He would now, over and over again, make choices that reflected his need for freedom from external direction. When later he wrote about a student-run seminar he had helped to organize at Union, the issue of freedom recurred in his account: “I am truly astonished at the freedom which was granted to us… The whole seminar was very freewheeling… I wanted to find a field in which I could be sure my freedom of thought would not be limited.”35 When years later he was tempted away from his position at Ohio State by an offer from the University of Chicago to establish a counseling center, again the issue of freedom seemed paramount in his experience of the opportunity. In his autobiographical chapter he wrote about this experience: “I learned to set the staff free… It was a time of innovation in our educational methods and in our freewheeling administrative process… We were also experimenting with much freedom of expression of interpersonal feelings … There was enormous freedom for creativity.”36 This needfor freedom had its source in the restrictive family environment he now left, and it would be expressed in his theoretical proposition that healthy development consists of increasing autonomy from the control of external forces.
Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest