OBSESSIVE THOUGHTS AND INNER VOICES

Field: Psychology (Social Sciences)

My concern is this paper is to consider the nature of obsessive thoughts with the aim of getting a clearer idea about the extent to which they are rightly identified as passive or as active. The nature of obsessive thoughts is of independent interest, but my concern with the question is also rooted in a general concern to map the extent of mental activity, and to defend the importance and centrality of a view of self-knowledge that appeals to agency. I hold that much of our mental lives is active, and that the distinctive knowledge we have of our own minds is in many cases best explained by appealing to agency. Along with many others, I take knowledge of our actions and activities to be distinctive. We know our actions and activities in a way that we do not know anything else, and in a way that is distinctively and essentially self-conscious. I am not going to attempt to offer a proper account of what I take an action to be, nor of how we know them as we do. But, very roughly, I take actions to be psychological events—some overt physical, some covert mental—that are the selections an agent makes against options, where her so selecting is her taking that selection as apt. Often, but not always, an agent's taking her selection as apt is her selecting on the basis of reasons. Further, I hold that selecting as apt gives a subject immediate self-conscious agent's awareness of the action that is her selecting. The claim is that once we appreciate that there are mental actions and activities, as well as physical actions and activities, we can give an explanation much of our self-knowledge that draws on an understanding of our knowledge of actions in general.22 See O'Brien 2008. Let us call a view that explains self-knowledge by appealing to agency, the agency view of self-knowledge. We can distinguish between an extreme and a moderate version of the view. According to an extreme agency view we need to appeal to agency to explain self-knowledge because all mental phenomena self-known are active. According to a moderate agency view we need to appeal to agency to explain self-knowledge with respect to those mental phenomena that are active. A distinct account will be required for those that are not. Both versions of the agency view are to be contrasted with the passivist view according to which our explanation of self-knowledge need not appeal to agency at all: there are passive mental phenomena, and whatever explains knowledge of passive mental phenomena explains knowledge of all mental phenomena. I am a defender of a moderate agency view. I take the moderate view for two reasons. First, because there seem to me to be mental phenomena that are entirely passive—certain forms of perception for example—knowledge of which an appeal to agency will not be able to explain.33 Boyle 2009 is a key paper in developing a case for giving up the assumption of unity with respect to explanations of self-knowledge. Second, there are passive elements of active phenomenon. In particular, an agency view of self-knowledge will have to draw, in my view, on a separate and prior view of knowledge of content.44 See O'Brien 2005. I am not a passivist because I do not think that the explanations available of our knowledge of mental content, nor of our knowledge of passive mental states such as perceptions, are sufficient to capture the nature of our self-conscious self-knowledge in active cases. In our intellectual processes, we may be either active or passive. Turning one's mind in a certain direction, or deliberating systematically about a problem, are activities in which a person engages. But to some of the thoughts that occur in our minds… we are mere passive bystanders. Thus there are obsessional thoughts, whose provenance may be obscure and of which we cannot rid ourselves; thoughts that strike us unexpectedly out of the blue; and thoughts that run willy-nilly through our heads. The thoughts that beset us in these ways do not occur by our own active doing. It is tempting, indeed, to suggest that they are not thoughts that we think at all, but rather thoughts that we find occurring within us. This would express our sense that, although these thoughts are events in the histories of our minds, we do not participate actively in their occurrence… It is not incoherent, despite the air of paradox, to say that a thought that occurs in my mind may or may not be something that I think.55 See Frankfurt 1998, p.59. It should be noted that I am not, in using this useful passage, aligning myself with Frankfurt's rather demanding views of what might be required for something to be truly active. My aim in this paper will be to begin the task of identifying the scope and nature of the active, taking my cue from the way in which Frankfurt divides up the terrain. I will not get very far. I hope, however, at least to suggest that the many of the mental occurrences Frankfurt identifies as passive are better construed as mental actions. Discussions of self-knowledge often overlook the fact that there is an important difference between the task of explaining how we know that our thoughts have the contents that they do, and how we know that our thoughts are of the type that they are: how we know what attitude we have to the content of the thought. We can, following, Frege, put this as a distinction between our knowing the content of our attitudes and knowing the force of our attitudes. As I understand it the agency theory is, or at least ought to be, pretty silent on the question of how we know the content of our attitudes. In fact most plausible accounts of how we know that we take P to be true, will trade off assumed capacity to think P, and to know it is P, rather than Q, we are thinking.77 This is true of diverse agency theorists about self-knowledge: Moran 2001, Peacocke 2003, O'Brien 2005, 2008. In so far as an obsessive thought involves only the passive apprehension of content the agency theorist should be happy to say that they have little distinctive to contribute here. If thought contents such as ‘the plane is going to crash’ can press themselves upon a thinker just as perceptual contents might, then we might expect that our knowledge of such contents be given the same explanation, but it would be an explanation beyond the ambitions and