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Frie, Roger (2008) (Editor). Psychological Agency: Theory, Practice, and Culture. MIT Press, ix + 261 pp. Hardcover (ISBN: 978-0-262-06267-1), $56.00; Paper (ISBN: 978-0-262-56231-7), $28.00.
"Agency is a concept that can be as obscuring as illuminating" (p. 51). So writes Elliot L. Jurist, one of the contributors to this collection of essays on psychological agency, edited by Roger Frie. Frie is a philosophically-informed psychoanalyst with a Ph.D. in phenomenological psychology and a Psy.D. in clinical psychology. He has edited or co-written several important books reviewed by this journal (and by this reviewer) in recent years (Frie, 2003; Burston and Frie, 2006).
This volume amply demonstrates both of the predicates in the above quotation. Fries erudition and the comments of the nine additional contributors (psychoanalysts, educational psychologists and a psychiatrist) explicate the concept of agency with insight and provide clinical and sociocultural applications. In general, agency is commonly understood as the capacity of human beings to make choices and to act on those choices. For many of us, however, the overall concept of psychological agency is often murky, confused and ambiguous. As noted by Jurist, the use of this term can be "obscuring."
In his introductory chapter, Frie observes that psychological research and practice do not conceptualize the term agency with any consistency. This appears to be true for the contributors to this volume as well. In the first paragraph of the Preface, Frie writes: "Broadly speaking, psychological agency refers to the human capacity for reflective action, and is based on the potential to imagine and create new ways of being and acting in the world" (p. vii). The contributors sometimes have different slants on the basic meaning of the concept. Jack Martin, for example, describes agency as "the capacity of human beings to self-determine their decisions and actions in ways not entirely dictated by biophysical and/of sociocultural constituents and factors outside of their control" (p. 97), while Jill Gentile defines agency as "the fundamental capacity to create personal meaning to initiate and 'own' the communication of desire and intent, and to make the 'spontaneous gesture'" (p. 118). Jurist describes both a thin sense and a thick sense of agency. Pascal Sauvayre, after describing agency as "an activity that involves the consttuction and formulation of meaning...