Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

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Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis
Knowing Others

Mary L. Edwards
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To J. C. C.
 Contents

Acknowledgements x
List of Abbreviations xii

Introduction 1

1 Sartre’s theory of the self 7

The transcendent ego 7
A sense of selfness 11
The constitution of the ego 18
The evolution of the Sartrean self 22
Anguish, shame and self-deception 26
Bad faith and self-formation 30
The possibility of self-knowledge 35

2 Knowledge of selves 41
The problem of other minds 42
Sartre’s solution to the conceptual problem of other minds 46
Shame and loneliness 50
Philosophical therapy and knowledge of selves 52
Existentialism and psychoanalysis: The very idea 54
Consciousness and comprehension 60
Existential ontology as psychoanalytic metatheory 63

3 Situated selves: The development of Sartre’s psychoanalysis 67

From discourse to dialectic 68
Dialectical materialism 70
Knowledge of dialectical objects 73
Sartre’s search for a new objective method 76
Sartre’s debt to Beauvoir 80
The spirals of self-formation 83
Knowledge of another self 87
viii Contents

4 The Family Idiot and the objectification of a self 91

Being 91
Flaubert’s passive constitution 92
The paternal curse 95
Pessimism and religiosity without religion 100
Comprehension 102
Autism, femininity and autoeroticism 103
A spectacle for his sister 105
Conversion from idiot to actor 107
Magical behaviour and imaginary acts 109
Knowing 113
The objective spirit 115
Sex and death, eating and decay 119
Flaubert’s choice of the imaginary 123
Flaubert’s failure 125

5 Objectivity in Sartre’s study of Flaubert 129

Why Flaubert? 129
Is Sartre’s method objective enough? 133
Madame Bovary: The missing fourth volume 136
Style over substance 136
The unlikely heroism of Charles Bovary 138
‘I am too small for myself ’ 140
Sadism and laughter 142
Emma’s insincerity, Flaubert’s truth 145
Sartre’s blind spots and their implications 147
The positive counterpart to Flaubert’s misanthropy 147
Reading ‘like a man’ 150
Implications 154

6 Imagining the selves of others 157

Bodies and books: Analoga for the self 157
Structure, language and Sartre’s ‘return to Freud’ 162
‘Show me your metaphysics!’ 166
Literature as experience incarnate 170
Imaginary lives 174
A true novel: Knowing through imagining? 176
 Contents ix

7 The future of Sartrean existential psychoanalysis 181

Sartrean existentialism: A new metatheory 182
Sartrean existential psychoanalysis in practice 187
Existential principles for integrative psychotherapy 192
Existential e-therapy 197
Suggestions for further research 199

Notes 205
References 231
Index 248
 Acknowledgements

This book develops some of the key ideas of my doctoral thesis, which was
supervised by Julia Jansen and Angela Ryan at University College Cork. I am
very grateful to Julia for her guidance in thinking about the philosophy of the
imagination and all matters phenomenological, and to Angela for her wisdom
on psychoanalysis in the French tradition and advice on studying French texts.
The lessons I learned under their supervision have continued to help me in my
postdoctoral research. I am also grateful to my external examiner, Kathleen
Lennon, who first suggested that I write a book about Sartre and ‘knowing
others’ after my viva.
In 2018, I took on what was initially meant to be temporary position at
Cardiff University and, marvellously, I’m still there. I don’t believe it would
have been possible for me to have written this book without the support and
encouragement of colleagues in The School of English, Communication and
Philosophy. Special thanks must go to Jon Webber who has been a great ‘Sartre
mentor’ to me. I am particularly grateful to him for his feedback on drafts of
Chapters 2 and 6 of this book and for discussions about the problem of other
minds, which led me to see how Sartre solves the conceptual problem. I am
also grateful to Alessandra Tanesini for being an inspirational senior colleague
and for giving me informative feedback on early drafts of sections of Chapter
1. Special thanks must go to my good friend and colleague Alex Dietz for his
comments on Chapter 7 and for sending a large box of books from Cardiff to Co.
Kerry in the midst of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. Thanks to Josh Robinson for
helpful comments on my book proposal. And thanks to my students enrolled on
French Existentialism and The Social Imagination modules I taught (2019–21)
for many enjoyable and challenging discussions on themes developed in this
book.
Another force in shaping my thinking since completing my PhD has been
my experience as a trainee psychotherapist at Dublin City University, which
has enabled me to gain a clearer sense of the potential clinical implications of
Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis. Special thanks are due to Aisling MacMahon
for her instruction on humanistic and integrative psychotherapy approaches and
for giving me such insightful comments on Chapter 7. Thanks also to Gerard
 Acknowledgements xi

Moore for his instruction in traditional psychoanalysis and psychodynamic

psychotherapy and to Gemma Kiernan for her warmth and wisdom as a personal
tutor.
I had the opportunity to present material for this book at a workshop on
‘Beauvoir and Sartre on Self and Others’ organized by the Husserl Archives at
KU Leuven in cooperation with Cardiff University in 2018, at the 2019 UK Sartre
Society Conference and at a Cardiff University Philosophy Work-in-Progress
seminar in 2020. I am grateful to each of the audiences for discussions following
my talks. I am especially grateful to two fellow UK Sartre Society members: Kate
Kirkpatrick – for her positive influence and for enlightening discussions on
philosophy and biography in Cardiff, Oxford and Leuven, which have informed
my approach to Sartre’s biographical studies – and Marieke Mueller – for
thought-provoking discussions on Sartre, Flaubert and psychoanalysis.
Many thanks to Lucy Russell and Liza Thompson at Bloomsbury for their
initial and continued enthusiasm for this project and for all their support
and advice throughout the writing and editing processes. I am also indebted
to Bloomsbury’s anonymous reviewers for constructive feedback on my book
proposal and for a clear-sighted assessment of the first completed draft of the
manuscript, which provided me the push I needed to revise the first chapters.
On a more personal level, I am thankful to friends both inside and outside
of academia for discussions related and entirely unrelated to this project, which
have provided me with a source of strength and energy: Victoria Wilde, Rebecca
Whiter, Miriam Twomey, Rachel Warren, Josie and Mike Burnes, Bernie Cronin,
Emer O’Connor, Mo Morris, Ritchie O’Connell, Brian O’Neil, Marie O’Mahony,
Katie Cosgrove, Mikey Goodman, S. Orestis Palermos, Huw Rees, Liz Irvine,
Anneli Jefferson, Richard Gray, Jonathan Mitchell, Alix Beeston, Danielle
Petherbridge, Luna Dolezal, Arthur Rose, Clara Fischer and Vittorio Bufacchi.
Thanks to my parents John and Abbie Edwards for their love, support and
patience with my scholarly pursuits, to my parents-in-law Johnny and Pauline
Clifford for so much kindness and understanding, and to my cousins Fiona
O’Connor and Kerry O’Connor for their encouragement regarding this project.
Finally, to my husband Jonathan Clifford: I cannot thank you enough for
supporting me in everything I do, for proofreading almost all this manuscript,
for picking up the domestic slack while I was writing it, and for putting up with
the ‘third person’ in our marriage – ‘ol’ Jean-Paul’. This book is dedicated to you.
 Abbreviations

For full bibliographical details, see the References.

B Sartre, J.-P., Baudelaire

BN/EN Sartre, J.-P., Being and Nothingness: An Essay on

Phenomenological Ontology/ L’être et le néant. Essai d’ontologie
phénoménologique

CDR I/CRD I Sartre, J.-P., Critique of Dialectical Reason I: Theory of

Practical Ensembles/Critique de la raison dialectique précédé
de questions de méthode, Tome I: théorie des ensembles
pratiques

CDR II/CRD II Sartre, J.-P., Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume II

(Unfinished)/Critique de la raison dialectique, Tome II
(inachevé): L’intelligibilité de l’histoire

CL/EC Sartre, J.-P., ‘The Childhood of a Leader’/L’Enfance d’un chef ’

CW Freud, S., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological

Works of Sigmund Freud

E Lacan, J., Écrits

EA/MA Beauvoir, S. (de), The Ethics of Ambiguity/Pour une morale de

l’ambiguïté

EW Flaubert, G., Early Writings: Gustave Flaubert

FI Sartre, J.-P., The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert 1821–1857

I Sartre, J.-P., The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of

the Imagination/L’imaginaire. Psychologie phénémonologique
de l’imagination

IF Sartre, J.-P., L’Idiot de la famille: Gustave Flaubert de 1821 à

1857
 Abbreviations xiii

IOT Sartre, J.-P., ‘Itinerary of a Thought’

IWS Sartre, J.-P., ‘An Interview with Jean-Paul Sartre’

MB Flaubert, G., Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners/‘Madame

Bovary: Mœure de province’

MT/HM Sartre, J.-P., ‘The Man with the Tape-Recorder’/‘L’Homme au

magnétophone’

Nov Flaubert, G. November

OIF/SIF Sartre, J.-P., ‘On The Idiot of the Family’/‘Sur « L’Idiot de la

famille »’

OJ Flaubert, G., Œuvres de jeunesse

S Flaubert, G., Salammbô

SE/ES Flaubert, G., A Sentimental Education/L’Éducation

sentimentale

SG Sartre, J.-P., Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr/Saint Genet,

comédien et martyr

SM/QM Sartre, J.-P., Search for a Method/Questions de méthode

SS/DS Beauvoir, S. (de), The Second Sex/Le deuxième sexe

STE/ETE Sartre, J.-P., Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions/Esquisse d’une

théorie des émotions

TE Sartre, J.-P., The Transcendence of the Ego/La transcendance

de la ego. Esquisse d’une description phénoménologique

W/M Sartre, J.-P., Words/Les Mots

WL/QL Sartre, J.-P., What Is Literature?/Qu’est-ce que la littérature ?

 Introduction

In 1969, psychoanalyst Jean-Bertrand Pontalis wrote, ‘One day the history

of Sartre’s thirty-year long relationship with psychoanalysis, and ambiguous
mixture of equally deep attraction and repulsion, will have to be written and
perhaps his work reinterpreted in the light of it’ (Pontalis 2008: 220). This
book fulfils the need for a scholarly investigation into Jean-Paul Sartre’s long
relationship with psychoanalysis that Pontalis identified over half a century ago.1
It traces the development of Sartre’s psychoanalytical thought throughout his
career and indicates how his philosophical work ought to be ‘reinterpreted in
the light of it’. Rather than treating Sartre’s philosophical and psychoanalytical
projects as separate enterprises, it proposes that his oeuvre can be read in a more
coherent and productive way when his psychoanalytical project is recognized as
an expansion of his philosophical one. To recognize this is not merely to see that
his psychoanalysis is rooted in, or that it applies insights from, his existential
philosophy, but also to appreciate how it ‘does’ philosophy in its own right.
A principal aim of this book is to illuminate the philosophical work in Sartre’s
psychoanalytical studies by showing how they synthesize his theories of the self,
the imagination, individual freedom and the situation, and complete some of his
philosophical arguments.
A major challenge for a project such as this is the sheer vastness of Sartre’s
oeuvre. It is estimated that Sartre produced twenty pages per day of his working
life (Eshleman 2020: 1) and of all the pages he produced, most belong to his
psychoanalytic biographies (Collins 1980: 5). The largest of these, The Family
Idiot, nears three-thousand pages. This makes the task of offering a comprehensive
and definitive study of Sartre’s psychoanalytic work impossible. This book
does not aim to do that. Rather, it strives to highlight how the development
of his existential psychoanalysis can be fruitfully read as an expansion of his
philosophical inquiry by focusing on one question: Does Sartre’s existential
psychoanalysis provide us with a special way of knowing other people? The
2 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

answer to this question clearly has philosophical implications, especially if it is

in the affirmative. If Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis provides us with a route
to knowledge of others that is surer or higher yielding than others, then it is
of importance to epistemology. But if it provides us with ‘new’ knowledge –
i.e. knowledge about others that cannot be gained through any other means
and which we can only have now thanks to it – then it is of major importance
to epistemology. It is also metaphysically important if this new knowledge
tells us something about others’ existence, that is to say, if it can speak to the
longstanding philosophical conundrum known as the ‘problem of other minds’:
the problem that it seems impossible to know anything about the mental states
of other people, including whether they exist.
The key claim of this book is that Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis does
indeed speak to the problem of other minds, as it represents the second phase of
his novel response to it. Further, it contends that Sartre’s response to the problem
of other minds solves it, albeit not on its original terms, by revolutionizing our
way of thinking about ‘selves’ and presenting existential psychoanalysis as the
means to make knowledge of our own selves and the selves of others possible for
us. By so doing, the book integrates Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis into his
overarching philosophical project. It also highlights how his determination to
solve the problem of other minds drives him not only to incorporate insights from
René Descartes, G. W. F. Hegel, Edmund Husserl, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and
Simone de Beauvoir into his existential philosophy, but also to supplement and
enhance his work in the field of theoretical philosophy through the development
and applications of an existential psychoanalysis that delivers knowledge of selves.
To begin with, Chapter 1 elucidates Sartre’s theory of the self by clarifying
his interpretation of the relationship between consciousness and the self in his
first major philosophical work, The Transcendence of the Ego; analysing the
important revisions he makes to his understanding of this relationship in Being
and Nothingness; and indicating how these revisions impact his first efforts to
establish the foundations of an existential psychoanalysis. It also explores how
Sartre’s existentialist understanding of the role of anguish, shame and self-
deception in self-formation provides him with strong normative motivations for
the development of an existential psychoanalysis. In the course of its exposition,
the chapter argues that Sartre’s ‘non-egological’ account of consciousness enables
him to reconceive of the self as an object outside of consciousness, remove
the metaphysical divisions that dominant philosophical conceptualizations of
the consciousness-self relationship place between the self of one person and the
self of another, and to present ‘consciousness-object’ and ‘consciousness-self ’
 Introduction 3

relations as having the same form, which lays the foundation for his claim that it
is possible to gain knowledge of other selves. Although the chapter delves quite
deep into some of the more complex aspects of Sartre’s thought concerning
the constitution and the knowability of the self, no prior knowledge of Sartre’s
existentialism is presupposed and definitions of technical phenomenological
and existential terms are supplied throughout so as to ensure that its content is
accessible to psychological and psychoanalytical readers who may be unfamiliar
with Sartrean existentialism, as well as philosophical readers who are well-
versed in it.
Chapter 2 contends that Sartre’s theory of the self in combination with
his ontology, or theory of being, enables him to offer a novel solution to the
problem of other minds. It argues that the first phase of this solution challenges
the terms in which the traditional epistemological problem of other minds is
set by showing that dominant concepts of ‘mind’ conflate two things that must
be treated separately: consciousness and the self. Consciousness, for Sartre,
is the being that is prior to knowledge and therefore beyond the scope of
epistemology, whereas the self is an object that we can conceivably know things
about and, therefore, within the scope of epistemology. Sartre’s recognition
of this distinction between consciousness and the self leads him to deny that
there is any epistemological problem about other consciousness, although he
accepts that there are two other problems about others: a conceptual problem
about other consciousnesses and an epistemological one about other selves. The
chapter shows how Sartre solves the conceptual problem and provides the first
phase of his solution to the epistemological one in Being and Nothingness. Then,
it explains how the second phase of this solution expands into his psychoanalytic
studies, where he aims to demonstrate the possibility of gaining knowledge of
other selves by applying the existential method of psychoanalysis outlined in
Being and Nothingness.
Chapter 3 tracks how Sartre’s development of dialectical reason informs
the refinements he makes to his existential psychoanalysis after Being
and Nothingness. It explains how his discovery of the dialectic brings his
existentialism into a productive dialogue with Simone de Beauvoir’s and enables
him to synthesize his existentialist conception of the individual with a Marxist-
Hegelian account of history. It shows how his theorization of a radically new
way of making sense of human being in the Critique of Dialectical Reason leads
him to make significant revisions to his existential conception of self-formation
and to his psychoanalytic approach. Finally, it shows how Sartre developed his
psychoanalysis after Being and Nothingness by considering his application of a
4 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

provisional revision of it to Jean Genet in Saint Genet – a work that expands his
philosophy by allowing him to synthesize aspects of Beauvoir’s existentialism
with his through an analysis of Genet’s psychological oppression.
Chapter 4 turns to examine Sartre’s most exhaustive application of his revised
psychoanalytic method in The Family Idiot. It shows that this multi-volume
work is designed to generate a reader-experience that he believes will enable
the reader to comprehend its subject, Gustave Flaubert’s behaviour and to use
this comprehension to convert the biographical facts about him into knowledge
of his self. It discusses Sartre’s central claim that Flaubert gained a passive
‘constitution’ due to the way he was nursed in his infancy, which then becomes
part of the ‘situation’ that he must respond to through making his self out of what
it makes of him. Next, it summarizes the case that Sartre builds for the view that
Flaubert’s nervous attacks (generally attributed to epilepsy) are best understood
as his neurotic response to his oppressive situation within the Flaubert family
because they can be comprehended in terms of his choice of the imaginary –
a choice that both ‘saves’ him by enabling him to go on living and stifles him
by preventing him from becoming anything other than the family idiot in his
reality. Finally, it considers how Sartre synthesizes a ‘regressive’ analysis with a
‘progressive’ one to interpret Flaubert’s most celebrated novel, Madame Bovary,
as an expression of his personal neurosis and a crystallization of the ‘neurosis’
of his entire class.
Chapter 5 addresses the important objection that the method of analysis
employed in the first three volumes of The Family Idiot does not appear to
be ‘objective enough’ to make good on its promise to deliver knowledge of
Flaubert’s self. It defends Sartre’s progressive-regressive method of approach by
showing that the psychoanalytical critique of Madame Bovary Sartre intended
to supply in the missing fourth volume would have provided him with a
valid means of confirming (or disconfirming) the findings of the first three,
as it would have provided him with a means of checking his findings against
something external to the dialectic he constructs in them. Then, it puts The
Family Idiot to the test by using the clues Sartre left behind about his intentions
for the fourth volume to provide a sketch of what a Sartrean reading of Madame
Bovary would have been like, so as to assess the extent to which it could have
confirmed the key findings of Sartre’s study as it stands.
Then, Chapter 6 aims to clarify the role of the imagination in Sartre’s project
of gaining knowledge of a self. It shows how Sartre’s theorization of the self
as an imaginary, ‘dialectical’ object in the context of his mature existentialism
motivates his use of author-centred literary criticism in his analysis of Flaubert,
 Introduction 5

as well as his choice to present the findings of that analysis in the form of a ‘true
novel’. It explains how Sartre’s use of the imagination in his attempts to gain and
communicate knowledge of Flaubert’s self does not contradict the theory of the
imagination he defended in The Imaginary (1940), which denies that it is possible
to gain knowledge through imagining. Further, it contends that The Family Idiot
(1971–2) is aptly described as a sequel to The Imaginary on the grounds that the
earlier work argues that the pathological preference for an imaginary life can be
comprehended as a choice, and the later work aims to show that it can through
its exposition of how Flaubert’s choice to lead an imaginary life is ‘incarnated’ in
his literary works.
Finally, the book closes with a consideration of ‘The Future of Sartre’s
Existential Psychoanalysis’ in Chapter 7. This chapter argues that integrating
Sartre’s development and applications of his existential psychoanalysis into
his overarching philosophical ‘treatment’ of problems about selves and others
not only enables us to interpret his oeuvre in a more productive way, but also
points to the potential of Sartrean existential psychoanalysis to make valuable
contributions to psychotherapy. But, rather than considering it alongside well-
known existential psychotherapies, such as those developed by Irvin D. Yalom
(1980), Rollo May (1983) and Emmy van Deurzen (2012), it aims to highlight
the value that a specifically Sartrean form of existential psychotherapy can
bring to psychotherapy as a result of its difference from these approaches, which
draw eclectically upon the work of a range of thinkers historically categorized
as ‘existential’ – a categorization that is problematic insofar as it emphasizes
‘superficial similarities’ between a diverse range of thinkers and overlooks
many, often profound, disagreements between them (Webber 2018: 1). The
chapter focuses on showing how Sartre’s existentialism can offer therapists
a rich, coherent psychological metatheory in which to ground their practice
and it makes some specific suggestions about how a Sartrean approach can
enhance integrative and electronically mediated psychotherapeutic practice.
Then, it closes by indicating some fruitful avenues for further research that are
opened by the new understanding of Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis offered
in this book.
A final word: Before we begin this investigation into Sartre’s existential
psychoanalysis, it should be noted that Sartre is not a trained psychoanalyst nor
was he ever analysed by one.2 Writing of his relation to psychoanalysis, he aptly
describes himself as a ‘critical fellow-traveller’ (MT/HM: 199/1813). This book
does not deem Sartre to have any more psychoanalytic authority than that of a
deeply interested outsider, who strives to reach some of the same ends as traditional
6 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

psychoanalysis by different means. That said, Sartre is a psychoanalytic outsider

who is especially well placed to offer constructive criticism. Not only does the
evidence suggest that he is the existentialist philosopher who demonstrated the
most interest in psychoanalysis (Cannon 1991: 6), his existentialism is, as Simone
de Beauvoir points out, an upshot of his fundamental interest in ‘people’ and
his aim to ‘replace the dry-as-dust analytical philosophy taught at the Sorbonne
with a concrete, hence synthetic, apprehension of individuals’ (1962: 42). So,
Sartre is an existential philosopher who takes the task of comprehending people,
in all their particularity, as his top priority. This book does not present Sartre as
a psychoanalyst but as a philosopher whose lifelong search for a non-reductive
way of understanding people led him to look to psychoanalysis for answers to
questions about people that, he believes, philosophy does not have the tools to
answer.
 1

Sartre’s theory of the self

Before beginning this inquiry into Sartre’s psychoanalytic approach to gaining

knowledge of others, it is vital to clarify what the object of such knowledge is.
What exactly constitutes knowledge of another person? Put briefly, the answer
to this question is knowledge of that person’s ‘self ’. But this brief answer is
unhelpful because Sartre’s concept of self is peculiar, if not idiosyncratic.
Moreover, his attempt to revolutionize our understanding of how the self can
be known through existential psychoanalysis commences from a denial that the
self exists in the way that it is generally presumed to. If we wish to appreciate
Sartre’s unique contribution to psychoanalysis, then it is necessary to gain a clear
understanding of his theory of the self. To this end, this chapter clarifies Sartre’s
construal of the relationship between consciousness and the self in his early
work, analyses the important revisions he makes to his understanding of this
relationship in Being and Nothingness, and indicates how these revisions impact
his first efforts to establish the foundations of an existential psychoanalysis.

