Sartre’s Being and Nothingness is in fact entirely a study of consciousness, of its existence and its absence. As such, the book qualifies as, and can truly be understood only as, a work of phenomenological psychology. At the heart of this specific psychology is the belief that much of what man perceives to be immanent and within his consciousness is in fact an illusion. The event we perceive as immanent is in fact not the event itself, but rather our consciousness of the possibility of that event occurring. Such subtle distinctions provide the structure of Being and Nothingness. Without an understanding of those distinctions …