Freud

Freud is the principal point of comparison for a proposed method of interpreting human action: an act must be read through the deeper structures it expresses, but those structures cannot be reduced to a past that mechanically determines the present. The book takes psychoanalysis as an indispensable model for moving beyond isolated behavior, then reverses its explanatory direction, treating conduct as part of a freely chosen, future-oriented project.

The Psychoanalytic Method

Freud and the book’s approach share a foundational premise: an act cannot be confined to itself. Even an apparently trivial action may express more profound structures, and psychoanalysis offers a method for making those meanings explicit. The question is not merely what happened immediately before a person acted, but under what conditions this particular person performed this particular act. On this account, conduct is symbolic: it can manifest a desire that must itself be understood within a larger organization of psychic life.

This shared method provides a way to avoid two inadequate accounts of the person. One imagines a horizontal stream of psychic events, each externally caused by what came before; the other posits a substance underneath the stream, but strips the person’s changing states of their meaning. Both, the text argues, confuse the for-itself with the in-itself. The act instead belongs to global structures and ultimately to the whole person: it is neither an isolated effect nor a meaningless surface.

Freud’s Determinism and Its Limits

Freud’s account is described as a vertical determinism. A symbolic act expresses an underlying desire, which in turn manifests a deeper complex; the complex precedes its expression and is constituted by the subject’s past. In this explanation, psychic life is reconstructed through connections such as transfer and condensation. The present act thus leads the interpreter backward, from its visible form toward an earlier psychic organization.

The subject’s history supplies the conditions through which drives attach to particular objects. Freud’s account, as presented here, begins with affectivity as a tabula rasa: external circumstances and the history of the subject determine which drive becomes fixed on which object. The child’s family situation, for example, is said to shape whether an Oedipus complex develops. In a different family structure, such as those attributed in the passage to peoples of the Coral Islands in the Pacific, that complex might not form. Later circumstances may determine whether it is resolved at puberty or remains central to sexual life. Although Freud’s explanation moves through deeper structures, the history that formed those structures keeps it anchored in antecedent causes.

The cost of that emphasis is a diminished future. If human reality is interpreted solely by regression from the present toward the past, one of its dimensions—the future—is lost. The subject’s acts then signify structures chiefly to an objective interpreter using discursive methods; the subject is not granted a pre-ontological comprehension of their meaning. In this picture, action is the result of a past that is, in principle, out of reach, rather than a way of inscribing a goal in the future.

Reversing the Direction of Interpretation

The book therefore borrows psychoanalysis as a method but proposes to apply it in the reverse direction. An act remains comprehensible and embedded in larger structures, but its meaning is not attributed to deterministic chance or explained by tracing it back to a prior psychic formation. Instead, the future turns back toward the present: conduct becomes intelligible through the possibilities and project in whose light it is lived.

Fatigue on a difficult path makes the contrast concrete. The slope being climbed and a restless night may contribute to the fatigue itself, but they do not determine how the person experiences it. That experience cannot simply be explained as the expression of a previously formed inferiority complex, either. A forceful struggle against fatigue may indeed express what is called inferiority, but the complex is not treated as a ready-made cause residing behind the behavior. It is understood as a project of the for-itself in the world, in the presence of the Other, and therefore as a way of choosing oneself.

Inferiority as a Project

In this interpretation, inferiority is not a hidden psychic object that precedes and causes each failure. It is the organized totality of failure behavior, understood as a projected plan and a general way of being. Individual failures indicate that project without reducing it to a fixed past formation; each attitude still reaches beyond what is given toward possibilities. Giving in to fatigue, for example, can make the path count as too difficult to traverse. The action thereby gives the situation a meaning rather than merely registering an external obstacle.

Even statements such as being ugly or stupid are treated as anticipations, not as neutral declarations of established qualities. They concern the adversity that women or society may present to a person’s undertakings, and that adversity becomes intelligible through the choice of those undertakings. The resulting account makes the inferiority complex a free, global project of choosing oneself as inferior before others: a way of assuming one’s being-for-others and responding to the existence of the Other. Freud’s backward explanation remains the indispensable comparison, but the decisive interpretive movement is toward the future possibilities through which conduct acquires its unity and meaning.