Editing Being and Nothingness (section)

===Critique of Freud===
Sartre offers a critique of the psychoanalyst [[Sigmund Freud]]'s theory of the [[Unconscious mind|unconscious]], based on the claim that consciousness is essentially self-conscious. Sartre also argues that Freud's theory of repression is internally flawed.<ref name="Baldwin" /> According to Sartre, in his clinical work, Freud encountered patients who seemed to embody a particular kind of paradox—they appeared to both ''know'' and ''not know'' the same thing. In response, Freud postulated the existence of the unconscious, which contains the "truth" of the traumas underlying the patients' behavior. This "truth" is actively repressed, which is made evident by the patients' resistance to its revelation during analysis. Yet what does the resisting if the patients are unaware of what they are repressing? Sartre finds the answer in what Freud calls the "censor". "The only level on which we can locate the refusal of the subject", Sartre writes, "is that of the censor." Further:

{{quote|[T]he resistance of the patient implies on the level of the censor an awareness of the thing repressed as such, a comprehension of the end toward which the questions of the psychoanalyst are leading . . . These various operations in their turn imply that the censor is conscious itself. But what type of self-consciousness can the censor have? It must be the consciousness being conscious of the drive to be repressed, but precisely ''in order not to be conscious of it''. What does this mean if not that the censor is in bad faith?<ref>''Being and Nothingness''. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1984, pp. 93–94.</ref>}}

In other words, Sartre views Freud's unconscious to be a scapegoat for the paradox of simultaneously knowing and not knowing the same information. Instead of alleviating the [[paradox]], Freud simply moves it to the censor, establishing "between the unconscious and consciousness an autonomous consciousness in bad faith".<ref>''Being and Nothingness''. Trans. Barnes, 1984, p. 94.</ref> Sartre thinks that the postulation of a censor within the psychic economy is therefore redundant: at the level of the censor, we still encounter the same problem of a consciousness that hides something from itself. For Sartre, what Freud identifies as repression is rather indicative of the larger structure of bad faith. [[Psychoanalysis]] thus does not yield any special insight, since hiding something from oneself occurs at the level of consciousness as a unified phenomenon, not as part of some intra-psychic mechanism.