ABSTRACT
FREE WILL AS A SENSORY-RATIONAL PROCESS, IN CONTRAST TO PSYCHOANALYTIC-HISTORICAL AND GESTALT-SITUATIONAL DETERMINISTIC ONES It is not that too few before me have written on the topic of free will but, rather, too many. And yet this topic remains so abstruse that only the foolish or the excessively bold would seek to address it. Most psychologies, even the Freudian and the gestalt, were unable to confront it directly because of several limitations. Perhaps Freud was so overwhelmed by his discovery of the extraordinary importance of unconscious motivations that he simply addressed less adequately those conscious propulsions that would be requisite for any legitimate notion of free will and voluntarism. Sometimes – one supposes he might have observed – this might be a pathological delusion related to those of grandeur and the assumption of magical powers. To the extent that the unconscious id comes under conscious ego control, the will may dominate in thought and in action, but it is never wholly free of unconscious influences. The gestalters, on the other hand, were so attracted by the way in which sensory ingestion was often compelled to organize reality perceptions in certain ways by the 'requiredness of situations' that they also tended to overlook what shaping of reality might still otherwise be achieved, from the top down: voluntarily. As for the behaviourist school, since 'will' of any sort was denied, free will was not even a topic.