The transcendent ego

At least since René Descartes identified himself with a ‘thing which thinks’ in his
Meditations on First Philosophy ([1641] 1997: 142–7), philosophers in the West
have tended to take a Cartesian concept of mind for granted in their attempts
to understand the self1 and so what may be called ‘the standard model of the
self ’ in the Western tradition makes four Cartesian assumptions: (1) we are each
identical with the mind that is distinct from, but connected to, our body; (2)
mental representations exist inside the mind; (3) mental representations are the
primary objects of both knowledge and conscious experience; and (4) the subject
of consciousness has exclusive access to their own mental representations. The
standard model thus construes the self as a mental thing that the subject has
8 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

direct access to through being identical with it. Consequently, the term ‘self ’
is typically taken to refer to a subject of conscious experience, who exists in a
private, mental realm, and consciousness is often regarded as the seat of the self
in the philosophical literature.
Sartre, however, rejects the standard model of the self. One of his earliest
and most enduring philosophical convictions is there is no self inside
consciousness,2 and his first major philosophical work, The Transcendence of
the Ego (La Transcendance de l’ego, 1937), provides us with an alternative to the
standard model of the self. This work is divided into two parts. The first part
aims to refute the standard model of the self by targeting the version of it that
Sartre finds preserved in Edmund Husserl’s work. The second argues for the
view that the self is, entirely, an object for consciousness that is constructed by
consciousness. As Sartre’s critique of Husserl’s theorization of the consciousness-
self relation supplies the theoretical groundwork for his own, let us commence
our exposition of the Sartre’s theory of the self from an analysis of what he finds
problematic in Husserl’s.
Sartre’s ambivalence towards Husserl’s work is apparent in the very first pages
of The Transcendence of the Ego. To begin with the positives, he recognizes Husserl
as the founder of phenomenology, the discipline that can grasp consciousness
as an ‘absolute fact’ instead of approaching it as an abstract ‘set of logical
conditions’ (TE: 4/18). He notes that the performance of a phenomenological
reduction – interpreted as a special form of ‘pure’ reflection on just what is
given to consciousness in a moment of its lived experience (Erlebnis)3 – makes
it possible for us to access and examine a ‘real consciousness’ (TE: 4/18). Finally,
Sartre is also in agreement with Husserl on the point that a phenomenological
study requires the performance of the phenomenological reduction known as
the epochē, which involves the temporary suspension of all beliefs about the
existence of objects beyond their immediate appearance.4 The performance
of the epochē is crucial for Husserl because he defines the phenomenological
attitude as one that abandons the ‘natural’ attitude that presupposes existence
of an ‘objective spatio-temporal fact-world’ that is ‘there for us all, and to
which we ourselves none the less belong’ (Husserl [1913] 2002: 55). The result
is that ‘the whole of the concrete life-word’ is no longer apprehended by the
phenomenologist as something that is objectively there but as ‘a phenomenon of
being’ that is there for them (Husserl [1931] 1960: 19).
However, Sartre then goes on to charge Husserl with failing to be consistent
in his application of the key phenomenological principle that ‘all transcendence
must fall under the scope of the epochē’ in his treatment of the ego (TE: 14/34).
 Sartre’s Theory of the Self 9

To understand the nature of this charge, it is necessary to clarify the terminology

employed. As Sarah Richmond (2004) observes, the terms ‘transcendent’ and
‘transcendental’ do not carry a Kantian sense in Sartre’s usage but, rather, the
phenomenological sense that Husserl describes them to have in §11 of his
Cartesian Mediations. Here, the transcendent is presented as the correlate
of the transcendental and this correlation is ‘derived exclusively from our
philosophically meditative situation’ (Husserl [1931] 1960: 26), which is to
say that these concepts are solely concerned with relations of consciousness.
‘Transcendence’ is a feature of ‘anything worldly’ that appears to consciousness
and which also ‘necessarily acquires all the sense determining it’ from
consciousness (Husserl [1931] 1960: 26). As such, transcendence is part of ‘the
intrinsic sense of the world’ for consciousness and, as consciousness carries ‘the
world as an accepted sense’ within itself and is, in turn, implied by this sense,
consciousness is characterized as the ‘transcendental’ being that constitutes a
meaningful world through its awareness of ‘transcendent’ objects (Husserl
[1931] 1960: 26). When Sartre writes that ‘all transcendence must fall under the
scope of the epochē’, then, he means that anything constituted by consciousness
must be excluded from a phenomenological conception of consciousness itself.
As Sartre sees it, Husserl’s failure to exclude all transcendence (or constituted
being) from his concept of the transcendental (or constituting) being of
consciousness is evinced in his claim to have discovered a pure, ‘transcendental
ego’ as a ‘residuum’ of the epochē and the phenomenological reduction in
Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (Ideen zu einer reinen
Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine
Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie) ([1913] 2012: 112).5 What Husserl
purports to find at the end of the phenomenological reduction to a transcendental
consciousness is a part of his self: an ego purified of the empirical subjectivity
that belongs to the world, an ego that is the subject of his experience which
he also is. Sartre objects to the notion that an ego is the subject of experience
by pointing out that ‘the consciousness that says “I think” is precisely not the
consciousness that thinks’ (TE: 10/23). He traces the tendency to posit the
existence of a substantial subject of experience to Descartes’ originary conflation
of his (constituted) image of his self with his (constituting) consciousness, which
led him to (mis)identify himself with a ‘thing’ that thinks, and he posits that
Husserl makes the same basic error as Descartes.
Sartre believes that his phenomenological approach avoids this error by
commencing not from the Cartesian cogito – i.e. the premise that ‘I think’ – but
from what he calls the ‘pseudo-“cogito”’ (TE: 16/34) – a clear precursor to the
10 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

‘pre-reflective cogito’ he will later describe as the condition for the Cartesian
cogito (BN/EN: 12/19). This pseudo-‘cogito’ represents an improvement of the
Cartesian cogito for Sartre because it concentrates solely on what is given to
pre-reflective thought and is, hence, minimally contaminated by the processes
involved in reflection.6 It facilitates a form of ‘pure’ reflection, which Sartre
believes yields apodictic7 evidence concerning the form of consciousness
reflected on because it limits its scope to just what is given to consciousness
in the immediacy of its lived experience. To illustrate the possibility of pure
reflection, Sartre observes how somebody who yells ‘I hate you!’ to a friend in
anger can always correct themselves by saying ‘That’s not true, I don’t hate you,
it was anger that made me say it’ (TE: 23/48). These two statements articulate
‘impure’ and ‘pure’ reflections, respectively. The former is impure because it
transforms the repulsive appearance of the friend in an experience inflected by
anger into an enduring state of hatred. Rather than focusing solely on the object
of pre-reflective experience – e.g. the friend who appears repulsive in the ‘heat
of the moment’ – impure reflection abstracts from it to contemplate an enduring
relation – hatred – between two objects – ‘self ’ and ‘friend’.
Although it might seem as though all conscious experiences are ‘endowed
with an I’ (TE: 10/27), Sartre argues that this is only because consciousness
usually engages in impure reflection, which retroactively inserts an ‘I’ into
experiences and interprets this ‘I’ as the subject of them. But the ‘sure and certain’
evidence delivered by the pseudo-cogito attests to the absence of an ego at the
primary, pre-reflective level of experience. When ‘I’ check my email, observe
one of Rothko’s red canvases, run to catch a bus, for example, all that I am is
consciousness of emails-awaiting-reply, of vibrating-hues-of-red, of the bus-
to-be-caught. This brings Sartre to a ‘non-egological’ concept of consciousness
which affirms that consciousness lacks an ego in its most primary form. It is
only when consciousness engages in a reflective contemplation of the relation
between itself (considered as an object) and (another) object that the ‘I’ appears.
Then, I say to myself that ‘I’ am checking ‘my emails’, ‘I’ am observing ‘this
painting’, ‘I’ am running to catch ‘that bus’ and so on. While there is an I-subject
in these reflective experiences, it is on the ‘object side’ of the consciousness-
object relation because it is what consciousness is contemplating, not the
consciousness doing the contemplating. Here lie the grounds for Sartre’s claim
that phenomenological reflection on strictly what is given to pre-reflective
consciousness shows that the ego ought not to be treated as part of the structure
of consciousness and so Husserl’s ‘privileged treatment’ of the self can only be
explained by ‘metaphysical or critical preoccupations that have nothing to do
 Sartre’s Theory of the Self 11

with phenomenology’ (TE: 14/34). What is more, Sartre also maintains that
Husserl’s incorporation of an ego into his concept of consciousness refuses one
of the most important implications of his discovery of the ‘intentionality’,8 which
is that consciousness is, fundamentally, a pure, pragmatic engagement with
objects in the world.9
Sartre is nevertheless convinced of the existence of a personal, ‘psychical
and psycho-physical me’ (TE: 4/18), which Husserl identifies as the ‘empirical
subjectivity’ that cannot survive the phenomenological reduction to a
transcendental consciousness because it belongs to the world (Husserl [1913]
2012: 112). For both Sartre and Husserl, this empirical subjectivity is an occasional,
transcendent object for consciousness, not an essential feature of it. What Sartre
takes issue with is the notion that there is another part of the self that survives
the phenomenological reduction in virtue of being integral to consciousness. He
questions the idea that we need to combine the empirical, transcendent self with
a transcendental ego when his phenomenological investigations show the field
of lived experience to be an impersonal one that only becomes personal upon
reflection. As ‘the I is not given as a concrete moment’, he affirms that it cannot
be ‘of the same nature as transcendental consciousness’ (TE: 14/35).
Thus, despite being deeply inspired by Husserl’s phenomenology Sartre’s
own phenomenological approach departs from Husserl’s in a way that enables
it to sustain a comprehension of consciousness as an unmediated, impersonal
apprehension of its objects. Husserl’s and Sartre’s different conceptions of the
phenomenological reduction and what it is supposed to achieve,10 along with the
fact that Sartre seems to read Husserl’s transcendental ego to be more substantial
than Husserl describes it,11 make it difficult to assess the success of Sartre’s
refutation of Husserl’s concept of the transcendental ego in any definitive way.
What is clear, though, is that through his departure from the phenomenology
of Husserl, Sartre breaks with a long tradition of treating consciousness as
inhabited by a thinking thing and begins to radically reconceive of the relation
of consciousness to the self.

A sense of selfness

Against Sartre’s non-egological view of consciousness, it may be contested

that even if phenomenological reflection indicates that there is no ego in
consciousness, a transcendental ego is the only thing that could explain a key
phenomenal feature of consciousness: the sense of ‘selfness’ that results from the
12 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

way that experiences are apprehended as part of a unified stream and also have a
first-personal character – i.e. a sense of all its objects as ‘mine’ or appearing ‘for
me’. This is not a Kantian a priori claim that it must be possible for an ‘I think’ to
accompany all our thoughts, which Sartre denies has any bearing on his inquiry
into the de facto structures of consciousness (TE: 2–4/13–18). It is the empirico-
inductive claim that the only thing that could give all our experiences a sense of
selfness is a transcendental ego. Although Husserl discovers a transcendental ego
within the phenomenological attitude rather than offering it as an explanation
for why consciousness is the way it is, his conception of the transcendental ego
as a ‘glance’ that unifies the stream of consciousness through the preservation
of its own identity (Husserl [1913] 2012: 111) can clearly serve this function. It
can provide consciousness with something that is both ‘prior to presences’ and
unaffected by them, which can act as its stable core (Breeur 2001: 193).
At first glance, Sartre’s non-egological view seems incapable of explaining
how consciousness could be unified and ‘mine’ for each of us. However, in a
passage that cites Husserl’s theory of retention approvingly, Sartre writes that
‘consciousness that unifies itself, concretely, by an interplay of “transversal”
consciousnesses that are real, concrete retentions of past consciousnesses’ (TE:
6/22, emphasis added). For Husserl, retention ‘constitutes the living horizon of
the now’ through its preservation of that which is ‘just past’ (Husserl [1913]
2002: 117). It explains how consciousness can stretch across time to grasp the
whole of a temporally extended object such as a melody through the retention
of the previous moment, and the one before it, extending all the way back to the
start of the melody. In this manner, the whole melody can be perceived even
though ‘only the now-point actually is’ (Husserl [1913] 2002: 114). For Sartre,
retention also explains how consciousness can be unified as it moves from one
object to the next, so that ‘consciousness’ refers to a unified movement rather
than a series of discrete object-consciousnesses. The unity of consciousness
through retention is a consequence of its intentionality in Sartre’s view, as the
movement of consciousness from one object to the next is not arbitrary but
driven by the significance consciousness sees in the objects on the horizon of
its experience, which is determined by the meaning of the objects that preceded
it that consciousness retains through the sense it perceives in the present
object. Every object refers to all those that preceded it, and the past guides
consciousness’s movement towards the future in the present. Hence, we do
not need to posit the existence of an immanent ego to account for the unified
character of consciousness in Sartre’s view.
 Sartre’s Theory of the Self 13

Sartre could also explain the ‘mineness’ of consciousness as an upshot of

intentionality. He could, for instance, say that while the same object might be
the object of two different consciousnesses, it cannot have the same meaning
for both because its meaning is partly determined by the past and each
consciousness has its own distinct past. But he makes a much stronger claim
than this; he holds that each consciousness ‘constitutes a synthetic, individual
totality, completely isolated from other totalities of the same kind’ (TE: 7/23),
which implies that the ‘mineness’ of consciousness is guaranteed by the nature of
consciousness itself and is not contingent upon its capacity for retention, which
could be compromised. But what, if not an immanent ego, could individuate
consciousness in this way? Kenneth Williford strives to clarify Sartre’s grounds
for this claim by interpreting the individuality of the Sartrean consciousness as
a result of its ‘non-positional’ consciousness of itself, or what he calls the ‘self-
manifestation of the stream’ (2011: 203). The non-positional consciousness
of consciousness is precisely what distinguishes it from its object on Sartre’s
account; it is consciousness’s tacit awareness that it is separate from its object and
it is ‘not positional’ because ‘consciousness is not its own object’ (TE: 8/24). So,
Williford’s proposal is that the non-positional consciousness that consciousness
always has of itself also bestows upon its object the character of being ‘mine’.
If correct, this would justify Sartre’s view that no two consciousnesses are ever
the same; it would mean that even if two people suffering from transient global
amnesia were suspended in a sensory deprivation tank and made to watch the
same video, through the same kind of video-playing goggles, at the same time,
their consciousnesses would not be ‘the same’ for the duration of the video as
each would experience the video as appearing for it and would, therefore, have
an experience that is its own.
However, there does not appear to be any feature of a non-egological
consciousness that could make it non-positionally conscious of itself in the
first place. If my consciousness is nothing but an empty movement towards its
object, what could make the object of my experience ‘manifestly mine’ if not for
retention or the fact that it is given to ‘me’, a subject who pre-exists it? Dan Zahavi
holds that Sartre is unable to provide a satisfactory response to this question. He
contends that while (pre-reflective) consciousness may be described as a ‘non-
egological’ field, it cannot also be described as a non-‘egocentric’ one because
to have an experience in the first-personal mode of presentation is to have an
experience in which ‘self-awareness’ is built into the ‘giveness’ of the object of
experience, so that the object is given as an object of my experience (2000: 64).
14 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

Sartre does not directly address this concern in The Transcendence of the Ego.
He does, however, suggest that consciousness’s psychical ego or ‘I’ has a distinct
presence to it, which is unlike that of any object and which is also distinct from
that of the self-as-object or the ‘me’. Further, he writes that the ‘psycho-physical
me is a synthetic enrichment of the psychical Ego’ (TE: 28), which suggests that
the ego is more basic than the ‘me’ that only exists as a positional object for
reflective consciousness. However, this idea problematizes Sartre’s claim that
the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ are merely ‘two faces’ of the same, transcendent ego (TE:
20/43). Being and appearance seem to come apart in the case of the ego in a
way that they do not for self-as-object, for which ‘to be’ and ‘to appear’ are the
same thing. For instance, Sartre explains that the ego does not disappear when
we are not positionally conscious of it by drawing an analogy between the ego
and the ‘World’, understood as ‘the infinite synthetic totality of all things’ (TE:
30/58). The World is always there for us; it is always on the horizon of the objects
of our experience and all the objects around us ‘appear merely as the extreme
point of that world which surpasses them and envelopes them’ (TE: 30/58).
Similarly, Sartre submits, the ego is also always there for us and is ‘to psychical
objects what the World is to things’ (TE: 30/58). But, while ‘the appearance of the
World in the background of things is quite rare’, the ego ‘always appears on the
horizon of states’ (TE: 31/58). Further, each of our states and actions are given
as being attached to the ego and only separable from it by abstraction. Even if
one manages to detach the ‘I’ from a state through a judgement such as ‘I am
in love’, this separation can only be temporary for Sartre because it would have
no meaning if the ego and the state were not synthesized in the movement of
consciousness – through, for example, attending lovingly to the object of one’s
affection, loving their laugh, eyes, etc. (TE: 31/58).
Thus, Williford is right to suggest that the ego grants the Sartrean consciousness
a ‘unity and stability’ by supplying it with a sense of continual presence (2011:
209). It seems that it is only due to the constant, horizonal presence of the
ego that Sartre can present the mineness of experience as something built-
in to experience itself. And yet, the notion that the ego is always there for
consciousness appears to contradict Sartre’s non-egological view because it
indicates that the ego is necessary for consciousness to be the way that it is. In
his attempt to avoid this problem, Sartre affirms that the ego qua transcendent
totality ‘participates in the dubious character of all transcendence’ and that it is
‘a dubious object’ because it is ‘the spontaneous transcendent unification of our
states and our actions’ and, hence, always subject to change (TE: 31/59). But it
is, rather, Sartre’s insistence that the ego is an object here that seems dubious.
 Sartre’s Theory of the Self 15

The kind of constant, creative, unbounded presence that he attributes to the

ego means that it cannot be aptly characterized as ‘objectual’ at all since objects
are, by definition, passive, determinate beings, with clear boundaries, separate
from other objects. What makes the object status of the Sartrean ego dubious,
then, is its perpetual presence ‘in’ consciousness – albeit it as an object on the
periphery of consciousness – since an impersonal, perpetual presence is what
characterizes the Husserlian transcendental ego that Sartre’s account of the self
seeks to ‘transcend’.12
Commentators have recognized that the characterization of the ego as
an object in The Transcendence of the Ego is inapt. Vincent de Coorebyter
observes that Sartre’s ego is comparable to an object in the respect that it is an
intentional object for reflective consciousness and a concrete existent because
it is transcendent, but he emphasizes that its concreteness is borrowed because
it synthesizes lived experiences to ‘give itself a real pole of intentionality’ (2020:
33). It approaches object status in Coorebyter’s view, but it cannot be accurately
portrayed as an object among other objects because it has no substance of its
own. Accordingly, he reads Sartre to correct himself on this point when he
refers to the ego as a ‘quasi object’ in Notebooks for an Ethics. Phyllis Berdt
Kenevan also sees reason to deny Sartre’s ego full object status. As she interprets
it as ‘a personalized account of the primary [impersonal] upsurge viewed as
“object”’, she maintains that can only be regarded as a ‘pseudo-object’ (1981:
201). For both Coorebyter and Kenevan, the Sartrean ego cannot be neatly
classified as an object because it has no substance of its own and its lack of
substance is only made into something substantial by an impure consciousness.
However, this does not go far enough; it is not enough to say that Sartre’s ego
is not truly or fully an object because it not only lacks a substance that objects
have, it also has a presence that objects lack and which we tend to associate with
consciousness itself.
Kenevan attempts to explain how the Sartrean ego could possess this quality
of presence while remaining transcendent. She suggests that we should not take
Sartre’s denial that there is a substantial self to entail the denial of what she calls
a ‘self-in-progress’. Although he affirms that there is no substantial self within
or behind consciousness, Kenevan argues that there is still ‘a self-as-temporal-
process of which we are non-positionally conscious with every act of positional
consciousness’ (1981: 200). Or, put differently, there is a non-objectual
process that creates the self, which we are constantly aware of, regardless of
what the positional object of our consciousness is, and it is on account of this
awareness that ego is perpetually present to consciousness without being ‘in’
16 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

consciousness. Provisionally at least, Kenevan’s reading enables us to posit the

ego as the pseudo-object of self-consciousness that does not disappear when
it is not the positional object of consciousness. However, Kenevan shows that
this solution to the problem that Sartre’s transcendent ego seems to have a
transcendental quality creates issues for other aspects of his existentialist theory.
Significantly, it presents a challenge for the notion that consciousness can
become ‘authentic’ by apprehending the true nature of its being as a freedom in
‘anguish’ (angoisse)13 because it makes it difficult to identify the agent of choice
and insight in anguish. It cannot be located in the ego, which is a pseudo-object
and, hence, passive, not active. Nor can it be located in consciousness, which is
impersonal and only conscious of itself in a non-positional, background way.
Anguish thus poses a serious problem for Sartre because it seems to imply the
presence of an agent and a subject of self-knowledge in consciousness, when
he insists that consciousness can contain neither and that consciousness can
only gain knowledge of itself by reflecting on itself as an object.14 To resolve this
problem in Sartre’s terms, it seems as though we have to postulate the presence
of two consciousnesses in anguish because anguish-consciousness appears to
be positionally conscious of two different aspects of itself in two different ways:
it is consciousness aware of itself as a consciousness that contemplates itself as
an object that it is not.
If the self that is the object of positional self-consciousness is regarded as ‘the
indirect unity of consciousness in temporal dispersion’, Kenevan notes that the
ego emerges as a ‘process self ’ and the problem of two separate consciousnesses
ought not arise, as the consciousness that reflects on its (past) self is conscious of
its self-as-object without being one with it. This is the case in ordinary, impure
reflection where the self-in-progress becomes objectified in the self when it is
reflected on. The problem of two consciousnesses arises in the context of anguish
because it is the result of pure reflection, through which consciousness grasps
the truth of its being as an always incomplete unity-in-progress that lacks self-
identity. For Kenevan, this indicates that the form consciousness takes in anguish
is irreducible to ‘consciousness of a transcendent object’ as it is conscious of itself
as a transcendental consciousness and a self-in-progress, which is not identical
with the self-as-object but responsible for it nevertheless. Her proposed solution
to the problem of two consciousnesses is to suggest that there are not two
consciousnesses here, but two kinds of intentionality operating within the same
consciousness. This would mean that there is ‘not only a positional intention
of objects other than consciousness’ in anguish but also, simultaneously, ‘an
 Sartre’s Theory of the Self 17

attention to the self that intends objects’ (1981: 206). Splitting intentionality
in two directions in this way would, according to Kenevan, enable Sartre to
construe the sudden revelation of a self-in-progress through pure reflection
as the apprehension of freedom in anguish while avoiding the problem of two
consciousnesses.
Such attention-intention-split is, as Kenevan notes, largely consistent with
what Sartre says about the anguish and pure reflection insofar as it would
demand a powerful and unsustainable concentration, which could only take
the form of a ‘momentary apprehension’ in a healthy consciousness (Kenevan
1981: 206, cf. TE: 46–9/79–84). But it is wholly inconsistent with what he says
about intentionality, both in The Transcendence of the Ego and elsewhere. Sartre’s
concept of intentionality goes far beyond Husserl’s original, which denotes the
essential character of consciousness as a being that is ‘of ’ or ‘about’ something
in virtue of existing as an ‘intentional’ relation or a directedness towards an
object (Husserl [1913] 2002: 82). In Sartre’s hands, intentionality also implies
that consciousness is dependent on its objects for its own existence (BN/EN: 20–
4/26–9).15 In The Transcendence of the Ego, he gestures towards this view through
his affirmation that everything ‘in’ consciousness is ‘clear and lucid’ because
the object of consciousness always opposes consciousness ‘in its characteristic
opacity’ (TE: 7–8/24). The thought here is that consciousness must be entirely
‘non-substantial’ and free of any opacity if it is to exist as a transcendental
movement towards objects that transcend it. Further, if part of it were to turn
back towards itself, this part would be cut off from all transcendence. This would
create closed loop and, hence, a kernel of opacity within consciousness, which
would amount to the ‘death’ of consciousness as a transcendental movement in
Sartre’s view (TE: 7/23); it would make consciousness be something else besides
consciousness of an object. A Sartrean consciousness could not therefore be
divided between ‘intending’ its object and ‘attending’ to itself in the way that
Kenevan suggests.
Be that as it may, Kenevan is certainly correct to observe that some modification
of the theorization of the consciousness-self relation in The Transcendence of the
Ego is required to account for anguish as the basis for authenticity since the
revelation that characterizes anguish seems to entail a profound kind of self-
awareness that exceeds the non-positional consciousness of consciousness. If
anguish must involve such an awareness, without compromising the integrity or
the intentionality of the Sartrean consciousness, though, the modification needs
to target Sartre’s conception of the self, not his conception of consciousness.16
18 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

