Lisa Blatz on Measuring the Emotional Experiences of Freedom
Lisa Blatz earned her PhD in Social Psychology, with highest distinction, in 2019 at the University of Cologne, Germany. She earned her MA at University of Göttingen and her BA at University of Jena. Her thesis focused on social-comparison-related emotions, such as envy. During a research stay at University of California, Berkeley (USA), she also developed new work in existential psychology, focusing on the emotional experiences of freedom. Her work is supported by four research funds, five scholarships, and she received an award to present her work at the 2019 Existential Psychology Preconference. Currently, Lisa also provides adult and child psychotherapy and counseling, combining practice and research.
By Kenneth Vail, Cleveland State University. September 24, 2021.
ISSEP: How did you first become aware of and interested in existentialism and existential psychology?
Erich Fromm and his Escape from freedom (1941).
Lisa Blatz: As a child, my family gave me a very free style of life. We grew up in the countryside and, looking back on it, life there was interesting in a variety of ways. As children, we could just run around and meet people and explore; I really enjoyed that. But it could also be quite boring too, which challenged me to consider what it was that I wanted to do. Sometimes I didn’t really know where to go, what to do, who to be, or why. My parents were always very supportive in whatever I wanted to do, but I always had to make the first step to choose what I wanted to do and I was a bit overwhelmed by that. So, naturally, as a teenager, I felt a bit lost and wanted to get some deeper understanding and guidance. I’m not a religious person, so I didn’t appeal to a higher power. Instead, I became interested in philosophy because it seemed like a good entryway for me to explore these important questions about what it means to be.
I was reading a lot, as a teenager, and came across the work of Jean Paul Sartre. My philosophy class never formally addressed the existentialists, so I began to read up on it on my own. Eventually, I made a book club in college with two friends and colleagues, during which we read Eric Fromm’s Escape from freedom (1941). His work really helped address these two sides of freedom: that it could be both liberating and also overwhelming. But what I really loved about his work was that although it could be an either/or situation, like a pendulum that swings from one side to the other, he didn’t necessarily consider it limited to a unidimensional form. He thought we could also experience both and that it was possible to manage and overcome the problems that come with being overwhelmed by freedom and afraid of being too free. That was when I began to develop an interest in researching these experiences.
ISSEP: You’ve been doing some research to study the experiences of positive and negative freedom. Can you tell us more about that?
Lisa Blatz: Of course! My research investigates some of the existentialist philosophical perspectives on freedom. Philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Fromm have devoted much attention to what Isaiah Berlin (1958) would have called negative and positive freedom. Negative freedom is the absence of restrictions—it’s “freedom from.” That is, negative freedom is when humans became free from the restrictions of behavioral instincts, when a child becomes able to make decisions free from their parents control, when citizens are able to move about free from harassment by police, and so on. Positive freedom is the capacity to act upon one’s will—it’s “freedom to.” That is, positive freedom is when a high school grad is able to exercise the freedom to choose a career path for themselves, when family exercises their freedom to choose to rescue a dog from a shelter, when citizens exercise their freedom to practice their own religious or secular beliefs, and so on.
Isaiah Berlin and a collection including his Four essays on liberty (1958)
I wanted to know: What emotional experiences are associated with these aspects of freedom? The more my students and I thought about this question, the more enthusiastic about it we became. However, we didn’t see any prior research on the topic or any prior way to measure the experience of positive and negative freedom. So that’s where we began.
Our first study was a qualitative analysis that sought to understand what people actually mean when they say they feel “free.” We asked lay persons, and also experts, on the topic to name everything that comes to their mind when they think about freedom—that generated a long list of hundreds of concepts and experiences! Then, in our second study, we turned those responses into quantitative survey items, had participants rate the degree to which they were experiencing them (e.g., on a scale of 1 – 10), and did an item analysis and factor analysis on those data to try to find systematic patterns—themes and experiences that tended to go together. The most amazing thing happened: we found evidence for a two-factor solution, with one subset of items mapping on to negative freedom and another subset mapping on to positive freedom!
