Agency: The Force and Compass of Transformation

What Form Transforms

As I trace out the trajectory of this transformation, I will also be addressing Robert Kegan’s (1982) question “what form transforms?” Illeris (2007) answers Kegan’s question as follows: The form that changes is one’s personal identity. I understand identity as a gestalt that includes both one’s meaning perspective as well as one’s sense of self. That sense of self is the affective component of identity. It is present when one feels at home in one’s body. Its absence is implied by phrases such as “I wasn’t myself today” and “I don’t know what got into me.” Like Illeris, I understand transformation as more than a change in meaning perspective. Rather, it is an ontological change—a change in one’s way of being in the world. Identity is the form that transforms—to answer Kegan’s question.

Next, I look at what are the conditions that precede and potentially mobilize the individual for such a change. Illeris (2007) describes transformational learning as “something one only becomes engaged in when faced by a situation or challenge exceeding what one can manage on one’s existing personal basis, but which one unavoidably must win over in order to get further” (p. 45). This is a more nuanced description than the abstract term, “disorienting dilemma,” that Mezirow employs: One’s ongoing development is stalled, even disorganized, until one develops new resources adequate to the challenge. One can’t “carry on” until this has been resolved. In summary, transformational learning involves a change in identity resulting from the unwelcome realization that one’s premises and available scripts cannot deal with the situation being encountered.

The Source and Force of Transformation

For me, this raises the ultimate question: Who or what entity engineers this identity transformation? I will argue that such a change cannot be initiated from within the existent identity but rather from some aspect of the psyche that is existentially beyond identity and, in some sense, is its source. That aspect exercises agency or the power of creation. I suggest that power was responsible for identity development during childhood and adolescence and is now responsible for the architecture of adult transformation. As will be clarified later in the article, this sets up a creator/created relationship—the psyche as creator and personal identity as created. Such a characterization oversimplifies the situation since it implies that all agencies arise from the psyche; however, the created, personal identity, is also endowed with limited agency. That is, the created (the meaning perspective) also exercises some autonomy and can make decisions based on its own priorities. In Mezirow’s theory, this limited agency involves a change in a specific meaning scheme but not in one’s overall meaning perspective. To return to my computer metaphor, such a change is like “tweaking,” but not changing, the operating system. The following aphorism is suggestive of the relationship between psychic agency and one’s meaning perspective: reactive patterns are like little self-sustaining engines. The only question being: Who’s going to live your life? You or your reactive patterns? Reactive patterns and interpretative frameworks structure the person’s existent meaning perspective. This aphorism points towards an agency (“you”) that can override those “settings.”

Some Obstacles to Theorizing Agency

Why is it important to foreground this agency? And why has it been merely presupposed in previous accounts of transformation? These first two questions bear directly on matters of pedagogical practices. In regard to the importance of foregrounding agency, how might we summon, address, and engage with the agentic capacity of our student’s psyche in order to support the transformative process? Hopefully, this article offers a nuanced, experiential understanding of that process. The second question, regarding the neglect of agency in the previous theorizing, addresses the broader social/cultural framework in general and social science methodology in particular. In traditional and early modern cultures, the work of agency was attributed to the soul. However, until relatively recently—especially in the academy—any talk of the soul was often met with an embarrassed silence. This resistance is reinforced by the methodological conventions of the social sciences which rule out any appeals to metaphysical entities. If a hypothetical entity can’t be validated empirically, it doesn’t exist. For example, Wegner (2005) employed neuroscience experiments to support such a position: “Automatic processes seem robotic and deeply causal. Controlled processes [acts of agency], for their part, seem less than genuine, reflecting unpredictable human choices rather than scientifically respectable causes” (p. 22). In his account, acts of agency are unpredictable and therefore not replicable. Not being replicable, they are not amenable to empirical research. The result is a depiction of human nature that elides what most of us consider to be one of our highest values: the exercise of agency. Originary thinking may not be replicable; nevertheless, it is responsible for novel solutions to intractable problems.

