GeistHaus

Inner Life

Agency and Relatedness

Two things people need, and cannot have at full strength at the same time: to belong to someone, and to be a self of their own. Psychoanalysts have given the pair many names. Otto Rank wrote about the will and the guilt it costs. Michael Balint sorted people by whether they cling or keep their distance. Sidney Blatt found two kinds of depression, one about losing people and one about failing oneself. The idea runs through Winnicott, Mahler and Bowlby, and it sits underneath most of the strains in any close relationship, including the one a person has with a listener. This page explains the two needs, why they pull against each other, and what it looks like when someone keeps solving the tension the same way.

Core Ideas

The Two Needs

In the 1960s the psychologist David Bakan called them agency and communion and argued that every human life is a negotiation between them (Bakan, 1966). The same two dimensions turn up wherever people have tried to map how we relate: in the interpersonal circle, which arranges all social behavior along an axis of control and an axis of warmth (Kiesler, 1996), and in attachment research, where the infant who feels safe is the infant who explores (Bowlby, 1988). Jay Greenberg, rewriting Freud’s two drives, replaced sex and aggression with effectance and safety: the push to act on the world and the push to stay held in it (Greenberg, 1991).

The agency side is the self that wants to choose, to make, to differ, to say no. The relatedness side is the self that wants to be known, to be held in mind, to matter to someone. Most people feel both every day, usually without noticing, because most of the time the two can be satisfied in turn. The trouble starts when they cannot: when saying what you think will cost you someone, or when keeping someone means not being yourself.

Why Becoming Separate Hurts

Otto Rank, one of Freud’s early circle, put the will at the center of development. He thought a child’s first act of will is counter-will, the no said against a parent, and that it is inevitably guilty, because it threatens the relationship the child depends on (Rank, 1945). Whether that no is met with interest or with injury shapes how freely the adult can act later. People whose early assertions were punished or mourned learn to want things quietly, or not to know that they want them, and Rank saw the resulting paralysis of the will as the root of much unhappiness. His remedy was not to get rid of the guilt but to help the person will anyway, starting with small refusals, in a relationship that survives them.

Balint described two shapes the adult solution tends to take. The one he called ocnophilic clings to people and feels any distance as danger; the one he called philobatic keeps to open spaces and relies on itself, treating closeness as the danger (Balint, 1968). Blatt found the same split in depression: the anaclitic kind, organized around loss and abandonment, and the introjective kind, organized around failure and self-criticism (Blatt & Blass, 1992). Neither is a diagnosis. They are two ways of leaning when the two needs pull.

Two Ways to Handle the Tension

Jeremy Safran and Christopher Muran made the idea concrete by watching what people do when a working relationship strains (Safran & Muran, 2000). They found two families of strain, and read each as one solution to the agency–relatedness problem.

Pulling away: relatedness bought with agency.
Going quiet, giving short answers, changing the subject, agreeing too readily, intellectualizing. The person keeps the connection by withdrawing their own side from it. It looks like politeness and costs them their voice. See why do I say it’s fine when it isn’t?
Pushing against: agency bought with relatedness.
Complaining, criticizing, demanding, testing. The person keeps their own side by attacking the connection. It looks like strength and costs them the thing they were angry about not getting. See why do I pick fights with people who are trying to help?

Most people lean one way, and the same person can do both in a single conversation. What Safran and Muran add is that a strain, handled well, is where a person gets to practice the harder third thing: staying in the relationship and speaking from their own side at the same time. A person who can say “that annoyed me” to someone who does not leave or retaliate has, for a moment, had both needs met. See when the conversation strains.

Holding Both

The relational tradition is wary of naming the goal as a stronger, more authentic self, because that is only one side of the pair and the one our culture already overvalues (Mitchell, 1988; Safran & Muran, 2000). Its alternative is harder to put on a poster. It is what Safran and Muran, following Winnicott, call a paradoxical acceptance: your needs are legitimate, and the world and the people in it will not always meet them, and both of those are true at once. Winnicott’s version was that a child learns to be alone only in the presence of someone who stays (Winnicott, 1958), and learns that the other is real only by discovering that the other survives being pushed against (Winnicott, 1969). Jessica Benjamin called the achievement mutual recognition: two subjects, each of whom can be a self without making the other into an object (Benjamin, 1988).

In ordinary life this is the difference between a no that ends a friendship and a no that the friendship absorbs; between needing someone and needing them to be exactly what you need. Emmanuel Ghent drew the line between need, which can be stated plainly and tends to be met, and neediness, which is need wrapped in the expectation of refusal and tends to drive people off (Ghent, 1992). Most of the work of holding both needs is learning to express the first without the second.

Examples

These are composite vignettes, not real people.

The Good Daughter

Priya calls her mother every Sunday and has for twenty years. She has never once said she would rather not, and the calls leave her flat for the rest of the day. Asked what would happen if she skipped one, she says “nothing, probably,” and then that her mother would be hurt, and then that she would feel like a terrible person. The call keeps the connection and costs her the afternoon, every week.

The One Who Leaves First

Marcus ends relationships at about the eight-month mark, usually over something small, usually before the other person has a chance to disappoint him. He describes himself as independent. He is also, he says in passing, lonelier than anyone he knows. Agency is intact; the thing it was protecting has not arrived.

Both in One Evening

Dana tells her partner the plan for the weekend is fine. An hour later she picks a fight about the dishes. Later still she says the real problem is that she had wanted to see her sister and never said so. The quiet yes and the loud no were the same unspoken want, handled two ways.

Sources