Freudian and existential analyses both treat acts as symbols of deeper structures

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 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Both our psychoanalyses refuse to admit that the subject is in a privileged position to proceed in these inquiries concerning himself. They equally insist on a strictly objective method, using as documentary evidence the data of reflection as well as the testimony of others. Of course the subject can undertake a psychoanalytic investigation of himself. But in this case he must renounce at the outset all benefit stemming from his peculiar position and must question himself exactly as if he were someone else. Empirical psychoanalysis in fact is based on the hypothesis of the existence of an unconscious psyche, which on principle escapes the intuition of the subject. Existential psychoanalysis rejects the hypothesis of the unconscious; it makes the psychic act coextensive with consciousness. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1340 (#expands, via linked claim)

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)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Existential psychoanalysis rejects the unconscious and makes psychic acts coextensive with consciousness — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1340; Sartre proposed an existentialist psychoanalysis rejecting Freud’s layered unconscious — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 710; Existentialism sought lived experience rather than explaining it away through abstract systems — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 1025 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Existential psychoanalysis decodes behavior to reveal each person’s fundamental choice of being. #exemplifies (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1346
• Existential psychoanalysis rejects the unconscious and makes psychic acts coextensive with consciousness #expands (0.82) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1340
• Sartre proposed an existentialist psychoanalysis rejecting Freud’s layered unconscious #expands (0.80) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 710
• Psychoanalysis converts each behavior’s hidden revelation into conceptual form #corroborates (0.80)
• Existentialism sought lived experience rather than explaining it away through abstract systems #qualifies (0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 1025