Being and Nothingness was "a pretentious metaphysical thesis" and "principally an exercise in misusing the verb 'to be'." The philosopher William Barrett, writing in "Irrational Man" (1958), described "Being and Nothingness" as "a great, uneven, brilliant and verbose tome". He noted Sartre's debts to Heidegger, but nevertheless credited him with originality. He criticized Sartre for neglecting Heidegger's "notion of the truth of Being", his understanding of what it means for a subject or object to be. In his view, Sartre failed to "deal with the problem of truth in a radical and existential way", instead viewing truth in "the ordinary intellectualistic sense that
Being and Nothingness sexual act". The critic Camille Paglia, writing in "Sexual Personae" (1990), equated Sartre's term for slime, "le visqueux", with "Dionysus' swamp, the fleshy muck of the generative matrix." The philosopher Thomas Baldwin, writing in "The Oxford Companion to Philosophy" (1995), described "Being and Nothingness" as a work of pessimism. He wrote that Sartre's argument that Freud's theory of repression is internally flawed is based on a misunderstanding of Freud, and that Sartre's attempts to adapt Freud's ideas are of greater interest. The director Richard Eyre recalled that "Being and Nothingness" was popular among British students in the 1960s, but suggests