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Sartre on the Freudian Unconscious and Surrealism

Glenn Mason-Riseborough (22/10/1999)

 

1.0 Introduction

One of the main objections that Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) had with both Freudian psychoanalysis and surrealism was their basic underlying assumption of an unconscious.  Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) thought that the unconscious drives are often undesirable to the conscious component of the mind and the inability to adequately deal with them is the source of conflict and neurosis.  In a sense, one is lying to oneself through the repression of certain undesirable unconscious drives.  Freud and his followers claimed that it is only through indirect analysis that one might gain access to this otherwise inaccessible area of the mind.  The surrealists followed Freud in asserting that there was a part of the human mind that was inaccessible to direct human introspection and awareness.  This assumption of an unconscious was a central part of the surrealist’s artistic works.   The techniques that they developed, such as automatism and automatic writing, were used in order to get to the truths that supposedly lay in the unconscious.  Sartre completely rejected this account of the mind, claiming instead that we have complete conscious access to all causes of our actions.  Sartre attempted to overcome the conceptual difficulty of lying to oneself in his discussion of “bad faith” (mauvaise foi).  As a result of this he drew his famous conclusion that we are “condemned to be free” (Sartre, 1956, p. 567).  In this essay I will examine this issue in more depth.  It is my task in this essay to elucidate Sartre’s main objections to the Freudian unconscious.  One of my main aims is to determine whether Sartre was justified in his rejection of the unconscious.  In addition, I will be examining whether Sartre’s arguments regarding the unconscious are also fatal to surrealism and whether Sartre’s theories necessitate rejecting it.  I will firstly give a brief exposition of the Freudian and surrealist perspectives before turning to Sartre’s own views on the unconscious.

To narrow down this essay I will not be making heavy weather over the alleged similarities between Sartre’s early novels (specifically Nausea) and surrealism.  There have been some suggestions (e.g. William Plank’s doctoral thesis Sartre and Surrealism[1]) that Sartre’s own writings have significant common ground with surrealist intentions.  This similarity is not so much about the unconscious as it is about the perceived order in the world – is it in the world or in humanity, and what is to be done about it if it is the latter?

 

2.0 Freud

As I stated in the introduction above, Freud posits an account of the human mind within which there are both conscious and unconscious elements.  Though he was by no means the first to postulate the theory that there are mental processes of which the conscious mind is not aware, this is, without a doubt, a central part of his theories and it is through him that this idea received significant recognition this century.  Throughout his career Freud developed a number of different theoretical models that show how the mind is structured.  While they all retain a number of similarities, such as stipulating that the mind has various components and that some components are not directly accessible to our consciousness, nonetheless there are some significant differences.  The two Freudian structures of the mind that are perhaps most significant in the context of this discussion on Sartre are:

1.                Freud’s earlier model of the mind that involves the structures of an unconscious, preconscious, consciousness and a censor.

2.                Freud’s later model of the mind that includes the id, ego and super-ego.

 

In his later work (New Introductory Lectures, published in 1933) Freud acknowledged the limitations of his earlier model and came to reject it.  Ivan Soll, in his essay “Sartre’s Rejection of the Freudian Unconscious,” argues that despite this Sartre still used Freud’s earlier model of the mind.  Soll writes:

Sartre tends to equate Freud’s relatively early topographical distinction between the conscious and unconscious regions of the mind with his later distinction between the ego and id.  In defining the Freudian notion of the ego as the “psychic totality of the facts of consciousness,” Sartre explicitly identifies the ego with the consciousness of the mind, and, by implication, the id with the unconscious part.  But the true account of the relationships among the Freudian concepts of the ego, the id, the unconscious, and consciousness is not so simple.

 

Later, Soll writes:

Sartre’s general neglect of the changes that Freud’s theories undergoes in the course of their development is further evidenced in Sartre’s failures to mention that this “disagreeable” and “inconvenient” discovery led Freud to reject completely any structural or topographical sense of “unconsciousness”

 

So, what were these two models of the mind that Freud postulated?  I will begin with Freud’s earlier model that Sartre criticises then move on to his later model.  I will give Sartre’s reasons for rejecting the earlier model in the section below on Sartre.  Due to the fact that Sartre essentially ignores Freud’s later model I will not spend too much time discussing the details of it, aside from very briefly explaining its essence in this section below.  As already mentioned, the central issue under discussion is examining and reconciling Sartre’s own views in the context of the unconscious.