The constitution of the ego

One of the principal aims of The Transcendence of the Ego is to show that the
self ’s appearance of being ‘one’ with consciousness is an illusion that results
from the way it is constituted. To fully comprehend Sartre’s initial conception
of the relation of consciousness to its self in anguish, it is vital to examine his
account of its constitution in the second part of The Transcendence of the Ego. In
the first part, Sartre tells us that the ego is an ideal, as opposed to a perceptual,
object and that the nature of its existence is distinct from that of other ideal
objects such as ‘mathematical truths’ and ‘meanings’, but he maintains that it
is ‘just as real’ as they are because it is given to us as transcendent (TE: 15–
16/36). The ego is real because it has a concrete presence for us, even though, as
Coorebyter reminds us, its concreteness is ‘borrowed’ from the lived experiences
that reflective consciousness objectifies and, subsequently, makes into the
substance of the ego (2020: 133). But how exactly does this process work? How
does consciousness unify aspects of its lived experience and, thereby, bring an
ego into existence without knowing that it is doing so?
To begin with, it is crucial to note that ‘states and actions’ are aspects of lived
experience that Sartre takes to be unified in the self (TE: 39/69). He uses the term
‘states’ to denote transcendent objects that are produced by impure reflections
on particular features of instantaneous consciousness. For example, I may take
the affect of tenderness that accompanies the present appearance of my cat for
an enduring state of love if it prompts me to say to myself ‘Gosh, I really do love
that cat’. ‘Actions’ facilitate the transcendence of consciousness in the present,
but the actions that form the self are transcendent objects since that is what
actions become the moment they are reflected on: my act of running yesterday,
for instance, is an object for my reflective consciousness now. Although Sartre
sometimes omits the term ‘qualities’ from his summations of what is unified
in the ego (TE: 30, 39/57, 69), he regards qualities as optional unities of states
that may also be constituents of the self. When they are incorporated into the
self, qualities are apprehended as inherent dispositions and potentialities that
are expressed through ‘failings, virtues, tastes, talents, tendencies, instincts, etc.’
(TE: 28/54).
If the ego is nothing other than the unification of these kinds of transcendent
objects produced by consciousness in the reflective mode, though, how can it
possibly appear to be the subject of consciousness? Sartre explains the deceptive
appearance of the ego as the effect of a special kind of impure reflection that
is made possible by the horizonal presence of the ego in all experience. This
 Sartre’s Theory of the Self 19

reflective process is described by Sartre as ‘magical’ because it inverts the logical

and ontological order of the relations between consciousness and the ego (O’Shiel
2019: 13–18). For the ego to appear to consciousness as a subject who precedes
all the transcendent objects that constitute it, he believes that consciousness
must apprehend its states and actions through a ‘magical procession’ (TE:
33/61), which presents the process of self-formation as running ‘in completely
the reverse direction from that followed by real production’ (TE: 34/63).
The aim of this procession is to return the spontaneity of consciousness to it
‘represented and hypostatized’ in the object it calls ‘I’ (TE: 35/63). In other words,
the aim of this magic is to make the spontaneity of consciousness ‘disappear’.
And being bewitched by this magic is precisely what Sartre believes makes it
possible for us to deny the truth of our being as a spontaneous consciousness
and buy into the idea that the nature of the self is fixed in advance by external
factors such as unconscious drives, evolutionary biology or a Divine Creator.
Moreover, by playing this kind of magic trick on itself, consciousness appears
to be guilty of precisely the kind of existential dishonesty that Sartre will later
call ‘bad faith’ (mauvaise foi) in Being and Nothingness (L’Être et le néant, 1943).
But it is unhelpful to read Sartre’s early account of the constitution of the ego
anachronistically through the lens of his later conceptual framework, not only
because the revisions that Sartre makes to his theory of the self during the late
1930s and early 1940s turn out to be foundational to the concept of bad faith
(as the next two sections explain), but also because viewing the ego of The
Transcendence of the Ego as constituted in an attitude of bad faith distracts us
from the central importance of the illusion of a stable self for psychological
wellbeing that Sartre is keen to emphasize in this work. This can be brought
out by attending to the fact that the attitude that Sartre associates with the
constitution of the ego here is the natural attitude.
While it may be tempting to classify the appearance of the self as ‘a typical
illusion of the natural attitude’ as Coorebyter does (2020: 136), this oversimplifies
Sartre’s position since he does not merely indicate that the appearance of the
ego is an effect of the natural attitude, he construes it as a core component
of the natural attitude in the course of his attempt to show that an important
advantage of his account of the ego is that it can provide a motivation for the
phenomenological epochē. He begins by pointing out that the natural attitude
is ‘perfectly coherent’ (TE: 49/83), lacking the kind of contradictions that
might push a philosopher to enact a radical conversion of their stance towards
the world, and so the appearance of the epochē in Husserl’s phenomenology
has a miraculous air. Once we recognize the natural attitude as an upshot of
20 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

consciousness’s ongoing but ultimately futile effort to conceal its spontaneity

from itself, though, Sartre argues that the epochē no longer seems like a miracle.
For if consciousness continually projects itself ‘into’ an object-like image of itself,
and if it merely takes a simple act of reflection for consciousness to apprehend
itself as a spontaneity that is separate from this image, then the epochē is a
manifestation of anguish. It is, at once, ‘a pure event of transcendental origin and
an accident that is always possible in our daily lives’ (TE: 49/84). The permanent
possibility of apprehending our ontological truth in anguish therefore gives us a
reason to suspend the ‘natural’ view that we each exist in the world as a thinking
thing among things because it reveals this view to rest upon the false assumption
that we are thinking things.
The idea that the reality of world we experience in the natural attitude hinges
on an image of ourselves as thinking-things-in-the-world, which we construct
in an attempt to flee from our ‘monstrous spontaneity’ (TE: 44/80), explains why
Sartre regards anguish as both the motivation for the epochē and a factor in the
precipitation of certain psychopathologies such as ‘psychasthenia’ (TE: 47/80).
Borrowing from Pierre Janet’s Les Névroses, he illustrates the connection he
sees between phenomenology and psychopathology through his discussion of
a young bride who suffers from a terror that if she is left alone in her house, she
will call out to passers-by on the street like a prostitute. He interprets this woman
to suffer from a ‘vertigo of possibility’ because the source of her distress is her
recognition that she could do precisely the thing she is terrified of doing as there
is no virtue inscribed in her being, no internal constraint, that would bar her
from doing it if she chose to. Instead of attributing the fear of this young bride to
a cognitive dysfunction or disorder, Sartre maintains that it results from the ‘fear
of oneself ’ that constitutes a ‘pure consciousness’ in anguish (TE: 49/83); that
is, he presents her distress as a consequence of lucidity not lunacy. She becomes
ill, in his view, because she apprehends the truth of her ontological structure
without having the means to cope with this truth. Although he does not specify
what could enable her to cope with this truth, his proposal that anguish lies at
the heart of her malady suggests that a more robust sense of self could have
mitigated the distress that her existential revelation caused her, or perhaps even
prevented her from having this revelation in the first place.
The illusory appearance of the ego thus turns out to have a protective function
for Sartre; it may be regarded as ‘a life jacket that keeps us from sinking into
the depths of our own possibility’ (Flynn 2014: 75). By bringing everything that
individuates us together at the surface-level of our experience and, at the same
time, concealing an oceanic emptiness that we cannot countenance, it shields us
 Sartre’s Theory of the Self 21

from apprehending our freedom in anguish, at least most of the time. In Sartre’s
words, it is

exactly as if consciousness constituted the Ego as a false representation of itself, as

if consciousness hypnotized itself before this Ego which it has constituted, became
absorbed in it, as if it made the Ego its safeguard and its law: it is, indeed, thanks
to the Ego, that a distinction can be drawn between the possible and the real,
between appearance and being, between what is willed and what is yielded to.
(TE: 48/82)

This passage illuminates the deep connection Sartre makes between the
constitution of the ego and the ‘sense of reality’.17 Not only does he believe that we
lose the reassuring sense of being one with ourselves in anguish, he also believes
that it causes the divisions that structure our sense of the world as a modal space
in which we can act to break down too. So, while he upholds that the ‘natural’
way that we conceive of ourselves in our everyday lives is based on a deception
that misrepresents the existential facts of our condition, he nevertheless regards
this deception as what enables us to experience ourselves as belonging to the
world and to ‘get on’ with the process of self-formation through action in that
world. Hence, The Transcendence of the Ego concludes that the ego is constituted
through an inherently deceptive process without which human life would be
unliveable.
However, we have already seen that this conclusion spells disaster for
Sartre’s initial attempt to account for the possibility of authenticity. It also puts
the possibility of self-knowledge into question, for it is extremely difficult to
understand how one could acquire knowledge of an ego that is constituted
through an inherently deceptive process. And what would the object of such
knowledge be anyway? Would it be the quasi-object that only falsely appears to
be the subject of consciousness, or would it be the true self-in-progress which
Sartre insists cannot be an object? Some clues about the answers to these questions
may be found in his reasons for rejecting the view that the subject has privileged
epistemic access to their ego (TE: 38–9/68–9). He proposes that since the ‘me’, or
the objective face of the ego, is given as an object in the world, it is the only part
of the ego that can be known. Also, he insists that the only way to gain knowledge
of it is through objective methods: empirical observation, constructing and
testing hypotheses, and so on. But because the subject is intimately familiar
with the other, subjective face of the ego, these methods, ‘which are perfectly
suitable for the entire domain of the non-intimate transcendent’ (TE: 38/68), are
unreliable for a subject seeking self-knowledge. The term ‘intimacy’ here refers
22 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

to the illusory sense that the ego is ‘part of consciousness’ (TE: 37/67), which
blinds us to our primary ignorance of it. The intimacy of each of us to our ego
represents a positive, unavoidable obstacle to self-knowledge for Sartre because
even when we try to examine our self objectively, by viewing it from a distance,
it always accompanies us in our attempt to withdraw from it; it will always be
the ‘I’ who is reflecting on the ‘me’. If we wish to know ourselves well then,
he recommends that we enlist the help of others and try, as best as we can, to
examine ourselves from another point of view. Nonetheless, he affirms that
this point of view ‘is necessarily false’ because it is another’s (TE: 38/69). This
can only mean that because the perspective that delivers the ego as an object of
knowledge is one that necessarily excludes the subject’s lived awareness of the
ego, it can only deliver knowledge of the ego that may be objectively accurate but
false because it misrepresents the ego as a ‘pure’ object in the world.
All this renders true self-knowledge impossible in the context of Sartre’s
initial theory of the self. Either we can gain knowledge of the self as an object
from a foreign perspective that does not have access to its subjective face and
therefore misrepresents it, or we can gain a true awareness of the ego as a self-in-
progress, which cannot be knowledge since the self-in-progress is irreducible to
an object of knowledge. Furthermore, this account of how the ego is constituted
and how it is known generates a paradox. It implies that someone who is
incapable of unifying their states and actions through the kind of magical,
impure reflection that constitutes the ego – say, someone in a permanent state
of anguish – would not have an ego. However, others would still be able to know
this person in just the same way as they know other people who do have egos,
through observation, etc. So, this gives us a non-existent ego that possesses an
objective face that can be known.

The evolution of the Sartrean self

Sartre drops the concept of the ego as a constant, horizonal presence to

consciousness in Being and Nothingness, where he only speaks of different
‘ekstases’ or modes of consciousness and the ‘self ’, understood as the part of
consciousness that can be observed. This self does not have a subjective face
that is hidden from others. It is not a pseudo-object that unifies reflections
on lived experience; it is a composite object that unifies a person’s actions in
the world. As such, Sartre’s revised concept of the self has been purged of the
presence that seemed to bestow a transcendental quality upon the ego. What
 Sartre’s Theory of the Self 23

is more, self-knowledge need no longer be posited as ‘false’ knowledge from a

perspective that is incapable of apprehending the true nature of its object, since
the self is an object that is entirely separate from, and ‘outside’ of, the process
that constitutes it.
Even this cursory summary of the major change Sartre makes to his theory of
the self between The Transcendence of the Ego and Being and Nothingness helps
us to see how his revised theory makes knowledge of selves feasible. But before
we can assess this feature of it, we must address the problem that it raises the
question of how consciousness can have a sense of selfness once more. How
can this self appear to be the stable core of our being if it is nothing more than
an ideal object that disappears as soon as we cease to attend to it? We have seen
that in The Transcendence of The Ego Sartre construes the intimate relation
consciousness has to its self as a function of the perpetual presence of the
subjective face of the ego on the horizon of experience. But what could supply
consciousness with a sense of selfness in the absence of this?
In Being and Nothingness, Sartre explains that the emergence of the self is
the upshot of a contingent social relation: ‘the Look’ (le regard). He illustrates
this relation with a vignette of a jealous lover peeping through a keyhole in a
hotel corridor. This may be considered a form of eidetic reduction through
the exploration of a paradigmatic case (Flynn 2014: 207) since, through being
narrated in the first-person, it invites you (the reader) to imagine that you are
peeping through a keyhole because you suspect that your beloved is in the
room on the other side with someone else. In striving to see the spectacle ‘to
be seen’ and to hear the conversation ‘to be heard’ on the far side of the door,
you are ‘a pure relation to the instrument (the keyhole)’ to these ends (BN/EN:
355/298). Your consciousness is fully absorbed in a ‘situation’ that reflects both
your facticity – the objective facts concerning your body and surroundings –
and your freedom – your chosen relation to these facts – which, together, make
the whole scene meaningful for you: the fact of the door obstructing the view
of ‘the spectacle’ is what makes the keyhole appear to you as ‘the instrument’.
While you are engaged in the activity of peeping, you live your jealousy, but
you do not know it; your self is absent from the scene. Everything changes the
instant you hear footsteps, though. This sound makes you suddenly aware of the
spectacle you make on the near side of the door for any passer-by who might see
you assuming such a compromising posture. You realize that you must look like
some kind of pervert! And voila, you have discovered your self through shame.
Without divesting ‘shame’ (honte) of its emotional connotations, Sartre
uses it in a technical way to refer to the primary form of our being-for-others
24 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

(être-pour-autrui): the form consciousness takes when it apprehends its self as

being that object which the ‘Other’ – i.e. another consciousness – is looking at,
judging. This means that the self appears to consciousness as having already
been constituted as an object by the Other who sees it from outside. The body
is therefore apprehended as what others see of us, and it replaces the subjective
face of the ego in supplying the terrain on which the magical procession that
produces the self advances. The body becomes the ‘ultimate magical object’
for Sartre (BN/EN: 468/391) because it is the perpetual, observable ‘outside’ of
our most intimate ‘inside’, which gives it a special function in his theory of self-
formation as the physical object that stands for the self. This function of the
body explains why Sartre designates it with the three ontological dimensions
he does. First, it is a being-for-itself, which is not ‘joined’ with consciousness
but which is consciousness ‘in its entirety’ (BN/EN: 412/344). This is the body
that is lived as my situation. Second, the body is a body-for-others, which may
be characterized as the ‘biographical’ dimension of the body; it is the one in
which the self is constituted because it is only through the body-for-others that
consciousness realizes itself – albeit always incompletely – as an object in the
world for others. In this dimension, the body is ‘the ultimate psychological object’
(BN/EN: 463/387) and it is through it that consciousness apprehends its ‘life’ and
its ‘character’ (BN: 459–62/384–6, 465–8/389–91). Third, the body is a (non-
psychological) object-being-for-others, in the dimension in which consciousness
is most alienated from its own being. Here, the body is given as if it is a being
apart from consciousness: it appears as ‘an organism’ or an object of science. It
is no surprise that this dimension of the body is most apparent in the context
of illness, as Sartre’s example of a stomach ulcer illustrates. The ‘pain “in the
stomach” is the stomach itself, in so far as it is painfully lived’ (BN/EN: 473/396),
but the knowledge that this pain is due to a stomach ulcer is discovered only
through others’ knowledge of human anatomy, the symptoms of stomach ulcers
in general, etc. When I undergo treatment for my stomach ulcer, Sartre writes
that both ‘stomach’ and ‘ulcer’ become ‘perspectives of alienation of the object I
possess’ (BN/EN: 474/396); I experience my body ‘designated as a thing outside
my subjectivity, in the midst of a world which is not mine’ (BN/EN: 470/393).
Situated in between the chapter that analyses the significance of the Look
(‘The Other’s Existence’) and the one that analyses interpersonal relations
(‘Concrete Relations with the Other’), Sartre’s phenomenological analysis of the
body and the different ways that it can be present to consciousness bolsters his
view that the illusory appearance of the body as the ‘container’ for the self is
key to understanding what, according to him, is the most peculiar feature of
 Sartre’s Theory of the Self 25

the self: its tendency to be mistaken for a subjective being that animates the
body from the ‘inside’ when, really, it is an object that unifies all the acts of the
body from a perspective that is ‘outside’ of the body. Moreover, it enables Sartre
to offer a more satisfactory account of the connection between non-positional
consciousness of consciousness and the self. Some of the remarks he makes about
the body in The Transcendence of the Ego do, however, anticipate the key role
Sartre will later assign to it in structuring consciousness’s relation to the world
and to the self. For example, it is suggested that the reason why fluid switches
from positional consciousness of an object (and non-positional consciousness of
consciousness) to positional consciousness of self are always possible – i.e. why
I can always easily respond to questions such as ‘What are you doing?’ with an
answer that begins with ‘I am’ – is because the body ‘acts as a visible and tangible
symbol for the I’ (TE: 41/72). This certainly hints at an awareness of one’s
embodied situation vis-à-vis the object of one’s consciousness in the here and
now is non-positional consciousness of consciousness – a view that Sartre later
explicitly endorses when he affirms that consciousness is the body and that non-
positional consciousness is ‘consciousness (of) the body as what it surmounts
and nihilates in making itself consciousness’ (BN/EN: 442/369).
Attending more closely to the body, therefore, enables Sartre to offer a
coherent and compelling account of the self as an object constructed in the
mode of being-for-others, which provides consciousness with an image of its
objective being by unifying the objectively observable aspects of its being. The
shift from a conception of consciousness as being haunted by an ego to a richer
appreciation of the necessity for consciousness to be a body dissolves the tension
between the ego as a private presence and the ego as a public object that we
observed in The Transcendence of the Ego, as a body is capable of being ‘lived’
and ‘looked at’, simultaneously, but only the body ‘looked at’ contributes to the
constitution of the self. Another advantage of this shift is that Sartre need no
longer trace the individuality and the ‘mineness’ of experience to presence of
a dubious ego-object because the fact that consciousness is a body, situated in
a specific place, means that, for consciousness, ‘to be is to-be-there’ (BN/EN:
332): there at this desk, there on the top of that hill, there at the table next to
the window in Les Deux Magots, etc. The possibility of one consciousness being
either qualitatively or quantitatively identical with another is therefore ruled out
as a direct consequence of embodied nature of consciousness. Further, Sartre
can now identify the body as the feature of consciousness that makes it non-
positionally conscious of itself in the first place, as the situatedness of the body
gives consciousness a specific point of view, which gives all experience its first-
26 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

personal character. As consciousness is always situated somewhere, all its objects

are given to it as standing in a particular relation to it, which incorporates a
sense of separation and difference into them, so that they appear as being ‘within
arm’s reach’, ‘beneath my feet’, ‘around the corner’, ‘up above’, ‘in my mind’s eye’,
etc. According to Sartre’s (revised) theory of the self, then, it is because my body
is my perspective on the world that all objects appear as being the way that they
are for me and all my experience is manifestly mine.
But what about the problem of authenticity? Understanding the lived body
as non-positional consciousness of consciousness does not resolve the issue that
there seem to be two consciousnesses in the experience of anguish. However,
I submit that Sartre’s revised conception of the relation of consciousness to
its self does. This is due to Sartre’s explicit theorization of consciousness as a
‘nothingness’, which enables him to affirm that consciousness is not just not
identical with the self it makes it the world; it is nothing at all in-itself. Hence,
the only real manifestation of consciousness is in the self which it is not,
and so the self-awareness that characterizes consciousness in anguish is the
apprehension of ‘not being’ the self. Or, if you like, anguish is the ‘manifestation
of the freedom it confronts’ in and through the apprehension of its self as an
object that it is separated from ‘by a nothingness’ (BN/EN: 73/70). As such, the
form consciousness takes in anguish is that of an ‘internal negation’,18 which is
the same form consciousness always takes: it is consciousness (positionally)
conscious of an object and (non-positionally) conscious of itself in its difference
from that object. It is not that the non-positional awareness of consciousness is
cognitive, but that the way that the self is given – i.e. in the form of a negation
– is apparent to a pure consciousness reflecting on its self in anguish when it is
ordinarily concealed in impure reflection. Anguish is a consciousness troubled
not by a second consciousness that knows the nature of its being, or by a split
between intending its self and attending to itself, but by its (non-positional)
awareness that it is not its self – the same awareness that it has of all its objects
– which is troubling in this context because consciousness presumes that it is its
self most of the time.

