What it is
Psychologist David Bakan described two modes of existence. Agency is the individual as an individual: asserting, protecting, building, mastering, standing apart. Communion is the individual as part of a larger whole: contact, openness, cooperation, being with rather than acting on.
Bakan warned that agency without communion is destructive. Later researchers found the same thing in people: unmitigated agency, or unmitigated communion, both cost something.
How it shows up for me
It gave me words for something in my own values. A lot of mine lean toward agency: efficiency, autonomy, precision. The ones I find hardest, like intimacy, are about communion. I don’t think I need fewer agentic values. I need the other side strong enough to balance them.