In Freud’s early work on dreams, hysteria, parapraxes and jokes he found it necessary to postulate the existence of unconscious processes to explain certain phenomena.  He made the distinction between three different usages of the term “unconscious.”  The first refers to a “descriptive” sense, in which we are unconscious of something merely because we are not currently thinking about it or paying attention to it.  Freud called this the “preconscious.”  The second refers to a “dynamic” sense in which there is a great deal of difficulty in bringing the subject matter to consciousness, and it may even be impossible to accomplish.  The third usage of “unconscious” is as part of a topographical model of the mind.  In his General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (cited in Soll), published in 1917, Freud clearly expressed what he considered to be a “crude” spatial conception of the mind.  He admitted that in some ways it was “incorrect,” but that it “must indicate an extensive approximation to the actual reality.”  In this representation of the mind, he considers the mind to be like two rooms next to each other, connected with a single door.  In the first room, the “ante-room,” the unconscious (Ucs.) resides, in which “the various mental excitations are crowding upon one another, like individual beings.”  The consciousness (Cs.) resides in the second “smaller” “reception” room.  At the doorway stands a “doorkeeper,” a censor, which “examines the various mental excitations, censors them, and denies them admittance to the reception room when he disapproves of them.”  The mental excitations that pass by the “doorkeeper” into the reception room become the preconscious (Pcs.).  They succeed in becoming fully conscious if they manage to “attract the eye of consciousness.”

Freud moved away from this model of the mind in the 1920s because of a number of problems with it.  Soll states, quoting Freud’s New Introductory Lectures, that “Freud was led to this position by a consideration of exactly the question that initiated Sartre’s criticism: ‘From what part of the mind does an unconscious resistance arise?’”  Rather than referring to the structural components – Ucs., Cs. and Pcs., Freud instead began talking about the id, ego and super-ego.  Freud made it clear that these new terminologies were not intended to be equivalent to the old structural terminologies, though they did have some overlaps.  Freud (cited in Soll) states in his New Introductory Lectures:

We perceive that we have no right to name the mental region that is foreign to the ego ‘the system Ucs.,’ since the characteristic of being unconscious is not restricted to it.  Very well, we will no longer use the term unconscious in the systematic sense.

 

Freud defined the id as the blind, uncoordinated, instinctual drives.  In many ways this has similarities with Arthur Schopenhauer’s (1788-1860) thoughts on the “Will.”  The ego is the organised part of the mind that attempts to integrate the drives of the id with external reality.  This most closely resembles the “I” of individual agency.  The super-ego is the moral aspect of the mind; it can be thought of as the conscience.  It is the critical part of the self that constantly evaluates itself, comparing itself with an ego ideal that develops according to social and cultural practices.

It is worth noting at this point that Plank, whose work I examine in the context of surrealism and Sartre’s response to it, does not pick up on this distinction in Freud’s views that I have discussed above.  He follows Sartre in using id and ego as equivalent terms to unconscious and conscious respectively.

 

3.0 Surrealism

The question that Plank asks is “what is surrealism? … Is it [André] Breton?  Or the early period of intransigence and excommunication?  Or the later, more mellow period?” (p. 1).  This is certainly also a central question to ask in the context of this essay.  We need to know exactly what Sartre is rejecting when he rejects surrealism.  Plank suggests that we accept (rightly or wrongly) Sartre’s definitions of surrealism, given the context of his discussion in comparing Sartre with surrealism.  While I agree with this approach, the parameters of my essay are a lot narrower than Plank’s thesis.  Perhaps as a consequence, I have had a great deal of difficulty in finding any clear definitions of surrealism in both Sartre’s and Plank’s works directly related to the Freudian unconscious.  Nonetheless, Plank states (p. 3):

At the root of most of Sartre’s objections was the surrealist belief that part of human reality lies hidden, unknown, and for a large part unknowable. … André Breton’s often quoted definition of surrealism is based on the assumption that the subconscious [unconscious] mind exists; and automatic writing, more generally automatism, the major technique of the surrealist, further assumes that a certain truth lies in the subconscious.  If we can overcome the deleterious effect of the rational faculties, this subconscious will express itself, destroying, in effect, the opposition between conscious and subconscious and producing a more complete human reality.

