The phenomenological theory of motivation was first extensively developed by Sartre in his early Sketch of a Theory of Emotions and then in The Transcendence of the Ego, Being and Nothingness, and the Critique de la raison dialectique. Sartre's theory presents three difficulties which were recognized by Merleau-Ponty whose position, as formulated in Phenomenology of Perception, is, in part, an attempt to resolve them. The point of view of this paper is that Merleau-Ponty has not satisfactorily resolved the difficulties and that, moreover, no adaptations of the theory could resolve them short of abandoning phenomenology as such by going beyond it.