JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Psychoanalysis253by another human attitude and because they can exist only by means of and forknowledge. Reflection, unable to serve as the basis for existential psychoanalysis, willthen simply furnish us with the brute materials toward which the psychoanalyst musttake an objective attitude. Thus only will he be able to know what he alreadyunderstands. The result is that complexes uprooted from the depths of the unconscious,like projects revealed by existential psychoanalysis, will be apprehended from thepoint of view of the Other. Consequently the object thus brought into the light will bearticulated according to the structures of the transcended-transcendence; that is, itsbeing will be the being-for-others even if the psychoanalyst and the subject of thepsychoanalysis are actually the same person. Thus the project which is brought tolight by either kind of psychoanalysis can be only the totality of the individual humanbeing, the irreducible element of the transcendence with the structure of being-forothers.What always escapes these methods of investigation is the project as it is foritself, the complex in its own being. This project-for-itself can be experienced only asa living possession; there is an incompatibility between existence for-itself and objectiveexistence. But the object of the two psychoanalyses has in it nonetheless the reality ofa being; the subject’s knowledge of it can in addition contribute to clarify reflection,and that reflection can then become a possession which will be a quasi-knowing.At this point the similarity between the two kinds of psychoanalysis ceases. Theydiffer fundamentally in that empirical psychoanalysis has decided upon its ownirreducible instead of allowing this to make itself known in a self-evident intuition.The libido or the will to power in actuality constitutes a psycho-biological residuewhich is not clear in itself and which does not appear to us as being beforehand theirreducible limit of the investigation. Finally it is experience which establishes that thefoundation of complexes is this libido or this will to power; and these results ofempirical inquiry are perfectly contingent, they are not convincing. Nothing preventsour conceiving a priori of a “human reality” which would not be expressed by the willto power, for which the libido would not constitute the original, undifferentiatedproject.On the other hand, the choice to which existential psychoanalysis will lead us,precisely because it is a choice, accounts for its original contingency, for the contingencyof the choice is the reverse side of its freedom. Furthermore, inasmuch as it establishedon the lack of being, conceived as a fundamental characteristic of being, it receives itslegitimacy as a choice, and we know that we do not have to push further. Each resultthen will be at once fully contingent and legitimately irreducible. Moreover it willalways remain particular; that is, we will not achieve as the ultimate goal of our