proper jurisdiction of the agency theory. Consider an analogy with our knowledge of our bodily movements. Suppose I know that my left arm has risen. I might think that it is very important in giving the right explanation of how I know that my left arm has risen that my account reflect whether the rising was an action of mine or not. If it was an action of mine, then my explanation of how I know it had risen might be very different from the explanation if it was not an action of mine but merely a reaction, or the result of my arm being lifted by someone else. It would not be an objection to a proposed account of how I know my actions, an account that put a lot of weight on the fact that it was an action that was known, to say that it does not cover the case in which my body moves passively and I know that it does. The response to such an imagined objection would be: I am not trying to explain knowledge of arm rising per se, but only those arm risings that are actions. Similarly, I suggest the agency theorist can press the objector from obsessive thoughts for evidence that the phenomena at issue here are attitudes of mind of a kind that were the target for explanation, and not mere entertainings of content, perhaps brought on by fear, or lust or some external stimuli. But what if we are considering a case of obsessive thoughts that are not just involuntary entertainings of content, but are rather judgements? That is, suppose that rather than there being merely entertainings of content that repeatedly come before the mind—as perceptions or memory images might—we are thinking about obsessive thoughts that are attitudes the subject takes with respect to the truth of some matter. In these cases when a thinker obsessively thinks ‘He loves me really’ or ‘The plane will crash’ she obsessively judges ‘He loves me really’ or ‘The plane will crash’. The question then is whether we can take such thoughts, understood as judgements, to be active. Agency theorists have claimed that in so far as judgements are commitments made by a subject with respect to the truth of some matter they are rightly seen as acts of rational agency. They are acts of mind undertaken by a subject in the basis of her taking the world to be some way, and thus fall within the scope of the active, and so within the scope of agency theory. Passing thoughts are passive in the sense that they are (i) not necessarily responsive to reason, and (ii) states from which one can distance or dissociate oneself. (Cassam, 2011, p.3) Part of what makes [obsessional thoughts] obsessional is their unresponsiveness to reason. I can find myself thinking or worrying that P even though I realize that there is no reason to think or worry that P. (Cassam, 2011, p.6) But there are two ways in which an attitude can be unresponsive to reason. First, an attitude can be formed on a faulty basis. Take a subject who tends to judge on some faulty basis that the world is a certain way. Although the options of denying P, or questioning P are available—indeed recommended—judging P is for her an apt selection given how the world strikes her. If such a subject is able on further reflection to realise that her basis for judging is not a proper one, she could be said to have been unresponsive to reason. And note such a subject might reliably and predictably have such a tendency, and indeed know that she reliably and predictably has such a tendency. Second, an attitude can be unresponsive to reason in the sense that it is based on nothing at all; in the sense that it is not grounded in the subject taking the world to be one way or another on any basis.88 This point is made in Ferraro 2003. Consider the first kind of case, of a subject who has an attitude, formed on the basis that the world strikes her in some way, which is nevertheless unreasonable and which the subject on reflection knows to be so. If what is going on in the case of obsessional judgements is that the subject has an epistemic weakness, perhaps caused by hope or by fear, which means that she tends prematurely to judge on the basis of bad or insufficient evidence, then there is no problem for the agency theorist. Suppose it were to be found that hope and fear causes subjects to make a distinctive kind of epistemic mistake in forming beliefs about what will happen. In particular, suppose that such subjects tend to take ‘possibly P’ as grounds for ‘P’. A subject suffering from such a weakness would be very likely to make obsessional judgements of the kind we have seen. In holding it to be possible that he loves her, or possible that the plane will crash, she judges that he does love her and the plane will crash. If that is what is going on, then in judging the subject is committing herself to a view about how the world is on some basis, and that is all that is required for the agency theorist to claim that judgements are acts of a rational subject. It may be that in so judging the subject makes a commitment that she is able shortly afterwards to realise was foolish and insufficiently grounded. On reflection she realizes that something's being possible is not sufficient for thinking it will happen, and she rehearses the probabilities of it not happening and for a moment faces the pointlessness of her hope, and the irrationality of her fear. This description of what is going on shows that it is important to make a distinction between a subject's forming a judgement on some basis that she is reliably able to come to see is insufficient or lacking in warrant, and forming a judgement on absolutely no basis at all, indeed, forming a judgement whilst simultaneously accepting it must be false. The agency theorist need not acknowledge the latter as a possibility, only the former. In response to the claim that there are ‘passive judgements’ that are unresponsive to reason the agency theorist can, therefore, insist that either the recalcitrance is consistent with us taking them to be active commitments by the subject to how the world is on some basis, and are thus tractable from the point of view of the agency theory approach to judgement, or are such that it is inconsistent with them being commitments at all. We get the impression that there could be a genuine commitment to the world being thus and so only by thinking it, only by switching between cases which are mere entertainings and cases