Anguish, shame and self-deception

We have just seen how from the early 1940s onward, Sartre regards the self as
a product of a social interaction, rather than an attempt to flee from anguish.
This change has important implications for his understanding of the role of self-
 Sartre’s Theory of the Self 27

formation not just in masking freedom and contingency from consciousness,

but also – and more importantly for our concerns – in the precipitation
of psychological illness. So, let us now clarify the nature of this change by
considering the relation of anguish to shame and self-deception.
Simply put, ‘bad faith’ is a form of self-deception that Sartre believes mediates
our relation to others, the world and our selves. Such pivotal significance is
assigned to the role of bad faith in structuring human experience in Being and
Nothingness that this work may be regarded as a treatise on bad faith.19 Although
there is vast amount of secondary literature devoted to the topic of bad faith,20
scholars continually point out that it remains rather poorly understood (Manser
1987; Eshleman 2008a; Levy 2020) and there has been much contention over
issues such as whether bad faith is avoidable (Rorty 1972; Solomon 2006; Horton
2017) and how it should be theorized in relation to sociality (Stone 1981; Santoni
1995, 2008; Bernasconi 2006; Eshelman 2008a, 2008b; Webber 2011). Studies on
the role of bad faith in self-formation are, however, surprisingly scant.21 Rather
than attempt to offer an exhaustive analysis of bad faith here, I aim to outline
the function of bad faith within Sartre’s (revised) theory of self-formation in this
section, before establishing how it can modulate a subject’s self-formation in the
next, so as to gain a clearer sense of how bad faith can represent an obstacle for
authentic self-formation, self-knowledge and psychological wellbeing.
First, it is vital to note that bad faith is initially defined as an attitude in
which one attempts to flee from anguish. As anguish is a consciousness aware
of its freedom through its awareness of its difference from its self, it is, evidently,
not something that one can truly flee from. To the contrary, Sartre writes that
one must ‘constantly think about it’ to ensure that one is not thinking about it
(BN/EN: 84/79). Hence, the attempt to flee anguish in bad faith is anguish in
the mode of fleeing from itself (BN/EN: 86/80). Although bad faith is a form
of deception, it cannot function like a lie whereby one person deceives another
through exploiting their ignorance about the truth of a given state of affairs
because it occurs within the unity of a single consciousness, which means that
consciousness cannot but be aware of what it seeks to hide from itself. To pull
off its deception, Sartre tells us that bad faith must engage consciousness in a
complex and ongoing project of distracting itself from attending to something
it is already aware of, and that it must generate a ‘Weltanschauung’ (worldview)
that simultaneously supports and shrouds this project by structuring the whole
of a subject’s experience and reflection so as to trap the subject in bad faith,
like a dreamer who cannot wake up without some external disturbance (BN/
EN: 114/103).
28 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

The waiter in the café is, undoubtedly, the most famous example of Sartrean
bad faith. The waiter is portrayed as being in bad faith because he tries to make
believe that he is a waiter in the same way that a pencil is a pencil. His movements
are rather too rapid, too precise, and he walks as though he is trying to ‘imitate
the inflexible exactitude of some kind of automaton, while carrying his try with
the recklessness characteristic of a tight-rope walker’ (BN/EN: 102/94). Through
these actions, he aims to ‘actualize’ (réaliser) his current, contingent situation
as a waiter in a café as a fact of his being (BN: 103/94).22 Whenever I discuss
this example with students, it always inspires a lively debate. Questions about
whether the waiter needs to be in bad faith to do his job well invariably arise,
along with imaginative proposals about how his behaviour might change were he
to suddenly apprehend his freedom not to be a waiter in anguish, which include
freezing, gleefully hurling plates at the wall, giving the customers a piece of his
mind, and running out of the café. But the very idea that the waiter’s behaviour
would have to be different were he not in a state of bad faith is hinged on what,
to my mind, is a far too simplistic opposition between bad faith and authenticity
– albeit one that is perfectly understandable given the location of this example at
the very beginning of Being and Nothingness (Pt. I, Ch. 2), shortly after bad faith
has been defined in relation to anguish.23 As Sartre switches from a third-person
description of the behaviour ‘the waiter in the café’ to a first-person analysis of
his thoughts – e.g. ‘it is precisely this person that I have to be and that I am not’
(BN/EN: 103/94–5) – in the course of narrating this example, Jonathan Webber
is right to maintain that the waiter need not be in bad faith to behave in the
way that he does because whether he is in bad faith depends not on what he
does, but on the attitude he takes towards it (2011: 184–5). This has two key
implications. First, whether someone is in bad faith is not something that can
be discovered through observations of their behaviour alone. Second, we can
perform our social roles perfectly well without being in bad faith, as we can truly
‘play’ at being them while being cognisant of the fact that they do not define us.
We can therefore be authentic without constantly being in anguish through a
pre-reflective engagement with the world in the natural attitude, which enables
us to respond to the exigencies of our day-to-day lives in a practical manner,
but which should not be conflated with the attitude of bad faith since it only
requires us to ‘suspend’ thoughts about the nature of our existence, not to deceive
ourselves about it.24
At the time he wrote The Transcendence of the Ego, Sartre had not yet
developed the concept of bad faith. In that work, it appears as though the
process of self-formation is the sole means by which consciousness can escape
 Sartre’s Theory of the Self 29

from a crippling state of anguish. It seems as though there are only two options
for consciousness: truth, anguish, and psychopathology or deception, a stable
self-concept, and an ability to function in the world. In Being and Nothingness,
though, Sartre separates self-deception from the process of self-formation so
that self-deception about the nature of one’s existence is no longer a condition
for the possibility of the existence of the self. We do not need to be in bad faith
for the self to appear in our experience, we only need to have experienced the
Look. The experience of anguish, however, remains a condition for authenticity
since we have to be aware of our condition in order to accept it. So, it follows
that the possession of a concept of self emerges a condition for the possibility
of anguish since we have to be aware of what we are objectively – i.e. a self-
object – in order to realize that we are irreducible to that. This means that
shame, a concept that is not introduced until Part III of Being and Nothingness,
is ontologically prior to anguish, a concept discussed in the first chapter of Part I,
because it is only in and through shame that I can conceive of myself as an object
for another. The discovery of the self as an object in shame is a prerequisite for
the revelation that one is irreducible to that object in anguish and the denial of
the true nature of one’s relation to that object in bad faith.25 Thus, not only is
it the case that bad faith is ‘necessarily social’ (Eshleman 2008b), anguish is too,
and Sartre’s whole phenomenological ontology turns out to be rooted in a deep
appreciation of humankind’s radical sociality. ‘I need the Other to fully grasp all
the structures of my being’ (BN/EN: 309/260–1), and I also need the Other to be
the complex kind of being that a human being is – one that is not just capable of
experiencing anguish and shame, but which is structured by these experiences
in the most fundamental way. Even though the interpersonal relation that
generates the concept of the self is posited by Sartre as a contingent one, it lies
at the very core of the human condition he analyses in his magnum opus. And,
given his concentration on the way bad faith can mediate our relations in that
work, it is reasonable to suppose that he views bad faith to have the potential
to play an important role in self-formation. Once we recognize that the self is a
product of human sociality for Sartre, the fact that all the concrete interpersonal
relations examined in Being and Nothingness are rooted in a conflict wherein
each consciousness strives to deny the true nature of their relation to the other
in bad faith,26 it is apparent that bad faith has the potential to inflect the relations
that have a formative influence on us.
Being and Nothingness is, however, an essay on phenomenological ontology.
Although it underlines the potential of Sartre’s ontology to enhance both the
accuracy and efficacy of psychoanalysis, it also affirms that psychoanalysis must
30 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

commence from the point at which ontology ‘abandons us’ (BN/EN: 796/662).
This explains the absence of any extended vignettes or case studies geared
specifically towards illustrating how bad faith can modulate an individual’s self-
formation in that work: this sort of psychoanalytical investigation is, quite simply,
beyond its scope.27 Nevertheless, we may look to the literary and psychoanalytical
works Sartre wrote around the same time as Being and Nothingness to gain a
sense of his views about how bad faith can influence self-formation as these
works give him scope to explore the effects of bad faith in the context of a life.

Bad faith and self-formation

For anyone interested in a Sartrean portrayal of a life shaped by bad faith, the short
story The Childhood of a Leader (L’Enfance d’un chef, 1939) is most illuminating.
It narrates Lucien Fleurier’s conversion to an attitude of ‘seriousness’, a form
of bad faith that involves interpreting values as facts that are independent of
human subjectivity. The story is psychoanalytical in the classical sense insofar
as it traces Lucien’s development from infancy and emphasizes his relationship
with his mother, his early discovery of his ambivalence towards her, and the
distress this causes him. But it also anticipates Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis
because it prioritizes Lucian’s response to his early existential awakening over
the maternal relationship in shaping who he eventually becomes. In an early
scene that sets the stage for the rest of the piece, young Lucian is shown to be
experiencing the anguish of not knowing who he will be and, at the same time,
making the discovery that he does not ‘exist’ in the way that things do; ‘all I have
to do’, he thinks to himself, ‘is plug my ears and not think about anything and
I’ll become a nothingness’ (CL/EC: 154/334). From this point on, he looks for
strategies for coping with this revelation, but he does not want to cope with it so
much as forget that he ever had it and ‘go back to sleep’ (CL/EC: 154/334).
Notably, Lucien embraces Freudian theory as a coping strategy. The discovery
of the unconscious is a welcome one for him as it enables him to attribute his
existential troubles to a cause. The finding that he can interpret his ‘strange
feeling of not existing’, the ‘emptiness in his conscience, his somnolence, his
perplexities, his vain efforts to know himself which met only a curtain of fog’ as
evidence that he has ‘a complex’ (CL/EC: 161/339), releases him from the worry
that his intuition that he lacks a fixed character contains some fundamental truth
about his being. He can now feel assured that a ‘true Lucien’ exists, even if he is
‘deeply buried in his subconscious’ (CL/EC: 161/339). Lucien’s endorsement of
psychoanalytic theory represents an important phase on his journey towards
 Sartre’s Theory of the Self 31

seriousness as it provides him with some relief from anguish and normalizes his
mixed feelings towards his mother, although it ultimately proves unsatisfactory
as a strategy of bad faith for him because it puts self-knowledge out of his reach.
By positing that the subject must continually work to discover who they are
through, for example, searching their experience and dreams for expressions of
their unconscious, psychoanalysis deprives Lucien of the kind of ‘metaphysical
comfort’ he desires: that of knowing who he is in advance.
Eventually, though, becoming a member of a right-wing political party and
an anti-Semite provides Lucien with the peace of mind and the self-assurance
he believes he needs to become a leader when he succeeds his father as the
owner of a factory. He completes his journey to seriousness shortly after a party
at which the host, Guigard, introduces him to a Jewish friend and, instead of
shaking hands with the Jew, he thrusts his hands in his pockets and leaves. What
is significant about Sartre’s recount of this scene is that it reveals his behaviour
to be motivated by his reflections on what a fellow party member had said about
him based on his previous anti-Semitic behaviour, not ideological fervour. After
he leaves the party, Lucien worries that he may have insulted Guigard, but his
last traces of self-doubt are swept away the next day at school when Guigard
apologizes to him. Lucien then responds ‘generously’ by saying, ‘I was wrong
too. I acted like a rotter. But what do you except – it’s stronger than I am. I
can’t stand them – it’s physical. I feel as though they have scales on their hands’
(CL/EC: 214/383). This ‘sorry, but . . . ’ formula is telling in a few respects. First,
what follows the ‘but’ excuses Lucien from the wrong he has just apologized
for. It relieves Lucien of any responsibility for his wrongful behaviour because it
presents his hatred for Jews as ‘stronger’ than he is and as something ‘physical’
that he has no control over. Nonetheless, we (the readers) know that Lucien is in
bad faith because we have insight into his psychological state immediately prior
to the act in question; we know that he was under no compulsion to act the way
he did and that he could have done otherwise.
After receiving Guigard’s apology, Lucien experiences an extraordinary
sense of delight because it seems to him that he is no longer an empty, troubled
consciousness; he is ‘Somebody who can’t stand Jews’ (CL/EC: 216/385). In a
word, he manages to make believe that he has become identical with his self.
What is more, because he undertakes this pretence in seriousness, he feels as
though he simply responds to the values he perceives in the world and, in light
of these values, he feels confident that his ‘innate’ anti-Semitism is something
‘sacred’ (CL/EC: 217/385), which makes him superior to others. Although
Lucien discovers that his ‘real self ’ is to be found in the eyes of others, which
from a Sartrean perspective is true, he makes believe that he can know himself,
32 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

immediately, by seeing himself reflected in ‘the frightened obedience’ of others,

‘the hopeful waiting of all those beings who grew and ripened for him’, the ‘young
apprentices who would become his workers’, etc. (CL/EC: 217/386), which is,
of course, false from a Sartrean perspective.28 The tale concludes with Lucien
identifying with his vision of himself as a person whose destiny to rule over
others was marked out for him ‘long before his birth’ and who has a ‘right to exit’,
even if others do not (CL/EC: 218–19/387).
At the end of the story, Sartre describes Lucien’s conversion to seriousness as a
‘metamorphosis’ (CL/EC: 219–20). As Sartre was a great admirer of Franz Kafka,
I believe that the allusion to Kafka’s depiction of Gregor Samsa’s transformation
from a man into an enormous, revolting insect in The Metamorphosis (Die
Verwandlung, 1915) is intended. Indeed, Sartre seems to use it to mock Lucien,
who no longer feels like a ‘big, bloated bug’ (CL/EC: 215/384) but a very
important person. This is because seriousness represents the most problematic
form of bad faith from an ethical perspective, and Simone de Beauvoir even
ranks the serious man among the ‘sub-men’ in the existential ethical system she
develops (EA/MA: 42/56).29 Through his conversion to seriousness, then, Lucien
becomes something less-than-human for the existentialist, although, unlike
Gregor Samsa, he is to blame for his diminished status. This interpretation finds
further confirmation in the very last line of the story in which Lucian looks
in the mirror, observes that his countenance is not quite terrible enough, and
resolves to grow a moustache because Lucien’s future moustache is reminiscent
of another moustache in Sartre’s fiction. In a memorable scene from Nausea
(La Nausée), the hero, Antoine Roquentin, is shown to detect a lack of (human)
existence in the ‘fine gentleman’ whom he believes does not feel the burden of
his existence in the way that he does. Of this ‘fine gentleman’, Roquentin makes
the following observation:

he exists Legion of honour, exists moustache, that’s all; how happy one must
be to be nothing more than a Legion of Honour and a moustache and nobody
sees the rest, he sees two pointed ends of moustache on either side of his nose;
I do not think therefore I am a moustache . . . He has a Legion of Honour, the
Bastards have a right to exit.
([1938] 1965/1981: 147/121)

The connection drawn between the moustache and the ‘right to exist’ in these
two works indicates that the moustache has symbolic significance for Sartre as
marker of the ‘respectable’ bourgeois male, whose bad faith and inflated sense of
his own self-importance blind him to his existential emptiness.30
 Sartre’s Theory of the Self 33

Clearly, then, the form of bad faith Lucien adopts makes him a bad person
from an existential ethical perspective. When considered as an example of how
bad faith can modulate a subject’s self-formation, The Childhood of a Leader
highlights how bad faith can be deployed by an individual to construct a false
self-concept that obscures the ontological truth of his being. Although it is
almost certain that he will derive great comfort from this, it mutilates him in
his very being in Sartre’s estimation. The serious person makes believe that they
know who they are and what their purpose is in advance at the cost of stagnating
– i.e. of ceasing to grow through stiving to become something that they are not
(yet). Lucien’s seriousness therefore prevents him from fully engaging with the
fundamental human project of ‘becoming’ or what we might call ‘authentic self-
formation’. But does it also make him ill? Not according to the standards used to
assess psychological health in his society.
However, it should be noted that, in Being and Nothingness, Sartre states
that he believes seriousness ‘reigns over the world’ (BN/EN: 810/674) and also
affirms that a principal goal of existential psychoanalysis is that of leading ‘us’,
as a society, to ‘abandon the spirit of seriousness’ (BN/EN: 809/674). This shows
that he regards the ability to engage in authentic self-formation as essential for
the health of a human being, understood as an embodied consciousness. When
coupled with the view that bad faith is a widespread phenomenon that can
inhibit authentic self-formation, we can see how this supplies the early Sartre
with a normative motivation for his attempt to establish the foundations for an
existential psychoanalysis that can cure people of bad faith. The species of bad
faith he calls seriousness is, at least, a sickness on his account because it projects
values into objects ‘in order escape from anguish’ by obscuring the human goals
that are true source of all values in the world (BN/EN: 810/674). Seriousness
leads people to pursue being blindly by concealing the freely chosen projects that
are really guiding them in this pursuit, which results in them relinquishing some
of the control they have over their self-formation by experiencing themselves as
‘passive’ in the face of objects and events that they could change. Thus, I submit
that, for Sartre, Lucien represents the picture of (male) health in a society that
is sick because its norms and standards are a product of collective bad faith and
which, also, tend to promote bad faith among its members who must find a way
to live in it.
The idea that Sartre views bad faith as an attitude that can prevent authentic
self-formation finds further support in his first psychoanalytic study, Baudelaire
(1946), which interprets Charles Baudelaire’s dandyism as a self-imposed trap
that stymies his personal growth. (Sartre’s) Baudelaire inflicts ‘minute, finicky
34 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

rules on himself primarily in order to put the brake on his bottomless freedom’
and his rigid adherence to them distracts him from attending to ‘his own inner
gulf ’ (B: 133/124). His pursuit of the project of being a dandy meant that his
‘psychic becoming could only take the form of incessantly working on himself ’
(B: 136/126); it inhibited his movement towards becoming something other
than he was because it demanded him to continually scrutinize and reproduce
his self-as-object – i.e. his past. Rather than embracing his existence as a self-
in-progress, he continually strives to reiterate his past self in a vain effort to
apprehend the fullness of a fixed, thing-like being in himself. Significantly,
Baudelaire’s bad faith prevents him from achieving authentic self-formation
in Sartre’s view, but it does not prevent him from achieving greatness. Indeed,
Sartre suggests that it may have even helped him create outstanding art since
his many ‘strict and useless rules’ enabled to develop exceptional skills in self-
restraint and to concentrate his energies on his work (B: 134/125). Despite
being a celebrated person in his society, though, Sartre contends that Baudelaire
suffered in his very being because he concentrated his energies on the goal of
self-possession instead of self-production. In the final analysis, then, Sartre
interprets Baudelaire’s existentially maladaptive bad faith to resemble Lucien’s
insofar as it expresses itself through behaviours that are ‘adaptive’ in his socio-
cultural context.
From the way that Sartre depicts bad faith modulating self-formation in these
early works, we can see that his conception of psychological health deviates
significantly from standard medical and psychoanalytic ones which prioritize
the subject’s ability to function in their social milieu. By calling attention to
the existential sickness of ‘high-functioning’ individuals such as Lucien and
Baudelaire, he gestures towards the idea that we, as a society, need to radically
revise our conception of health. Moreover, these two early attempts to explore
the effects of bad faith of self-formation point to a key distinction between a self-
concept that is forged in bad faith and the ‘real’ self for Sartre.31 Both of them
contrast the subject’s self-concept with what ‘we’ (Sartre and his readers) know
about him through observing him from another point of view: Lucien’s final
concept of himself as a born leader is contradicted by our comprehension of him
as someone who chooses to be a racist and a bully so that he can make believe
that his existence is ‘justified’, and Baudelaire’s concept of himself as someone
whose sensitive soul singles him out for membership in the artistic elite is
revealed to us as part of the cover he tried to pull over his freedom. Without
denying the subjective truth of these individuals’ self-concepts, Sartre’s contrasts
between how they conceive of themselves and what we know about them
 Sartre’s Theory of the Self 35

demonstrate why individuals’ self-concepts cannot be taken for self-knowledge

on his account: they do not necessarily result from the kind of careful, objective
analysis that could deliver knowledge of a self.

The possibility of self-knowledge

The very first paragraph of The Transcendence of the Ego states that ‘the Ego is
a being in the world, like the Ego of another’ (TE: 1/13) and – the revisions to
his theory of the self notwithstanding – Sartre remains committed to the view
that there is no difference between the fundamental structure of my reflections
on my self and my reflections on another person’s self. In both cases, my
consciousness is conscious of a self that it is not. But does it follow from the
ontological equivalence that there are no epistemological differences between
my reflections on my self and my reflections on another person’s self?
One reason that might be offered in support of the view that the subject
stands in an epistemically privileged position with regard to their own self,
which also seems prima facie compatible with Sartre’s theory of the self, is
that the subject is the person who is ‘closest’ to their self and, therefore, the
person who is best-placed, proximally, to acquire knowledge of it through
the ordinary routes – i.e. observation and analysis. However, the challenge
that the subject’s intimate relation to the self presents for self-knowledge
neutralizes any epistemic advantage that may result from the subject’s
proximity to the self, as the body as it is seen from the outside is mysterious
to the subject who lives it ‘from the inside’. Although it is right to expect that
being intimately acquainted with the object one seeks knowledge of would put
one in epistemically advantageous position, what we are intimately acquainted
with through the lived body on Sartre’s account is not the self that others see
‘in’ our body but, precisely, the aspect of our being that can neither be seen
and nor known: our experience, which is a nothingness. Thus, our intimate
acquaintance with the lived body is not an intimate acquaintance with the
object of self-knowledge.
Further, there is not only an ontological gap between consciousness and the
self on Sartre’s account, there is also a temporal gap. He describes the constant
striving of consciousness to overcome this gap as a circuit of selfness (circuit de
l’ipséité) (BN/EN: 159/139), which communicates the view that consciousness
experiences the self as a moving target that is always behind it in time. Like a
dog chasing its tail, consciousness must constantly turn back to discover its self.
36 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

But it can never fully grasp it because the act of reflection that makes the self
appear for it is another act through which consciousness transcends and changes
its self. This inability of consciousness to unite with its self – to become what
it is – through reflection motivates Sartre’s recommendation that Descartes’
memorable phrase, cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am), be reformulated as
‘I think, therefore I was’ (BN/EN: 178/154). Self-knowledge necessarily excludes
knowledge of what one is now (becoming) in his view because the process of
self-formation requires consciousness to be its self in the mode of fleeing from
it, and self-reflection is but another way of fleeing from the self through trying
to grasp it.
Thus, we can see that there is an epistemological difference between my
reflections on my own self and my reflections of the self of another person in
Sartre’s view. The difference is that the former are less reliable than the latter.
The Sartrean subject therefore stands in an epistemically disadvantaged position
with regard to their self. We are each better placed to know others than ourselves
because we can see others from the outside and we can analyse them objectively
from a distance. However difficult it may be to gain self-knowledge in practice,
though, Sartre assures us that it is possible since the self can be known by
others, and others’ knowledge can become a ‘knowledge-object’ for us (BN/EN:
455/381).
An important objection to Sartre’s view that it is only possible to acquire
self-knowledge by studying the self objectively comes from an unlikely source:
Richard Moran’s influential and avowedly Sartre-inspired account of self-
knowledge in Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge. Here,
Moran proposes that our first-person access to our own thought processes about
what to do and believe provides each of us with an exclusive claim to authoritative
self-knowledge, which explains the intuition that the way that we know ourselves
is different from the way that we know others, as well as our expectation that
people can gain immediate insights into their self even if they lack the sort of
justification that we would ordinarily expect to accompany knowledge claims.
Another attractive feature of Moran’s view is that it can account for why the
inability to respond to questions concerning one’s own intentions, beliefs and
feelings immediately and without having to consider empirical evidence is often
a good indication that there is something wrong. In the absence of something
wrong, Moran argues that subjects can generate beliefs about themselves that
are authoritative because they have the quality of ‘transparency’. A belief is
transparent, according to Moran, when it appears to be true from the subject’s
first-person perspective. So, a person’s response to the question ‘Do I believe that
 Sartre’s Theory of the Self 37

p?’ is transparent if she can arrive at it simply by directing herself to the question
of whether p is true. If somebody can only respond to this question by reviewing
her past behaviours, statements, etc., then assessing whether she has justification
for attributing that belief to herself, Moran argues that transparency has failed.
Moran’s discussion of examples of transparency failure in cases of akrasia
(weakness of will), repression and self-deception points to a link between an
impaired capacity for generating transparent beliefs and interpersonal conflict.
Notably, he offers his own interpretation of Sartre’s example of an akratic gambler
who has resolved to quit gambling (BN/EN: 70–7/67–70) as an illustration of
exactly how interpersonal conflict can cause transparency to fail. The akratic
gambler is, he argues, committed to the truth of his decision to quit gambling
because he knows that this is what he has resolved to do. Still, the gambler cannot
affirm in all confidence that he will quit gambling because he also knows that
he has a long track-record of reneging on this kind of commitment. On the one
hand, then, the gambler knows that the strength of his determination to avoid
the bookmaker’s shop provides him with theoretical grounds for the expectation
that he will in fact do so. On the other, he regards this ‘purely theoretical’ point
of view of his resolution ‘as an ungrounded, inconstant thing on which to base
any confidence about what he will in fact do’ (2001: 79). Moran argues that we
cannot attend to all the epistemically salient features of the akratic gambler’s
situation if we treat his inability to avow that he will quit gambling separately
from his report of his will to do so since this will lead us to overlook the crucial
point that, ordinarily, avowals and reports run together.
While the mere capacity to report marries with traditional understandings
of a ‘purely epistemic capacity’, Moran contends that the capacity to avow is
what gives ordinary self-knowledge its characteristic authority and immediacy;
it is what enables subjects to declare for themselves without having to make
any observations (2001: 91).32 Accordingly, he takes the separation of these two
capacities in the gambler’s case to highlight two possible routes to knowledge
of the self: the ‘avowal route’ and the ‘empirical route’. The former is the way
to ordinary, authoritative self-knowledge. It is immediate, and it allows the
subject to bypass the longer, less reliable empirical route. The need to take the
empirical route to gain knowledge of the self usually indicates that something
has gone wrong for the subject epistemically, according to Moran. Although he
acknowledges that this epistemic problem is unlikely to capture all that has gone
wrong for the subject in such cases, he believes that it shows that at least part of
what is wrong is that transparency has failed and that the ordinary route to self-
knowledge is barred for them.
38 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

