How People Change: Psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis on the Essence of Freedom and the Two Elements of Self-Transcendence

Fernando Kaskais

Jul 7

Illustration by Mimmo Paladino for a rare edition of James Joyce's Ulysses

"We create ourselves. The sequence is suffering, insight, will, action, change."

BY MARIA POPOVA

"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." And yet, dragged by the momentum of our lives, we ossify into identities and habit-loops, harder and harder to reconfigure, more and more haunted by the paradox of personal transformation. If we are not careful enough, not courageous enough, we may cease believing that change is possible, thus relinquishing the deepest meaning of faith and of freedom; we may forget what Virginia Woolf well knew: that "a self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living."

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."

Wheelis captures the universal undertow of our aching longing for change:

Sometimes we suffer desperately, would do anything, try anything, but are lost, see no way. We cast about, distract ourselves, search, but find no connection between the misery we feel and the way we live. The pain comes from nowhere, gives no clue. We are bored, nothing has meaning; we become depressed. What to do? How to live? Something is wrong but we cannot imagine another way to live which would free us.

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. He writes:

Personality is a complex balance of many conflicting claims, forces, tensions, compunctions, distractions, which yet manages somehow to be a functioning entity. However it may have come to be what it is, it resists becoming anything else. It tends to maintain itself, to convey itself onward into the future unaltered. It may be changed only with difficulty. It may be changed from within, spontaneously and unthinkingly, by an onslaught of physiological force, as in adolescence. It may be changed from without, again spontaneously and unthinkingly, by the force of unusual circumstance, as in a Nazi concentration camp. And sometimes it may be changed from within, deliberately, consciously, and by design. Never easily, never for sure, but slowly, uncertainly, and only with effort, insight, and a kind of tenacious creative cunning.

[…]

We create ourselves. The sequence is suffering, insight, will, action, change.

A century after William James admonished in his landmark treatise on the psychology of habit that "we are spinning our own fates," Wheelis observes that our personality is defined by our recursive actions, that "we are what we do," that "identity is the integration of behavior." He writes:

Action which has been repeated over and over… has come in time to be a coherent and relatively independent mode of behavior… Such a mode of action tends to maintain itself, to resist change. A thief is one who steals; stealing extends and reinforces the identity of thief, which generates further thefts, which further strengthen and deepen the identity. So long as one lives, change is possible; but the longer such behavior is continued the more force and authority it acquires, the more it permeates other consonant modes, subordinates other conflicting modes; changing back becomes steadily more difficult.

[…]

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.

Art by Kay Nielsen from East of the Sun and West of the Moon, 1914. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

In consonance with James Baldwin's reckoning with how we imprison ourselves and his disquieting insistence that "people are as free as they want to be," Wheelis considers the difficulty of finding and owning our range of freedom amid the tug of momentum and the limitations of circumstance:

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. Freedom is not an objective attribute of life; alternatives without awareness yield no leeway… Nothing guarantees freedom. It may never be achieved, or having been achieved, may be lost. Alternatives go unnoticed; foreseeable consequences are not foreseen; we may not know what we have been, what we are, or what we are becoming. We are the bearers of consciousness but of not very much, may proceed through a whole life without awareness of that which would have meant the most, the freedom which has to be noticed to be real. 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...

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