Existential freedom and a psychological understanding of freedom : can psychology as a science access categories of existential philosophy?

Bibliogr. s. 80-82

The range of issues presented in the article is centred around various perspectives of thinking about human freedom: existential freedom, freedom on the mental level as well as freedom in contemporary cognitive sciences. The first one is based on the philosophical (especially in C. Jaspers approach) elaboration of the experience of a person. The second one pertains to our actual psychological capabilities and limitations; here the works of such doctors and therapists as C.G. Jung, E. Fromm, A. Kępiński and others have been adopted for the basis. Finally, the third one deals with the way which freedom is treated in within the cognitive trend dominating scientific psychology. Performed comparisons demonstrate that both the “existential freedom” as well as the “freedom on the mental level” seem to be phenomena resisting the investigation by naturalistically-oriented scientific psychology with its “subjective” “third person” methodology. Psychology which aspires to be counted among natural sciences, similarly to other sciences from this domain engages in the detection of relations, causative and functional laws and “mechanism” belying investigated phenomena. “Freedom” - if it is spoken about - is here rather “perceived” or “experienced” - awhile not real. At the same time it seems that psychology, as a detailed science should not - without venturing beyond its own competencies - explicitly formulate statements pertaining to the meaning of the experience of freedom or the existence of freedom “as such”. The issues mentioned are relevant insofar as they pertain to the question regarding the possibility and a potential scope of changes which can occur in a subject at the participation of its will and its own work.