But what characterizes the knowledge acquired through the avowal route? If
we consider what it is, in isolation from the route to it, there do not seem to be
sufficient epistemic grounds for viewing it as a distinct form of knowledge. Even
if we grant that it is transparent to the subject who possesses it, transparency is
a feature of the subject’s experience of knowledge, not of the knowledge itself.
For if ordinary self-knowledge is to be a sui generis form of knowledge as
Moran proposes, it must be irreducible to propositional knowledge about the
self. Otherwise, it is simply propositional knowledge, acquired in a special way.
Although Moran does not offer a sustained account of the positive epistemic
features of self-knowledge,33 it is apparent that one thing that makes it distinct
from propositional knowledge for him is that it is both propositional and
agential. It is propositional because it is knowledge ‘about’ the self and agential
because it is arrived at via the avowal route, which Moran presents as a ‘knowing’
and a ‘becoming’ at once because he interprets avowal as a reflective act that also
contributes to the ongoing formation of the self. The thought is that, even if the
propositional content of my self-knowledge and another’s knowledge of me is
the same, my knowledge is authoritative in a way theirs is not, in virtue of also
being agential or self-shaping and this is what makes ordinary self-knowledge
irreducible to propositional knowledge.
We now can see that Sartre would object to Moran’s account of self-knowledge
on the grounds that it joins together what his phenomenological ontology pulls
apart: being and knowing. For Sartre, agential being and knowledge exist on
two incommunicable levels: the first on the pre-reflective plane in which
consciousness ‘is’ a direct, pragmatic engagement with an object, and the second
on the reflective plane in which it ‘contemplates’ an object. No knowledge
whatsoever can be acquired through being on his account since knowledge is
always a product of reflective thought about objects, which is ontologically
secondary to the pre-reflective thought that is consciousness of them. Hence, his
claim that ‘to know one believes is to believe no longer’ (BN/EN: 115/104). By
the same logic, to avow what one believes is no longer to know it, for an avowal is
not act that could yield knowledge but, rather, a pre-reflective act that articulates
an idea delivered by a previous reflective act. There is no ontological distinction
between an avowal and a report from a Sartrean perspective since both are acts
that articulate a thought gained through reflective processes. And, so long as
the content of an avowal and a report is the same, they are also epistemically
indistinct.
Although Moran’s account of self-knowledge may be regarded as ‘Sartrean’
insofar as it emphasizes the point that there is a ‘self-transforming aspect to a
 Sartre’s Theory of the Self 39

person’s reflections on his own state’ (2001: 59), it does not preserve Sartre’s
ontological insight that knowledge may be realized, affirmed and communicated
by avowing, but never gained ‘through’ it. This, to my mind, means that a significant
advantage of Sartre’s account of self-knowledge over Moran’s is that it is rooted
in a robust phenomenological ontology that draws a clear distinction between
the relations of being and the relations of knowledge. Moran might defend his
departure from Sartre’s ontological foundations by contending that there is no
way to account for how people can be authorities on their own decisions unless
they can gain ordinary self-knowledge in the way that he proposes. He may,
for instance, note that if I avow my decision about what to do in the presence
of another, ‘I do indeed provide him with a reason to expect something, a very
good reason if I’m not too vacillating, or a liar; but what I possess myself is
not an expectation, based on evidence, but an intention, based on a decision’
(2001: 56). While it is obviously true that I alone can announce my intention in
a way that is based upon my own reflective deliberation about what to do, it is
mistaken to take my ability to announce my intention for evidence of my having
self-knowledge ‘in advance’ since whether I will act on my intention necessarily
eludes my knowledge. An intention announces a subject’s commitment to doing
something, but it does not close off the possibility of them doing something
else. Indeed, this is the central message of Sartre’s original discussion of the
akratic gambler, which presents the gambler’s problem as ‘anguish in the face
of the past’ (BN/EN: 70/67). What troubles Sartre’s gambler is that his earlier
resolution to quit gambling remains ‘there’ for him, but only as part of his past,
and he recognizes that it has no hold over him now. His problem is not that he
lacks self-knowledge, but that he sees all too clearly the truth of his condition.
His previous good resolution haunts him because he knows that is part of who he
is in the mode of ‘not-being’ it now; he suffers because he is keenly aware of the
fact that there is nothing that can be known about his past that will determine
what he will do in the future.
The difference between Sartre’s and Moran’s treatment of the akratic gambler
is telling. It allows us to see that Sartre’s rejection of the primacy of knowledge
is not ‘merely theoretical’ because he views it as a condition for understanding
both the ontological structures of being and the concrete behaviour of
individual human beings. His analysis of the akratic gambler shows that he too
can account for what has gone wrong when a person is impaired in his capacity
to declare for himself, but it also indicates that it is not possible to get to the root
of what is wrong in these cases by remaining at the level of ‘ordinary’ knowledge.
For Sartre, the akratic gambler has an existential problem, not an epistemic
40 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

one: he knows that he has committed to quit gambling and what distresses him
is his awareness that his past commitment does not bind him. From a Sartrean
perspective, then, Moran’s epistemic treatment of the akratic gambler is
distortive: by lumping the agential and epistemic aspects of the gambler’s akrasia
together, it overlooks the crucial point that the akratic gambler is tormented by
the fact that he cannot gain self-knowledge ‘in advance’. Consequently, it fails to
appreciate that the kind of knowledge that could help the gambler deal with his
situation is not the same knowledge he already has (of his commitment), gained
via the avowal route,34 but knowledge that unifies his conflicted feelings about
gambling at a deeper level; reveals the role of his agency in their generation; and
enables him to accept what he is, who he can be and what he can never know. Far
from being ‘ordinary’, though, such knowledge is an extraordinary achievement,
one which Sartre believes his existential psychoanalysis makes possible.
 2

Knowledge of selves

The previous chapter examined the rationale for Sartre’s non-egological

view of the self, which supplies the basis for his existential understanding of
consciousness as being whose existence ‘precedes’ its essence (BN/EN: 737/613)
because it holds that consciousness can only acquire an essence through becoming
something – namely, a self. Thus, Sartre’s existentialism radically reconceives
of the consciousness-self relation in a way that has major implications for the
extent to which we can know ourselves and others, implications which he
explores through the development of his existential psychoanalysis.
Now, although psychoanalysis is, first and foremost, a clinical discipline that
aims to cure psychological illness, it is also a methodological approach to the
study of an individual’s psychology because it aims to cure through the provision
of self-knowledge in a therapeutic setting. More specifically, it works to supply
the individual with insight into the source of their psychological distress, the
cognitive resources to conceptualize it and the support they require to work
through the distress it causes them. The potential of psychoanalysis to deliver
new insights into human psychology greatly intrigued Sartre as a philosopher;
yet, the philosophic significance of his psychoanalytical studies tends to be
neglected by philosophers.1
The central aims of this chapter are to highlight how Sartre’s interest in
psychoanalysis intersects with his chief concerns as an existentialist philosopher
and to show that his psychoanalytical work is best understood as an extension
of his philosophical work. It contends that Sartre’s development of an existential
psychoanalysis represents the second phase of his novel solution to the conundrum
about other minds that has long troubled philosophers. It explains that first phase
of his solution aims to show that it is possible to acquire knowledge of other
‘selves’ in theory, and the second aims to show how it is possible in practice. The
first phase is contained within Being and Nothingness, but the second extends
far beyond it, into Sartre’s later works, which refine and apply his existential
42 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

psychoanalysis. While the first phase is well-researched, the second is not. As

a consequence of this, I believe that Sartre’s response to the problem of other
minds has yet to be appreciated in its entirety and the philosophical import of
his existential psychoanalysis has been largely overlooked because it has not
been viewed as part of his philosophical enterprise.

The problem of other minds

How do we know that other people are not mindless zombies?2 This is a popular way
to introduce philosophy students to the problem of other minds. The question
is intriguing, and the stakes are high. If you cannot provide a satisfactory answer
to it, then you cannot reject solipsism: the view that you are the only being in
the universe who has mental states such as thoughts, feelings and beliefs (hard
solipsism) or that you cannot rule out the possibility that you might be (soft
solipsism or ‘other minds scepticism’). Solipsism is generally thought to be
intolerable,3 but we lack sufficient evidence to refute it conclusively. This is the
traditional epistemological problem of other minds.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there have been two basic kinds
of philosophical response to this problem in the Western tradition. The first
is to start from one’s own mind and to assess what is it possible to know about
other minds from the first-person perspective. A paradigmatic example of this
kind of response is the argument from analogy, which was also the ‘standard’
philosophical response to the problem of other minds in Anglophone philosophy
up until the middle of the twentieth century.4 Although it can be traced back to
David Hume ([1739–40] 2000: 206–11), it finds its paradigmatic formulation in
John Stuart Mill’s An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, where
the following justification is offered for the claim that others have minds: ‘First,
they have bodies like me, which I know in my own case, to be the antecedent
condition of feelings; and because, secondly, they exhibit the acts, and outward
signs, which in my own case I know by experience to be caused by feelings’
([1865] 1872: 243). This pithy passage exhibits all the definitive features of an
argument from analogy: it affirms we each have direct knowledge of our own
mental states through experience; it observes that we express at least some of
these through actions, gestures, facial expressions, etc., which make them
observable from the outside; it observes that others have a physical constitution
and expressive repertoire that resembles ours; then, from these observations, it
concludes that others must also have mental states.
 Knowledge of Selves 43

By commencing from the first-person perspective, the argument from

analogy acknowledges the subject-other asymmetry with respect to knowledge
of minds that both shapes our experience of others and lies at the heart of the
epistemological problem of other minds.5 As I write this sentence, for example,
I experience flow of my thoughts about what to write next, the texture of the
keys beneath my fingertips, the sound they make as my fingers meet them,
and so on. But I do not have such insight into other people’s experience. I can
observe the motions of another person typing but I cannot gain knowledge of
their thoughts and feelings by so doing; I can only make guesses about them
based on my observations. The recognition of this subject-other asymmetry
as an experiential fact, combined with a Cartesian concept of mind, generates
the presumption that knowledge of one’s own mind is epistemically direct and
‘self-intimating’ because it results from the subject’s non-observational, non-
inferential, first-hand experience of being ‘one’ with it, whereas knowledge of
other minds is epistemically indirect because it is based on inferences drawn
from third-person observations of their behaviour. If we commence from this
presumption, the likelihood of one person being able to make legitimate claims
to knowledge of another person’s mind looks slim, as three degrees of separation
would need to be overcome to gain such knowledge – namely, all that which
separates the subject’s mind from their body, their body from the other’s and the
other’s body from their mind.
The argument from analogy presents the analogy between the subject and
other people as a means of overcoming the epistemological problem generated
by the subject-other asymmetry. However, the obstacle to justifying our
claims to knowledge of other minds that results from that asymmetry cannot
be satisfactorily overcome by grounding said knowledge in an inference from
analogy, since it is always possible to draw the wrong inference from the
evidence available. As no inferential knowledge can be placed beyond doubt,
the argument from analogy cannot eliminate the in-principle possibility of
solipsism being true.6 What is more, there is an even deeper issue with the
argument from analogy, which arises because of its assumption of a Cartesian
concept of mind. As Descartes’ construal of the mind as a ‘thing which thinks’,
which is isolated from, and capable of expressing doubt about, all things
external to it (Descartes 1997: 142–7), it implies that one knows one’s own mind
through being identical with it, whereas knowledge of everything else is acquired
through representations that mediate the relation between mind and world. The
supposition that knowledge of one’s own mind is self-intimating in this way,
though, is problematic because it renders the origins of our mental concepts
44 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

mysterious. If my sole source of knowledge of ‘the mental’ is my experience of

my own mind, then I would seem to have no grounds for a concept of mind
distinct from the concept of my own experience. What could possibly prompt
me to conceive of certain ‘objects’ in my experience as other ‘minded’ beings,
other subjects of experience? Although the view that we do not possess a general
concept of mind and so cannot ascribe minds to others (conceptual solipsism)
seems to be obviously contradicted by our ability to formulate questions about
other minds, the argument from analogy cannot sustain an account of how we
could have come to have a concept of mind that is general and dissociable from
the ‘mineness’ that characterizes our own experience. It simply presumes that we
have this concept from the start.
The second kind of response to the problem of other minds is motivated by
the recognition that the argument from analogy becomes incoherent when it is
pushed to its full conclusion since it presupposes a Cartesian concept of mind
that both generates the traditional epistemological problem of other minds and
makes it difficult, if not impossible, to explain how we could come to conceive
of ‘minds’ in the first place (Avramides 2001: 218–30). Or, as Norman Malcolm
puts it, the argument for analogy leads ‘first to solipsism and then to nonsense’
(1958: 974). To redress these problems with the Cartesian concept of mind,
the second response commences from the ‘neobehaviourist’ concept of mind
associated with the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and his followers.
In his later work, Wittgenstein strives to show that many, if not all, mental
states manifest themselves as observable behaviours. To this end, he construes
first-person psychological statements such as ‘I am in pain’ as behaviour that
humans can use instead of ‘primitive, natural, expressions of sensation’ such as
crying, grimacing and limping ([1953] 2009: §244). Rather than communicating
knowledge of the subject’s (private) mental states to others, Wittgenstein argues
that such statements are themselves expressions of mental states that trade off the
same basic human capacity for immediate, interpersonal understanding as other
‘natural’ behaviours. Taking their cue from Wittgenstein’s diffusion of mental
states into the world, neobehaviourists argue that observable behaviours are
our criteria for the application of mental concepts, without necessarily denying
that some mental states may be unobservable from a third-person perspective
as behaviourists might do. Malcolm (1958), for example, contends that it is only
possible to acquire mental concepts that are general by making associations
between others’ use of them and certain kinds of behaviour, and by taking
observable behaviours as our objective criteria for the application of mental
concepts. If this were not the case, he maintains that the words each of us use
 Knowledge of Selves 45

to describe our mental states would collectively amount to a ‘private language’

comprised of concepts whose sense is strictly subjective. As Malcolm sees it,
the recognition that we must see others as the bearers of mental states, before
we can even conceptualize our own, frees us of the illusion that we each learn
what mental states are in the private theatre of our own mind. Another effect
of the realization that others teach us what it means to be ‘minded’, according
to neobehaviourists like Malcolm, is to dissolve the traditional epistemological
problem of minds by showing that we must take others to be minded before we
can even entertain the question of whether they are.
Instead of commencing from one’s own mind, then, proponents of the
neobehaviourist response to the problem of other minds start by showing that
we can only understand what a ‘mind’ is in terms of other people’s behaviour
because minded others are the condition for our ability to think about and
relate to one another in the ways that we do. Replacing the Cartesian concept of
mind with a neobehaviourist one that views knowledge as tempered by action
and, specifically, interaction thus solves the conceptual problem of other minds
(Avramides 2001). But the claim that this move also renders the epistemological
problem of other minds redundant is suspect because the neobehaviourist
conception of mind is vulnerable to a version of the charge that is frequently
levelled against functionalism – the heir to behaviourism in contemporary
philosophy of mind, which, broadly speaking, interprets mental states as
functional properties that play a causal role in behaviour. Despite being credited
with saving the reality of the phenomenal from the eliminativist tendencies
of classical behaviourism, functionalism has been criticized for overlooking
essential subjectivity of the mind (Searle 1992; Strawson [1994] 2010; Chalmers
1996). It is entirely conceivable that what the functionalist calls ‘mental states’
are internal events that generate behaviour, without the attendant experience.
But functionality without feeling is precisely what characterizes the ‘mindless
zombies’ that populate the nightmare scenario used at the start of this section
to introduce the problem of other minds! Like functionalism, neobehaviourism
delivers others who are ‘minded’ in the sense they are involved in a shared world
of action but who could still be ‘mindless’ in the sense that they act without
consciousness.
The thought that others might be mindless zombies troubles us because we
do not have direct access to other people’s experience. While neobehaviourists
rightly observe that we can only acquire mental concepts that are general
through relating to others whom we take to be minded, reframing the ontology
of subjective experience in terms that emphasize third-person-accessible
46 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

behaviours does not dissolve the subject-other asymmetry that gives rise to
the epistemological problem of other minds. As Barry Stroud points out,
‘something’s being so does not follow from it being thought or believed to be
so’ (1994: 241). Even if the belief that other minds exist is a necessary condition
for the acquisition of a general concept of mind, this is no guarantee of its truth
because it does not rule out the possibility that the (only?) subject could have
acquired the belief in the existence of other minds through relating to beings
she took to be conscious but were in fact zombies, deceptive androids, etc. Only
the provision of a positive metaphysical result that proves that other conscious
subjects exist could eliminate this possibility, and neobehaviourism provides no
such result.
We can now see why many contemporary philosophers are resigned to the
view that the epistemological problem of other minds is insoluble.7 The attempt
to solve it seems to place the investigator in a double bind: either she starts from
her own mind and gets caught in a conceptual quagmire about other minds or
she starts from the minds of others and leaves experience out of her concept of
mind, which enables her to overcome the conceptual problem of other minds
but renders her incapable of speaking to the very problem she set out to address:
the problem that she cannot know for certain that others exist as subjects of
experience like her. Sartre, however, escapes this double bind by offering a
response to the problem of other minds that solves the conceptual problem
without purging experience from its concept of mind.

Sartre’s solution to the conceptual problem of other minds

The first section of the chapter on ‘The Other’s Existence’ in Being and
Nothingness is simply titled ‘The Problem’. At first glance, one might suppose
that the problem being addressed is the epistemological problem of other minds,
reformulated to target other ‘consciousnesses’ as Sartre tends to avoid using the
term ‘mind’ (esprit) due to the connotations of an ‘internal’ psychological realm
it carries (I: 5–7/17–18). But this would be mistaken. The section that introduces
‘The Problem’ points out that the two forms of consciousness that Sartre has
already described – pre-reflective and reflective consciousness – present
consciousness as a being that is ‘for-itself ’ (pour-soi), although lived experience
reveals that there are also times when consciousness exists ‘for-the-other’ (pour-
autrui) (BN/EN: 309/261). The problem for Sartre, then, is that the form of
consciousness that apprehends its self as an object for another consciousness has
yet to be accounted for.
 Knowledge of Selves 47

The fact that Sartre articulates what he takes to be ‘the problem’ about
‘The Other’s Existence’ without mention of any epistemological concern in
the first section of the chapter raises the suspicion that he takes issue with the
traditional epistemological framing of problems about others. This suspicion is
then confirmed by the expansive critique of previous proposed solutions to the
problem of other minds that spans the next two sections and covers realism,
Berkeleyan idealism, Kantian metaphysics, as well as the phenomenologies
of Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger. In the course of this critique, Sartre accuses
almost8 all his predecessors of mistakenly treating others as objects. But how, one
might wonder, is it possible to treat others as objects in the context of an inquiry
explicitly concerned with whether they exist as subjects of experience? Sartre’s
reply is that treating the question of the existence of other conscious subjects as
a question about whether we can know that they exist is to be concerned with
‘others-as-objects’ – albeit psychological objects, other ‘consciousnesses’ – that
are externally related to consciousness (see Figure 1).9
Although relating to others-as-objects is one form that our relation to
others can take, it is neither the only nor the primary form of that relation in
Sartre’s view. Indeed, the central aim of his analysis of the Look is to show that
the relation to the ‘other-as-subject’ he calls ‘shame’ is the primary form of our
being-for-others.10 It attempts to illustrate how the structure of consciousness is
triangulated in shame: it is connected to the ‘other-as-subject’ and its object (the

Figure 1 The Other apprehended as an object in an external relation to

consciousness.
48 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

Figure 2 The Other apprehended as a subject in an internal relation to

consciousness.

self-as-seen-by-the-other) by a double ‘internal negation’ (BN/EN: 404/338, see

Figure 2). The other-as-subject is therefore given to shame-consciousness as part
of a structure that is its own, as the ‘indispensable intermediary’ between it and
its idea of its self (BN/EN: 308/260); shame-consciousness is a consciousness
apprehending its difference from both the other conscious subject who looks at
it and its objective being – i.e. its self – which the experience of the Look reveals
to it. The distinction between the other-as-subject and the other-as-object is
therefore a distinction between primary and secondary relations in his view.
Although he does not make this distinction explicit throughout his discussion,11
it is what allows him to maintain that the other ‘can in no way be known [connu]’
and state that ‘I can indefinitely increase my knowledge [connaissance] of the
Other’ without contradiction (BN/EN: 397/332). In the first case, he is referring
to the other-as-subject who is given to shame-consciousness as a vital element
of the internal relations that constitute it as an awareness of its self as an object
in the world that is ‘for’ others. In the second, he is referring to the other-as-
object in a world that is ‘for’ consciousness. All epistemological treatments of
the problem of other minds that do not recognize the distinction between the
 Knowledge of Selves 49

other-as-subject and the other-as-object and the ontological primacy of the

former are doomed from the very beginning, in his estimation, because they
invariably fail to appreciate that another consciousness can never be the object
of our consciousness (or knowledge) because other people’s experience eludes
ours in principle.12
Sartre’s recognition of the fundamental inaccessibility of any experience
beyond our own, including that which we take to be constitutive of other
consciousnesses, leads him to see the need to account for how we can even
conceive of an experience that is ‘other’ when the only experience we have access
to is our own as the most basic philosophical problem about other minds. So,
like the neobehaviourists, he prioritizes the conceptual problem of other minds
over the epistemological one. But he grounds his solution to the conceptual
problem in an analysis of first-person experience, not behaviour. Recognizing
Sartre’s analysis of shame as an attempt to derive a solution to the conceptual
problem of other minds from experience helps us to understand why, on the one
hand, he affirms that shame delivers the presence of other-as-subject to us as an
experiential certainty while, on the other, he concedes that the epistemological
problem concerned with the existence of other-as-object cannot be definitively
solved.13 As the other-as-subject and the other-as-object appear on two mutually
exclusive and ‘incomparable’ planes of experience on his account, it is only
‘probable’ that there is an other-as-object looking at me whenever I experience
the Look even though the presence of other-as-subject in my experience of it
is beyond doubt (BN/EN: 376/315). Sartre’s analysis of shame-consciousness
does not provide the kind of positive metaphysical result required to solve the
epistemological problem of other minds – i.e. proof of the existence of the other-
as-object – but it does demonstrate that the presence of the other-as-subject is
a ‘necessary condition of my objectivity’ and, hence, my concept of self (BN/
EN: 368/308). Indeed, we can only make sense of his claim that his solution to
the problem of ‘The Other’s Existence’ is ‘worked out entirely on the level of the
cogito’ (BN/EN: 291/307) if that problem is the conceptual problem of other
minds, as his expansion of the Cartesian cogito beyond reflective consciousness
to being-for-others discloses not the existence of two consciousnesses, but a
particular form of consciousness that is constituted by a relation between it and
two internally related concepts: the ‘other-who-sees-me’ and the ‘self-as-seen-
by-the-other’.
Thus, the first phase of Sartre’s solution to the problem of other minds is
complete. His analysis of shame reveals the concept of self as being internally
related to the concept of another human perspective on the subject’s being. He
50 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

thereby solves the conceptual problem of other minds through the provision
of a positive ontological result that reveals the concept of the other-as-subject
as integral to the structure of shame-consciousness. Although this strategy is
unable to solve the traditional epistemological problem of other minds on its
own terms, it has important implications for it.