Next, we wanted to study this stuff in the wild, so to speak. So, our third study was a longitudinal “daily diary” field study among college students during the week of their graduation ceremony. They first completed the freedom scale we created, then they rated their emotional experiences four times a day each day for one week, and at the end of the week they completed the freedom measure again. As one might expect, they felt very happy during their graduation week! But when we dug deeper into the data, we could see some ambivalence (both positive and negative emotions) related to freedom—people enjoyed the newfound freedom from their university studies but at the same time they felt anxious about facing their freedom to go out and find their way in the world.
ISSEP: In what ways can this sort of research help us to better understand important human experiences?
Lisa Blatz: The emotional experiences of existential concerns have an important impact on our well-being. I see this with my clients in therapy all the time. Their individual circumstances can be quite diverse, of course, but their emotional experiences are real and can have a dramatic influence on their subsequent motivational orientations. When my clients encounter freedom-related challenges, we often have to decide what to do with those moments—can we find a way to break out and reinvent ourselves, or do we have difficulty navigating them and begin to feel lost?
For example, if a client is going through a divorce, they might actually want out of that relationship—it might offer them liberty in a variety of desirable ways. But at the same time, that freedom might present a new set of challenges. They might gain freedom from a possessive or restricting partner; but after the divorce they would also be faced with the overwhelming freedom to exercise their own judgment about who they really are, what their new concept of family will be, how to re-engage the world around them, and so on. It presents an opportunity for growth, for sure, but it can also be overwhelming and potentially cause people to shrink from the challenge by staying in an unhealthy marriage or abdicating their responsibilities by following the advice of others instead of deciding for themselves. It’s important for us researchers to continue to study these sorts of emotional responses to the experiences of positive and negative freedoms, so we can better understand them and help people to overcome them or even use them to their advantage.
ISSEP: Do you see the topic being dealt with in interesting ways in the humanities or the arts?
Lisa Blatz: Oh yes, it’s everywhere! For example, jazz great Nina Simone often sang a song called I wish I knew how it would feel to be free (1967), which extolled the emotional experiences of both negative freedom (e.g., wishing to break the chains…) and positive freedom (e.g., flying like a bird in the sky).
I wish I knew how
It would feel to be free
I wish I could break
All the chains holdin' me…Well, I wish I could be
Like a bird in the sky
How sweet it would be
If I found I could fly
In modern pop literature, Jonathan Franzen’s book Freedom: A novel (2010) is about the temptations and burdens of liberty. It follows a family as they try to find their way in life, creating opportunities for themselves (free from restrictions) and then grappling with responsibility for the freedom to exercise their own free will—sometimes not necessarily knowing what do do with it.
In the classic vein, George Orwell’s Animal farm (1945) illustrates both the emotional experiences of freedom as well as the impact of those experiences on motivational orientations and society. In the beginning the farm represents a sort of prison, with the animals under the complete and strict authoritarian control of the farmer. The farm’s prize-winning middle white boar, Old Major, became the voice of their misery and then ultimately led them to a rebellion—they successfully ran the farmer off the farm! For a while, they simply enjoyed being free from the farmer (negative freedom).
However, the animals also slowly began to face the fact that they now also had the freedom to do whatever they wanted (positive freedom). Ultimately, they became overwhelmed by that positive freedom, by the burden of developing their own values and engage life in self-determined ways. To relieve the burden, they began to limit and displace their freedom again—following the instructions of two other pigs, Snowball and Napoleon, and pledging to live according to a strict set of laws (“The Seven Commandments”). By the end, they had given up their freedom to behave as they wished and were no longer even free from an oppressive autocracy.
