The idea of psychic freedom, it will be noted, is at odds with concept of psychic determinism. Freud, for instance, demonstrated that the voluntarism of the nineteenth century was an illusion. He showed that we did things for reasons which we did not understand. Those reasons were repressed in the unconscious and could only be understood through the methods of psychoanalysis. But as useful as the idea of psychic determinism is in explaining neurotic behavior, it is less useful in describing a healthy, nonfixated, nondriven person.
Creative persons are freer than noncreative persons.
Psychologists who study rats in mazes know little about human creativity. Just because rats can be predicted statistically to behave in one way, such a prediction says nothing about the individual rat. It does say something about the conditions of the experiment. There is no freedom in a closed system. Neurotic people know little subjective freedom.