Shame and loneliness

Shame is revelatory for Sartre, not because it makes an addition to the things
that I know, but because it is an ‘original’ reaction through which ‘I recognize
the Other as a subject out of reach’ (BN/EN: 395/330). Through shame, I
learn that I cannot know what the other person who is looking at me sees. It
is precisely this lack of knowledge that gives shame its distinctive phenomenal
character: ‘unease’ (malaise) (BN/EN: 375/314). Shame is uneasy for the very
reason that involves the apprehension of myself as an object with a ‘nature’,
which is not an observable fact in the world for me, but only for another. In
shame, I apprehend my nature as something that ‘escapes me and is unknowable
as such . . . I do not feel myself losing my freedom in order to become a thing;
instead my freedom is over there, outside the freedom that I live, like a given
attribute of this being I am for the other’ (BN/EN: 360/302). So, shame is a
discovery of one’s self and of one’s alienation at once; it shows me that I am
alienated both from my self and from the Other who holds the secret of my
‘nature’. This points to what is probably the most singular feature of Sartre’s
treatment of problem of other minds: its foregrounding of ‘human loneliness’
as an existential problem (Kirkpatrick 2017: 141). In fact, it is Sartre’s emphasis
of the ontological root of human loneliness that motivates his departure from
the social ontology of Heidegger. Despite following Heidegger in rejecting the
traditional epistemological framing of problems about others, Sartre argues that
the German philosopher’s notion of being-with-others (Mitsein) is an upshot of
an unfounded assumption of ‘ontological solidarity’ between human beings that
is flagrantly contradicted by the phenomenology of social experience (BN/EN:
338/284) and which is also incapable of helping us to resolve ‘the psychological
and concrete problem of our recognition of the Other’ (BN/EN: 341/287). In
contrast to Heidegger, Sartre grounds his social ontology in a phenomenological
analysis that highlights the impossibility of a ‘we’ at the primary level of being.
Each of us experiences our being as one that is originally and inescapably ‘alone’,
he maintains, because the presence of others in our experience has the nature of
 Knowledge of Selves 51

a ‘contingent and irreducible fact’ (BN/EN: 344/289). Our being neither requires
nor constitutes the being of others; we simply encounter others and react to
this encounter with essential modifications in the form of our own being. Our
ontological isolation is what Sartre posits as the ultimate source of the profound
sense of our separateness from others, that ‘great metaphysical solitude which is
the lot of each and all of us’ (B: 54/52).
This ontological isolation is the source of our epistemological isolation on
Sartre’s account. My fundamental inability to experience any experience apart
from my own is the reason why it is always possible for me to be mistaken
about what others are thinking and feeling and, indeed, about whether they are
thinking and feeling at all. When I am all alone in a certain space, no aspect of
my situation escapes my awareness, but the arrival of another introduces a new
aspect ‘of which I am not master, and which escapes me as a matter of principle –
because it is for the Other’ (BN/EN: 363/304). This new aspect is the ‘reverse side’
of situations in which others are present – the side we cannot see – that Sartre calls
‘devil’s share’ (BN/EN: 363/304–5) on account of its potential to give us hell14 as a
key component of shame and all varieties of what we might call ‘epistemic social
anxiety’ (Bering 2008).15 Without denying that others’ emotions feature in our
experience, he stresses the point that emotions as they are experienced by others
do not. He appears to allude to the work of phenomenologists such as Edith
Stein, Max Scheler and Theodor Lipps when he notes that ‘modern theories of
Einfülung [empathy], of sympathy, and forms . . . improve the description of our
means of presentifying the Other’ but do not put the debate about what we can
know about others from our experience on its true ground (BN/EN: 311/263).
Insofar as these theories represent precursors to recent ‘perceptual responses’ to
the epistemological problem of other minds, this swift dismissal of them gives
us a good sense of how Sartre would assess them. These responses argue from
the phenomenological insight that we can sometimes perceive emotions, such
as anger, in the faces of others to the conclusion that, at least in some favourable
circumstances, perception provides us with direct epistemic access to others’
mental states (McDowell 1998; Overgaard 2012). Sartre’s remark that theories
about the potential for empathetic forms of perception to yield knowledge do
not treat questions concerning our knowledge of others on their ‘true ground’
indicates that he would categorize perceptual responses to the problem of other
minds alongside others that he believes fail because they do not differentiate
between other-as-subject and other-as-object. As the recognition of this
difference shows that the other’s body is a secondary structure that belongs to
the other-as-object in his view, the knowledge of others’ emotional experience
52 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

that perceptual responses take to be gained directly through the perception

of others’ expressions, gestures and the like is ‘purely and simply conjectural’
knowledge of the other-as-object (BN/EN: 312/263).
Here we see why Sartre refuses to view the epistemological problem of other
minds as a ‘special’ epistemological problem. Because he believes the only aspect
of human being that can be the object of knowledge – for any consciousness – is
the objective aspect of it, he contends that the only true object of our knowledge
of others is the other-as-object, which is not mysterious. There is no such thing
as ‘direct epistemic access’ to a consciousness, or an other-as-subject, in his view,
as a consciousness can only become known by being reflected upon as an object
it is not: a ‘self ’. Accordingly, he affirms the traditional interpretation of the
epistemological problem of other minds is premised upon a mistaken conflation
of the other-as-object – which can be the object of knowledge – with the other-as-
subject – which necessarily eludes knowledge – in its concept of ‘mind’ and that
this generates the illusion that people have ‘mental states’ that they know directly
through being identical with them. Once we see that knowledge of people is
not a special kind of knowledge but knowledge of objects (selves) in the world,
which is empirical just as all knowledge is,16 then, Sartre upholds that others are
not necessarily mysterious to us. This gives us grounds for interpreting Sartre’s
response to the problem of other minds as ‘therapeutic’, as it suggests that it is
possible to overcome our epistemological isolation from others though gaining
knowledge of their selves.

Philosophical therapy and knowledge of selves

The philosophy of later Wittgenstein is renowned for its ‘therapeutic’ ambition and
is often regarded as the paradigm of therapeutic philosophy, and Wittgenstein’s
and Sartre’s approaches to philosophy have been recognized as similar insofar
as they both aim to instigate a therapeutic shift in the way that we view the
world and, thereby, ‘change the way we live’ (Morris 2008: xiii). As we have seen
that Sartre’s solution to the problem of other minds cannot be characterized
as Wittgensteinian in the sense of being neobehaviourist, it is important to
recognize how Sartre’s and Wittgenstein’s philosophical-therapeutic responses
to the problem of other minds aim to be therapeutic in very different ways.
In his later work, Wittgenstein searches for discoveries that bring philosophy
‘peace’ by saving it from the torment of questions it cannot answer ([1953] 2009:
§133). He aims to achieve this by exposing the philosophical concerns that
 Knowledge of Selves 53

trouble us as nothing but confused ideas that result from language ‘idling’ and
not doing its work properly, as opposed to the deep and serious problems they
seem to be (2009: §132). As James Peterman notes, Wittgenstein is principally
concerned with the way that the same viewpoints that give rise to traditional
philosophical problems also seem to put us at odds with ‘the human form of
life’ and so he strives to use philosophy as a means of providing ‘a therapeutic
clarification of the human form of life’, which, he hopes, will bring our viewpoints
into agreement with our life (1992: 116). For Wittgenstein, a therapeutic change
of viewpoint has the potential to have a double effect. First, it can promote
an acceptance of our human form of life. Second, it can inoculate us against
‘pathological’ modes of philosophical thinking that attempt to justify certain
uses of language by an appeal to standards that are external to the facts of human
life, which are, for the most part, readily available to us.
One of the main causes of ‘philosophical diseases’, according to Wittgenstein,
results from a ‘one-sided diet’ that nourishes one’s thought ‘with only one kind
of example’ (2009: §593). Philosophy of mind, he argues, has become ill by
placing too much emphasis on introspection, which does not play a great role
in the ways that we ordinarily think about our minds, as evinced by the fact
that questions such as ‘How do you know that you believe that?’ and answers
such as ‘I find it out through introspection’ very rarely make sense in the course
of everyday life (2009: §164). Thus, problem of other minds is the upshot of
a ‘one-sided diet’ in his view. Rather than taking the fact that dimensions of
others’ experience will always elude our knowledge – and the fact that it ‘plays
hell with us’ (Wittgenstein 1968: 276) – as the starting point of his response to
the problem, then, he sets this aside and focuses instead on what we can know
about others on the basis of observable behaviours. He offers the shift from
the first- to the third-person perspective on human relations as a ‘cure’ to the
‘sickness’ that is solipsism. And, as we have seen above, this shift in perspective
does enable us to solve the conceptual problem about other minds. Nonetheless,
the first-person perspective that reveals the unknowability of others’ experience
to us is not an optional perspective on human life that we can simply abandon;
it is the perspective of lived experience. So, Wittgenstein’s therapeutic solution
to the problem of other minds would be unacceptable to the existentialist
philosopher, since it soothes through sanctioning an avoidance of the troubling
fact that others are first given to us as beings beyond our epistemic reach, which
motivates the problem in the first place.
Although Sartre’s existentialist treatment of the problem is similar to
Wittgenstein’s in that it prioritizes the conceptual problem, it is therapeutic in
54 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

an entirely different way. In accordance with the existentialist principle that it

is only through a clear-sighted appreciation of how we are limited by the facts
of our situation that we can avoid the trappings of bad faith and apprehend
the full extent of our freedom, Sartre’s response to the problem of other minds
commences from an appreciation of our epistemic isolation from others as a
concrete fact, rooted in the very structure of our being. Through his insistence
upon the conceptual distinction between experience that is other than my own –
i.e. the other-as-subject – and the objective being of another person – the other-
as-object – Sartre’s approach allows us to reconcile our theoretical understanding
of others as observable, potential objects of knowledge with our lived experience
of them as radically ‘other’ and unknowable. Moreover, Sartre does not stop at
providing us with concepts that furnish us with perspicuous representations of
our social experience17; he also derives a conclusion from his analysis that may
help us cope with the fact of human loneliness: that everything about another
person that matters is objective and, hence, potentially knowable by anybody.
In summary, Sartre not only believes that an understanding of the ontological
basis for human loneliness enables us to accept it as an inevitable feature of our
form of life, he also takes it to illuminate something that the typical conflation of
the other-as-subject with the other-as-object in philosophical discourse blinds
us to: the in-principle possibility of knowing everything there is to know about
another. This possibility emerges as a consequence of the realization that what
cannot be known about another is precisely nothing because the subjective
aspect of their being is their consciousness, which has no self or mind inside
or behind it and which is also no thing in itself. Sartre’s solution to the problem
of other minds does not inoculate us against solipsism at the level of abstract
philosophical reflection; yet, it shows that everything that really matters about
others, every concrete aspect of their being, is potentially knowable. It is therefore
therapeutic in virtue of presenting the complete knowability of other selves as a
salve for human loneliness.

Existentialism and psychoanalysis: The very idea

Sartre believes that existential psychoanalysis (psychanalyse existentielle) is

the discipline that can deliver knowledge of selves and he outlines its guiding
principles and key methodological features in Being and Nothingness. Before
we can assess whether and how Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis might
work, we first need to establish its possibility in principle. This is because the
 Knowledge of Selves 55

term ‘existential psychoanalysis’ might seem to be oxymoronic insofar as it

combines an analytic method whose chief goal is to make discoveries about the
unconscious18 with a philosophy that rejects the unconscious. For existential
psychoanalysis not to be an impossible chimera, psychoanalysis must be able to
withstand the loss of the postulate of the unconscious, which its founder presents
as its most fundamental premise (CW XIV: 166, CW XIX: 13). But how could
psychoanalysis yield insights into the psyche if no part of it is unconscious? To
respond to this question, it is prudent to first establish the definitive features
of the classic psychoanalytic unconscious. Although the task of defining and
delimiting the unconscious is complicated by the fact that Freud changed his
views frequently – most notably when he traded his topographical model of the
mind in for the structural model in The Ego and the Id (1923) – our interest in
establishing the extent to which the unconscious is integral to psychoanalysis
is best served by concentrating on its core features, which endured the various
changes Freud made to his model of mind.
Freud’s early topographical model distinguishes between two types of
nonconscious thoughts, located in different systems in the mind. The first
are those which are not conscious right now but are capable of becoming so,
should attention be directed towards them: the name of one’s favourite primary
school teacher, for instance. These are ‘preconscious’ thoughts, located in
the ‘Preconscious’ system, which consciousness can access with relative ease.
The second type are ‘unconscious’ thoughts, which express animalistic or
infantile wishes, some of which are ‘repressed’ due to their potential to cause
psychological pain. These are stored in the ‘Unconscious’ system, which is off
limits to consciousness. Freud’s subsequent structural model of the mind is
more complex because it accommodates the idea that thoughts in any part of the
mind could be unconscious, even those in ‘the ego’, which denotes the rational,
agential part. Despite these significant changes, Freud continued to concentrate
on thoughts that are ‘dynamically unconscious’ – i.e. those that are unavailable to
consciousness because some part of the psyche is opposed to them – since these are
what he believes to be responsible for psychological illness.19 Let us then take the
psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious to refer to instinctual, nonconscious
thoughts that can ‘drive’ our action and find expression in dreams and parapraxes,
but which cannot become conscious without the aid of psychoanalysis.
Now that we have a sense of what the psychoanalytic unconscious is, a good
place to start our inquiry into whether psychoanalysis could become existential
is Sartre’s argument that the postulate of the unconscious is incapable of solving
the puzzles of self-deception, which arise from the fact that people appear to be
56 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

unaware of thoughts that their neurotic behaviour, parapraxes, jokes, etc., attest
to; since, in order for a person deceive themselves about their own minds, they
would need to both know and not know what they are deceiving themselves
about and engage in the activity of self-deception without being aware of it (BN/
EN: 90–7/84–9). Although, at first glance, Freud seems to avoid this puzzle by
positing that the deception of self-deception is unconscious, Sartre contends that
the notion of unconscious thoughts presupposes the existence of a censor within
the mind that allows some thoughts to enter consciousness and blocks others.
To be able to apprehend some thoughts as thoughts ‘to be repressed’ (BN/EN:
94/87), though, he maintains that this censor must possess both a project to shield
consciousness from thoughts of a certain sort and a rather sophisticated degree
of understanding to be able to discern which thoughts are of that sort and find
effective means of keeping them out of consciousness. As the understanding of
how to effectively pursue projects is the hallmark of rationality and the pursuit
of projects is what defines agency, it seems as though the activity of intrapsychic
censorship could only be undertaken by a rational agent. This gives rise to a serious
problem for psychoanalytic theory in Sartre’s view since no part of the Freudian
psyche appears to be a fitting candidate for the role of the censor; it cannot be the
rational, agential ego, since that would imply that consciousness has an awareness
of its unconscious thoughts, and it cannot be the id, since the id is not rational.
The operations performed by Freud’s censor imply that it must have
self-awareness for Sartre and, because self-awareness is what distinguishes
consciousness from non-conscious things for him, he believes that the censor
must be a consciousness. While the presence of another consciousness within
the psyche could lead to concerns about the proliferation of consciousnesses,
this is not necessarily a problem for Freud’s account, which could potentially
accept that there are multiple consciousness within the mind. However, as
Sartre reads Freud to attribute rationality and self-awareness only to the ego that
consciousness identifies with, he concludes that censor-consciousness would
have to be just like ego-consciousness:

[W]hat type of consciousness (of) itself can the censor have? It must be
consciousness (of) being conscious of the drive to be repressed, but precisely in
order not to be conscious of it. What is left to say, other than that the censor must
be in bad faith? We have gained nothing from psychoanalysis since, in order to
eliminate bad faith, it installs between the unconscious and the conscious mind
an autonomous consciousness in bad faith.
(BN/EN: 94/87)
 Knowledge of Selves 57

If Sartre is correct to claim that Freud must posit the existence of another
consciousness that is just like ego-consciousness within the psyche, then his
psychoanalysis only appears to solve the puzzle of self-deception by dissociating
‘deceiver’ from ‘deceived’ in the ego’s consciousness only for them to be united
once more in the consciousness of the censor.
But this is a big ‘if ’ because Sartre’s representation of Freud’s psychoanalytic
theory in Being and Nothingness is riddled with inaccuracies and misleading in
some respects. Notably, it has even led commentators to accuse Sartre of bad faith
in his reading of Freud (Neu 1988; Askay and Farquhar 2006). This accusation
appears to be well founded if the species of bad faith referred to here is ‘faith’,
understood as an epistemological attitude of ‘unwarranted certitude’ towards
one’s own view and a bias against any evidence that contradicts it (Webber 2009:
96), as Sartre does indeed focus on the ‘bad Freud’, the scientific reductionist
who posits meaningless biological forces as the ultimate source of our behaviour,
and ignores ‘good Freud’, who was a master in the hermeneutics of human
experience, as Stuart Z. Charmé submits (2020: 256). It is hard to imagine that
the Freud Sartre depicts could be the same Freud who, in his case study of the
Rat-Man, describes how he learns that his patient could not accept his clinical
interpretation of his (the Rat-Man’s) unconscious feelings of resentment towards
his father until it became emotionally meaningful for him.20
Further, while Sartre parses his account of the inability of Freud’s theory to
resolve the puzzle of self-deception in terms that refer to Freud’s later structural
model – i.e. ‘ego’ and ‘id’ – it seems only to apply to the earlier, topographical
model, which locates unconscious thoughts in a discrete system, as Freud’s later
structural model introduces the notion of the ‘super-ego’, which, ostensibly,
enables him to present the ego as the chief agent of unconscious intrapsychic
censorship. This has led one commentator to charge Sartre with contriving ‘to
ignore’ Freud’s later writings (Howells 1988: 149) and another to read him as being
‘dead wrong’ about Freud’s theorization of repression and other forms of ego-
defence (Soll 1981: 590). At first glance, these charges seem correct, especially as
the term ‘Superego’ appears only once in this part of Sartre’s discussion (BN/EN:
94/87). Webber, however, contends that Sartre’s objection to the unconscious
targets the conceptual dualism that underpins both Freud’s topographical and
structural models of the mind: a dualism between ‘rational’ and ‘arational’ mental
items. As Webber explains, rational mental items are responsive to evidence
about the way the world is, and they form part of a logically coherent system,
which means that they are ‘available for beliefs to be formed about them, beliefs
that can be linguistically articulated’ (2018: 80). As such, they can be conscious
58 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

or preconscious but never unconscious because the subject identifies with them
and can easily become aware of them. In contrast, arational mental items are
‘structured in a way that they do not stand in any rational relations with one
another or with anything else’ (2018: 80). Put simply, they are primitive ‘wishes’
whose organization is determined by arational biological forces. Such wishes can
enter consciousness and motivate the subject to engage in acts that satisfy them,
such as having sex, eating or sleeping. But if the subject is opposed to a wish
or to the act that would satisfy it, it will be consigned to the unconscious. This
reading underlines Freud’s tacit commitment to the view that any ‘rationally
structured’ mental item is ‘consciously accessible’ (Webber 2018: 81). This then
leads Webber to conclude Freudian psychoanalytic theory is, as Sartre suggests,
incapable of solving the puzzle of how the inherently rational activity of the
censor could elude consciousness.
At this point, we might raise the concern that Webber seems to overlook
Freud’s discussion of the ‘the unconscious sense of guilt’ in The Ego and the Id
(CW XIX: 26–7, 49–54), which strongly suggests that he abandons the conceptual
dualism between rational and arational mental items. After all, Freud’s finding
that unconscious guilt is a precipitating factor for many forms of psychological
distress leads him to argue that some of the highest intellectual processes may
be unconscious because guilt is the result of critical self-reflection – a rational
process par excellence. He then introduces the concept of the super-ego (Über-
Ich) to account for phenomena like unconscious guilt. He also believes that it
enables him to respond to many of his philosophical dissenters by solving the
puzzle of how rational processes ‘can remain to a great extent unconscious’ (CW
XIX: 39). As the super-ego is theorized by Freud as an element of the psyche
that develops as a result of the individual’s internalization of social norms and,
eventually, comes to take on the parental role of censoring socially unacceptable
wishes, this would explain the possibility of there being ‘rules without reason’
within the psyche. Further, Freud’s concept of the super-ego enables him to
identify the ego as the usual agent of unconscious policing of thoughts as he can
now say that it performs this role ‘in the service and at the behest of its super-
ego’ (CW XIX: 52). So, while the ego is the systematic organization of rational
mental items, and the part of the psyche that the subject identifies with, the
scope of the ego’s activity exceeds the scope of conscious awareness because it
can also become the pawn in the play of the super-ego. But, here, Freud’s account
runs into trouble again because for the super-ego to use the ego to serve its own
agenda, it must have an agency and an understanding of its own, which it cannot
have if it is nothing more than a repository of internalized rules. The super-ego
 Knowledge of Selves 59

could not conceivably take hold of the ego by being part of the ego that is ‘less
firmly connected with consciousness’ (CW XIX: 28); it has to be a consciousness
to do this.
Contrary to the view that Sartre’s objection to psychoanalytic theory neglects
Freud’s later ideas about how intrapsychic censorship occurs, it demonstrates
why both of Freud’s models of the mind are incapable of explaining how it occurs
because both require there to be a censor somewhere in the mind, which also
must be a rational, agential consciousness. Although the dualism of rational
and arational mental items does not map neatly onto an antithesis between
consciousness and the unconscious in Freud’s later work, due to the introduction
of the concept of the super-ego, it persists there nonetheless, and this is why
the notion of the super-ego is of no help to Freud in solving the puzzle of self-
deception. The rational activity of the super-ego needs to be inaccessible to
the rational ego, but this is inexplicable if the ego and the super-ego are simply
functionally defined regions of one mind. There seems to be no way for the
super-ego to be rationally structured and inaccessible to the conscious part of
the ego unless it is effectively another, separate mind within the conscious mind,
within which the puzzle of self-deception re-emerges.
So, here we see that Sartre, the philosopher, succeeds in identifying a flaw
in Freud’s theory of mind that renders it incapable of solving the puzzle of self-
deception. But this criticism misses the crucial point that Freud’s theory of
mind was not developed to solve this puzzle but, rather, to act as a metatheory
that provides his psychoanalysis with a foundation that is ‘non-empirical’ but
scientific nevertheless (Askay and Farquhar 2006: 29). It is not geared towards
solving abstract theoretical puzzles but towards providing a picture of the mind
that most accurately reflects the findings delivered by the empirical research
and explains how psychoanalysis works in the way that it does. As Freud sees it,
his aim to provide a scientific basis for his clinical approach prevents him from
producing ‘a complete and ready-made theoretical structure’, ‘like a philosophical
system’, because it means that he must move ‘step by step along the path towards
understanding the intricacies of the mind by making an analytic dissection of
both normal and abnormal phenomena’ (CW XIX: 36). Therefore, the most
important issue with Sartre’s critique of Freud in Being and Nothingness, in my
view, is that it does not consider debate about the unconscious on what Freud
and his followers would consider to be its ‘true ground’. While we may take the
internal coherence and the explanatory force of Sartre’s account of bad faith as
a reason for preferring it to Freud’s picture of the psyche, Freud’s picture of the
psyche is more credible from a scientific perspective because it was developed in
60 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

response to the findings of case studies and other empirical research. Although,
in the next chapter, we shall see that Sartre makes a compelling argument for
the view that psychoanalysis should not measure itself by the standards of
empirical science, he fails to consider and respond to the possibility that Freud’s
psychoanalytic metatheory may be able to account for empirically observed
phenomena that his own theory cannot.
Putting the issues with Sartre’s criticism of Freud aside, what we can learn
from it is that psychoanalysis is, at least in theory, compatible with Sartrean
existentialism since Sartre’s argument that his notion of bad faith enables him
to solve the puzzle of self-deception, which he believes Freud’s hypothesis of
the unconscious is incapable of solving, shows that he can account for how
psychoanalysis could uncover insights that are concealed from the subject. As
Sartre submits that bad faith can prevent consciousness from gaining knowledge
of its own (necessarily conscious) thoughts, psychoanalysis can still pursue the
end of enlightening subjects about their thoughts without hypothesizing the
existence of the unconscious.

