is intelligibility, it seems to me, that forgiveness demands.
One might ask: if freedom and causal determinism are not incompatible, why should we be
so convinced they are? I believe it is because we are in the grip of one or another of several
confused pictures; enumerating them amounts to a brief recapitulation of the discussion above:
1)
2)
3)

4)
5)
6)

we think of causes as forces, rather than as generalization, which describe and allow us to
predict certain regularities; or
we think of predictability as presuming mechanisms; or
we assume that the real explanations of all events and processes are entirely physicalist. If
this were true, if the concepts of mind were to be shown unnecessary, then the concept of
choice, belonging as it does to the language of mind, would have no place. Here is where
my argument about explanatory dualism belongs, for if no translation from the language
merely of matter to that of minds is possible, then reasons are an indispensable part of the
explanatory vocabulary for human actions; and, rather than undercutting the notion of
choice, reason is essential to it; or
we de ne freedom as existing only where all causes of an action are entirely within us.
This, I have argued, turns out to be an incoherent idea; or
we assume that free choice presumes full consciousness of all the factors that enter into
that choice. Surely that is never possible, but free choice makes no such presumption; or
we assume that all mental determinants of action are unconscious. But that is contrary to
the psychoanalytic enterprise, one of the goals of which is to render some unconscious
motivations available to conscious awareness.

Freedom and constraint

I have argued that there are no facts of a general, metaphysical nature which rule freedom out.
In particular, causal determinism is not itself such a fact. As creatures with minds, we always
assume agency and attribute it to others, though as Strawson points out, and every judge and
jury know, it can be challenged in any number of ways. Nor can we claim, with Sartre (1956),
that as conscious beings we are always and necessarily free. That claim assumes a position on
the mind body question that is untenable, and it goes against what we know about the ubiquity
of unconscious processes. Freud was one sort of absolutist about freedom; Sartre another. Both
sorts rely on arguments about the relations between mind and body, reasons and causes, that
are mistaken.

FREEDOM AND FORGIVENESS

525

But I turn now to particular sorts of constraint that extenuate or exculpate in particular cases.
Extreme deprivation or the threat of severe punishment, for example, may present us with
options all of which are virtually intolerable. In that case our choosing one option over
another does not re ect anything we really desire or want. Sophie is asked to choose which of
her two children shall be murdered and told that, if she doesnt choose, both will be. She
chooses her daughter, but it isnt a free choice. In fact, it is scarcely a choice at all.
In a central tradition of western liberalism, freedom refers primarily to an absence of
external constraint on ones activities by other persons, as in the case of Sophie. Mill (1981)
referred to this as negative freedom. Such freedom can be only a matter of degree and
compromise, since a society without any externally imposed constraints would in the end result
precisely in peoples depriving each other of freedom in one way or another.
Side by side with this concept of negative freedom is a concept of positive freedom, which
derives, as Berlin puts it,
from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master. I wish my life and
decisions to depend on myself, not external forces of whatever kind . . . I wish to be a
subject, not an object, to be moved by reasons, by conscious purposes, which are my own
(Sartre, 1956), not causes which affect me, as it were, from outside (1998, p. 203).

I wish to be autonomous, to be governed only by rules or laws which I give to myself. (We saw
earlier that, depending on how it is articulated, the concept of autonomy leads to paradoxical
conclusions.) Sometimes freedom in this sense is spelled out as the freedom to realize ones
potential, or speak, worship and pursue happiness as one conceives it. The contrast between
negative and positive freedom is sometimes put as a distinction between freedom from and
freedom to. The second sort also can be only a matter of degree.
My focus, however, is not on external but internal factors that diminish both freedom from
constraint and freedom to do what one wants. That there are such, typically conceived as
passions that master us, or compulsions and addictions that act on us as if they were external
forces, is an old idea. Psychoanalysis has helped us understand how compulsions and
addictions work; it also explores more subtle ways in which neurosis impairs agency. Berlin
suggests that autonomy requires being moved by conscious purposes, but it isnt the
unconscious per se that causes trouble, rather unconscious processes of particular kinds,
typically those involving intrapsychic con ict and outdated, unrevised beliefs that signal
anxiety has kept in place.
What follows is by no means an exhaustive list of the inner constraints on freedom, but
some of the most prevalent.
1)

