Wish and will
Chapter 7 of Irvin Yalom's Existential Psychotherapy (1980) is called "Willing". It follows the chapter on responsibility, and it starts where that one stops. Knowing that you are the author of your life is one thing. Writing the next line is another.
The previous chapter is summed up on its own page, on responsibility avoidance. This one is about the step after it.
The organ of the future
Yalom opens the chapter with a borrowed phrase. Hannah Arendt called the will the mental "organ of the future", in the way memory is the organ of the past. Yalom calls the phrase felicitous and builds on it. The will is what carries a person from knowing into doing.
He spends the first part of the chapter on the thinkers who shaped his view: Otto Rank, Leslie Farber and Rollo May. From May's Love and Will he takes a pairing. Wish gives the will its warmth and its content. Will gives the wish direction. One without the other goes wrong in opposite ways.
Most of what follows is about the first half of that pair.
A section called "Wish"
The will, in Yalom's reading, does not start from nothing. Before anyone can decide, there has to be something to decide about. That something is a wish. The section called "Wish" takes up people for whom this first step is missing.
Yalom describes patients who, asked what they want, do not know. He mentions the urge to shout at them, "Don't you ever want anything?" And then he turns to what this does to the people around them.
"The wish-blocked individual has enormous social difficulties."
— Irvin D. Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy (New York: Basic Books, 1980), chapter 7, "Willing", section "Wish", p. 303
Others feel the same urge to shout, he goes on. A person without wishes of their own has no opinions and no inclinations to offer. They come to live on the wishes of others. In the end those others grow tired of supplying wish and imagination for two.
Not an incapacity
Yalom does not leave it as a portrait of an empty person. "Incapacity", he writes, is too strong a word. More often the wish is there, and the person distrusts it or pushes it down.
He lists the reasons, each in a patient's voice. Some decide it is safer not to want. Wanting makes a person vulnerable, and one who never wishes can never be weak. Some go numb to their inner life, so that nothing they wanted can disappoint them. Some wait, as children do, for a caretaker who will read their wishes and meet them unspoken. Others fear that a wish said out loud would irritate or drive away the people they depend on. So they do not allow themselves the right to wish.
None of these is a lack of will. Each is a way of not letting a wish reach the surface, where it would have to be answered.
Under the wish, a feeling
The next subsection goes one layer down. It is called "The Inability to Feel". Yalom notes that the inability to wish is rarely discussed in the clinical literature on its own terms. It is usually part of something wider: the inability to feel.
Many patients, he writes, seem unable to feel, or to put their feelings into words. A wish is made of feeling. If feeling is closed off, the wish has nothing to form from.
That gives the chapter its order. Feeling comes first. From it a wish can form. Only a wish gives the will something to work on. When a person cannot decide, the trouble may lie two steps earlier than the moment of choosing.
And then a decision
After "Wish" comes "Decision—Choice", where a wish turns into an act. Yalom treats it at length, and it deserves a page of its own. Here it is enough that deciding comes last.
Yalom does not offer a method for finding wishes. He looks at what gets in their way: the fear of being exposed, the numbness, the waiting. All of them keep a person safe.
What the chapter leaves open
Read as a whole, the section describes an ordinary scene. Someone is asked where they would like to eat, or what they would like to do on a free evening, or whether they want to stay in a job. The answer is "I don't mind" or "whatever you think". Yalom's point is that this answer is not always modesty. Sometimes it is the only answer available, because the wish never got as far as words.
He does not suggest that everyone who defers to others is blocked. He also does not claim that feelings, once found, produce clear wishes. He describes a sequence and the places it can break.
What do I want, and do I feel it before I start deciding?
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