Freedom with Responsibility: Interconnecting Self, Others, and Social Structures in Contexts

Abstract

Humans capable of freedom and responsibility live in contexts. Persons exercising freedom with responsibility coconstruct both what occurs between them as individuals and the quality of group life. In responsible freedom, each person interprets accurately the meanings of all parties and acts to protect the freedom of each to respond and connect with integrity. Contexts both expand and constrict possibilities for freedom and responsibility. Interpersonal trauma, intergroup conflict (Chirot & Seligman, 2001), conditions of justice (Boszormenyi-Nagy & Krasner, 1986), and power (May, 1972) impact freedom and responsibility. Eric Berne formulated a social psychiatry that presupposes living in contexts. Transactional analysis highlights experiencing contexts through ego states, transactions, group imagoes, and scripts. These constructs emphasize the individual and interpersonal dimensions of human development. However, larger contextual dynamics necessitate expanding the conventional transactional analytic perspective to include social-structural processes. A comprehensive, integrative framework expands Berne's social psychiatry to encompass social-psychological and systemic processes–from self to international relations –that bear on the exercise of freedom and responsibility. Effective clinical applications require responsiveness to client dynamics and to emerging theory as encapsulating the dimensions of personal experiences and social structures through which freedom and responsibility, harm and healing transpire.