Sartre's bad faith, the Freudian unconscious, and a case of #METOO

In this chapter, I propose a new Freudian notion of the unconscious that differs from other notions one can find in Freud’s writings, in particular the one Sartre criticizes, according to which the unconscious is conceived as a metaphorical secret room for conflictual mental states. At the heart of Sartre’s criticism is the notion of “the censor,” a little person within us, a homunculus, whose function is to either lock in forbidden emotions and desires or let them out “disguised,” or symbolically distorted. The new notion I propose is still Freudian, and that is based on two interrelated psychological processes: one is what Freud calls “primary processes,” which are associative processes, and the other is Sartre’s notion of bad faith. Sartre’s notion of bad faith was meant to replace the Freudian unconscious, which he sought to demolish. And yet my aim is to show that bad faith is in fact an aspect of the Freudian unconscious. I use Sartre’s example of the date or the coquette, re-read as a case of #METOO, in order to demonstrate this new notion of the unconscious as associative patterns of inattention.

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