As Sartre criticises Freud's notion of 'unconscious' as bad faith (as a contradictory combination of being-in-itself and being-for-itself), he proposes that a 'vantage point' is responsible for the subject's awareness and not knowledge. However, that very awareness still accounts for why the subject's positional reflectiveness is (for example, in the case of Sketel's patients suffering from sexual frigidity) bad faith. That is, the subject does not positionally know it and yet is nonpositionally aware of it. Is this not just a terminological fabrication to dodge the whole issue?
Of course, it may be argued that they are different in terms of having any content or not, being internally or externally motivated, etc., but the question still remains.
I do think Sartre overcame the difficulty and that his solution can avoid being a terminological dodge by linking it to the distinction between waking consciousness and the subconscious in the fashion of depth psychology.
Dear Ashkan,
yes Freud's and Sartre's models are completely different. Put it simply, from a Freudian perspective, Sartre only approaches to preconscious phenomena but denies the possibility of unconscious phenomena as such.
Well saying that makes you more Sartrian than Freudian. From a psychoanalytical perspective (both Freudian and Lacanian), all this is a very basic (and common) misunderstanding of the unconscious. For an interesting phenomenological critique of most common misunderstandings of the unconscious, I recommend:
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. « Préface à Hesnard ». Dans : Parcours deux 1951–1961. Verdier, Paris, 2000.
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