Original Choice

The "original choice" is Sartre's term for the foundational act through which the for-itself constitutes itself as a total project in the world. It is not a deliberate, reflective decision taken at some moment in time, but the very structure of consciousness as freedom — a non-positional, non-thetic self-relation that is identical with being-for-itself. Because it is identical with consciousness rather than an act performed by consciousness, it is always already operative and never available as an explicit object of knowledge. This is why Sartre insists the original choice is "conscious but not known": it is not repressed in any Freudian sense, but neither is it transparent to reflective self-scrutiny. Existential psychoanalysis aims to articulate this choice by reading backward from individual acts and attitudes toward the singular "unitary synthesis" of possibles that gives them their coherence.

The original choice is further characterized by its totality and its pre-logical structure. It is "total like the complex" — meaning it organizes all particular possibilities into a unified ensemble, functioning as the condition of intelligibility for every more specific project — and "prior to logic" in that it cannot be derived from or justified by any prior principle. It is the ultimate ground of all grounds, the irreducible fact about a given human existence. This makes it formally analogous to, but ontologically opposed to, the Freudian "complex": both function as organizing totalities beneath reflective awareness, but where the complex is a causal-mechanistic formation produced by repression and the unconscious, the original choice is a free, self-sustaining projection that bears its meaning transparently in itself.

This concept appears exclusively in the Sartrean source (jean-paul-sartre-hazel-barnes-being-and-nothingness-an-essay-on-phenomenological) and operates as the existential-psychoanalytic counterpart and rival to several cross-referenced Lacanian and Freudian concepts. Most directly, it stands in structural tension with the concept of the Unconscious: where Freud posits an unconscious that is genuinely unknown to consciousness and accessible only through the analyst's decipherment, the original choice is, for Sartre, always conscious — never buried in a hidden stratum of the psyche — which is precisely what allows existential psychoanalysis to claim the subject's own final intuition as its evidential ground. This is the axis along which Sartre's critique of the Freudian postulate of the unconscious and of Repression is organized.

The concept also resonates, in an inverted form, with the Lacanian treatment of Consciousness and Desire. For Lacan, consciousness is decentred, derivative, and structurally deceived by the symbolic order and the big Other; desire has no inner origin but is constituted through the Other's field. Sartre's original choice, by contrast, posits consciousness as ontologically sovereign — the source, not the effect, of meaning and desire. The "original choice" is thus best read as the concept the Lacanian corpus systematically dismantles: it is the presupposition that Lacan's decentring of the subject, his formula "the desire of man is the desire of the Other," and his insistence that "the unconscious is the discourse of the Other" collectively refute. In this sense, within the corpus as a whole, the original choice marks the Sartrean limit-case of a fully transparent, self-grounding subjectivity that the Lacanian and Freudian frameworks render theoretically untenable.

Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological OntologyJean-Paul Sartre · 1943 (page unknown)

This original choice operating in the face of the world and being a choice of position in the world is total like the complex; it is prior to logic like the complex.

The quote is theoretically loaded because it simultaneously borrows and polemically recodes the Freudian term "complex": by asserting that the original choice is "total like the complex" and "prior to logic like the complex," Sartre grants the complex its structural features (totality, pre-reflective depth, organizing power) while stripping away its causal-mechanistic, unconscious character — making "choice" and "complex" formally equivalent but ontologically antithetical, with freedom replacing determination as the ultimate ground.