Sartre vs. Freud: Are You Free or Are You Driven?
Is the person radically free to choose who they become, or are they shaped by unconscious forces beyond their awareness? This determines whether therapy liberates choice or reveals the hidden causes of behavior.
The Positions
Existence precedes essence. There is no human nature that settles in advance what you are; you make yourself out of a situation you did not choose. Bad faith is not only the lie that you had no choice, though that is its commonest form. It is equally the opposite move: claiming to be pure freedom, unweighted by anything you actually are. As for the unconscious, it does not explain self-deception, it relocates it. Something has to know what is being hidden in order to hide it, and naming that something a censor does not make the knowing go away.
The ego is not master in its own house. Unconscious drives, defenses, and early relational patterns determine far more of behavior than conscious choice. The feeling of free choice is itself often a rationalization for actions whose real motives remain hidden. But the point of showing you this is not to excuse you. Where id was, there ego shall be: analysis exists to widen the narrow strip of ground on which choosing is actually possible.
Clinical Implications
This debate shapes how clinicians understand 'resistance.' For Sartre, a client who cancels sessions is making a choice and must own it. For Freud, the cancellation is overdetermined: anxiety about what might emerge, repetition of an attachment pattern, unconscious aggression toward the therapist. Existential therapy asks the client to own the choice. Psychoanalysis asks the client to own something they did not choose and cannot yet see. Both arrive at responsibility. They disagree about what has to be understood before it can be assumed.
In Session
An existential therapist: 'You chose not to come last week. What were you choosing?' A psychoanalytic therapist: 'I wonder what it means that you didn't come last week: what might have felt dangerous about continuing.' The first trusts the client's agency. The second trusts the client's unconscious.
Toward Resolution
Both positions carry a clinical danger, and in each case the danger comes from the flattened version. Sartre read as pure voluntarism becomes blame: if you are free, your suffering is your fault. Freud read as pure mechanism becomes exemption: if the unconscious did it, nothing is asked of you. Neither man held the flattened version. The later Sartre wrote about le vecu, lived experience that is opaque to itself because it is a totalization that cannot be conscious of what it is. That is not the unconscious, but it is much closer to it than the young Sartre allowed. What survives the softening is the question that started it: whether the opacity is a structure to be uncovered or a project you are still carrying out.