Unconscious intrapsychic con ict, which interferes with the forming of coherent desires,
not merely because the con ict is unconscious, but because the con icting desires cancel
each other out. For example, you choose graduate school because you want a life that is
better than your mothers, but unconsciously you feel anxious about this wish and so manage to fail your qualifying examinations. One might say failing the examinations was what
you wanted; it is what you intended. But I would prefer to say that, though there were
(inarticulate) desires, there was nothing we can appropriately call intention. Failing the exams wasnt what you wanted; you wanted, perhaps, punishment for your competitive
wishes, or to hold on to your old relationship to your mother in a way that you feel your
success would make impossible. Or your wish to succeed was compromised by guilt over
leaving your mother behind. Since these wishes were being kept from awareness, the sort

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2)

3)
4)

5)
6)
7)

Marcia Cavell
of appraisal of reality and re ection on how best to achieve ones desires that is required
for choice were not possible.
Signal anxiety, which can trigger into play old defensive maneuvers that occlude the differences between this situation and the traumatic one that is unconsciously brought to
mind. Not only is the perception of the present clouded; but also the defensive action, or
thought, in which you engage is typically automatic, and the reasons for it hidden from
you.
Repression, dissociation and splitting, which also close down perception, and prevent that
integration of perception, desire and belief that allows us to consider one desire or perception in the light of the others, to weigh competing evaluations and desires.
Unconscious identi cations, which can lead to confusions about self and other such that it
is unclear to the agent whether it is she who thinks this thought and desires this object, or
rather the person with whom she is unconsciously identifying in her need, perhaps, to keep
her close.
Con icts about knowing: for example, the person who distrusts her own thoughts and
perceptions because of the risks she unconsciously believes they carry for her relations
with others.
Phantasies of omnipotence that hold one back from action, or that lead one to actions that
have peculiarly wayward consequences.
A rigid need to maintain control over oneself, other persons, and the world.

About this nal constraint: it may be that an openness to our own unconscious, a willingness to
be receptive, is itself conducive to agency, and that choosing as always a deliberative, controlled, fully conscious activity represents only one sort of freedom. We have evidence that
creativity, for example, requires an ability to let go; that the spontaneous gestureas distinct
from the one that is overly controlled in the fear of a loss of control, or that is compulsive or
arbitraryis one way in which freedom often shows itself. In such spontaneous moments we
may feel that something beyond ourselves has taken over, as the word inspiration, breathing
in, suggests. Yet inspirations often arise from what is most truly ours.
All the vicissitudes of choice just discussed erode the ability to know what one wants, to
hold different and discordant desires in mind at once and re ect on them, to assess the future as
future and the past as past, to make appraisals of both, oneself, that are fairly realistic to the
present, to consider the possible consequences of ones actions. Of course, we must always act
in the fact of uncertainty; it is because this is so that life can only be understood backwards. We
are never free of intrapsychic con ict; but we may be relatively so in certain areas of our lives,
and more so in others than we have been.
Recently Rangell asked should we, with Brenner and George Klein, reject the tripartite
structural view, substituting the whole person for the ego; or should we, as Rangell himself
urges, consider the ego as the agent of action? He writes, The question of the person or the
self or the ego as agent remains unsolved, even unaddressed, in most groups (2003, p. 1132). I
suggest recasting this as a question about when and to what extent we can be considered agents.
So recast, there can be no clear-cut answer. Agents are persons, by de nition, it seems to me;
but like freedom, agency is a matter of degree.
In the anti-libertarian passages quoted earlier, Freud conceives a life story as a sequence of
causally related events from which, because they are causally related, freedom is absent. But
he also taught us to think of the mind as an ordering of experience in which the present
includes the past in a number of complicated ways: the past is repressed, interpreted in the light
of trauma, reinterpreted through insight, compressed into screen memories, registered below

FREEDOM AND FORGIVENESS

527

the threshold of consciousness in a way that continues to set off signals of anxiety which are
later inappropriate to the dangers at hand. That we always to some extent understand the
present in terms of the past allows moments and events to have meaning for us in a way that is
uniquely possible for human beings. The narrativists are on to this idea, though I dont think
it has the implications they often draw, namely that the past is merely something we construct.
Rather, the past helps construct the way we receive and go to the world, as, in a never-ending
cycle, the present helps us construct our understandings of the past. In the grip of the past we
may make choices in which freedom is reduced, but neither the past nor causality itself is the
thief.
Is freedom compatible with psychic determinism as Freud understands it? Yes, if
determined means caused. Yes, also if it means motivated, embedded in the natural world
in complex ways. I agree with Freud when he writes, If we give way to the view that a part of
our psychical functioning cannot be explained by purposive ideas, we are failing to appreciate
the extent of determination in mental life (1901, p. 240). But Freud fails to appreciate the
ambiguities in both determinism and freedom which admit degrees.
I have referred in this paper to the idea that we are embedded, enmeshed, in the external
world, and that, while this embeddedness may seem to argue against freedom, it is actually one
of its necessary conditions. Let me summarize some of the ways in which we are embedded,
for they are relevant to the subject of forgiveness: 1) minded creatures begin life as organisms
that have some of the features requisite to mind but that are not themselves mental in character.
As adult agents we are a composite of the given and the made; 2) who we are, what we do, even
how we form our desires, are part of a causal story, a story that, as we grow, comes more and
more to have meaning for us; 3) the external world has an impact on us: if we are in the
Kalahari and I perceive a lion charging toward us, it may well be that there is a lion charging
toward us; 4) we have an impact on the external world. Referring to the last two points,
philosophers have often said, in a kind of short-hand, that as believers we go toward the world,
attempting to adapt ourselves to it, but as desirers and agents we try to adapt the world to us.
The embeddedness is both essential to the forming of intention, and responsible for
innumerable ways in which intentions go astray. I dont know what an absolutely free creature
would be, but acting as agents who sometimes make choices does not require absolute
freedom.

