The So-called Unconscious and the Dream from the Point of View of Jean Paul Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

Article

Abstract

[In Russian]

Sartre’s confrontation with classical psychoanalysis led him
within the framework of development of his existential psychoanalysis
to important insights regarding what is there called
the unconscious. !e same can be said about the essence of the
dream. His criticism concerns, "rst of all, the reifying conception
of the unconscious, of the drives, and of consciousness, the
deterministic conception of in#uences of both libido and of the
external conditions of the consciousness. Sartre opposes the possibility
of self-deception through the special ontological structure
of consciousness to the repression. In his later work Sartre, taking
account of the in#uences of family and socio-cultural in#uences,
transformed his existential psychoanalysis into regressive-analytic
and progressive-synthetic method which integrated both classical
psychoanalysis and sociological aspects. In his conception of the
dream Sartre builds up upon the di$erences between the sensory
perception and the imagination understood as a constitutive
ability of consciousness which enables us to free ourselves from
the real. In the dream because of the repression of the ability for
sense perception2 and re#ection the actualization of the closed
sphere of the imaginary takes place. Without the ability to take an
external standpoint, the dreamer is entirely delivered left to the
spontaneity of his symbolically-laden imagining consciousness,
in which he identi"es himself with the hero of dream.