Comparative analysis of conduct reveals a person’s fundamental choice hidden under each act

Evidence

This comparison allows us to understand better what an existential psychoanalysis must be if it is entitled to exist. It is a method destined to bring to light, in a strictly objective form, the subjective choice by which each living person makes himself a person; that is, makes known to himself what he is. Since what the method seeks is a choice of being at the same time as a being, it must reduce particular behavior patterns to fundamental relations—not of sexuality or of the will to power, but of being—which are expressed in this behavior. It is then guided from the start toward a comprehension of being and must not assign itself any other goal than to discover being and the mode of being of the being confronting this being. It is forbidden to stop before attaining this goal. It will utilize the comprehension of being which characterizes the investigator inasmuch as he is himself a human reality; and as it seeks to detach being from its symbolic expressions, it will have to rediscover each time on the basis’ of a comparative study of acts and attitudes, a symbol destined to decipher them. Its criterion of success will be the number of facts which its hypothesis permits it to explain and to unify as well as the self-evident intuition of the irreducibility of the end attained. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1346 (#expands, via linked claim)

There were several other things he avoided as well, but which I had never considered, had never seen, because what a person does always overshadows what he does not do, and what dad didn’t do was not so conspicuous, also because there was nothing at all neurotic about him. But he never went to the hairdresser’s; he always cut his own hair. He never travelled by bus. He hardly ever did his shopping at the local shop, but always at the large supermarkets outside town. All these were scenarios where he might have come into contact with people, or have been seen by them, and even though he was a teacher by profession and thus stood in front of a class every day, and occasionally summoned parents to meetings, and also spoke to his colleagues in the staffroom every day, he still consistently avoided these social situations. What was it they had in common? That he might be assimilated into a community with no more than chance as its basis? That he might be seen in a way over which he had no control? That he was vulnerable sitting on the bus, in the hairdresser’s chair, by the supermarket till? — Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 1314 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Fundamental choice can be revoked, so psychoanalytic symbols must shift; A person’s avoidances can reveal character more than actions do — Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 1314; Existential psychoanalysis decodes behavior to reveal each person’s fundamental choice of being. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1346 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Existential psychoanalysis decodes behavior to reveal each person’s fundamental choice of being. #expands (0.95) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1346
• A person’s avoidances can reveal character more than actions do #qualifies (0.75) — Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 1314