ABSTRACT
Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential philosophical psychology, as developed in Being and Nothingness and several other early and middle works, is most notable for its emphasis on freedom. Its central theoretical claim is that persons are free, in a morally and existentially important sense, to be as they want to be: free, that is, to choose who (but not what) they are, and to lay out the ground plan of a way of life, within a range of given determinants and situational constraints. Persons are also free within certain bounds to remake themselves, and the assumption of alternative ways of life and life plans always remains a living option, even if it is never actualized. To this is added the claim that regardless of whether persons actually remake themselves, they are always and already completely responsible for their actions and their way of being in the world. The freedom they enjoy consists in an autonomous and creative agency, and not, as many critics of Sartre have charged, in radical indeterminacy or causelessness.
