Agency occupies a contested but indispensable position across the depth-psychology corpus, bridging phenomenological philosophy, trauma theory, neuropsychology, and somatic approaches. The term carries at least three distinguishable registers. In phenomenological and embodied-cognition accounts — most systematically in Gallagher’s work — agency names the pre-reflective sense of being the willful initiator of an action, underwritten by forward motor-control comparators and distinct from, yet normally coincident with, the sense of bodily ownership. When this neurological substrate fails, as in schizophrenic delusions of control or thought insertion, agency and ownership dissociate in clinically illuminating ways. A second, psychodynamic register appears in Freud’s structural theory, where psychical agencies — ego, id, superego — distribute and contest authorship of mental acts without any single locus holding sovereign control. A third, experiential-therapeutic register dominates van der Kolk’s trauma framework: agency is the felt capacity to shape one’s circumstances, grounded in interoceptive awareness and the medial prefrontal cortex, and its loss is the defining wound of trauma. Damasio further situates agency within the biological construction of selfhood, rooting it in the organism’s spatial and temporal perspective. Across all three registers, the literature converges on a key tension: agency is simultaneously a phenomenological given of ordinary action and a fragile achievement that pathology, trauma, and structural dissociation can dissolve.
‘Agency’ is the technical term for the feeling of being in charge of your life: knowing where you stand, knowing that you have a say in what happens to you, knowing that you have some ability to shape your circumstances.
Van der Kolk defines agency as interoceptively grounded self-determination, arguing that its recovery through mindfulness and MPFC strengthening is the central aim of trauma treatment.
, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, 2014thesis
The notion of agency refers to the initiation or source of the act. It involves a sense of generating or being the willful initiator of an action.
Gallagher distinguishes agency — the sense of willful initiation — from ownership of movement, showing how both are normally coincident yet can dissociate in involuntary action and pathology.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005thesis
This ‘forward’ motor control, which does not depend on sensory feedback, not only helps to generate the action, but it is likely responsible for generating a conscious sense of agency for action.
Gallagher locates the neurological basis of agency in a forward premotor comparator system that anticipates action consequences prior to sensory feedback.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005thesis
the sense of agency for action, which goes awry in pathological symptoms such as delusions of c[ontrol]… the pre-action system is anticipatory.
Gallagher argues that the anticipatory character of the forward motor system is what makes agency possible and its disruption — as in psychotic delusions of control — clinically legible.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005supporting
the body-schematic system will fail to register a sense of agency, a sense that it is the subject himself who is the willful generator of the movement.
Gallagher demonstrates that absence of efference copy at the forward comparator produces a clinical loss of agentive self-attribution, as observed in schizophrenic symptomatology.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005supporting
The Roots of Individual Perspective, Ownership, and Agency — Whatever happens in your mind happens in time and in space relative to the instant in time your body is in.
Damasio grounds agency in the organism’s bodily perspective, treating it alongside ownership as a biological construction arising from the spatio-temporal situatedness of the living body.
, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1999supporting
In certain positive symptoms of schizophrenia specific aspects of self-awareness are disrupted. These symptoms include delusions of control in regard to bodily movements, thought insertion, and auditory hallucinations.
Gallagher uses schizophrenic symptomatology as a pathological probe to reveal the normally hidden structures of self-awareness and agency underlying ordinary embodied action.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005supporting
distressing dreams do in fact contain something which is distressing to the second agency, but something which at the same time represents a wish on the part of the first agency.
Freud’s structural model distributes agency across competing psychical systems, so that no single faculty owns the dream-wish, establishing a foundational depth-psychological pluralisation of agency.
, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900supporting
it seems possible for metarepresentation to go wrong in at least two ways… metarepresentation can become hyperreflective, and as a result, the schizophrenic can over-monitor aspects of his own experience.
Gallagher explores how over-monitoring as well as under-monitoring of self-generated action can disrupt agency, complicating simple deficit models of schizophrenic loss of authorship.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005supporting
we rebuke, oppose and reform each other as if the responsibility lay also in ourselves, and not just in our congenital make-up and in the accidental necessity of that which surrounds and penetrates us.
This Stoic passage frames the philosophical problem of agency as a tension between determinism and the pre-theoretical social practice of attributing responsibility — an ancestral framing of the debate continued in depth psychology.
, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987aside