Freedom and forgiveness

I should probably have been unable to do anything with my generosity; neither forgive,
because the person who offended me might have been following the laws of nature, and
you cant forgive the laws of nature; nor forget, because even if it was according to the
laws of nature, it was still an affront (Dostoevski, 1972, p. 20).

What does forgiveness have to do with free will? And why should it interest psychoanalysts?
To the rst I answer that without free will there can be, as I said above, no room for the concept
of either resentment or forgiveness, since it is only moral agents, sometimes acting freely and
with intention, toward whom both resentment and forgiveness are appropriate. If it turns out
that what we thought was a moral agent is really a force of nature, or a person who, by virtue of
insanity or dementia, or some marked genetic de ciency, cannot be held responsible for what
she does, then moral blame, moral responsibility and forgiveness are not in the picture.
The answer to the second is that, as I see it, the capacity to forgive both calls on and enlarges
the capacity for choice. Why forgiveness should interest psychoanalysts was a question put to
me by an analyst on reading an earlier version of this paper: Isnt forgiveness a religious

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Marcia Cavell

notion? she asked. I agreed that it is religious, and also ethical. But psychoanalysis is replete
with ethical notions. Consider gratitude, to which forgiveness is related. Both forgiveness and
gratitude require an emotional understanding of the other as a person like, but separate from,
oneself as a center of agency with her own subjective take on the world, her own needs and
interests, outside ones omnipotent control. Forgiving either another or oneself requires
relinquishing phantasies of omnipotence and omniscience, and seeing the recipient of
forgiveness as larger than the deed to be forgiven. Both gratitude and forgiveness call for an
ability to love that is informed by these understandings; knowledge alone is not enoughone
might know one has been given something of value, and not feel gratitude; might know there
are extenuating circumstances, and not forgive.
Self-forgiveness in particular, with which the analyst is clearly concerned, is foreclosed so
long as one holds on to impossible self-ideals and the masochistic need for self-punishment; it
is facilitated by compassion for the person one was earlier, and a self-respect that allows her to
distinguish herself as agent from the deed she did. The emotion of shame makes this dif cult,
for shame tends to spread over the whole self; it does not focus on the particular action of
which one is ashamed. It is all too easy, furthermore, to move from a particular shame to a
general sense of shame, which is one of the reasons that shame is so destructive an emotion
(Stocker and Hegeman, 1996, pp. 221 6).
Forgiveness requires a certain letting go of the past. We say that to forgive is to forget, but
that is not necessarily what happens. Margalit (2002) contrasts two biblical images of
forgiveness: the rst is a complete blotting out of the past, something only God, as we might
conceive Him, can do; the second is the covering over of a stainits there, you see it, but, if
you forgive, you dont act on it. Akhtar remarks that
we repeat not what we have repressed, but what we remember in a particular way . . . to let
go of grudges, we do not need to recall what has been forgotten, but rather to experience
a mental ampli cation, elaboration, and revision of what indeed is remembered and
re-enacted over and over again (2002, p. 181).

