Abstract
There are two main questions: Why should a counselor advise taking responsibility at all? What senses of responsibility can be helpful for psychotherapy? I will argue that there are minimally three senses of responsibility (role, capacity, and causal responsibility) that are conducive for therapeutic work. To recapitulate, role responsibility implies that the agent has a certain duty or an obligation; causal responsibility means that there is a causal connection between the outcome and the agent’s preceding behavior; and capacity responsibility signifies that the agent has certain capacities (choice, self-control) which make them eligible for moral relations. I will argue that these senses of responsibility serve many vital functions, helping to increase self-awareness, to augment self-control, and to contribute to moral relations, to name just a few.
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Notes
- 1.
There is one passage that could indicate that Freud talks about liability-responsibility in the above-mentioned passage. One of the sentences contains the word “blameless”, and, as we remember, the idea of blame is one of the attributes of liability responsibility. As Freud puts it, “It is true that in the metapsychological sense this bad repressed content does not belong to my ‘ego’—that is, assuming that I am a morally blameless individual—but to an ‘id’” (ibid.). But there is a potential for misinterpretation here. In the original, the phrase “blameless individual” is written as “moralisch untadeliger Mensch”, which literally denotes “morally impeccable person” (1925, 133). The important point is that nothing is said about blaming oneself. What Freud says essentially is that people should not think of themselves as virtuously perfect creatures, who are unable to have any egocentric or devilish impulses. Since people have the id, they are disposed by their nature to have some impulses which they might dislike or which would run counter to moral codes.
- 2.
In the German original text, the word “being” has a counterpart “Wesen”, which could also be translated as “nature” or “character”. “Wenn der – richting verstandene – Trauminhalt nicht die Eingebung fremder Geister ist, so ist er ein Stück von meinem Wesen” (1925, 133).
- 3.
For a detailed discussion of self-knowledge and issues, such as how people can know themselves and to what extent, see (Cassam 2014).
- 4.
A parapraxis (a Freudian slip) is a minor involuntary fault in action (unintended move), memory (forgetfulness), and speech (slips of the tongue, pen), which psychoanalysts interpret as the impact of unconscious forces (subdued memories, repressed wishes, etc.). The ordinary examples are calling someone by the wrong name, misquoting, and misplacing objects. According to Freud, these errors reveal the true thoughts, feelings, desires, and attitudes that people may hold in their unconscious. Freud introduced this concept in his famous work “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life” (1901).
- 5.
Things that the person must remember or can forget concerns research in the ethics of memory (Bernecker and Michaelian 2017). Some scholars argue that people could have a moral obligation to remember certain things or events from the past, such as crimes against humanity to preserve the memory of radical evil (Blustein 2012; Rieff 2016).
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Beliavsky, V. (2020). Three Senses of Responsibility. In: Freedom, Responsibility, and Therapy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41571-6_8
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