Responsibility avoidance
Part II of Irvin Yalom's Existential Psychotherapy (1980) is called "Freedom", and its first chapter is "Responsibility". Yalom takes the word in Sartre's sense: to be responsible is to be the author of one's own life. Most of the chapter is about how people manage not to notice this.
The core of it is a section titled "Responsibility Avoidance: Clinical Manifestations". It opens with an observation about the field. The new therapies looked like a riot of competing schools, yet Yalom finds one thing they share: an emphasis on taking personal responsibility.
Defenses, not failings
Yalom does not treat avoidance as a moral failing. He treats it as a defense, like the others clinicians know. He describes several: compulsivity, handing responsibility to someone else, denial, avoiding autonomous action, and trouble with decisions.
These are not categories to sort oneself into. Each one comes from the consulting room, with a person attached.
A force that is not me
Compulsivity, in Yalom's account, builds a psychic world in which a person does not experience freedom. Life runs under the sway of a force felt as alien, "not-me".
His example is Bernard, a twenty-five-year-old salesman. Bernard was driven in sex, in work, even in leisure. Once he failed to arrange a meeting with a woman, having phoned too late on purpose. He sighed with relief. Now he could read and get a good night's sleep, which was what he had wanted all along.
The drive had decided, so Bernard did not have to.
Someone else's hands
"Many individuals avoid personal responsibility by displacing it to another."
— Irvin Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy, chapter 6, "Responsibility Avoidance: Clinical Manifestations"
In therapy the other person is often the therapist. Bernard again: he did not think about his problem between sessions. He stored up material and dumped it in Yalom's lap. When this was pointed out, he had an answer ready. Working it through in advance, he said, would strip the sessions of spontaneity.
Things that happened to me
Denial takes two forms in the chapter. The first is the innocent victim. This is a person who suffers from events she herself set in motion, without seeing her own hand in them.
Clarissa joined one of Yalom's groups to work on her trouble with intimacy. Soon after, she went back into analysis and did not mention it to the group. Her analyst called the group "acting-out" and refused to discuss it with Yalom. The members pressed her, and she felt victimized again. In the end she left "due to circumstances beyond her control". Yalom reads the episode as her core problem in miniature.
The second form is losing control. A person goes briefly out of their mind. In that state nobody holds them accountable, not even themselves. Yalom insists that on careful examination such behavior is by no means disorderly. It has a purpose, and it pays.
The call that was not made
The quietest form is avoiding autonomous action. Paul, depressed and between jobs, went to New York for interviews. They filled six hours of a three-day trip. He had many friends in the city. He spent two nights looking at the telephone, wishing they would call. None of them knew he was in town.
Yalom and Paul went through the explanations: no energy, too humiliated to ask, they would think he only called when he needed them. Another one surfaced slowly. Paul did not want to see that his comfort rested in his own hands. Yalom told him it was frightening to be one's own father. Paul came back to that phrase for the rest of his therapy.
Where it stops
A chapter like this could read as an accusation. Yalom addresses this himself, in a section called "Limits of Responsibility". It opens with a doubt. Responsibility works in therapy, he writes, but how far does the truth go?
He does not pretend the world is soft. Environment, genetics and chance play a role in every life, and he borrows Sartre's phrase for it, the "coefficient of adversity". Poor health, a handicap or a thin education can keep anyone from a job or a partner. What remains, on his account, is narrower. A person is still responsible for what they make of the handicap, and for the stance they take toward it.
He turns the same doubt on his own profession. Many therapists, he admits, preach responsibility and privately believe in circumstances. He does not exclude himself. Such a therapist soon agrees that the patient is "a casualty of destiny" and ends up recommending singles clubs.
Which of the things I say about my life do I say so that I do not have to be its author?
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