In 1958 the film director, John Huston, invited Jean-Paul Sartre to write a screenplay about Freud's discovery of the unconscious determinants of the neuroses and of the psychoanalytic method for obtaining access to them. This is surprising, since Sartre's animosity toward psychoanalysis was well known. Recently, however, Sartre had read the first volume of Ernest Jones's biography of Freud, which had just appeared in French translation, and the correspondence between Freud and Fliess, which had appeared in French two years earlier. According to Pontalis, Sartre's reaction to these works was delight at "discovering" that Freud had not been the ambitious, armchair theoretician and doctrinaire philosopher he had thought him to be, but had been driven to heroic investigations by the need to free himself from his own neurotic conflicts.

Sartre went back to the Breuer-Freud Studies on Hysteria, the case history of Dora, and Freud's account of his own dreams in The Interpretation of Dreams. He studied them carefully and in 1959 wrote