On Being Freer
aware that the habit, which works automatically, can be intervened with; only the self, via the psyche, knows what parts of itself have been subtracted from its vigilance and put under the control of the psyche (which may cause warning signs to be ignored or cause the person to be engulfed in habits with no feedback reaching the self). The psyche may point to an appetite, say, as a justification for maintaining the functioning that a habit is. So, living at the automatic level via the psyche the person does not suspect that anything can be done to come out of it and therefore remains in the state of the status quo with regard to harmful behaviors. But once alerted, the self can delegate to affectivity—which can at any time be in contact with the same objectified realm as the psyche—the job of pouring enough energy into a behavior to alter it and to note the alteration. When the past no longer immediately commands that one yields to the strength of the automatic but rather that one yields to a future envisioned by the self as an expression of itself, the role of affectivity is to inject energy into some mechanisms so that their presence will be felt within the objectified and the new functioning thus has a chance to become as legitimate as other functionings of the self. Then, within the person, the dynamics of the self begins a complex work of temporarily maintaining the intervention of affectivity and of withdrawing from the psyche energy that had been sunken into the habit. The result, of course, is a changed behavior. Sustained by affectivity so long as hope is present— and this represents the future—the new functioning and its expression in behaviors is now under the scrutiny of the self. When the new functioning is considered safe, it is passed to the
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