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The famous book of Jean-Paul Sartre, L'Être et le Néant, now available in this excellent translation, may interest psychoanalysts for a variety of reasons. It is the fruit of a remarkable development in scientific thought concerning the human condition, known under the name its instigator, Edmund Husserl, gave it: phenomenology. Husserl (1859-1938), a close contemporary of Freud, mentions Brentano (whose lectures on philosophy Freud attended for some time) as one of his predecessors. Freud and Husserl, both investigating the human condition but from different angles, went completely independent ways, neither of them ever mentioning the other's name or work. Pure description of the data of consciousness is one of the fundamental ideas of Husserl's phenomenological method. Husserl wanted to start from all that is directly given, from what can immediately be seen and apprehended, still prior to all theoretical thinking. His plan seems in every way acceptable, yet it is a grave lesson that it proved workable only to a limited extent. The psychoanalyst is not surprised when qualified critics demonstrate that Husserl did not succeed in safeguarding his phenomenological descriptions from unconscious biases. However, there can