which are judgements based on unstable reasons. The second element that was supposed to make obsessive judgements passive was that the subject can distance herself from them. She can take an attitude towards them that they do not represent her considered thinking, her best reasons, or a product of her capacity for slow thinking.99 See Kahneman 2011 for the distinction between fast and slow thinking. Fast thinking is efficient, non-reflective thinking, but it is often irrational. The subject can, in fast thinking, judge the world to be some way, on some basis that, on reflection, turns out to have misled them into thinking something false or irrational. Nevertheless, in so far as they really are judgements of hers, rather than hopes, wishes, or fears—that is, in so far as they constitute her taking the world to be a particular way at that point—she cannot be thought to be simultaneously judging that ‘He loves me really’ or ‘The plane will crash’ and thinking that she is wrong to think so. Under this construal of them, obsessive thoughts are in many ways rightly thought of as repeated snap judgements that a subject withdraws from on reflection. I think we can get a clearer view of the challenge obsessive thoughts present to the agency theory if we look at parallel case of physical actions. We see that a parallel objection to the objection from obsessive thoughts can be made to a theorist who claims that our account of our knowledge of our physical actions needs to appeal to the fact that they are exercises of agency. Suppose that it is not contested that our knowledge of our own physical activities and actions is particular. By that I mean, suppose it is agreed that the nature of our knowledge of our physical activities and actions depends importantly on the fact that it is knowledge of our actions, and so agreed that it is not like our knowledge of others’ actions and not like our knowledge of our non-active, passive movements. Suppose it is also not contested that a decent account of our knowledge of our activities and actions is going to draw on the fact that they are in contrast to some productions of the subject, exercises of agency. Suppose further that we take utterances to be a kind of physical action, and as such we take our account of how we know our utterances to be a special case of how we know our physical actions. In so taking it we take it to be important to our account that a subject's utterances are exercises of her agency. Suppose, now, that in response to both the general case of physical action, and to the specific case of utterances, it is objected that the agency theorist must be wrong in thinking that there is something about the fact that they are actions that explains our knowledge of them. The agency theorist must be wrong because they do not have a way of dealing with the problem of passive actions: actions with respect to which the subject seems to be passive in the sense that they are recalcitrant or not responsive to her reasons for acting, and to be such that the subject disassociates herself from them. Like the objection from thoughts to which we are ‘bystanders’ there seem to be three kinds of case the objector might have in mind. First, there are the familiar cases of obsessive or compulsive actions: repeated hand washing, repeatedly checking the door is locked, smoking another cigarette. And in the case of utterances, we have cases where a subject seems to obsessively repeat an utterance to themselves: ‘I must send that email’, ‘I must send that email’. There are also Torette's cases. Consider for example the rare cases of echolalia—where a subject repeats the words of others—and palilalia where she repeats her own words. In all such cases the subject can regret and distance herself from her actions and utterances, acknowledge, no sooner than she has carried out them out, that she had no purpose in acting or speaking as she did. Second, we sometimes act in such a way that our action seems to come from nowhere: we suddenly catch something falling, or stand up and walk to the window. In the case of utterances we can suddenly exclaim on some matter and surprise ourselves in doing so, Here we also have Torette's cases in which a subject seems to make an utterance that comes from nowhere, and that is completely at odds with her purposes. Third, we have drifting action: actions such as doodling, or finger tapping with no obvious aim, or direction, by a subject's reasons for acting. As we are concerned with the case of obsessive thoughts let us consider what we would expect the agency theorist about our knowledge of our actions to say about the challenge that obsessive actions pose to their claim that our account of our knowledge of our actions needs to be rooted in the fact that they are precisely actions? Presumably what we would expect is for the agency theorist about knowledge of actions to start sorting cases from cases. Looking at the examples of obsessive actions raised we might except them to identify some as not really actions at all, but rather as automatic bodily reactions or responses. Torette's cases, for example, are likely to be best understood as phonic tics, on a par with blinks and throat clearing rather than as exercises of agency. In so far as they are not selections the agent has active control over, and in so far their production by-passes the normal processes for action production, we have no reason to treat them as actions. And if they are not actions we need not expect them to be known by the subject in the same way she knows the utterances that are expressions of her agency, and which she has active control over. In contrast, some of the examples seem to be best as actions, but as actions for very or reasons that and are recalcitrant to the further and of the subject. a subject to give up who nevertheless a in response to her to to acts and acts taking that as the apt to do at that And she does so even though her action is unresponsive to reason and is one that she or disassociates herself In such a case we seem to have a action, and an action known to be so by but they are actions the and known in the way we know actions. There are also cases of compulsive and repeated which we might be of they are or I think plausible is that like the smoking case, are active to a that the world must be in some washing, rather than