Methodological Issues: Does the Paper Perform Its Claims

In this article, I tried to find a path that respects both academic conventions and a style that performs the theoretical claims that I am making. Chief amongst those claims is that transformational learning is the ultimate creative process. It is the challenging work of acknowledging the inadequacies of one’s existing framework and then creating a framework with more encompassing premises. Inevitably, one encounters a tension between the loyalty to the old and the courage to adopt the new. A similar tension will motivate this article as I intend to transcend some academic conventions in order to enliven the theory. Like the transformative experience itself, this approach may be unsettling for some and liberating for others.

Aiming for congruency, I employ a style that manifests a creative process. This article should “do” what it “says.” That intention is served by the phenomenological approach as well as through my extensive use of analogy and metaphor. I want the reader to experience as well as understand the thesis that I am propounding. My use of figurative language is also intended to evoke the reader’s first-person experience of transformative moments and processes. They can then test the concepts that I am employing against their first-person experience to assess the usefulness of these concepts. My hope is that they will be rewarded for working through the initial, more traditional, framework to arrive at a more radical comprehension of the central place of agency. The resultant understanding will complement the third-person accounts offered by Mezirow (2000) and others. Equipped with both first-person and third-person accounts, the reader will be in a much better position to accompany students who’ve been thrown into confusion by a disorienting dilemma. Students will be more encouraged to persist in this difficult journey if the teacher’s comments and questions display a nuanced understanding of the student’s experience. This article will also enact the transformational learning process, particularly the last step where there is an integration of what had been previously theorized with the more central place that I have assigned to the agency.

Definition of Terms

Before addressing the concerns raised in the introduction above, I will attempt to define the terms being employed: free will and agency. Consulting the literature, I was able to ascertain that the field in general doesn’t make clear distinctions between “free will” and “agency.” Any definitions that are offered have a number of critics who take exception. As a result, no consensus emerges.

I argue that this absence of consensus is not a matter of lack of rigour but rather due to the nature of the phenomena being studied. Agency can’t be observed directly from a third-person perspective—a necessity for the objective ambitions of positivistic science. It can only be experienced from the first-person point of view. However, when we do observe “uncaused” changes in behavior, we attribute those changes to the exercise of agency.

Having not discovered any widespread agreement on definitions of those terms, I will articulate the meanings that I assign. This discussion could take considerable space in an already long paper, so I will confine my remarks to two phenomena that appear to be agentic. First, let me contrast agentic behavior with nonagentic movement. A marble rolling down a hill is tracing out a path, but its path is being determined by external factors like gravity and topography. An agent’s actions, on the other hand, are generated internally. For example, a cat walking down that same hill will take a different path than the one travelled by the marble. The cat’s path will have been chosen.

One rudimentary definition of agency sees it as an action that is context-sensitive and goal-directed. The marble’s “action” is neither sensitive nor goal-directed while the cat’s behavior is both. The latter’s behavior can’t be fully accounted for by the law of gravity in combination with the topography of the hill. Therefore, we surmise that something internal is generating the behavior. I claim that action that is context-sensitive, goal-directed, and efficient is generated by, and therefore a marker of, consciousness. Beginning with this premise, I will argue that sentience is conscious but not reflective. I distinguish action thinking (such as the cat walking down the hill or a person playing soccer) from representational thinking such as making plans for the future. In this way, I lay out two distinct layers of agentic activity: sentient or prereflective agency as compared to agency exercised in the formation and implementation of a representational plan. Accordingly, there can be more than one source of agency within the same individual. The recognition of plural agencies was part of the appeal of psychoanalytic theory. It was able to account for behaviors that were often contrary to the intentions of the conscious ego. In that way, psychoanalytic theory confirmed and explained our experiential reality. When theory illuminates life, it is picked up.

