Sartre's first major philosophical essay, The Transcendence of the Ego,¹ tries to develop a phenomenological theory of consciousness and yet breaks markedly away from a central concept of Husserl's later philosophy, i.e. the transcendental ego. Since the validity of Sartre's claims would undermine most of the work which Husserl undertook since 1905 it seems worthwhile to consider them in some detail.