Passion before Prudence

The Twin Paths of Commitment
These, I believe, are the two innate strivings that govern how we function as human beings. In his book, The Duality of Human Existence, David Bakan called these two strivings or motivations "agency" and "communion." For now, let’s call them "actuation" and "participation."
By actuation I mean the striving of the individual to influence, manage, or master his or her environment, whether that environment is personal, as it is in the social world, or transpersonal, as it is in the natural world. Actuation is a motivational thrust, a directional trend. The goal toward which it strives is what Robert White calls "effectance." Its means of attaining that goal is some form of competence.
Participation is also an innate, active, original striving. But its goal is connection, fusion, or belonging. And its means of attaining that goal are communication, engagement, association.
Since these two strivings lead in opposite directions, there is inevitably tension between the two. How do we resolve that tension? The answer is that we don't. That tension, in fact, is the source of our development as human beings. The tension is why an emphasis on one striving tends to follow the other.
What Otto Rank called the "trauma of birth," an act of agency or actuation (marked by breathing for the first time on one's own), follows communion or participation in the life of the mother, in the womb.
In the same way, nursing, an act of participation, is followed by the infant's mastery of the crib environment with hands or mouth and, ultimately, by a process of weaning to solid foods, both of which are acts of agency.
This rhythm between the strivings for actuation and participation continues throughout life. Tension between the two is desirable because excessive actuation can lead to isolation (Bakan cites Hitler as an example of agency unmitigated by communion) and excessive participation (consider Jonestown) can lead to incorporation by another or others.
Psychologist Erik Erickson does not use these terms in describing his eight stages of human development. But his analysis charts a life-long alternation between the two.
Life begins, writes Erickson, with the stage of trust, a stage of participation or communion, before we develop autonomy, a stage of actuation or agency. Autonomy is followed by the working through of relationships with parents during the stage of initiative to the achievement of what Erickson calls industry. We must then acquire identity before we can move to the joys and responsibilities of intimacy. Next comes the creative stage of generativity, followed by an integration through our "comradeship with distant times" to the final stage of integrity.
This oscillation between actuation and participation is due to the fact that human beings are innately both agents and participants, that our strivings are in both directions, one usually alternating with the other, and that our continuing development in life is the product of maintaining a healthy tension between the two.