Perhaps this is the time to insert an explanatory note: In the above, I employed the term “consciousness,” whereas the literature preponderantly favors “agency” to refer to the same capacity for generating goal-directed, responsive behavior. Agency puts the emphasis on action (goal-directed behavior), whereas I am employing consciousness in a dual capacity—for both perceiving and directing action. Stated this way implies that perception and action are separate activities, but it would be more accurate to say that behavior is action guided by perception. Whereas goals arise internally, both action and perception are interactional. That is, they are directed towards one’s circumstances and operate cybernetically. When articulating a theory in language, we’re compelled to employ linear thinking that necessarily separates perception from action, but in life, they operate as a purposive, interactional whole.

In addition, carrying out an action has traditionally been attributed to the will, whereas agency has come to be the preferred term. This preferred terminology has consequences. An associated term, agent, suggests something solid, a “real” entity—when, in fact, it is a reified concept. Both the agent and the ego are more aptly described as organizing activities rather than stable, thing-like entities. Those activities produce repetitious patterns that are often characterized as structures—an interpretation that supports the error of reification. However, toiling underneath those repeating patterns while supplying them with energy is the prepersonal consciousness/will. Thus, in my model, there is both prepersonal and personal agency. The prepersonal is the ultimate creator, whereas the personal is the created. Castaneda (1977) made the same point poetically: First, the “self” (impersonal consciousness) dreams the double (one’s personal identity), and eventually, the double begins to dream the self. In the vocabulary of psychology, the psyche or impersonal consciousness constructs a personal identity. That personal self consists of conceptual premises derived from the person’s interactional history. Eventually, the psyche constructs a model of an ideal or aspirational self that it then attempts to actualize through its self-practices (e.g., going to the gym, meditating, yoga, studying wisdom traditions). These practices begin to transform the personal self in the desired direction. In Castaneda’s language, this is the double “dreaming” the self. By cultivating a self, we are acting on and reinforcing the belief that we are agents or initiators of change. We also discover the limits of the personal self’s agency as, despite repeated efforts, our “default settings” continue to produce behaviors and emotions that escape the control of our conscious self.

Affect and Transformation

Our personal self or identity is that which we own and which owns us. Is it the same as Mezirow’s “meaning perspective”? My sense is that Mezirow’s term emphasizes cognitive processes and neglects affect. I qualify his notion of meaning perspective with a claim that it is an incarnated or embodied perspective. And further, that affect is its power source. Prior to the disorienting dilemma, affect is omnipresent—and therefore taken for granted—producing a familiar feeling and disclosing a familiar world, until the rupture. Then, “I don’t know who I am nor what to do.” Now, affect is fully awake, alert if not panicky.

Prior to this emergency condition, the individual’s prepersonal ² consciousness is fused with their meaning perspective. What the person experiences as their personal identity is the product of that fusion. Perhaps I can convey what I mean by this by drawing on my therapeutic practice. Over the course of therapy, the client learns to look at rather than through their meaning perspective. Initially, they are not aware of their frame of reference. Over the course of therapy, they detach, separate, or undo their fusion or identification with their meaning perspective. They move from the assumption, “I am my meaning perspective,” to the realization, “I have a meaning perspective.” Prior to this moment, in Kegan’s (1982) depiction, they were subjected by their frame of reference. That is, their subjective experience was being constructed and maintained by their meaning perspective. Only through detachment are they capable of making their frame of reference an object of inquiry. What is it that detaches? That will be addressed in the next section.

Impersonal Consciousness

Beneath the personal self is the impersonal life force that uses the former as its habitus (Bourdieu, 1977). Bourdieu characterizes habitus as the way that group culture and personal history come to be held in the body and the mind. We hold and use our body in a certain way, such as posture and accent, and likewise, with our more abstract mental habits, systems of categorization, and action scripts. I see considerable overlap between Mezirow’s meaning perspective and Bourdieu’s habitus with the latter acknowledging the embodied aspect that the former overlooks.

I like Bourdieu’s term habitus because it implies an inhabitant. I identify that inhabitant as the life force/impersonal consciousness. That inhabitant attaches to whatever seems to promote survival of the organism. The various attachments that are built up become the meaning perspective or habitus. Initially, it attaches to mother, but eventually, it attaches to the premises from which the meaning perspective is elaborated. In both attachments, ontological security is the goal. The foregoing is a static model of the relation between the life force and the meaning perspective.

A more dynamic, processual depiction would depict the life force as utilizing the meaning perspective to navigate the lifeworld. That perspective provides a general orientation for interpretating events as well as scripts for responding to them. The meaning perspective could be compared to a circuit board, whereas the life force is the power that makes it functional. They become a composite creation which I’ve identified as the personal self. However, when an event reveals that the meaning perspective is inadequate, the life force detaches from the old and eventually generates and attaches to the new premises.

Because the meaning perspective’s raison d′être is survival of the person, the disorienting dilemma is an emergency condition. To clarify, it is an emergency condition from the point of view of the meaning perspective but not immediately for the organism. That is, just because my meanings are being challenged, even refuted, doesn’t mean that I am going to die—but it feels as if I might. This occurs when I’ve identified with my meaning perspective. As a result of that identification, my body reacts to the disorienting dilemma with fight, flight, or freezing. Or is it my body that’s reacting? It might be more correct to say that it is the life force that flees or becomes aggressive or “plays dead.”

However, the disorienting dilemma can also be the occasion for activating agency in the service of transformation. Metaphorically, it is similar to a human pilot disabling or overriding the autopilot in order to take control (this metaphor reminds me of the problems with the MAX 737 airplane whose programing prevented the pilot from taking over manually). As I write this, I am thinking of a client who told me that he had “split off” from his experience when he was 14 years old. As he explained it, “my experience no longer touched me; had no consequences for me.” Not an act of agency on his ego’s part but instead something passively endured by it. I suggest that it was a prepersonal agency that was responsible for the “split.” It recoiled from the disorienting dilemma as if from a shock. This addresses my earlier question: “What detaches from the meaning perspective?” My client’s experience suggests that it was prepersonal consciousness that “bailed” from what had been revealed to be an unreliable platform. His impersonal consciousness and his personal self had separated and existed in independent realms. Not integrated. The latter had become frozen in time. He had come to therapy because he finally realized that it wasn’t enough to disable his inadequate “autopilot.” Now, his project was to reclaim his agency and construct a new “operating system.”

What criteria would be used for constructing this new perspective? To answer that, I turn to another more concrete definition of agency: It is the ability to make free choice from amongst an array of options. In that sense, it is the compass referred to in the title of this article. What does this add to our understanding that my earlier definition might have elided? That earlier one placed the emphasis on goal seeking without identifying how the goal is chosen. I suggest it employs a reference point when considering its choices. For example, “Of all the options arrayed before me which one will make me better and which, bitter?” In this example, the reference point that was being invoked acknowledged social and psychological factors for evaluating options. Who or what employs that criteria for choice making? My provisional answer? The same entity that detaches from the previous unreliable premises: the prepersonal consciousness. The remainder of this article will argue that it is this “entity” that is the prime mover of the transformative process.

Integrating Agency With Transformational Learning Theory

This prime mover has not received sufficient attention when theorizing transformative learning. However, I would like to review some authors who have gestured toward that “entity” through their references to the emotional vicissitudes that accompany transformation. I will first indicate how I interpret emotional reactions. Then, I will explicate how those emotions imply, without explicitly identifying agency. I characterize emotions as affective responses to existential events. The intensity of the emotion is a measure of the life force’s investment in, or attachment to, the personal identity. For example, fear is anxiety about the loss of that investment. Grief, on the other hand, is the acceptance of that loss. Kegan (1982) makes similar claims about the emotions experienced as the self progresses through the developmental stages.