Together, these sorts of artworks underscore that restrictions on negative freedom can be unpleasant and miserable, whereas becoming free from our external constraints is not only emotionally healthy but often exhilarating. However, they also suggest the emotional landscape of positive freedom may be a bit more complicated. I’m hopeful that continued research on the topic can help us understand why it might sometimes make us shrink away from self-determination and responsibility (as it did for George Orwell) and why it can sometimes make us feel like we can fly like a bird in the sky (as it did for Nina Simone).
ISSEP: You’ve attended, and presented research at, our Existential Psychology preconferences; how has your experience been with those?
Lisa Blatz: I attended the first [2019] Existential Psychology preconference in Portland, OR, and it was such a special occasion! I had been developing these interests for quite some time, but the other students and research groups here were focused on other topics. I was leading that research sort of on my own, as somewhat of a side project. So it was so important to attend this preconference and see all these other researchers who are also passionate about freedom, too. Dr. Rich Ryan gave a Keynote address about research on self-determination and autonomy; Dr. Sheena Iyengar presented her work on freedom, choice, and autonomy; and Dr. Becca Schlegel presented work on the true self, decisions, and authenticity. I loved the poster session, too, because I learned so much and had fantastically vivid discussions with like-minded researchers from different disciplines and methodological backgrounds. I felt completely at home and it validated that these research topics are both important and tractable – it was really inspiring!
“Good research takes time and requires your sustained passion and dedication, so find a topic that interests you in a meaningful way”
ISSEP: What is one piece of advice you would give to future students who have an interest in following in your footsteps?
Lisa Blatz: Find a topic that fascinates you; a topic you find meaningful in some way. In some ways this is easier when researching existential psychology in social and personality domains, because that’s the level at which we traffic—we often naturally wonder about how love works, why we vote for certain politicians, or what is the meaning of life. But you might also be interested in the building blocks to those sorts of social and mental experiences, which might lead us down a few levels to cognitive or neuroscience. Or maybe you’ll be interested in some blend of these approaches (e.g., existential social-cognitive-neuroscience).
In any event, the phrase “research is me-search” is not just a catchy quip—it can also be a sensible piece of advice. Good research takes time and requires your sustained passion and dedication, so find a topic that interests you in a meaningful way. If you’re intrinsically interested, you’ll be much more motivated to think deeply about it and stick with it over the years.
ISSEP: Can you tell us a little about yourself outside the research context?
Lisa Blatz: I’m interested in modern dance. I read somewhere that dance is like the mother tongue of human beings, because it can connect us and communicate without words. That may be, because no matter the source I love to watch dancers and get involved with their movements. One of the performances I appreciated most was “Babel (Words),” by the Flemish choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. When I moved to Cologne, I took up dancing with a studio for about two years. It was so much fun; I learned a lot and made some great friends! I went in a different direction since then, but I still love to dance around and love to watch others’ performances too.
Hiking and camping is also a lot of fun. I love that moment when I wake up in a tent and get out to fix a little coffee on a little stove and enjoy a good view out in the morning air. Beautiful. One of my favorite camping trips, recently, was to Norway. It was just a lovely place: picturesque lakes, charming landscapes, and the society is really open. Highly recommended. I do a bit of running, too; nothing competitive, I just love being outside!
I also like to travel around to stay connected with friends and family, which typically means fun little weekend jaunts around Germany though during covid I’ve had to get a bit more creative.
ISSEP: A lot of us like to listen to music in the lab; what are you listening to lately?
Lisa Blatz: I’m not a very intense person, in general, so I really like low-key music. When I’m studying, I usually listen to music that mixes electronic with jazz. Some of my favorites for studying are Wild window (feat. Tricky Trio) by Mees Dierdorp and All Melody 2 by Nils Frahm. They bring in a lot of creative influences and it’s good for keeping focused. Outside of studying, I’m a big fan of Radiohead. They haven’t produced a new album in quite some time, but Thom Yorke is phenomenal and I really enjoy their lyrics and sound.