Bringing Beauvoir Back – How Her Ideas Can Help Us Find Freedom in The 21st Century.

(Final project option 2d)

PART 1: TWITTER THREAD

1. Simone De Beavoir says that humans are a combination of facticity (material reality) and transcendence (freedom). You are oppressed when others act on you as a facticity, treating you like an object & denying your freedom. This oppression is exhausting, isolating, and cruel (⅛). 
2.  “The trick of tyrants is to enclose a man in the immanence of his facticity and to try to forget that man is …a movement toward the future, a project. …he thus arrogates to himself the right to treat them like cattle.”  Objectifying enables justifying oppression. (2/8) 
3.  Here is the provocative claim: if you have repeatedly experienced this kind of objectification and denied your freedom, you may begin to internalize these ideas and start to limit your own freedom. Beauvoir claims that some (like “the western woman”) … (3/8) 
4. … “consent” to their oppression by having the ability to liberate themselves and choosing not to. And…I agree. To some extent, we start to restrict ourselves and limit our own freedom above and beyond the way our situation already does. (4/8)
5.  I will say that when I first read this claim I did not take it well. You feel this too. Upon further introspection I found that I was resistant to anyone telling me I may be limiting myself because usually such comments come from a place of ignorance and minimization. (⅝)
6.  However, discomfort is often not a good enough reason to look away. The idea that individuals limit themselves by denying their ability to change their situation is not one that is exclusive to Beavoir. Martin Selgimans theory of learned helplessness makes the same claim. (6/8)
7. This looks different for each person, but you find yourself more comfortable when thinking about the various ways you are restricted than the various ways you have freedom, it may be worth (without judging yourself) exploring ways to break out of this cycle. (⅞)
8. I am no expert, but I am going to take some ideas from Beauvoir that helped me reacquaint myself with my freedom and create (i) a video exploring her ideas and explaining how anyone can use them and (ii) a blog on beauvoir-inspired psychotherapy. Find them on my website! (8/8)

PART 2: YOUTUBE VIDEO

PART 3: BLOG

“[T]he purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free.” (May, 1981, p. 19) 

I am in my first class back in person after a year and a half of online school. Appropriate to my feelings on this strange occasion, this is a class on existentialism. As we look through the syllabus I learn that this class has a focus on public philosophy – the process of making philosophy accessible, applicable, and integrated into the everyday. At the end of class, we go around the room and share where we think public philosophy is most needed. While in most first-day-of-class-icebreaker-go-around-the-room type of activities I am guilty of making up answers that I have absolutely no conviction about, for this one, I really mean what I say. I share that I think we need to integrate philosophical ideas more with the field of psychotherapy. 

After a semester of reading, writing, and discussing existential philosophy – I only feel more passionately about this. Therefore, for my final project, I am returning to this original proposition. I will attempt to take philosophical ideas, more specifically those of freedom and oppression by Simone De Beauvoir, and make recommendations for the field of therapy. 

Let me say that this is an absolute urgency. Western psychotherapy has a tendency to make assumptions about the needs of a client, pathologize them, and try to look at them as an individual cut off from the systems that act on them. This ignores the links between systemic oppression and mental health challenges. Moreover, a power dynamic is maintained between therapist and client by the idea that the therapist holds the knowledge to make a client better. This inevitably does what Simone de Beauvoir identifies as the source of oppression: treating the client as an object, a “facticity,” while erasing their agency to know what is best and make this a reality. Existential therapy must push back against this status quo. It must define the therapist-client relationship as a mutual transcendence wherein the therapist is invested in realizing the clients freedom because it is a prerequisite of their own. 

Ontological freedom is the idea that we have the freedom to make choices, moral freedom is the ability to embrace ontological freedom and use it to live a meaningful life with ethics, purpose, and deep relationships. In the youtube video I created about integrating these ideas into your life, I said that there are five different active steps an individual can take to achieve moral freedom. These were:  

1. Gaining critical consciousness
2. Identifying your goals
3. Giving them sub-goal status and making transcendence your email goal
4. Realizing freedom in your relationships with others 
5. Engaging in resistance and revolt 

Each of these ideas can be integrated into psychotherapy and an experienced practitioner can thoughtfully guide a client struggling with mental health challenges. 

The first three stages all involve leading up to the breakthrough that there is a difference between choice and options. Though one’s options are restricted, this does not mean that they do not have choices. The client must come to the realization of their own transcendence. They must realize that each decision has the power to shape their “self” and their life. Ideas about the fixed self should be replaced with ideas of the self as a constant project under construction. This is not an easy transition, and will require a deep introspection into the unchallenged assumptions that are at the core of a clients self construct. It will require asking the difficult question when a client says “I am like xyz” of “what evidence do you have that you are this way?.” 

In the last two stages, therapists must take on the challenge of understanding their client’s complex relationships with the systems and people around them and empowering them to find freedom in this through deliberate action. Returning to the clients understanding of their oppression, these stages should focus on helping them find a deeper sense of meaning and purpose by dismantling the systems that oppress them. They must also begin doing this in their close relationships and find their own freedom through the freedom of others. 

The overarching goal of this therapy is to help clients live responsibly and intentionally. Several existential psychologists are already doing this. Rollo May’s wish to will theory suggests that only once we know what we want we can live by it, and he helps clients achieve this level of clarity about what they want. Otto Rank claims that our problem is not that we don’t know what we will but that we don’t know how to will. He works with clients to build the ability to will. However, what is lacking is a holistic approach that integrates an understanding of oppressive systems with styles of therapy that currently help clients achieve a sense of moral freedom. This is what I believe Beavoir’s philosophy can add to the conversation and allow us to achieve.