We might think of forgiving not as a forgetting, but a remembering that accepts the past as past
and that it cannot be undonein this way it is like mourning. Nor, of course, is forgiving a matter of denying that harm was done. In this sense, forgiveness, or rather what looks like forgiveness, may come too early in the psychoanalytic process.
Is forgiving something we can will? I doubt it, any more than we can will mourning.
Margalit suggests that forgiveness is a case of overcoming resentment and vengefulness, of
mastering anger and humiliation. Such overcoming is a result of a long effort, rather than a
decision to do something on the spot (2002, p. 204). We can will to do things that may bring
forgiveness: trying to understand why someone has acted as she did, or to nd some empathic
connection that reveals her fully as a person. In the case of oneself, this may mean an emotional
recalling of what one felt in crucial circumstances of ones earlier life; a curiosity about what it
might have been in the world to which one was trying to accommodate oneself; and what we
call self-knowledge.
It is not the part of the analyst to forgive, perhaps, but it is her role to facilitate the patients
felt acknowledgment of what the patient has suffered and done, encouraging a larger
perspective that allows the patient to be compassionate for herself. I think of forgiveness as
involving an appreciation for the ways in which, as I said above in the section on free will, we
are both agents and sufferers, embedded in a world beyond us, and that between agent and
sufferer there is no clear line. I call this a kind of empathic objectivity, different from
Strawsons objectivity in that mine is reactive: it regards the other person as a person. It does

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not withdraw agency from her, but sets her and her doings in a larger context. She is not the
center of the world, nor the ultimate source of her actions. The capacity for self-forgiveness,
then, is diminished by narcissism and developed through acknowledging the limits of ones
power, our interdependence with other persons in an uncertain world that is, in good measure
but not entirely, out of our hands. Feelings of guilt have their essential place in the process of
self-forgiveness, but past a certain point they narrow ones focus, compared to the opening and
receptivity that are a part of gratitude and forgiveness. And just this sort of openness, I have
suggested, enhances agency.
Is everything, in principle, forgivable? This is a question beyond the scope of this paper. But
were we to address it we might want to look at the novels of Dostoevski and at Arendts work
on Eichmann (1963). In The brothers Karamazov Dostoevski describes acts for which he thinks
forgiveness would be both impossible and grotesque. Arendt argued that Eichmanns actions
were such as to put him outside the human community and beyond the possibility of
forgiveness. Catastrophic mental impairment renders forgiveness irrelevant because the
object is not a moral agent; monumental cruelty may rather make forgiveness impossible.
At the beginning of this paper I said that a part of wisdom is to see the inevitability of the
past. I asked, but if the past was inevitable, why not the future also? My answer has been that
there is choice in both cases. Ones past actions were not, in truth, inevitable, if that means
there was no choicethough in understanding your life backwards you may come to see you
had less choice than you thought. From your rst-person point of view, reconstructing the
narrative of your life, you see that, given your history, your assumptions, your fears, your
feelings, of course you did what you did; and you see that some of what you had thought were
your choices were more compelled than you realized. You express this with Ah, now I see!
You are not saying that your action was forced, or completely beyond your control, but that it is
now intelligible in a way it was not before. Sometimes you discover what you did through
talking with someone else who may have a better sense of the context of a particular emotion
or action of yours than you yourself do. She may have helped you put parts of your story
together that, for you, were isolated, or register something to which you are responding yet for
various reasons have not yet acknowledged. I take this to be something that happens in any
psychoanalysis.
We are not always mistaken in thinking we are free, responsible agents. But we do make
mistakes in both directions: we often think we have choice where we dont; we often think we
have less choice than we do. We often believe, falsely, that we were the sole agents of our
misfortune; we often fail to see the agency we have had. The difference between past and
present choice is that some of the doors now in front of us open to genuine options, and
sometimes there is nothing to stop us if we choose to go through one rather than another. The
doors behind us have closed. We cannot change the past itself, but we can come to remember,
understand, and tell it differently, which may change how we live our lives now, precisely
because we are the sort of things in the universe that have minds, sometimes do things for
reasons, make choices, ask for and receive forgiveness.

Translations of summary
Freiheit und Vergebung. In der Geschichte der Philosophie und politischen Gedankens bedeutet Freiheit eine
Reihe verschiedener Dinge. Die Autorin erortert einige dieser Bedeutungen und ihre Relevanz fur die
psychoanalytische Theorie. Das allgemeine Argument gegen Freiheit, das in der Gedankengeschichte
hervorgebracht wurde und in Freud sein Echo fand, ist die These des kausalen Determinismus; aber es wird
hier gedrangt, dass dies an sich keine Bedrohung der Freiheit im Sinne des Worts ist, das fur eine moralische
Instanz gebraucht wird: eine freie Wahl ist eine, die zum Teil zumindest durch Grunde bedingt und relativ

