How People Change: Psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis on the essence of freedom and the two elements of self-transcendence

Summary by ChatGPT:

Psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis explores how people create themselves and transcend their own limitations over time in his book, "How People Change." Wheelis suggests that personality is defined by actions and behavior that resist change while also offering potential for change. The struggle to balance necessity and freedom is key to personal growth and development. Through introspection, we gain "insight" that serves as a guide in our journey towards growth, but ultimately our change comes through our own efforts and actions.

Highlights that stood out to me below:

• All that you touch you Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change,” Octavia Butler wrote in her poetic insistence that “God is Change
• How to remember this redemptive truth and live it is what the psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis (October 23, 1915–June 14, 2007) explores in his 1973 book How People Change (public library) — a field guide to navigating the landscape of the psyche when “the theories with which we have mapped the soul don’t help.”
• At the heart of the book is Wheelis’s roadmap to freedom, contoured by the negative space around it — our stubborn, scared resistance to change.
• We create ourselves. The sequence is suffering, insight, will, action, change.
• Wheelis observes that our personality is defined by our recursive actions, that “we are what we do,” that “identity is the integration of behavior.
• We are wise to believe it difficult to change, to recognize that character has a forward propulsion which tends to carry it unaltered into the future, but we need not believe it impossible to change. Our present and future choices may take us upon different courses which will in time comprise a different identity… The identity defined by action is not, therefore, the whole person. Within us lies the potentiality for change, the freedom to choose other courses.
• Often we do not choose, but drift into those modes which eventually define us. Circumstances push and we yield. We did not choose to be what we have become, but gradually, imperceptibly, became what we are by drifting into the doing of those things we now characteristically do.
• we may not know what we have been, what we are, or what we are becoming
• Freedom is the awareness of alternatives and of the ability to choose
• It is contingent upon consciousness, and so may be gained or lost, extended or diminished.
• Wheelis cautions against our most common delusion: that insight alone produces change. Insight, rather, is what aims the vector of change, but we move along it by the force of action
• the proportion of necessity to freedom depends upon our tolerance of conflict: the greater our tolerance the more freedom we retain, the less our tolerance the more we jettison; for high among the uses of necessity is relief from tension.
• He cautions against our tendency to reduce the feeling of conflict by constructing our own bounds of necessity — routines, habits, and rigidities that deliberately limit our degrees of freedom in order for life to feel more controllable — but cautions equally against the total absence of structure and control, which unravels life not into freedom but into chaos
• Change becomes possible when we correctly calibrate necessity and freedom. If we are living solely in necessity, if we are conscious solely of the constraints upon our lives, we feel that nothing is possible; but if within the constraint we come to see two possible courses of action, we are living in freedom. At the heart of it is the freedom to change
• We are responsible,” we say, “for what we are. We create ourselves. We have done as we have chosen to do, and by so doing have become what we are. If we don’t like it, tomorrow is another day, and we may do differently.
• Viktor Frankl’s hard-earned conviction that “everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way,
• We must affirm freedom and responsibility without denying that we are the product of circumstance, and must affirm that we are the product of circumstance without denying that we have the freedom to transcend that causality to become something which could not even have been previsioned from the circumstances that shaped us.
• In a condition of struggle and failure we must be able to say “I must try harder” or “I must try differently.” Both views are essential; neither must take precedence by principle. They are analogous to the view of man as free and the view of man as determined. The two do not contend, but reflect the interaction between man and his environment. A change in either makes for a change in outcome. When we say “I must try harder” we mean that the most relevant variable is something within us — intention, will, determination, “meaning it” — and that if this changes, the outcome, even if everything else remains unchanged, will be different. When we say “I must try differently” we mean that the most relevant variable lies in the situation within which intention is being exerted, that we should look to the environment, to the ways it pushes and pulls us, and in this study find the means to alter that interaction.
  • Note: This embodies the idea that we are shared by both psychological and sociological / ecological forces; person-in-environment
• This is self-transcendence, a process of change that originates in one’s heart and expands outward, always within the purview and direction of a knowing consciousness, begins with a vision of freedom, with an “I want to become…,” with a sense of the potentiality to become what one is not. One gropes toward this vision in the dark, with no guide, no map, and no guarantee. Here one acts as subject, author, creator.
• Wheelis captures the heart of the matter:

  What have we to go on? What to cling to? That people may change, that one person can help another. That’s all. Maybe that’s enough.

Thought-provoking questions to consider from article:

1. How does Wheelis define the relationship between freedom and necessity in creating change within oneself?
2. What does Wheelis caution against in terms of our tendency to restrict our range of freedom?
3. How does Wheelis suggest that change can be initiated and sustained?