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Professor Hanly makes a sustained attempt to refute the theories of Jean-Paul Sartre and incidentally to show the inadequacy of other philosophers' ideas about the human psyche as compared with Freud's ideas. Extended explication of Sartre's ideas is given before they are subjected to criticism.
Hanly's outline corresponds roughly to Sartre's Being and Nothingness, but he does not confine himself to that text. He begins with a section on method, before considering the self, relations with others and with the natural world, and concludes with a discussion of the nature of freedom. After Sartre's views are presented, a transition is made by re-casting the phenomenological descriptions into psychoanalytic ones. From the new point of view, Sartre's ideas are seen to be partial and superficial, lacking in perception of the unconscious structures underlying awareness and choice, and of instincts and their conflicts arising out of early relations with significant adults. The form of the argument is a debate in which one side is set up for refutation by the others.
To the extent that Hanly has unified his defense of Freud against philosophy, the debate can be said to be between those who acknowledge the fundamental importance of the instincts and those who do not, for it is not the case with many philosophers, as it is with Sartre, that they equate the psychic with the conscious. What the other philosophers seem to have in common is some idea of the will or reason as free, not subject to the natural law of mechanistic causality. Hanly's task in defending Freud is philosophical. He is concerned with what the human psyche is, how it operates and is to be known and explained, and whether the study of the human being is a part of natural science or a wholly different one based on the uniqueness of human freedom and reason.
These questions were answered by Freud and his followers in the process of developing psychoanalysis as a means of studying human nature and of conceiving of