The freedom to act, think, feel and be are variously understood within the psychotherapeutic traditions current today.
It is generally agreed among psychodynamic therapists that freedom on a personal level is limited not only by facticity but by the extent to which we act without conscious knowledge of what we are doing.
Freud’s hope was that by making the unconscious aspect of mental life fully and clearly conscious one could increase one’s domain of free choice.
Existential therapists have a different view of freedom, believing that freedom is the burden of being self-accountable for our sense of the meaning of our existence and of the way in which we relate to other humans who also bear the same burden of consciousness.
