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15 The Master of Self-Deception
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269 I have to say that I was incapable of understanding [Freud] because I was a Frenchman with a good Cartesian tradition behind me, imbued with a certain rationalism, and I was therefore deeply shocked by the idea of the unconscious. —Sartre [We should] avoid the perilous reef of the unconscious which psychoanalysis meets at the start. —Sartre The more we seek to win our way to a metapsychological view of mental life, the more we must learn to emancipate ourselves from the importance of the symptom of “being conscious.” —Freud Despite Sartre’s ambivalence toward Freudian psychoanalysis, his position regarding the unconscious remained relatively consistent throughout his career.1 Simone de Beauvoir recalled that it was as early as 1932 that Sartre held a theory which was specifically designed to render the notion of the unconscious superfluous.2 Sartre later wrote: “I was . . . deeply shocked by the idea of the unconscious . . . I must say that I remain shocked by what was inevitable in Freud . . . I do not believe in the unconscious in the form in which psychoanalysis presents it to us today.”3 What compelled Sartre to oppose continuously Freud’s notion of the unconscious? The answer is protracted and extensive. Obviously, this chapter will not provide us enough space to fully develop Sartre’s argument against the unconscious , but some key elements will hopefully shed light on this discussion. The Master of Self-Deception: Sartre on Freud 15 Considerations of a Philosophical Nature Sartre’s own “Cartesian” heritage formed the background for his disapproval . Descartes had, of course, insisted that the mind is a unity, that is, indivisible: “it is one and the same mind that wills, understands and has sensory perceptions.”4 The mind remains an indissoluble unity because whatever happens—there remains a single center of consciousness, a single center of awareness and control. Yet, Freud did not share Sartre’s loyalty to Descartes, nor was he “philosophically constituted.” (Freud, with the exception of courses from Brentano, lacked formal philosophical training.) Hence, he borrowed a variety of philosophical ideas from, at times, discrepant philosophical systems without attending to the inherent inconsistencies among them. Perhaps one of Sartre’s main frustrations with the “unconscious,” then, was the extent to which it reflected Freud’s haphazard philosophical approach.5 Sartre felt that while Freud purported to adopt a Cartesian mechanistic view of humans, he mixed it with a finalistic, teleological account as well. Philosophically speaking, the two did not go together, or, at the very least, not without numerous mistakes. The Unconscious as a Misinterpretation of Self-Deception Ever true to his transcendental proclivities, Sartre’s critique of the Freudian unconscious in Being and Nothingness occurred in the context of his discussion of how “bad faith” was possible at all.6 Sartre defined “bad faith” as a lie to ourselves within the unity of a single consciousness—the motive being, to escape the responsible freedom which comprises our very being (that is, to hide the truth of its import for our existence).7 How does bad faith do this? Consciousness bestows meaning insofar as it vacillates at its own convenience between the two primary aspects of any situation— our transcendence (freedom) and our facticity (our necessary connection to given features of the world, namely, those beings which we engage with our freedom). The two are perfectly capable of a harmonious coordination , in what Sartre called “sincerity.”8 However, often when we try to account for why we did a particular act, we vacillate between an appeal to our transcendence and to our facticity, and form an explanation to suit our purposes rather than to reflect any truth in the situation. In other words, we often fail to take the unitary nature of a situation into account and instead seek to absolve ourselves from any responsibility for our actions. 270 A P P R E H E N D I N G T H E I N A C C E S S I B L E [54.227.136.157] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 07:48 GMT) We consequently make excuses for ourselves (that is, deceive ourselves) by either focusing on the external forces which (we claim) made us do a particular act (for Sartre, a perfect example was found in the Freudian instincts ); or, we focus on our freedom to do otherwise now and in the future , rather than address what we actually did at the time. At this critical juncture, Sartre posed the question: how...