 

In addition, I looked to Breton’s works to shed further light on this surrealist assumption.  In his Surrealist Manifesto (Le Manifeste du Surréalism), written in 1924, he has numerous and specific references to Freud.  Breton admits to being familiar with Freud’s theories of dream interpretation and also his “methods of examination.”  He also credits Freud with helping to discover that “the depths of our minds conceal strange forces capable of augmenting or conquering those on the surface.”  In addition, Breton’s essay What is Surrealism?, written and intended as a retrospective look at the movement, clarifies his intentions.  He writes that automatic thought is disengaged from “conscious, aesthetic or moral preoccupations.”  What Breton does not do is give a clear account of the details of his understanding of Freud’s conception of the unconscious (or unconsciousness in general).  Was Breton working with a specific Freudian model of the mind (Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto was written a year after Freud published The Ego and the Id)?  Or was he merely assuming uncritically some general idea of unconsciousness?  While I have no conclusive proof either way, it seems to me that the latter is more likely.  Breton (and surrealism in general) seems more concerned with developing a way of living and an artistic methodology rather than examining in detail specific metaphysical and physical structures of the mind.  For their work to be addressing a fundamental truth, all that is required is that there are unconscious mental processes.  If this is the case, then to reject surrealism one needs to make the stronger claim that there exists no unconscious mental processes.  It is not sufficient to merely reject Freud’s structural model of the unconscious.

 

4.0 Sartre – Rejection of the Unconscious

Sartre’s clearest argument against the Freudian unconscious and psychoanalysis is in the second chapter of his tome Being and Nothingness, published in 1943.  He devoted six or so pages to this issue.  As already mentioned above, Sartre clearly argued against Freud’s earlier model of the mind.  Sartre wrote (p. 90):

In the psychological interpretation, for example, they use the hypothesis of a censor, conceived as a line of demarcation with customs, passport, division, currency control, etc., to re-establish the duality of the deceiver and the deceived.

 

Despite this, Sartre confusedly also used Freud’s later terms “id” and “ego.”  He used terms variously from both Freudian models without clearly appreciating the difference.  He showed that he considers “id” and “ego” to be synonymous with unconscious and conscious, respectively, when he writes:

By the distinction between the “id” and the “ego,” Freud has cut the psychic whole in two.  I am the ego but I am not the id.  I hold no privileged position in relation to my unconscious psyche. … I stand in relation to my “id” in the position of the Other (Sartre, 1956, p. 91).

 

But let us put aside Sartre’s confusion regarding Freud’s models of the mind.  What, exactly, was Sartre’s reason for rejecting the unconscious as a structure?  Sartre thought that while Freud’s earlier structure solved the problem of a person lying to him/herself, nonetheless it merely transferred the same problem to the censor.  Sartre argued that the censor was in a paradoxical situation by being conscious of the repressed mental excitations, but at the same time also not conscious of them.  This is indeed a problem if it is true, but was Sartre correct in his claim?  The answer is clearly no.  If we recall Freud’s “two room” analogy, then it is not the case that the censor is unconscious of the repressed mental excitations.  It is only the consciousness residing in the “reception room” that is unaware of the repressed mental excitations.  Sartre seems to think that the censor and the consciousness are the same, whereas Freud’s model clearly showed that they were different.  Nonetheless, Sartre is able to plausibly question Freud’s earlier model by using Freud’s own empirical clinical evidence against him.  Sartre writes:

Freud in fact reports resistance when at the end of the first period the doctor is approaching the truth.  This resistance is objective behaviour apprehended from without: the patient shows defiance, refuses to speak, gives fantastic accounts of his dreams, sometimes even removes himself completely from the psychoanalytic treatment.  It is a fair question to ask what part of himself can resist (Sartre, 1956, p. 92).

 

But in this Sartre is rejecting a specific model of the mind, and one that Freud had already rejected twenty years earlier for much the same reasons.  Soll further clarifies the issue by pointing out that while Sartre mistakenly thinks that Freud’s model does not remove the problem of self-deception, he misses the point that although it does remove the problem it does so at a high price.  The concern is that thinking of a person as composed of person-like parts is circular and may involve problems of infinite regress.

