Abstract

Sartre builds up his notion of Bad Faith and then develops it by borrowing the method used in psychoanalytic theory. Thus, he treats Bad Faith as the model of a mental illness and inquires into its nature, origins, symptoms, and treatment. Following this procedure, he isolates consciousness as the origin of Bad Faith and describes in his examples from Nausea (1938) to Saint Genet. Actor and Martyr (1952) a variety of symptoms of varying degrees of severity. These and other questions are extensively treated in Being and Nothingness. Some critics, however, tend to relate Sartre’s ideas of Bad Faith solely to this latter exposition. I believe this is a mistake, and that Sartre’s conception may be shown to have changed and developed in other writings.