Psychoanalysis posits drives and prohibitions as disconnected givens, splitting human unity

Evidence

To escape from these difficulties people gladly have recourse to the unconscious. In the psychoanalytical interpretation, for example, they use the hypothesis of a censor, conceived as a line of demarcation with customs, passport division, currency control, etc., to reestablish the duality of the deceiver and the deceived. Here instinct or, if you prefer, original drives and complexes of drives constituted by our individual history, make up reality. It is neither true nor false since it does not exist for itself. It simply is, exactly like this table, which is neither true nor false in itself but simply real. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 282 (#expands, 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 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Psychoanalysis is undone by the external super-ego it identified; Psychoanalysis reduces the social to the psychological by axiom; The Freudian unconscious reintroduces a deceiver-deceived duality rather than explaining bad faith — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 282 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• The Freudian unconscious reintroduces a deceiver-deceived duality rather than explaining bad faith #expands (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 282
• Psychoanalysis reduces the social to the psychological by axiom #expands (0.75)
• Psychoanalysis explains people through the past, never through freely chosen future aims #expands (0.70) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 131