In his essays of the "thirties Sartre had established the outlines of his thought; the self was a construct, it was phenomenal, it belonged to the world and like the world was beyond our true immediacy. This immediate self-possession is not a self in the traditional sense of a personality or soul, but was an evaporative power, the capacity to withdraw from any content, to deny itself any identity. This unconditional negation Sartre labelled "nothingness' [le Néant]. Sartre's great work, Being and Nothingness¹ is an attempt to explain human experience in terms of nothingness. Despite its obvious indebtedness to Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud and above all, to Heidegger, its achievement is unique and impressive and in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War it brought Sartre great fame.