Freedom

We are at our core, responsible for ourselves.  Sartre said that we are the authors of ourselves.  Through the choices we make and do not make; our action and inaction; we ultimately design ourselves.  The responsibility for this design is ours alone.  We are, as Sartre stated, “condemned to freedom.”

Our freedom extends beyond our individual life design.  We are the ones who provide form and meaning not only to our internal world but the external one as well.  We come face to face with outside world only as it is processed through our senses and perception and psychological filter.  Reality is not at all as we imagined in our youth—we do not enter into and (ultimately leave) a well-structured world.  Instead we play our role; our part in constituting that world.  We assign office and function to our world as though it appears to have an independent existence.

Because of this reality, the ground beneath us is not certain.  If there is no structure, then what, pray tell is beneath us?  Existentialists call it, Das Nichts—nothingness; the chasm, the abyss of freedom.  At the river’s edge of this lake of nothing are deep currents of anxiety.

While the word freedom rarely flows in the clinical relationship between client and therapist, its derivatives—responsibility, willing, wishing, deciding—are inescapable foci of attention in the therapeutic relationship.