SARTRE'S BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
against and what measures of defence to employ - the censor effectively reduplicates the person: though nominally a mere part of the person, in truth it is indistinguishable from the per son as a whole. If on the other hand it is insisted thatthe censor lacks ration ality and is a genuine mechanism, then Freud's division of the mind faces the insuperable problem 'of accounting for the unity of the total phenomenon (repression of the drive which disguises itself and "passes" in symbolic form)" and in order to 'establish comprehensible connections' among its different parts, Freud will be 'obliged to imply everywhere a magic unity linking distant phenomena across obstacles' (53/93). 109 Freud's notion of the unconscious, Sartre concludes, rests on a mere verbal trick, and the metapsychology's postulated division of the mind is a nothing but a screen imposed by a 'materialistic (chosiste) mythology' (52/91), behind which lies the person in their complete unity and with full responsibility for their duplicitous self-relation and all of the behaviour which follows from it. As regards the question which this leaves us with - of how we may then hope to explain irrationality and failures of self-knowledge - Sartre's answer in brief is that fail ures of self-knowledge are never real in the sense that might seem to force on us the partitive conception of the subject: they are always products of choice, reflexive appearances that the subject freely creates. And as regard the philosophical problem that this may be thought to raise - the classic, much discussed paradox of lying to oneself - this is what Sartre's theory of bad faith (see §37) will try to deal With, taking the place of psycho analysis in uncovering the motivational sources of irrationality in a way that preserves the unity of the self and unconditional personal responsibility. (See also in this connection the later discussion at 472-6/550-5 of Adler's psychoanalytic theory.) Sartre has attempted here an internal critique of Freud. Its success is not, note, required for the overall argument of B&N: strictly, for Sartre, Freud's theories fall to the ground directly, since, as the Introduction showed, the very idea of unconscious mental states is unintelligible. Sartre is willing to employ this much more standard objection,IIO but he has reasons for dwelling on Freud in B&N and for giving psychoanalysis more of a run for its money. Sartre is in spite of everything greatly impressed 1 24