Consciousness and comprehension

Sartre begins the section ‘Existential Psychoanalysis’ with an illustration of how

our experience usually coincides with a comprehension of its object in terms of
a specifically human meaning by examining an experience in which it is made
to be conspicuous by its absence: reading Paul Bourget’s explanation of Gustave
Flaubert’s literary ambition. Bourget’s description of Flaubert’s ambition as an
upshot of the ‘exhilaration [effervescence] in his young blood’ (BN/EN: 724/603)
– a pseudo-biological condition Bourget takes to be common among precocious
‘types’ around eighteen years of age – inspires feelings of ‘resignation and
dissatisfaction’ in the reader in Sartre’s view (BN/EN: 727/605). It does so because
our intuition tells us that ambition is not something ‘received’ ready-made from
a platonic heaven or something that certain ‘types’ of people possess in the way
that some rocks have moss on them, and others do not. Sartre maintains that the
concept ‘ambition’ tells us nothing about Flaubert’s ambition, which is not the
same as that of Charles Baudelaire, Artemisia Gentileschi or Aretha Franklin.
If Flaubert was ambitious, it is because he chose to act in ways that made it
appropriate for others to describe him that way. ‘Ambition’ cannot therefore be
part of the explanation for Flaubert’s behaviour; it merely identifies a pattern of
behaviour that requires explanation.
 Knowledge of Selves 61

Sartre takes the lack of explanatory force of ‘traits’ and ‘types’ illuminated
by psychological ‘explanations’ like Bourget’s to show that the ultimate term
of a psychological explanation cannot be some unintelligible physiological
factor – bubbling of the blood and such like. It must, rather, be a psychic
‘irreducible’, whose irreducibility will be self-evident, not because it meets
criteria determined by a theory of mind, but because it will be accompanied by a
‘feeling of satisfaction’ when it is reached (BN/EN: 728/606). Initially, the claim
that a feeling of satisfaction is what should signal the endpoint of a psychological
explanation seems odd, and it is certainly unorthodox. However, it is not itself an
upshot of a ‘mere intuition’ or a hunch that Sartre has; it is a claim that is firmly
grounded in his phenomenological ontology. He is critical of psychological
interpretations that attempt to explain acts by placing them in sequences that
are ‘empirically observed’ but literally ‘unintelligible’ (BN/EN: 726/604) because
he is committed to the view that all actions, unlike spasms or reflexes, are
comprehensible phenomena. And yet, no action can be comprehended in terms
of factors that are external to lived experience – be they unconscious thoughts
or the ‘objective’ features of the environment that elude the subject21 – but only
by continually asking why the subject acts. This view is not some childish quest
for a ‘because’ that admits of no further ‘why?’ but, rather, a demand based upon
a ‘preontological’ comprehension22 of ‘human-reality’ and a ‘related refusal to
consider man as something that can be analyzed or reduced to basic givens’ (BN/
EN: 728/606).
Now, Sartre borrows the term ‘preontological’ from Heidegger to denote
an innate comprehension of being, which is prior to any reflective knowledge.
Preontological comprehension on Sartre’s account is the primary, nonthetic
understanding that consciousness necessarily has of all acts. But how might
preontological comprehension be related to a refusal to explain a person in terms
of ‘basic givens’ in this context? The answer, I believe, lies in Sartre’s notion of
‘human-reality’ for which he is, again, indebted to Heidegger because ‘human-
reality’ resembles Heidegger’s notion of Dasein (literally: ‘there-being’) insofar
it echoes the idea that human being is thrown into a temporal world. But Sartre
also puts a Bergsonian23 twist on his conception of ‘human-reality’ through his
affirmation that, once thrown into the world, human being then throws itself
towards the future by choosing projects to pursue, which makes ‘existing’ and
‘choosing itself ’ the same for it (BN/EN: 752/618), as it continues to exist only in
and through continually choosing what it is to be. It follows that each individual
realizes themselves as a human being only through the pursuit of a fundamental
project to realize an ‘original choice’ (choix originel) of Self. The capitalized first
62 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

letter of ‘Self ’ (‘Moi’ in the original French) is used by Sartre to distinguish the
real ‘self ’ one is for others from the ideal ‘Self ’,24 which is the unattainable end of
the process of self-formation (BN/EN: 82–3/77–8): the fusion of consciousness
with its ideal self in a being ‘in-itself-for-itself ’ that is not constituted by freedom
but possesses freedom as an attribute, which would amount to being God (BN/
EN: 796/662). This makes Sartre’s notion of ‘original choice’ original in the
double sense that it is the origin of all other choices and that it is always an
original creation of consciousness as each consciousness chooses the nature of
the Self it aspires to be.
Having a source in an original choice is what makes every human act
– even those that seem trivial, irrational, self-destructive, or pathological –
comprehensible in terms of projects and, ultimately, in terms of a fundamental
project on Sartre’s account. It guarantees that every human act is motivated and
that anybody who has an awareness of its motive can comprehend its meaning.
This underpins Sartre’s claim that psychological understandings must exploit
the comprehension ‘of being that is a characteristic of the enquirer’ inasmuch as
they too are participants in the creation of ‘human-reality’ (BN/EN: 745/620).
The capacity of the enquirer to comprehend the subjective sense of an agent’s
acts is, for him, as important as their capacity to be objectively observed since
this is what enables the enquirer to grasp the agent’s motives. This explains why
Sartre objects to Freud’s views about the meaning of human behaviour and
where it is to be found. Even though Sartre praises Freudian psychoanalysis
for recognizing that each act refers ‘immediately to deeper structures’ and for
refusing to set up a ‘horizontal psychological determinism’ that explains acts
by the antecedent moment (BN/EN: 599–600/502), he argues that it sets up a
‘vertical’, libidinal determinism through its aim to trace acts back to a biological
cause. He concludes that this effectively reduces the psychological significance
of the acts examined by Freudian psychoanalysis to a function of their cathetic25
charge, which is determined by arational instincts,26 and ignores the role played
by projects and ‘the dimension of the future’ in motivating acts and making
them meaningful (BN/EN: 480/502–3).
As Sartre sees it then, Freud fails to follow his ground-breaking discovery
that we make more meaning than we know through to the proper conclusion
that all human action is meaningful all the way down to its source in an original
choice. While he believes psychoanalysis has the potential to uncover the full
meaning of behaviour, he maintains that if it is to be true to Freud’s theory it
must invariably switch from asking why-questions to what-questions to discover
 Knowledge of Selves 63

a ‘cause’ of behaviour it examines, which prevents it from realizing its potential

to fully explain behaviour in terms of human meaning.

Existential ontology as psychoanalytic metatheory

If Sartre holds that the ultimate source of human action is an original choice
and that we each have an immediate, primary comprehension of all our acts in
terms of that choice, what kind of insights can his psychoanalysis deliver? We
are now able to see why Sartre’s answer is ‘insights into the self ’. Introspective
reflection on lived experience may supply a crude expression of some of the
meaning of acts in terms of the agent’s known preferences and projects, but it
is not a viable route to self-knowledge for Sartre because it does not employ the
kind of ‘instruments and techniques’ necessary to isolate the choice embodied in
the act, ‘to determine it in concepts and place it on its own in the full light of day’
(BN/EN: 740/616). At best, then, such reflections can deliver ‘quasi-knowledge’
(BN/EN: 740/616). While the Sartrean consciousness comprehends all its acts
and can reflect upon any of them, the problem is that it retains all the details of
its experience in a wholly disorganized way, with the result that when it reflects
on its experience, it grasps a multitude of meanings without a sense of their
‘salience’ or ‘proportion’ in relation to one another (BN/EN: 740/616). So, when
left to its own devices, consciousness is generally incapable of turning its innate
comprehension of its acts into self-knowledge.
Here we see how Sartre uses his distinction between consciousness
(conscience) and knowledge (connaissance) (BN/EN: 8–16, 740/16–23, 616)
to bolster his view that psychoanalysis can, and should, become ‘existential’.
Insight cures for him as it does for Freud, although for Sartre curative insights
are insights into the ‘real self ’ we are for others, as opposed to a ‘deep self ’
within us. The contrast between the metaphors Freud and Sartre use to describe
the psychoanalytic process illuminates what is perhaps the most fundamental
difference in their approach. Freud describes psychoanalysis as the ‘archaeology’
of the mind (CW XII: 12, Bernfeld 1951); he takes the task of the psychoanalyst
to be that of digging in dark depths of a buried past to unearth the supressed
wishes that torment the analysand in the present. Sartre, however, borrows a
Barrèsian metaphor to present the task of the psychoanalyst as that of solving
a ‘mystery in full light’ (BN/EN: 740/616).27 He sees the analysand’s original
choice (of Self) the key to solving this mystery, as it is their solution to the
‘problem of being’, understood as the problem of being thrown into the world
64 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

without any preordained purpose. Although he characterizes human being

as a ‘useless Passion’ because it aims to solve the problem of being through
the pursuit of a fundamental project to become its Self, which is doomed to
failure (BN/EN: 797/662), the pursuit of this project results in the production
of a real self. Establishing the nature of an analysand’s Self in the context of an
existential psychoanalysis thus discloses ‘the real aim’ of all their pursuits in
Sartre’s view (BN/EN: 810/674–5), and this is precisely the insight that could
enable them to transform their innate, disorganized comprehension of their
original choice into knowledge of what it has made them – i.e. self-knowledge.
Hence, for Sartre, psychoanalytic interpretation does not cause the analysand
to ‘gain consciousness of what he is: it makes him gain knowledge of it’ (BN/EN:
745/620) and his enlightenment can only be explained if he has always been
‘conscious of his deep tendencies’ (BN/EN: 745/620). If consciousness – and its
innate comprehension of all its acts – is a necessary but not sufficient condition
for self-knowledge, then there is no contradiction in denying that anything is
hidden from consciousness and affirming that people often lack self-knowledge.
The supposition that the ultimate source of psychopathological symptoms is
an arational source outside of consciousness led Freud to deem it appropriate to
attempt to approach the study psychopathology in a purely objective manner,
as the natural sciences study their objects. However, Sartre believes that this
restricts Freudian psychoanalysis to accruing empirical knowledge about the
analysand, which means that it does not also explicitly aim to comprehend
the ‘subjective’ meaning of the analysand’s acts in a way that would allow
it to solve the mystery of what motivates them. This leads him to conclude
that Freudian psychoanalytic explanations of behaviour can only amount
‘probable’ hypotheses, whose probability positively correlates to the ‘amount of
behaviour’ they explain (BN/EN: 594–5/619),28 because they do not exploit the
analyst’s and analysand’s ability to intuitively apprehend the human meaning
of human action.
An existential psychoanalysis, though, can draw upon a phenomenological
understanding of the structures of being in general to guide its ‘objective’29 analysis
of the ‘ontological meaning’ of concrete objects in the world for individuals in
Sartre’s view (BN/EN: 777/645). Further, Sartre’s phenomenological ontology
gives psychoanalysis a non-arbitrary endpoint. This is because once the
analysand’s original choice (of Self), which drives their fundamental ‘project of
being’, has been grasped, Sartre writes that we arrive at ‘the point from which we
can reach back no further . . . for evidently one can go back no further than being’
(BN/EN: 733/610). His ontology posits that human being is ‘fundamentally
 Knowledge of Selves 65

a desire to be, and the existence of this desire is not to be established through
empirical induction’ because it ‘comes out of an a priori description’ of
consciousness’s being, since consciousness apprehends itself as ‘its own lack of
being’ (BN/EN: 733/610). On the one hand, then, Sartre’s phenomenological
ontology has an edge over Freud’s as a psychoanalytic metatheory insofar as it
gives psychoanalysis a clear end-point and enables the analyst to offer clinical
interpretations that are humanly meaningful all the way down to an original
choice at the core of the human being. On the other hand, it rejects the premise
of the unconscious from the very start through its affirmation that ‘psychological
facts are coextensive with consciousness’ (BN/EN: 740/616), which means that its
stance on the unconscious is neither falsifiable nor responsive to new discoveries.
Hence, it cannot supply psychoanalysis with a scientific metatheory. Moreover,
as Richard Askay and Jensen Farquhar observe, Freud could reject the idea that
Sartre’s ontology represents a viable alternative metatheory for psychoanalysis
on the grounds that it begs the question of whether unconscious processes
exist (2006: 276–80). Although, from a phenomenological perspective, Sartre’s
a priori dismissal of the unconscious is justified – since phenomenology aims
to provide all other disciplines with a robust foundation through commencing
from the apodictic evidence yielded by reflections on experience and Sartre sees
no evidence for the existence of unconscious processes in experience itself –
from a scientific perspective it certainly is not.
Even though Freud’s psychoanalysis has a better claim to knowledge of
psychopathologies and their presentation because of its empirical basis,
Sartre’s arguably has a better claim to knowledge of selves. Sartre upholds that
his existential psychoanalysis provides the surest route to knowledge of selves
because it is ‘a method that aims to bring to light, in a strictly objective form,
the subjective choice through which each person makes himself a person,
i.e., acquaints himself with what he is’ (BN/EN: 745/620). The thought is that
once analysand can make sense of all the acts considered during the existential
analysis in terms of projects, she will then be able to identify the original choice
that unifies all her acts by pulling them all towards the same end. The method
of existential psychoanalysis can therefore be conceived of as a form of eidetic
reduction to the essence of a self, where the ‘essence’ of a self is nothing other
than the subject’s original choice of Self. As is the case in a Husserlian eidetic
reduction, the discovery of an essence in the context of an existential analysis
is confirmed by intuition of the subject(s) involved in the analysis, who will
experience a feeling of satisfaction – an ‘aha!’ moment if you will – when they
have arrived at the ‘strictly objective’ articulation of the analysand’s original
66 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

choice of Self that makes the primary orientation of their being comprehensible.
Further, as Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis treats behaviour as intelligible
all the way down to an original choice, its interpretations of the meaning of
behaviour do not involve an inference to ‘a causal influence’ from the existence
of a ‘theme’ or human meaning, which generates epistemological problems for
Freudian psychoanalysis (Meehl 1995: 1021).
Let us now take stock. We have seen that the first phase of Sartre’s response
to the philosophical problem posed by the presence of minded others in our
experience solves the conceptual problem of other minds by showing that the
discovery of the self in shame involves the certain apprehension of another
conscious subject, therefore, explains the emergence of a conception of
consciousness that is general. Sartre does not solve the traditional epistemological
problem of other minds on its own terms, though, because he rejects those
terms. He takes the appearance of the other-as-subject to shame-consciousness
as a fundamentally unknowable being to reconfirm the basic principle of his
phenomenological ontology: that no consciousness can ever be the object of
knowledge because it is no thing in-itself. This, for him, shows that there is no
problem about knowledge of other consciousnesses because consciousnesses
are simply not the kind of beings that can be known. There is a problem about
knowledge of selves, though, since selves are objects; yet, Sartre denies that this
problem is a special epistemological problem because selves are not the subjects
of an internal life but objects in the world. The problem is that the discipline
that yields knowledge of selves – existential psychoanalysis – has not yet been
developed.
The second phase aims to solve what Sartre identifies as the real
epistemological problem about other ‘minds’: the problem that we do not yet
have a sure-fire route to knowledge of ‘selves’. Hence, the philosophical point
of his provision of a sketch of an existential psychoanalysis in Being and
Nothingness is to indicate that a discipline that delivers knowledge of selves is
‘possible’ in principle (Moati 2019: 266–7). And, as Sartre notes at the end of
this sketch, certain ‘especially accomplished biographies’ already attest to this
possibility (BN/EN: 746/620). All of Sartre’s psychoanalytical works after Being
and Nothingness can therefore be read as part of his project to complete this
second phase of his solution to the problem of other minds by showing exactly
how we can gain knowledge of selves.
 3

Situated selves: The development of Sartre’s

psychoanalysis

We have now seen that Sartre’s existentialism interprets all behaviour as having
its raison d’être an original choice (of Self) and that it construes this choice as the
‘essence’ of the self in virtue of being what determines the shape of each person’s
process of self-formation. From this, it follows that knowledge of a self can only
be gained via a comprehension that can make sense of all the acts that constitute
that self in terms of the subject’s original choice, which makes it possible to
understand the subject’s acts as part of a coherent whole – i.e. a self.
During the 1950s, however, Sartre came to see that an entirely new form of
reason is required to deliver knowledge of selves because he realizes that we do
not simply make our selves, we make them out of what has already been made
of us (SG: 49/64; SM/QM: 97/127). This means that if we are to gain knowledge
of a self, not only must we be able to comprehend the subject’s acts in terms of
their original choice, we must also synthesize this comprehension with an
understanding of the extent to which the subject’s capacity to choose is constrained
by their situation. None of the dominant methods of interpreting human
behaviour enable us to do this in Sartre’s estimation, not even his initial form of
existentialism.1 This is because the form of reason that all established systems of
thought rely on is one that, he believes, precludes an understanding of human
being as simultaneously free and constrained, subject and object, constituting
and constituted. A radically new rationality is therefore required to understand
human being in its full complexity, one that can preserve and make sense of the
contradictions inherent in it. Sartre supplies a detailed account of this rationality,
which he calls ‘dialectical reason’ (raison dialectique), in the Critique of Dialectical
Reason (Critique de la raison, 1960, ‘Critique’ hereafter). This articulation of a new
way of interpreting human being represents a major breakthrough for Sartre and
it has significant implications for his existential psychoanalysis. So, let us now
establish what dialectical reason is and how it drives the changes Sartre makes to
his psychoanalytical approach after Being and Nothingness.
68 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

From discourse to dialectic

Philosophers have employed ‘the dialectic’ as a method of dialogue since the

time of Socrates/Plato. This method works by considering a thesis and its
antithesis, then synthesizing them in a new thesis. In Phaedrus, for instance,
Plato’s Socrates recounts two speeches about love: one which argues that it is
undesirable and one which argues for the contrary view. He then describes
how each speech contains a partial truth about love. One reveals its jealous,
troublesome ‘left’ side, while the other reveals its heavenly, generous ‘right’ side
(265e–266b). He therefore concludes that the only way to the truth about love is
the dialectician’s way, via the synthesis of the contrary partial truths contained in
both speeches, as this way leads to an understanding of love in its full complexity
– i.e. its potential to bring us joy and happiness on the one hand and misery and
torment on the other.
When the dialectic is understood as a discursive method in this way, Sartre
can be interpreted as having been a dialectical philosopher long before he
wrote the Critique (Cumming 1981). His discussion of the stutterer in Being
and Nothingness provides a particularly fine example of what may be considered
an early Sartrean dialectical analysis. Here, Sartre’s initial thesis is that the
stutterer’s stutter is behaviour that manifests the choice to be inferior before
others. If, as often happens, the stutterer was to visit a psychoanalyst to cure his
stutter, Sartre denies that this would undermine his initial thesis. Even though
visiting a psychoanalyst is behaviour that ostensibly manifests the choice not
to be inferior before others, it is not necessary to dismiss the stutter’s claim to
behavioural status to understand the stutterer’s motives. Instead, Sartre shows
that both behaviours can be understood when they are traced back to a choice
that establishes their harmony at a deeper level. The choice of inferiority
achieves this end, he contends, as it allows both the stutter and the attempt to
cure it to be interpreted as part of the same inferiority-project, which is pursued
directly through stuttering and indirectly through visiting an analyst in the hope
of confirming that the stutter is ‘incurable’ (BN/EN: 620/519) and, hence, his
appearing inferior before others, inevitable. The synthesis of these contrary
choices therefore makes the full range of this stutterer’s conduct intelligible. It
also suggests that Sartre was already employing the dialectic to explain how ‘we
try, on the one hand, to actualize something which, on the other hand, we refuse’
in the early 1940s (BN/EN: 619–20/519).
In light of this, Sartre’s insistence that he did not discover the dialectic
until later in his career is surprising. Although he admits to having known
 The Development of Sartre’s Psychoanalysis 69

of the dialectic since his student days at the École Normale Supérieure
(1924–9), he claims not to have employed it himself until after Being and
Nothingness. And while he accepts that some parts of that work ‘resemble
the dialectic’, he states that the approach of this work ‘was not dialectical in
name’ nor was he aware of a dialectic in it at the time of writing it (IWS: 9).
According to these remarks, then, Sartre only became aware of the potential
of the dialectic to provide a new means of interpreting human being after he
undertook a serious, independent study of Hegel in 1945. So, ‘the dialectic’
that enables Sartre to see that there is another way of interpreting human
being is a Hegelian one. Despite the key terms in Being and Nothingness
– i.e. ‘being-for-itself ’ and ‘being-in-itself ’ – indicating a strong Hegelian
influence on his initial existentialism,2 I believe we ought to take Sartre at his
word on this point for two main reasons. First, his remark that ‘my relations
toward the Other are not dialectical but circular’ in Being and Nothingness
(BN/EN: 482/403) stands in clear tension with his later interpretation of the
dialectic as ‘indistinguishable’ from ‘the relations which each person has with
everyone through inorganic materiality’ (CDR I/CRD I: 36/55). Second, as I
endeavour to show in this chapter, it is only in works written after 1945 that
Sartre begins to analyse human being with the explicit end of revealing a
concrete synthesis in it.
But what does the Hegelian dialectic represent for Sartre and how does his
discovery of it alter his understanding of human being? According to Alexandre
Kojève’s interpretation, which Sartre largely followed,3 Hegel does not present
the dialectic ‘as a philosophical method’ but rather as a process that is being
continually effected through history (Kojève 1969/1947: 183/460), which means
that task of the Hegelian philosopher is not to construct the dialectic but to
disclose it. This makes the Hegelian dialectic less ‘dialectical’ in the traditional
sense of the term than it is descriptive and phenomenological since its chief
aim is to comprehend the dialectic ‘in’ being exactly as it reveals itself. Sartre
evidently agrees with (Kojève’s) Hegel that the dialectic ‘must be recognized
where it is there to be seen, instead of being dreamed of in areas where we
cannot yet grasp it’ (CDR I/CRD I: 34/152) and he interprets dialectical reason,
which aims to do just this, as the ‘living logic of action’ (CDR I/CRD I: 38/156).
Hence, he motivates his investigation into dialectical reason with the bold claim
that ‘absolutely no one, either in the East or the West, writes or speaks a word
about us or our contemporaries that is not a gross error’ because the dialectical
reason present in the movement of history has yet to be identified or properly
understood (SM/QM: 111/155–6).
70 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

What we ordinarily think of as reason simpliciter is just one kind of reason,

according to Sartre. It is ‘positivist’ or ‘analytic’ reason, which has a much more
limited scope of understanding than the more primary, ‘dialectical’ reason
that human history conforms to. If the notion that the movement of history
conforms to reason strikes us as odd, Sartre explains that this is only because
we are so firmly anchored in the positivist tradition, and he reassures us that
the existence of dialectical reason will be demonstrated through its capacity to
‘reveal certain structures, relations, and meanings which necessarily elude all
positivism’ (CDR I/CRD I: 58/173). Although this idea appears to be latent in
Sartre’s acknowledgement that the stutterer’s behaviour is unconstrained by the
analytical logical principle of non-contradiction in Being and Nothingness, his
treatment of the stutterer there would not qualify as ‘dialectical’ in the sense
that Sartre later uses the term as it neglects to attend to the dialectic between the
stutterer’s choice and history – including his own developmental history.
Even though Sartre views history as ongoing process of ‘totalization’, rather
than a teleological progression towards an absolute ‘totality’ as Hegel does,
thinking about history in terms of the dialectic is productive for him, as it enables
him to further substantiate his claim that all human acts are comprehensible by
revealing them as irreducible constituents of the intelligible, totalizing movement
of history. The discovery of the dialectic is also instrumental in leading Sartre
to a greater appreciation of the role of culture in the constitution of selves as
it enables him to present every human act as a consequence of an original
choice and ‘centuries of history’ and, specifically, the way that history has been
preserved in the culture through which the agent interprets their experience
(CDR I/CRD I: 54/170).

