Trigger Warning: Self-harm and harming others (in hypothetical situations). Please only proceed if you are comfortable with a mature discussion of the topic.

Have you ever caught yourself thinking about doing stuff you would abhor or be disgusted with… yet you somehow feel compelled to do it? Say you’re in a family reunion and your aunt tells you to hold your baby cousin and you somehow hear an eerie voice in your head telling you to drop them? Or maybe despite you being secure with your sexuality, you’ve had the thought of having intercourse with someone whom you are not attracted to? Or maybe you have the urge to shout out loud in the middle of the mall? Or worse, what if I killed someone or killed myself, despite my absolute refusal of such acts?

Those are intrusive thoughts. 

I intended to ask these uncomfortable graphic questions because they accurately mirror the raw and abhorrent form of these thoughts; so common is it these days for people to say they have intrusive thoughts that the term has been bleached of its horror. In truth, all of us have them – they’re just more frequent with people who are diagnosed with anxiety disorders such as Pure OCD. Intrusive thoughts “are thoughts, images or urges that are unwanted but pop into your mind anyway. They’re often violent, disturbing or unnerving in nature.”

But how do we explain the presence of these thoughts? Psychological and scientific studies already have answers to these questions that link them to natural chemical processes in the brain and our instincts for danger or survival. But, Sartrean existentialism could also help us explain consciously, within our own reflections, why they exist. And, it is not at odds with these studies. This is because, the very being of man, is absolute freedom which leads to a feeling of what Sartre calls anguish. Anguish happens when we become conscious of our own freedom or more precisely, man as a being of freedom becomes conscious/aware of its being-free. This freedom means that we stand before an infinity of possibilities, including the very ones that could horrify us.

For instance, when we stand before a cliff, we have two fears; the fear of falling caused by an external threat that is determined by nature and the fear of choosing to jump. Anguish arises when we realize that I have no fixed essence and there is nothing compelling me to do or not do anything – that I am free to jump, I am free to become the monster I despise, to return to my addictions,  to break the promises I have made, to abandon my past commitments, to change your identity, etc. The very presence of these intrusive thoughts is a result of man’s anguish – of being confronted with one’s own freedom – because it may very well be the case that these intrusive thoughts find their way to reality through my actions. 

It’s natural for us to be horrified by the endless horizons of our freedom in which our intrusive thoughts are but one instance.

In the same way we have desires, we also have aversions – preferences concerned with our dislikes. The uninvited disturbing and sudden presence of these aversions through intrusive thoughts can ‘feel’ like impulses to do it. The fact that we get disturbed by it is a natural reminder or revelation from the mind of the stuff that you do not want and your terrifying freedom to do it. It registers as some sort of perceiving danger – that is, again, the danger of being free to do it. The Stoics would have responded to intrusive thoughts by telling us that the presence of these thoughts no matter how abhorrent or disgusting they are, is not the problem and it is outside our control. How we respond to it, however, and whether we will let these intrusive thoughts win by acting upon it or be weighed down by it is within our power. In Sartrean terms, these intrusive thoughts are part of our facticity – the pre-given facts of our world or being that we cannot change but we can transcend. Since anguish is our being, it’s natural for us to be horrified by the endless horizons of our freedom in which our intrusive thoughts are but one instance. But this very same being of anguish is what allows us to transcend – to go beyond our facticities. If I deceive myself that I do not have freedom by remaining immanent in my facticity, like allowing our intrusive thoughts to compel us to act, I will be acting in bad faith. 

Bad faith is an attempt to flee from this anguish or consciousness of freedom by deceiving himself. He is both the liar and the lied to. He is conscious or aware of this ‘lying’ but is in denial that he is, which makes the lying possible. He is one who deceives himself either as pure facticity or pure transcendence. When one is acting as if he does not have absolute freedom, he is in bad faith. So, if we let our intrusive thoughts win even though we clearly do not want to do so by saying we have no choice, we deny ourselves the freedom to have acted otherwise.  

However, Sartre reminds us to strive towards authenticity by acknowledging that one’s being is completely free and taking responsibility for this freedom through our choices.  But we are not our intrusive thoughts, we are how we respond to these thoughts and they are unwanted possibilities we can constantly nihilate – to reduce them to nothing with our constant refusal to let it win. They don’t need to define my reality unless I allow them to do so. We are always free to not act in accordance with them. The real enemy and friend of man is himself; what is it going to be?

Works Cited:

Sartre, Jean-Paul., Being and Nothingness trans. Sarah Richmond (New York: Washington Square Press, 2021). 

______. “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” Existentialism and Human Emotions, trans. Bernard Frachtman and Hazel Barnes (New York: The Wisdom Library, 1957).