Every individual person is a “being-for-itself” possessed of self-consciousness, but he or she does not possess an essential nature and has only a consciousness and a self-consciousness, which are eternally changeable.
For Sartre, for any individual to claim “that’s just the way I am” would be a statement of self-deception. Likewise, whenever people internalize the objectified identity granted to them by other people or by society, such as servile woman or dutiful worker, they are guilty of self-deception. Every individual person is a “being-for-itself” possessed of self-consciousness, but he or she does not possess an essential nature and has only a consciousness and a self-consciousness, which are eternally changeable. Whenever people tell themselves that their nature or views are unchangeable, or that their social position entirely determines their sense of self, they are deceiving themselves. Sartre believed it is always possible to make something out of what one has been made into. This task of self-actualization, however, involves a complex process of recognizing the factual realities outside of one’s self that are acting on the self (what Sartre calls facticity) and exactly how those realities are working, as well as knowing fully that one possesses a consciousness independent of those factors.