JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

13 PsychoanalysisThe Viennese doctor Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) designed psychoanalysisas a scientific cure for neurotic disorders through the patient talking to atrained ‘analyst’. It has become a Weltanschauung whose scientific statusis controversial. Psychoanalysis entails the anti-Cartesian tenet that I maybe in mental states of which I am wholly or partly unaware. My actions arethe product of a power struggle between ego, superego and id and are theexpression of libido and childhood trauma. Cure or explanation entailsmaking the unconscious conscious.Sartre invents a kind of explanation called ‘existential psychoanalysis’even though he insists that the unconscious does not exist because theidea of an unconscious mental state is contradictory. Part of a state’s beingmental is its being conscious. How is this psychoanalysis without theunconscious possible?To decide this, we need to examine what Sartre endorses and repudiatesin classical or Freudian psychoanalysis. Sartre and Freud agree that theexplanation of human action has to be holistic not atomistic. Any piece ofbehaviour, no matter how trivial, is revelatory and symbolic of the person asa totality, in terms of whom it has to be deciphered. A person can not beunderstood as an aggregate of empirical components. Nevertheless, bothSartre and Freud reject any fixed, a priori view of human nature whetherbiological, historical or theological. A person can not be usefully studied inabstraction from their life, including their lived situations.Sartre’s rejection of the unconscious is not so Cartesian as might appear.From the fact that my mental states are conscious it does not follow that Iknow what they are. Even if my attitudes towards my hopes, fears andintentions are conscious I may misunderstand or be ignorant of their contents.Sartre replaces the Freudian concept of libido with his own concept of the