Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud appears as the central reference point for the book’s account and critique of empirical psychoanalysis: a method that reads observable conduct as symbolic expression of a person’s unconscious history, but whose account of repression, the author argues, ultimately reintroduces consciousness inside the unconscious. The critique does not dismiss psychoanalytic interpretation; it identifies both its explanatory reach and the unresolved contradiction in its model of psychic division, then distinguishes it from existential psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis and the interpretation of conduct

Freud’s method begins from a division between the id and the ego. In the book’s reconstruction, instinctual drives and complexes formed through individual history constitute a psychic reality that is neither true nor false in itself. Fear, forgetting, dreams, and other conscious symbols, however, are concrete facts of consciousness. Their significance emerges when they are connected to the patient’s historical situation and to the complexes they express. The analyst interprets these facts much as a deceived person might interpret the behavior of a deceiver: the behavior is apprehended, but its truth depends on recovering the project and context that give it meaning.

An impulse to steal a book from a bookstall illustrates the distinction. The person may understand the impulse as a direct response to the volume’s rarity, interest, or price; psychoanalytic interpretation may instead connect it to self-punishment and, more remotely, an Oedipus complex. The proposed meaning is not immediate self-knowledge. It is a hypothesis supported by how many psychic facts it explains and, pragmatically, by whether it enables successful treatment. The analyst mediates between unconscious drives and conscious life, supplying an interpretive synthesis the subject cannot secure through intuition alone.

This account makes self-analysis possible only under restrictive conditions. A person with some psychoanalytic knowledge may attempt it, but must distrust intuition and apply learned interpretive rules from the outside, as if examining someone else. Its results remain hypotheses of varying probability, not certainties conferred by direct inner access. The book thus emphasizes a consequence of Freud’s model: the subject is not privileged in interpreting the causes and truth of the person’s own psychic phenomena.

The censor and the problem of resistance

The division between id and ego is meant to explain how someone can be deceived without consciously lying to themself. By placing the subject in relation to their unconscious psyche as though they were another person, psychoanalysis replaces the unity of deceiver and deceived with a structure resembling the deepest form of being-with others. Yet the account encounters a test in the patient’s resistance to treatment. As the analyst approaches a supposed truth, the patient may show defiance, refuse to speak, give fantastic accounts of dreams, or withdraw from treatment altogether.

Neither the ego nor the complex can readily explain that resistance within the model as described. The ego, treated as the totality of conscious facts, has no privileged knowledge of their meaning and can at most assess the probability of the analyst’s hypotheses. The complex, meanwhile, is understood as pressing toward conscious expression and evading repression; it would cooperate with the analyst rather than resist. The censor is therefore assigned the refusal: it must recognize that the analyst’s questions are nearing the drives it represses.

That assignment creates the central difficulty. To distinguish drives that must be repressed from permissible needs such as hunger, thirst, or sleep, and to allow some impulses through while disguising others, the censor must know what it is screening. It must also understand that the drives are to be repressed, recognize the direction of the analyst’s inquiry, and compare the repressed complex with the proposed interpretation. Such discrimination entails awareness of its own activity. The censor can avoid consciousness of the drive only by being conscious of what it is keeping from consciousness—in effect, by acting in bad faith.

The author’s objection is that psychoanalysis has not removed bad faith but relocated it. Its proposed separation of unconscious and conscious activity requires an autonomous, self-aware censor between them. Even a more elaborate division into id, ego, and superego, expressing themselves through the censor, does not resolve the difficulty: hiding something from oneself presupposes a single psychic mechanism performing complementary acts of maintaining and concealing the same material. Repression and disguised expression therefore remain joined within one activity rather than cleanly divided among psychic agencies.

Conscious symptoms and the limits of the unconscious

The book tests this problem against a case described by the Viennese psychiatrist Wilhelm Stekel. Women whose husbands’ infidelity has made them frigid may deny experiencing pleasure during sex despite objective signs of pleasure observed by their husbands. Stekel’s reported admissions indicate that some deliberately distract themselves during the act by turning their thoughts to daily occupations, such as household accounts. The example is not presented as a hidden complex inaccessible to awareness: the women’s distraction is a way of proving to themselves that they are frigid.

This conduct exemplifies bad faith because the effort to avoid being present to pleasure presupposes recognition that pleasure is being experienced. The attempt to deny the experience therefore depends on an awareness of the very thing it disavows. For the book, the case exposes a limit in an explanation that locates the relevant activity in an unconscious psyche: the behavior can be understood only as a conscious evasion, though not as a cynical act fully agreed with by the person performing it.

The argument does not claim that every psychoanalytic interpretation fails. Rather, it identifies a category of conduct whose structure resists explanation by unconscious repression because the evasion itself depends on the translucency of consciousness. Together with the censor’s implied awareness, this case leaves the original problem of bad faith unresolved and directs attention toward describing its patterns without dividing the psyche into agencies that must secretly know what they supposedly do not know.

From Freud’s method to existential psychoanalysis

The later account of existential psychoanalysis both borrows from and departs from Freud. Both approaches treat objectively discernible manifestations of psychic life as symbols of deeper, total structures of the individual. Both reject simple primary givens such as fixed character or hereditary disposition, and both understand the person through a history unfolding in a situation rather than through isolated traits. Their inquiries consider the person in the world and use available documentation—including letters, witnesses, intimate diaries, and social information—to reconstruct a life and the crystallization of meaning around crucial events.

Their central explanatory terms differ. Empirical psychoanalysis seeks a complex whose meanings are polyvalent; existential psychoanalysis seeks the person’s original choice, a prelogical synthesis that organizes a position in the world and shapes responses to logic and principles. Rather than treating conduct as the expression of an unconscious complex, it interprets particular actions as divergent symbols of a fundamental project. It uses comparison: because each act can both disclose and disguise that choice under the conditions of its occasion, the investigator compares multiple behaviors to bring their shared orientation into view.

The two methods also share an insistence that the subject has no privileged position in such an inquiry. Self-investigation remains possible, but the subject must examine themself as though they were another person and rely on objective evidence, including reflective data and the testimony of others. The decisive break is that existential psychoanalysis rejects the unconscious and treats psychic acts as coextensive with consciousness. A fundamental project may be fully experienced without being known as such: reflection apprehends particular dated desires and their symbolic texture, but may lack the conceptual instruments to isolate and name the choice they express.

The fundamental project and its manifestations

The book relates this method to an account of desire in which human reality is fundamentally a desire to be. The original project is not a hidden, abstract wish that first exists and later produces particular emotions. It manifests only through concrete, contingent expressions such as jealousy, greed, love of art, cowardice, and courage. Each specific person’s empirical conduct gives that project its particular appearance; interpretation therefore proceeds through the lived expressions rather than positing a separate desire behind them.

The existential method’s resemblance to Freud lies in treating such concrete expressions as symbolically related to a broader personal structure. Its difference lies in what that structure is and how it is known. Freud’s account invokes unconscious complexes whose truth must be inferred and mediated by the analyst; existential psychoanalysis regards the fundamental project as conscious but not necessarily conceptually grasped by its subject. Reflection is described as luminous yet limited: it possesses the conduct and its significance in an undifferentiated way, without the connections and concepts required to bring the underlying choice fully into view. Freud consequently remains both a methodological precursor and the foil through which the book marks its rejection of an unconscious agency that would have to know, in order to repress, what it supposedly does not know.