I suppose it represents for me the equivalent of conscious-unconscious, which is to
say that I no longer believe in certain forms of the unconscious [sic] even though
Lacan’s conception of the unconscious is more interesting...I want to give the idea
of a whole whose surface is completely conscious, while the rest is opaque to this
consciousness and, without being part of the unconscious, is hidden from you. When
I show [inThe Family Idiot] how Flaubert did not know himself and how at the same
time he understood himself admirably, I am indicating which I call experience
[ve ́cu] – that is to say, life aware of itself, without implying any thetic knowledge or
consciousness. This notion of experience is a tool I use, but one which I have not
theorized.^35
The pages on existential psychoanalysis inBNare both culminating
and promissory. They draw on the for-itself/in-itself/for-others triad,
now concretized by appeal to our being-in-situation, and they criticize
the disappearance from contemporary psychology ofmanas a unity
of responsibility, that is “a unity agreeable or hateful, blamable and
praiseworthy, in shortpersonal”(BN 561 ).
Sartre offers us a preview of subsequent studies when he remarks that,
“to be, for Flaubert, as for every subject of ‘biography,’ means to be
unified in the world. The irreducible unification which we ought to find,
which is Flaubert, and which we require biographers to reveal to us –
this is the unification of anoriginal project, a unification which should
reveal itself to us as anon-substantial absolute”(BN 561 ).
The principle of existential psychoanalysis is that “man is a totality
and not a collection. Consequently, he expresses himself as a whole in
even his most insignificant and his most superficial behavior. In other
words, there is not a taste, a mannerism, or a human act which is not
revealing”(BN 568 ). Sartre borrows Freud’s method of interpretation
(hermeneutics) but focuses it on the subject’s preontological, prereflec-
tive comprehension of his original project (the Choice) that defines the
meaning/direction (sens) of his life. That Choice is the “transcendent
meaning of each concrete, empirical choice” (BN 564 ). Where Freud
attends to the unconscious, Sartre deciphers the discernible manifest-
ations of one’s “psychic life” to bring to reflective awareness (knowledge)
the preflective comprehension of its transcendent meaning. “While
empirical psychoanalysis seeks the complex, existential psychoanalysis
(^35) Sartre, “On the Idiot of the Family,” interview with Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka,L/S
127 – 128.
222 Bad faith in human life:Being and Nothingness