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man must be measured against the science of Freud.
Sartre proceeds with characteristic intellectual exuberance: he
briskly dismisses Freud, denies flatly the existence of the unconscious,
and quotes one of Stekel's worst books to show that the central knot
of every neurosis is conscious. One wonders what kind of experience
Sartre can have had with neurotics.
Philosophers have, of course, their own particular form of resistance
to Freud, and Sartre might be excused also as simply reflecting the low
level of psychoanalysis in France, the one culturally advanced nation
which has made no contribution to psychoanalytic knowledge. But neither
excuse covers his failure to make use of such figures as Scheler and
Bergson, who indicate distinct philosophic grounds for the unconscious.
And phenomenology itself, when reinforced by other empirical data,
would lead in the same direction. Attentive phenomenological analysis
shows consciousness shading off to the unconscious; to put it paradox–
ically: certain conscious experiences do contain unconscious parts-a
crude example of which are certain kinds of double-take in the movies.
But, philosophy aside, what about the enormous weight of empirical
evidence adduced from clinical experience? When Sartre proposes to
found a new kind of psychoanalysis-"existential psychoanalysis"-he
strikes as frivolous and presumptuous the reader who is acquainted with
the long discipline and empirical evolution which gave birth,
in
the case
of Freud, to the concept and technique of psychoanalysis. However agile,
a mind which can step off so blithely and briskly into a new science does
not carry very much ballast. To paraphrase what Sartre has Orestes say
of his moral conscience: "It is too light, it needs to become heavy."
Sartre rejects Freud in order to absolutize the notion of "choice of
oneself," according to which man completely creates his character by his
choices. He denies the existence of "character" in order to affirm the
existence of "the situation." But his notion becomes self-defeating at
this point: for unless we know some of the laws of formation of charac–
ter, we cannot change it as we wish, and the idea of the plasticity of
human nature becomes unusable and pointless. Freedom demands some
determinism we can make use of. The result of Sartre's rejection of
Freud shows up in his discussions of the emotions, which will seem thin
and puerile to anyone acquainted with the psychoanalytic treatment of
these matters, and of anti-semitism, which is inadequate to the uncon–
scious sources of this problem.
3.
Sartre's first and best book,
La Nausee,
succeeds precisely in that
the union of philosopher and creative writer is more intimately achieved
in it than in any of his other books. Much as ideas, and the elaboration
of ideas, figure, the author has not shirked the novelist's tasks: the re–
markable thing is the life with which the ideas are invested, as forming