 

5.0 Sartre – Rejection of Surrealism

As I have shown in the previous section, Sartre erroneously rejects the unconscious as a structure of the mind.  Does this mean that Sartre also fundamentally rejects surrealism?  Well, it depends on two things.  Firstly, it depends on whether surrealism is committed to accepting the specific Freudian structure of the mind in which there is an unconscious (Ucs.), or whether it is merely committed to the much less radical claim that there exists unconscious mental processes.  As I stated in the section on surrealism above, I support the latter claim.  Secondly, it depends on whether Sartre is merely rejecting the Freudian structure which includes the Ucs., or he is making the much stronger claim that there does not exist unconscious mental process.  Soll states:

Sartre clearly rejects the notion of an unconscious psychic system or region; but what is his position with respect to the more modest claim that there are unconscious psychic processes?  Sartre does not supply a direct and definitive answer; but this is not surprising since he does not seem to distinguish clearly between the two claims.  There are, however, several indications that he is also in opposition to the idea of unconscious mental processes.

 

Soll’s reasons for this include the fact that Sartre argues that (in opposition to Freud) both the repressed material and also the repressing agency must be conscious.  This is because according to Sartre, the censor knows the repressed material, it is the repressor of the material, and that the censor is conscious of its own activity.  It might be replied to this, as Soll does, that we could plausibly conceive of a censor that is merely an unconscious mechanism.  Nonetheless, Sartre does not accept this alternative view, according to Soll.

It seems therefore that based on Soll’s arguments Sartre is undoubtedly making the stronger claim, that is, there are no unconscious psychic processes.  Thus, it follows that he rejected the essential assumption of the surrealist doctrine.  One possible further position is available if one still wants to show that Sartre is open to surrealist art (and hence open the door to the connection between Sartre and Surrealism that Plank addresses).  This is to suggest that (in earlier Freudian terms), while there is no unconscious, there still may be difficulty in getting the consciousness to turn its attention to specific components of the preconscious.  While Soll seems to reject this for the reasons given in the paragraph above, I think that it strongly parallels Sartre’s discussion of “bad faith.”  Sartre seems satisfied with the idea that we turn our attention to some things to avoid other things, for example, his description of Stekel’s case study of the frigid woman (p. 95).  While there is no “dynamic” sense of unconsciousness, there is still the issue of what to focus on.  We may reinterpret surrealist art by suggesting that it attempts to overcome bad faith by allowing the consciousness to “widen its gaze.”

 

6.0 Conclusion

Sartre’s rejection of the unconscious is based on a number of confusions and misinterpretations of Freud’s writings.  He does not fully appreciate Freud’s different usages of the term “unconscious” and neither does he seem to realise the fundamental differences in Freud’s models of the unconscious.  Nonetheless, in this essay I have tried to address whether Sartre needs to necessarily reject surrealism, based on his own theories.  I have shown that surrealism requires at least the acceptance that there are certain unconscious processes, but need not necessarily accept that there are unconscious structures such as Freud’s earlier model.  Sartre clearly rejects Freud’s earlier model of the unconscious, but it is unclear whether or not he rejects the descriptive sense of unconscious.  Soll apparently thinks that he does, but I have questioned this in the context of Sartre’s discussion of “bad faith.”  Thus, it seems to me that there is, just barely, room in Sartre’s theories for having essential common ground with surrealism.  It may be argued that surrealist artistic methods are one way of overcoming Sartrean bad faith.  Does this mean that Sartre is committed to accepting some sense of unconscious?  I think he is.

 

Bibliography

Breton, A. (1936). What is Surrealism? Retrieved from World Wide Web 26/7/99:

         http://www-e815.fnal.gov/~romosan/surrealism.html

 

Breton, A. (1924). Surrealist manifesto. (source unknown).

 

Freud, S. (1991). Introductory lectures on psychoanalysis (J. Strachey trans.). London: Penguin. (originally presented as a lecture series 1915-17).

 

Plank, W. (1981). Sartre and Surrealism. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press.

 

Sartre, J. (1956). Being and Nothingness (H. Barnes, trans.). New York: Washington Square Press. (original work published in 1943).

 

Sartre, J. (1965). Nausea (R. Baldick, trans.). London: Penguin. (original work published in 1938).

 

Soll, I. (19??). Sartre’s rejection of the Freudian unconscious. (source unknown) pp. 582-604.