Before we take that up, let me sketch in the overall framework that he employs. He makes the case that each stage requires a reconfiguration of the subject/object balance. That is, each developmental stage is a progression of how we parcel out what belongs to me, the subject, and what belongs to the world, the object (my intuition suggests that Kegan’s subject/object structure is a foundational premise of what Mezirow terms the meaning perspective). It begins with the differentiation between “me” and the “not me.” Initially, that distinction is made between self and mother, then between self and other, and ultimately between the impersonal consciousness and the meaning perspective. When initially attempting that distinction, I might conclude that the me is that which I can control—I am the cause—whereas I cannot control the not me. These are crucial distinctions if one is to make accurate attributions. For example, if my premise is that I’m responsible for other people’s feelings, then a whole range of my behaviors will be an expression of that action logic.

These are critical distinctions for one’s ontological security—hence the emotional distress when our attributions are problematized. They orient me as to what I can initiate versus what is beyond my control. When that subject/object balance is disturbed, I become disorientated. To give some experiential sense of how distressing that is, I refer to my clients’ experience of cannabis-induced paranoia. When I ask them what they mean by paranoia, they elaborate as follows: “I don’t know if I’m generating my experience or the people around me are making me feel this way.” Lacking clear attribution, they don’t know how to proceed.

Kegan claims that the developmental stages through which we move require a temporary and provisional suspension of the attribution question—for the time being, I consider all this as me and all that as not me. As I move through the development stages, I become increasingly sophisticated in the way that I parcel out my subjective experience from their objective correlates. Whereas Kegan’s focus is largely on mapping the developmental process that begins in childhood and moves through adolescence to adulthood, Mezirow directs his thought to disruptive experiences in adulthood. There is something universal in at least the progression through earliest stages of development as Kegan elucidates it. However, there is nothing inevitable about transformational learning. As adults, we can choose to reconfigure our meaning perspective in order to move forward or we can stall or even regress to an earlier, more primitive way of experiencing the world.

To move from one stage to the next is a fraught enterprise because the relative stability of one’s current stage has to be given up in order to move on to the next stage. As stated earlier, while moving between stages, appropriate attribution becomes disturbingly difficult. The key word here is “disturbingly.” Emotions are the form that disturbance takes. As Kegan (1982) puts it,

It [striking a subject-object balance] is an activity we have always shared…; at the same time, we experience this activity. The experience…may well be the source of our emotions themselves. Loss and recovery, separation and attachment, anxiety and play, depressions and transformation, disintegration and coherence—all may owe their origins to the felt experience [italics mine] of this activity. (p. 44)

I want to nuance Kegan’s insights with the claim that emotions are indicators and concomitants of attachment and detachment. For example, when the attachment is to a meaning perspective that can still be taken for granted, we feel grounded—we experience trust. We feel ontologically secure. On the other hand, when we experience a disorienting dilemma, that same ground is revealed to be untrustworthy. We detach or separate from it and experience groundlessness. No matter how daunting that wrenching is, it is required if that meaning perspective is to appear as an “object” for critical inquiry.

There are emotional manifestations of detachment. Mezirow (2000), for example, identified shame and guilt. Shame is the repudiation of what you are. It radically undermines the personal self. Imel (1998) used different language to characterize that phase—calling it a sense of alienation. That nuances my understanding of shame—one is now alienated from one’s previous identity. Both shame and alienation refer to ontological matters—to one’s way of being in the world. One can succumb to the shame or begin the process of critically examining one’s epistemic, sociocultural, and psychic assumptions.

