Self Deception In Sartre

Sartre brings up a lot of different topics in his writing, but they all relate to the main idea of existentialism. Existentialism is that it is up to us to find our purpose or our essence by being authentic to our own nature. Existentialism says that existence precedes essence, so we are born first and it is up to us to find our purpose in the world. Self-deception and psychoanalysis is the ability to lie oneself and to others to create positive reinforcement to oneself. Sartre also writes about being-in-the-world and taking up a role that affects our freedom. In this paper, I will be discussing Sartre 's ideas on authenticity, essence, self-deception, and the concept of Being-in-the-world I will be using a crash course video, “Self-Deception

Some characteristic of self-deception are irony, lying, and denial. “In irony a man annihilates what he posits within one and the same act; he leads us to believe in order not to be believed; he affirms to deny and denies to affirm; he creates a positive object but it has no being other than nothingness” (Sartre “Self-Deception and Falsehood” 300). Self-deception consists of irony since it is said that person leads other to believe in order not to be believed or in other words, it is a lie since he is trying to hide something that he does not want others to know about. For example, if something embarrassing was to happen to somebody they will do their best to convince the rest of the people that heard about it that it is not true that it was just a misinterpretation and so he is trying to make them believe something that it is not true to make them not believe what they heard. Self-deception also consists of lying to oneself since it says that they create a positive object or they replace a negative memory with a positive one. “The essence of the lie implies in fact that the liar actually in complete possession of the truth which he is hiding” (Sartre 300). The person knows the entire truth of what actually occurred, but he creates a fake reality and so he is living a lie because he makes himself believe that the lie is the truth. The final characteristic of self-deception is denial since he denies that the truth actually happened, but he might be doing it unconsciously

Self-deception and Sartre’s view of psychoanalysis on the conscious and unconscious mind tie together due to it all being a lie but seen as a reality in the host’s point of view. “To escape from these difficulties people gladly have recourse to the unconscious” (Sartre 303). These two concepts are relatable since in self-deception the person decides to lie to himself in order to escape his difficulties, but psychoanalysis takes it a different direction and instead say that the person puts it into their unconscious mind where one would have difficulties retrieving it from. “There is truth in the activities of the deceiver; if the deceived could reattach them to the situation where the deceiver establishes himself to his project of the lie…” (Sartre 303). The person does not generally forget about the lie when putting it into their unconscious mind but instead puts it aside so they would not remember about it unless it is brought up or something relatable occurs and jogs their memory of the event or the