not, is for the agent the apt to do. the of the what seems is that there is to that what we have is really an It will be an action grounded in a way that does not with the agent's and and will be an action which the agent can distance herself but will be an action Thus they might be known in the way we know we are our or smoking a or ‘I must send that email’. to my reason for appealing to knowledge of actions and these obsessive to which we may be considered as not as it is that we be agency theorists with respect to our knowledge of our actions and so such problem cases must be and if they must be tractable in the action case, not in the obsessive thought case It may be that the right account of our knowledge of our actions does not need to appeal to the fact that they are actions of an and it may be that there is no between the physical action case and the thought My reason for appealing to obsessive actions in the action case is a much it is that one needs to be in the nature of the phenomena if one is to be that the phenomena are either or an agency view of self-knowledge. action that is at the of action as apt can nevertheless be from the agent's point of view, and known to be so by the agent on reflection. As such it is one that the agent can distance and herself and which can seem to be an on the agent in many And we need to distinguish such a case from cases which can to be actions, actions, when in fact they are not an action at all: they are mere reactions or automatic responses. Both kinds of phenomena may seem to be on a subject who is in some way to be a both are by their being unresponsive to reason, and being such that the subject themselves from them. the should not be seen as a problem for the agency view, and the latter should not be seen as the is, when with the of obsessive thought we need to be in our to separate the grounded mental as the judgement that loves me really’ or the plane will merely passive of contents or images which can to be but in fact are not. In so far as we are dealing with acts of mind in which we have a subject obsessively thinking on some basis that something is the case, her attitude, and her knowledge of her attitude, fall in the of the agency view. But there seems to be no particular reason to that a version of the agency view will to them. In so far as the subject has those contents passively upon her then they are indeed out of of the agency a moderate agency theorist has the need for a distinct account of passive entertainings of when with the question of the extent to which obsessive thoughts are active or passive we have the that they may occur both as mere passive entertainings of content, and also occur as but commitments to the truth of some matter by a subject. these do not, it seems to cover the we on our obsessive thoughts there are two very different we find ourselves doing that have not been by the identified so far. First, and I think this is what is going on a if not of the when we are obsessively thinking, we seem to be to We to ourselves in certain in response to our and our We repeatedly as put it, loves me really’ or ‘the plane is going to crash’. Second, we can find ourselves up in images that in some way represent the over. in obsessively thinking loves me really’ I the or in thinking ‘the plane is going to crash’ I the plane and the My for the is to consider the that if not obsessive thinking is silent I will suggest that, so obsessive thoughts cases for the agency view of self-knowledge. understood our knowledge of our obsessive thoughts will be subject to pretty much the same account as that which explains our knowledge of our obsessive overt and have to idea that much thinking is through a kind of See views are very different but both take much of our thinking to be is or or and both suggest that we can know our thinking by being of such Further, they seem to take the view that if our thoughts are in our to them is and some in particular, by I will suggest that we ought rather to see our knowledge of as absolutely parallel to our knowledge of our that I will we should not consider it to be known phenomena in any it is rather known by an agent's awareness of what they are doing. takes an of of our although it can from subject to subject. this to or 2011, I with the that thinking about such may us to explain at least some of our to our thinking. In in so far as we can also and question and and so on, in a of can a in our account of our awareness of some of our thinking I think was on to it seems to me that we have to be in how we understand if it is to be able to the of us to know our thinking. the extent that they have an account of how we should understand the nature of and our to it, it seems to be that have precisely the wrong one if it is to us here. we to look at the nature of we a distinction between what the of and the of both about in a of silent This an appeal to the of I am of myself by being in by being an to my On the hand that on our own utterances and our own silent that our to our is as an suggest he is with a and thought to be approach to awareness of The with the agent The agent is the assumption that is an who and an who like the agent assumption was to to there is a who and a who what the is The idea then was that a what they were by what they were The question in what sense is one of to that P if the is a in are The sense in which one is of to that P is that one to that P. This is with the rather than the to much needs to be said about this of but to is to the of something which seems is to the nature of involves an to the way in which utterances are when is and some to be thinking, with the A idea then is that knows she is thinking about she on herself in the silent there are in fact no in the to be up by any and and know The is not that they take there to be genuine going on when someone they seem to take it that the of is the of the is is on and that just as important to so important to the appeal to rather than to the capacity to to explain our knowledge of is both and It is to suppose that a subject is of they have to their capacity for to as the of their We can best understand most and in particular the kind of that most my thinking, as by mental actions of a certain In particular, we can them as the awareness of which nor 2011 that acts as of the on which we know our own