Another authors, Boyd and Myers (1988), address another aspect of the emotional ordeal that accompanies critical reflection: grief. Grief is the healthy alternative to the alienation referred to earlier. Whenever my clients make references to getting back to their familiar sense of self, I know that they feel alienated. They no longer feel at home in the world. However, going forward is the only possibility for constructing a new habitus. To accomplish this, the transforming individual grieves or lets go of their old patterns of behavior and ways of perceiving. This process clears a space and, correlatively, activates an existential need to adopt or establish new meanings. Kegan (1982) illuminates this process with his claim that human beings are meaning makers. As he puts it, “it is not that a person makes meaning, as much as that the activity of being a person is the activity of meaning-making” (p. 11). He is asserting that we are a process rather than a hypostasized thing, a verb rather than a noun. The self is a dynamic balance that requires ongoing work to maintain. When that dynamic balance is destabilized, continued existence is experienced as precarious. As Kegan (1982) puts it, the meaning-making process is replete with “the rhythms and labors of the struggle to make meaning, to have meaning, to protect meaning, to lose meaning, and to lose the ‘self’ along the way” (p. 12). Stated this way, it is understandable why complete transformation is a rarity. I suspect that attachment to a “solid,” unchanging meaning perspective would appeal to the desire for permanence—the ultimate ontological security, which brings me back to the processes of attachment and detachment.

The Discovery/Creation of New Premises

I will now move the discussion to the most important but the least understood portion of the transformative learning process—that mysterious process where new premises are developed. transformative learning theory is quite articulate in regard to how a disruptive event can provoke a search for more adequate premises but more preliminary about the process by which it is resolved—restricting itself to the outcomes produced as a result of rational discourse. For the disoriented person, such conversations introduce the possibility of alternative meaning perspectives.

The discovery that such possibilities exist can offer relief to someone floundering in chaos. However, at this point in the process, it is more in the nature of an abstract possibility—a placeholder for change. As such, it is a conducive social environment for supporting the disoriented individual. However, it does not delineate the intrapsychic process that the transforming person undergoes in adopting new premises.

In order to partially fill in this theoretical lacuna, I employ the anthropological notion of liminality. Essentially, the term refers to transitional processes—the journey from disorientation to integration. Between those two end points lies the liminal zone. Liminality refers to a time when the old configurations of social reality are increasingly seen to be in jeopardy, but new alternatives are not yet in hand. (The pandemic generated a liminal condition.) What we need in order to move through that zone is a safe place from which to witness that ambiguity, to notice the tension and the unresolved without the compulsion or pressure to achieve closure and resolution. As stated elsewhere, a supportive relationship with a mentor provides just such a space.

Because there is little if any structure in that realm—hence the experience of groundlessness—agency is relatively unfettered in its search for new meaning perspectives. Originary thought, that transcends the conventional, customary, and/or traditional ways of operating, becomes possible. I suggest that the eventual outcome—the adoption of new premises—cannot be prescribed beforehand. Furthermore, I suggest that process occurs within the blankness or emptiness that the disorientation opens. Lest this possibility sound too esoteric, even mystical, I turn to developmental psychology in order to reveal that same “blankness” is an inevitable part of the developmental process as one moves from one stage to the next. According to Cross (1999), “[T]he periods of greatest personal growth are thought to lie in the unnamed and poorly defined periods between stages” (p. 262; emphasis in original).

Here, Cross is referring to developmental psychology’s stage theory—most famously developed by Piaget. She is making the point that while the developmental stages themselves are characterized by stable configurations of meaning and thus are amenable to theoretical description and analysis, the dynamic phase between stages remains undefined. The concept of liminality is a good placeholder for that undifferentiated zone. Turner (1969) makes the argument that this “empty” zone is the locus for a psychic rather than social resolution: “a realm of pure possibility where novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise”—a realm that might disclose originary perspective shifts for both individuals and cultures. Developmental psychology suggests that most, if not all, people move through the liminal zone a number of times on their journey from infancy to adulthood. I suggest that we can’t recall those transitional phases because the mental work accomplished there is of the nonrepeating sort. It is singular. Furthermore, because it is an activity of the will, it can’t be represented—only experienced.

Nevertheless, as adults, we can assume that we must have had those transitional experiences in order to arrive at our current developmental level. This suggests that having survived these transformations as children and adolescents, we can have some confidence about doing so as adults. While the liminal zone may be a place of awe and dread, it is also the locus of transformation. There we have access to an agency that can supply both the power and the direction for that evolution.