e but determined by psychical or physical conditions. The opposite state, indeterminism, is defined that volitional decisions are in certain cases independent of antecedent physiological and psychological cause. Free will is very much like indeterminism, almost the same but somewhat more ambiguous. Free will means the capability of making decisions independent of external constraint and in accordance with the inner motives and goals of the actor. A lesser version of absolute free will would be the ability to choose among alternate possibilities.
Theories of counseling somewhat follow the development of discussion of free will and determinism, tracing a historical course along the map of thought in psychology. It is not possible to tell the whole story in a brief essay such as this, but informative to provide an overview in order to understand the direction of counseling in contemporary times.
Psychology was first perceived as a science in the 1800s along with beliefs in determinism, universal causation and the possibility of predictability according to known conditions of the person. There was a presupposed natural order and systems of metaphysical law that informed guesses about logical human action. Emerging from this scientific foundation were Freud's work in psychoanalysis, based on biologic and psychic determinism and in the early years of the 20th century, behaviorism and Skinner's learning theory and environmental determinism.
Then a philosophical, theoretical and methodological divide occurred between these early foundations and the work of William James, whose pragmatic inclusion of ideas relating to the cognitive and emotional self made a major impact on the development of counseling theory. Along with James came Alfred Adler and Viktor Frankl, who were contemporaries of Freud, but somewhat ahead of their time in moving more toward self-determinism.
In the 1950's humanism and phenomenology developed, in...