Existential psychoanalysis remains an unbuilt method with possible future exemplars.

Evidence

Towards the end of Being and Nothingness, he had explored the idea that our lives might be arranged around projects that are genuinely ours, yet that we do not fully understand. He also called for a new practice of existentialist psychoanalysis, to be based on freedom and on worldly being. He never accepted Freud’s picture of the psyche as being arranged in layers, from the unconscious upwards, as if it were a slice of baklava or a geological sediment to be studied; nor did he agree on the primacy of sex. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 710 (#expands, via linked claim)

If sexism and the existentialist language were not to blame, another reason for The Second Sex’s intellectual sidelining might be that it presents itself as a case study: an existentialist study of just one particular type of life. In philosophy, as in many other fields, applied studies tend to be dismissed as postscripts to more serious works. But that was never existentialism’s way. It was always meant to be about real, individual lives. If done correctly, all existentialism is applied existentialism. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 687 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

The descriptive schema is proposed as a law; and assuredly, a mechanistic psychology could not accept the notion of moral invention; at best it can recognize less but never more; at best it acknowledges failures, but never creations. If a subject does not wholly replicate a development considered normal, his development will be seen as being interrupted, and this will be interpreted as a lack and a negation and never a positive decision. That, among other things, is what renders the psychoanalysis of great men so shocking: we are told that this transference or that sublimation was not successfully carried out in them; it is never supposed that perhaps they could have rejected it, and perhaps for good reasons; it is never considered that their behavior might have been motivated by freely posited aims; the individual is always explained through his link to the past and not with respect to a future toward which he projects himself. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 131 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Existential psychoanalysis decodes behavior to reveal each person’s fundamental choice of being. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1346; Psychoanalysis explains people through the past, never through freely chosen future aims — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 131; Sartre proposed an existentialist psychoanalysis rejecting Freud’s layered unconscious — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 710 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Sartre proposed an existentialist psychoanalysis rejecting Freud’s layered unconscious #expands (0.90) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 710
• Existentialism is by nature applied to real individual lives #qualifies (0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 687
• Psychoanalysis explains people through the past, never through freely chosen future aims #complicates (0.72) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 131