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Marcia Cavell

unbehindert von ,,externen wie auch ,,internen Kraften ist. Jedoch, da die Handelnden in einem kausalem
Zusammenhang eingebettet sind, die sowohl die physische Welt als auch andere Leute mit einschliesst, konnen
die Handlungsfahigkeit und Freiheit in unzahligen Arten kompromitiert werden. Weder Freiheit noch
Handlungsfahigkeit ist eine Bedingung, die wir absolut haben oder nicht haben, sondern es ist eine Frage des
Ausmasses. Psychoanalytische Therapie arbeitet darauf hin, die Handlungsfahigkeit auszubauen und die
Zwa nge gewisser innerer Krafte zu verringern. In dem Sinn wie es hier de niert wird ist Objektivitat eine
Haltung, die unsere Eingebundenheit in der Welt akzeptiert. Mit Objektivitat kann sowohl Vergebung als auch
Selbstvergebungeinhergehen, was wiederum die Handlungsfahigkeit starkt.
Libertad y Perdon. En la historia del pensamiento loso co y poltico, la libertad ha signi cado una cantidad
de cosas diferentes. La autora considera varios de estos signi cados y su relevancia en la teora psicoanaltica.
El argumento general contra la libertad que se ha montado en la historia del pensamiento, y de la que hace eco
Freud, es la tesis del determinismo causal; pero aqu se alega que esto en s no constituye amenaza alguna para
la libertad, en el sentido de en el sentido de poder actuar como instancia moral: una libre escogencia es aquella
que hasta cierto punto es causada por unas razones, y que relativamente no viene coartada por fuerzas
externas ni internas. Sin embargo, porque los que actuan como instancias estan empotrados en un nexo
causal que incluye tanto el mundo fsico como a los demas, la instancia y la libertad pueden quedar
comprometidas de innumerables maneras. Ni la libertad ni la instancia son condiciones que tengamos
absolutamente o de las que carezcamos absolutamente, sino que es cuestion de grados. La terapia
psicoanaltica trabaja en direccion de expandir la capacidad de instancia y disminuir la coartada de
determinadas fuerzas internas. De acuerdo con la de nicion que se usa aqu, la objetividad es una actitud que
acepta nuestro empotramiento en el mundo. Con la objetividad podran venir el perdon y el autoperdo
n, que a
su vez promueven la instancia.
Liberte et pardon. La liberte a recu des signi cations differences dans lhistoire de la philosophie et de la
pensee politique. Lauteur examine certaines de ces signi cations et leur pertinence par rapport a` la theorie
psychanalytique. Largument prevalent qui apparat contre la liberte dans lhistoire de la pensee, et qui est
retrouve chez Freud, est la the`se du determinisme causal ; mais nous defendons ici lidee que ce determinisme
de menace pas en soi la liberte en tant que notion necessaire a` la capacite morale a` agir : le libre choix est un
choix qui est determine, jusqua` un certain point, par les raisons que lon se donne, ce qui est relativement
independant aussi bien des forces internes qu externes . Dans la mesure ou` plusieurs facteurs peuvent
se trouver impliques dans un reseau de connexions incluant aussi bien le monde physique que les autres
personnes, la capacite dagir et la liberte peuvent se trouver compromises dinnombrables facons. La liberte,
comme la capacite dagir, ne constituent pas des conditions que nous possedons absolument, ou dont nous
manquons de facon absolue, mais sont soumises a` des degres. La therapeutique psychanalytiquetravaille dans
le sens dune extension de la capacite dagir et dune diminution des contraintes de certaines forces internes.
Dans le sens de ni ici, lobjectivite est une attitude qui accepte notre engagement dans le monde. Lobjectivite
peut amener avec elle le pardon et le pardon de soi-meme, ce qui a` son tour favorise la capacite dagir.
Liberta` e perdono. Nella storia della loso a e del pensiero politico, la parola liberta` ha signi cato molte
cose diverse. L autrice di questo articolo prende in considerazione molti di questi signi cati e la loro attinenza
alla teoria della psicoanalisi. Largomento principale che nella storia del pensiero si e` contrapposto allidea di
liberta`, e che ha trovato eco in Freud, e` la tesi del determinismo causale; qui tuttavia sinsiste che questultimo,
di per se, non e` una minaccia alla liberta` nel senso della parola che si riferisce allistanza morale: la libera
scelta e` quella causata, in qualche misura, da forze sia interne sia esterne. Tuttavia, poiche gli agenti sono
radicati in un nesso causale che comprende sia il mondo sico sia le altre persone, la capicita` di agire e la
liberta` possono essere compromesse in innumerevoli modi. Ne la liberta` ne la capicita` di agire sono una
condizione che possediamo o perdiamo in assoluto, ma una questione di grado. La terapia psicoanalitica opera
al ne di ampliare la capacita` di agire e diminuire le costrizioni di certe forze interne. Nel senso qui de nito,
loggettivita` e` un atteggiamento che accetta il nostro inserimento nel mondo. Assieme alloggettivita` puo`
venire il perdono, sia per gli altri sia per se stessi, che a sua volta favorisce lazione.

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