Dialectical materialism

Despite the usefulness of the Hegelian dialectic for Sartre, it is an unlikely

source of inspiration for him because it is both idealist and anti-individualist.
Sartre’s existentialism is fundamentally opposed to idealism because it affirms
that we are capable of effecting change in a world beyond thought and idealism
is a metaphysic that deprives us of this capability by denying there is anything
beyond thought. What is more, Sartre argues that idealism also fails to appreciate
the double character of human being as both an embodied subject who acts and
a body that is acted upon, which effectively blinds it to the basic, material source
of antagonism between individuals: ‘scarcity’ (CDR I/CRD I: 113/225). As he
 The Development of Sartre’s Psychoanalysis 71

sees it, the permanent possibility of scarcity is the bottom line of the explanation
for why conflict is the primary relation between human beings. I first apprehend
other people not simply as other consciousnesses but as other human organisms
with the same material needs and anxieties as me. I am also always aware that,
in the context of scarcity, they could take what I need to survive. Hence, others
embody an existential threat to me at a primal level. Although I may overcome
that threat and develop positive reciprocal relations with others, if I respond
to that threat by attacking another, Sartre explains that ‘it is myself that I try to
destroy in him, so as to prevent him from destroying me in my own body’ (CDR
I/CRD I: 133/245).
Another problematic feature of Hegel’s dialectical idealism for Sartre is that
it offers no way of confirming or disconfirming interpretations of the dialectic
against something that is external to the thought of the investigator. As the
movement of being and the process of knowledge are one and the same for the
idealist philosopher, there are no true ‘unknowns’ because nothing is truly ‘other’
than consciousness. This has the effect of making all knowledge – be it of objects
or persons – a form of ‘self-Knowledge’ (Savoir de soi) because it is nothing other
than thought knowing itself (CDR I/CRD I: 22/141). In the context of Sartre’s
existentialism, though, we have seen that all knowledge – even self-knowledge
– is knowledge of objects that are other than consciousness. Indeed, Sartre’s
insistence upon the otherness of objects and the irreducibility of the embodied
individual stands in such stark contrast with Hegel’s dissolution of the object
in consciousness and of consciousness in Spirit (Geist)4 that it is legitimate to
wonder whether his existentialism is compatible with any interpretation of the
Hegelian dialectic. And although it is undoubtedly a key aim of Sartre’s mature
existentialism to show that dialectical reason can furnish us with knowledge of
objects that analytic reason cannot provide us with, but which is also grounded
in an ‘objective’ analysis and verifiable,5 we may have reservations about whether
the dialectic is fit for this purpose, given its origins in Hegel’s idealism.
To show that the dialectic can be interpreted to manifest itself through
history in such a way that it can be apprehended by reflective thought, while
always also being other than thought, Sartre looks to Karl Marx’s materialist
reinterpretation of the Hegelian dialectic. Here, he finds a balance between
Hegel’s ‘epistemologization’ of being and Søren Kierkegaard’s subjectivism. He
regards Kierkegaard’s insistence upon the primacy, specificity and irreducibility
of lived experience to undercut the ‘dogmatic’ absolutizing6 that leads to the
absorption of the being into knowledge in Hegel. Although Kierkegaard’s
conclusion that any abstraction from the concrete particulars of lived experience
72 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

amounts to falsification goes too far in Sartre’s view, as it precludes the possibility
of philosophy – which must abstract from the concrete in order to uncover truths
that are general – he believes that Kierkegaard’s treatment of lived experience
teaches us that the opposition between what can be known (objects) and what
eludes knowledge (the being of consciousness itself) is rooted in an indissoluble
opposition between two ontological structures (SM/QM: 10–13/16–20).
Sartre finds an implicit Kierkegaardian reproach of Hegelian idealism in
Marx’s dialectical materialism because he reads it to underscore the lived reality
of history by asserting that the objectification processes that all people are
involved in are processes of ‘opening out’, through which they develop their own
lives and transform themselves ‘by changing nature’ (SM/QM: 12/20). This is
what he believes enables Marx to affirm the irreducibility of being to knowledge
and to present the dialectic as discoverable in ‘both’ being and knowledge (CDR
I/CRD I: 23/142). The superiority of Marx’s interpretation of the dialectic over
the Hegelian original for Sartre is therefore an upshot of what he takes to be
its tacit ontological commitments. It is because Sartre reads Marx’s dialectical
materialism as an ‘ontological monism’ that is also ‘dualist because it is monist’
that he believes it can explain how the logic of thought can map onto the logic
of being ‘without idealism’ (CDR I/CRD I: 25/144). In short, it is because Sartre
reads the Marx’s Marxism to contain an implicit ‘demand for an existential
foundation’ (SM/QM: 177/245) that he finds Marx’s interpretation of the
dialectic compatible with his existentialism.7
Sartre aligns his mature form of existentialism with a ‘realistic materialism’
(matérialisme réaliste) (CRD I: 148),8 which, he believes, supplies Marx’s
dialectical materialism with the existential foundation it demands. This new
alignment serves as the rationale for the changes Sartre makes to his key
ontological terms the Critique, wherein ‘being-for-itself ’ and ‘being-in-itself ’
are replaced with ‘praxis’ and ‘practico-inert’. These changes are not merely
terminological. While Sartre’s mature existentialism still subscribes to a dualistic
ontology that construes existence as comprised of two components in an internal
relation, it assigns different features to these components.
The Ancient Greek term ‘praxis’ is often translated as ‘realization’ or ‘action’
and Marx uses it to refer to distinctively human activity in his first thesis on
Feuerbach. In the Critique, ‘praxis’ refers any purposeful action. However,
Sartre’s realistic materialism leads him to interpret praxis as material change
that refers to a project and involves a passage from one objective state to
another through ‘interiorization’ – i.e. through being mediated by the thought
of the agent (CDR I/CRD I: 71/185). Unlike being-for-itself, praxis cannot be
 The Development of Sartre’s Psychoanalysis 73

used interchangeably with ‘consciousness’ or ‘thought’ because it has to have a

material manifestation.
‘Practico-inert’ is distinct from being-in-itself because all that can be said
of the latter is that it is: it is the being that is identical with itself, whereas the
practico-inert designates the world of worked-on matter in which praxis obtains.
The introduction of the concept of the practico-inert is perhaps the most major
development in Sartre’s social theory (Caws 1992), due to how its recognition of
the way that matter imposes necessities upon human being because of what it is,
and because of its indifference to human being, facilitates a nuanced appreciation
of how socio-material structures mediate between the aims of individuals and
their ability to accomplish them. The presence of ‘practico’ in the practico-
inert signals that there is no ‘pure inertia’ anywhere in the human universe, as
material things possess a kind of automatic or agentless agency, which makes the
material world capable of acting upon the action of agents in it. This explains the
existence of ‘counter-finalities’: the by-products of praxis that transform it into
‘antipraxis’. Sartre illustrates this idea by considering the floods that occurred in
China as a result of agricultural deforestation. The Chinese peasants’ positive
pursuit of greater yield from their harvests through the creation of more arable
land, he explains, blinded them to the consequence of negative aspect of their
pursuit (the removal of trees): the increasing lack of protection from floods
provided by forestry. Although the Chinese peasants could not have foreseen
the consequences of deforesting their land, the terrible history of the Chinese
floods can be regarded as ‘an intentionally constructed mechanism’ through
which agents’ need-satisfying intentions became counterfinalized, as their
praxis was stolen, reversed and handed back them in an unrecognizable form
(CDR I/CRD I: 162/273). The practico-inert thus incorporates far more than
the brute physical facts of the environment; it also refers to the potential of
the environment to act upon us. (It is also indicative of the kind of ecological
awareness that is associated with the term ‘Anthropocene’ today, as it construes
nature as having been irrevocably touched by culture.)

Knowledge of dialectical objects

We have already seen why, for Sartre, everything that can be known about
another person pertains to their objective being, their ‘self ’. He reaffirms
this view in Search for a Method, but he formulates it somewhat differently.
Here, he argues that subjectivity exists only in its objectification, so that ‘the
74 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

objectified truth of the objectified subjective must be considered the only truth
of the subjective’ (SM/QM: 98n./136n. emphasis added). This claim is consistent
with Sartre’s earlier view that even if it were possible to experience another’s
experience, no knowledge of them could be gleaned from such an experience
because the truth of their being lies in the objective world. However, it should be
noted Sartre’s conception of truth in his later work is decidedly more Hegelian.
Hegel illustrated his conception of truth by pointing out that the ‘bud disappears
in the bursting forth of the blossom’, which is then superseded by the fruit; yet,
it is nonsense to claim that each of these forms – bud, blossom, fruit – falsifies
the previous as ‘the truth’ of the plant when each form is necessary to it and
‘this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole’ (Hegel 1977: 2).
Sartre’s later conception of truth is also dialectical in this way. In Search for a
Method, he affirms that ‘truth is something which becomes . . . a totalization
which is forever being totalized’ (SM/QM: 30/45). This means that no fact in
isolation can be true since facts only become truths through their relation ‘to the
totalization in process’ (SM/QM: 31/45). So, while the facts themselves are not
subject to change, and no fact can be excluded from the totalization, the truth
of the relation between the facts is subject to change with the emergence of new
facts within the developing totalization.
Although this Hegelian conception of truth as a relation might initially appear
to be a form of relativism, Sartre denies that this is the case. He even presents
dialectical reason as a corrective to what he calls ‘the relativism of the positivists’
which regards the reconstitution of an object ‘in its totalising movement’ as an
impossibility on the grounds that dialectical reason makes this possible (CDR
I/CRD I: 23/143). Just as the bursting forth of the flower and the fruit does
not falsify the bud, the claim of dialectical reason to deliver ‘certain totalising
truths – if not the whole Truth’ cannot be disqualified by the way that the facts
are reorganized from one moment to the next (CDR I/CRD I: 23/143). Hence,
Sartre views truth as relational but not relative; it is a function of the relation of
all the facts to one another at a given moment, which means that the truth of any
given moment is not merely valid from a particular perspective at a specific time
and place, it is ‘valid for all the particular cases which recreate it’ in a way that
discloses its dialectical necessity (CDR I/CRD I: 37/156).
Sartre’s Hegelian conception of truth does not imply that he abandons his
conception of knowledge as (empirical) knowledge of objects, but it does
give him a more sophisticated conception of the totalizing, imaginary objects
that allow human beings to make sense of their experience. In what follows,
I will use the term ‘dialectical objects’ to refer to such objects, which are
 The Development of Sartre’s Psychoanalysis 75

both constitutive of and constituted by the historical dialectic. As the historical

dialectic ‘can only be the totalisation of concrete totalisations effected by a
multiplicity of totalizing individualities’ (CDR I/CRD I: 37/155–6), dialectical
objects refer to the concrete totalizations of which it is composed and which
represent the proper objects of dialectical investigations: namely, particular
histories and selves. Only a dialectical analysis can deliver knowledge of such
objects in the context of Sartre’s mature existentialism, not because it can
uncover any new facts about them but because it provides the key to the proper
organization of the facts and knowledge of a dialectical object must be an
‘organization’ not an ‘inventory’ (CDR I/CRD I: 23/143).
The first major epistemological implication of Sartre’s discovery of the
dialectic is that knowledge of a dialectical object, such as a self, requires the
knower to configure all the facts concerning that object in a way that renders
each fact intelligible in terms of the ‘totalization’ of all of them. The second is that
it is possible to communicate knowledge of dialectical objects via the production
of representations that facilitate ‘re-totalizations’ of them. This should not be
read to reintroduce an intellectualist conception of truth as correspondence
between representation and reality, though. Sartre’s mature existentialism
affirms that it is possible to communicate knowledge of dialectical objects
through language, not because it takes the intelligible structure of language to
correspond to that of dialectical objects but because it views the language we
use to describe them as nothing other than their intelligible structure, since our
conceptual comprehension of human-reality is, simultaneously, an ‘immediate
existence’ in our consciousness of objects and the basis for ‘an indirect knowing
of existence’ (SM/QM: 170–1/236). The very idea that our being and knowledge
are dialectically related in this way is, Sartre stresses, ‘contradictory to the
intellectualist idea of knowledge’ (SM/QM: 175/242).
One further point is, I believe, crucial to understanding how Sartre adapts
his epistemology after his discovery of the dialectic. In a lengthy footnote in
Search for a Method, Sartre observes that Marx can only present his materialist
conception of reality as capturing its absolute truth by supressing his own
subjectivity and imaging himself ‘an objective observation’ (SM/QM: 32n./47n.).
The suppression of subjectivity in the work of Marx and his followers has, Sartre
argues, resulted in the production of materialist perspectives that exclude the
‘human’ from the ‘matter’ they are concerned with. To highlight the error of this
approach, he draws an analogy between microphysics and dialectical analysis on
the grounds that ‘the revelation of a system’ in both kinds of investigation is only
effected ‘in and through’ human acts that change it (SM/QM: 32n./47n.). Just as
76 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle holds that any attempt to measure the velocity
of a subatomic particle will interfere with its motion in an unpredictable way,
Sartre’s mature existentialism holds that the contemplation of an object changes
it by reintroducing it into the dialectic at a new stage and ‘re-totalizing’ it there.
Even if Marxist analyses often neglect to situate knowledge within the dialectic,
Sartre nevertheless finds ‘the rudiments’ of the ‘realistic epistemology’ in them
(SM/QM 33n./49n.), which he goes on to develop by emphasizing knowledge as
part of the dialectic.

Sartre’s search for a new objective method

Freud coined the word ‘psychoanalysis’ by coupling ‘psychology’ and ‘analysis’.

He brought these two terms together to emphasize the analogy he sees between
the discipline he founded and ‘chemical analysis’ in terms of its scientific rigour
and methodological approach. He therefore conceived of psychoanalysis as a
sister to chemical analysis in the psychological realm, with the idea being that
just as chemical analysis strives to isolate the ‘fundamental substance’ from the
salt in which it is combined with other substances and initially ‘unrecognizable’,
psychoanalysis strives to isolate the pathological ‘instinctual impulses’ from the
complex mental formations in which they are embedded (CW XVII: 160).9
However, Freud recognized the subjective dimension of psychology as a
clear obstacle to psychoanalysis being ranked among the natural sciences. The
tendency of his case histories to read like novels particularly concerned him. In
the Prefatory Remarks to A Case of Hysteria, for example, he criticizes physicians
who read psychoanalytical case studies not as contributions ‘to the psycho-
pathology of the neuroses’, but as novels ‘for their private delectation’ (CW VII:
9). Obviously, Freud is most disturbed the exploitative nature of this practice in
the context of studies that detail patients’ sexual experience. But his insistence
that the value of these studies lies in their provision of clues to the answers to
scientific questions about ‘the internal structure of the neurosis’ and ‘the relation
between the mental and the somatic’ (CW VII: 13) also betrays his concerns
about the mere possibility of his psychological studies being read in a literary
manner, as opposed to a source of facts about natural phenomena. Freud is, I
believe, troubled by the fact that his case studies afford literary readings because
he knows that if psychoanalysis is to be recognized as a scientific enterprise that
generates knowledge about nature beyond ‘the subjective’, its subject needed to
be recognized as a natural one. He therefore strove to ‘naturalize’ the subject
 The Development of Sartre’s Psychoanalysis 77

of psychoanalysis by connecting the thoughts of the patients he studied to a

natural object – the unconscious – whose physical operations are potentially
observable.10 Hence, his insistence that it will always be possible to discover
the presence of ‘an unquestionably organic factor’ in the aetiology of even the
mildest psychological disorders – ‘the neuroses’ (CW XIII: 175).
Although Sartre agrees with Freud on the point that the subject of
psychoanalysis must be an object in the world, he regards Freud’s approach
to objectifying the subjective as unhelpful because it reduces the subjective
to a mere effect of arational, causal processes within the natural order. By
taking the thoughts it takes to be the ultimate source of psychopathological
symptoms to be an upshot of natural processes, Freud’s psychoanalytic theory
dismisses the significance of meaningful connections between thought contents
that its analyses often uncover because it supposes them to be the result
of rationalizations that occur at a relatively superficial level and, therefore,
incapable of shedding any light on the deeper, unconscious, arational, natural
mechanisms that ultimately cause psychological problems. This effectively
excludes the intelligible relations between thoughts from the causal processes
that count for Freudian psychoanalysis, at least in terms of its scientific agenda.
And this, in Sartre’s view, leads Freudian psychoanalysis to interpret behaviour
as if it emerged from a thing-like substance rather than a totalizing movement
– i.e. a human being. Although the analytic approach it employs allows it to
explain thought in wholly objective terms by tracing it to a biological source,
Sartre describes it as a ‘logic of ambiguity’ insofar as it affirms the significance
of the subjective at the empirical-therapeutic level of patient analysis only to
deny it at the level of aetiological theorization (CDR I/CRD I: 17n./137n.).
From the perspective of dialectical reason, this ambiguity can be attributed to
Freud’s failure to recognize that the proper object of psychoanalysis is not a
natural, ‘analytical’, purely objective object but a dialectical object that is partly
constituted by subjectivity.
In a lengthy footnote that spans over two pages in the Critique, Sartre
illustrates his understanding of the relation between dialectical and analytical
objects through the example of a picture of a line intersecting a circle. A child or
an uneducated person, he writes, can look at this picture and intuitively grasp the
truth that a straight line which intersects a circle at one point must also intersect it
at another. This, he believes, is because the picture is first dialectically intelligible
in terms of praxis – as an abstract representation of movement, in which the
circle ‘as the abstract idealisation of enclosure, confines’, while the straight line
‘as the idealisation of a disciplined journey, shatters obstacles in its path’ (CDR I/
78 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

CRD I: 62n./177n.). A mathematician, however, would not be satisfied by merely

apprehending this truth this way; she requires proof. But the proof pushes the
‘circle-as-sensible-object’ into the background and defines it by only ‘one of its
properties’ (CDR I/CRD I: 62n./177n.) – the property of being radially oriented
around a centre point – which allows the relation between the line and the circle
to be expressed algebraically (in terms of simultaneous quadratic and linear
equations). Sartre concludes that the mathematician’s analytic process ‘destroys
the sensible and qualitative unity of the circle-gestalt’ in order to interpret it in
a purely geometrical schema (CDR I/CRD I: 62n./177n.). The analytical truth
concerning the relation between the circle and the line is, therefore, only a
partial truth of the dialectical object, which it can only be arrived through the
suspension of the rich, primary comprehension we first have of it.
Rather than regulate the primary, lived comprehension of experience to
the background by treating the subject of psychoanalysis as an analytical
object, Sartre uses dialectical reason to incorporate the subjective into the
objective process of self-formation and to, thereby, preserve its significance to
psychoanalytic investigations. So, while in Being and Nothingness, Sartre notes
that existential psychoanalysis has yet to find its ‘Freud’ (BN/EN: 745/620) –
meaning someone who could develop an objective method appropriate to the
study of selves – once he discovers dialectical reason, he realizes that he can
be existential psychoanalysis’s ‘Freud’. Dialectical reason provides him with
the tool he needs to work out how Freudian psychoanalytic techniques can be
adapted and incorporated into an existential analysis. In Search for a Method, he
construes them as belonging to the ‘regressive’ part of his proposed ‘progressive-
regressive’ method of analysis and, contra Freud, interprets them to be chiefly
concerned with uncovering the ‘subjective’ significance of the biographical facts
for the analysand. He then presents the ‘progressive’ part as being concerned
with gaining an ‘objective’ understanding of the analysand’s socio-material
situation. By bringing these two parts together, his revised method of existential
psychoanalysis works to synthesize a comprehension of the action of ‘childhood’
on shaping the analysand’s choices with an understanding of the effects of
the ‘objective structures’ and ‘material conditions’ upon them in a ‘dialectical
totalization’ (SM/QM: 64/90).
This progressive-regressive method is geared towards highlighting the
individuating features of the subject’s objective being – i.e. those that cannot
be explained as a result of the objective conditions – as this allows the choices
that contribute to their self-formation ‘to emerge from the background of the
general contradictions of productive forces and relations of production’ (SM/
 The Development of Sartre’s Psychoanalysis 79

QM: 57/81–2). Sartre’s explicit aim to push the progressive analysis from a
general understanding of the analysand’s socio-material situation all the way
through to the discovery of the choices that individuate them is what makes his
revised psychoanalysis both Marxist and existentialist. Although Sartre reads
Marx himself to have often pushed his analyses close to this point, he holds that
contemporary Marxists leave the task of establishing the particulars of a person’s
life to other disciplines, which lack the means to do so satisfactorily because
Marxism is ‘the only philosophy which can really grasp the complexity of human
being’ (SM/QM: 53/76). So, Sartre’s progressive-regressive method is ‘objective’
insofar as it can, in principle, be applied to any human being by any other, but it
is also ‘subjective’ insofar as the analyst must regard their subjectivity as a tool
to be used in the analysis, rather than as an impediment to it. This is because,
for Sartre, our basic capacity to comprehend the primary, human significance of
biographical facts is essential for the acquisition of knowledge of a self, as it is
what allows us to apprehend them as part of a totalization.
A word on the body: It would be absurd to ascribe to Sartre the untenable
view that biochemical factors never play a role in precipitating psychological
illness. Although his initial existentialism has, however, been rightly criticized
for not having taken the potential for the body to constrain freedom seriously
enough (Wider 1997; Howells 2011) and although I believe this problem is
redressed in Sartre’s mature existentialism through its emphasis of need as
a central force in structuring human-reality, I will not belabour this point
here because Sartre’s crucial point is that the self, not the body, is the proper
object of psychoanalysis. So, Sartre can, for example, accept that behavioural
and personality changes may be the only symptoms of a brain tumour
(Madhusoodanan et al. 2015), although he would affirm that such symptoms
are psychologically significant only insofar as the subject can choose the way
that these symptoms manifest themselves and/or the stance she takes towards
them. When there is no scope for the subject’s choice to oppose the facts of their
situation, there is no dialectical process of self-formation in play, only causal
determination. Sartre’s discussion of the wounded soldier in The Family Idiot
illustrates this point well. This solider is marching away from the enemy and he
knows that if he continues to march alongside his comrades, he will escape. But
he suffers more with every hour that passes, he becomes less able to endure it,
and, consequently, he loses interest in joining with the regiment, outwitting the
enemy in pursuit and being nursed back to health. This is because the strength
of his choice is reduced by the ‘violent’, unchosen desire ‘to give up, to leave his
comrades, to let himself fall, to lie passively, awaiting disaster and death’, which
80 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

will eventually become ‘irresistible’ (FI I/IF I: 36/46). Once this happens, the
soldier’s choice drops out of the equation; his physiological state deprives him of
the power to make himself anything other than a wounded soldier who is going
to die if his comrades do not carry him. Thus, all ‘psychological’ symptoms that
are truly the effects of organic illness fall within the purview of medicine not
psychoanalysis on Sartre’s account because they are not part of the dialectic that
constitutes the subject’s self, although they will be reintegrated into this dialectic
when the subject regains their capacity to choose.

Sartre’s debt to Beauvoir

How can society shape selves? Sartre’s initial form of existentialism cannot
provide a satisfactory answer to this question. The only notion it can draw on to
explain how people can be constrained in their self-formation is bad faith. But
bad faith is a tool for coping with the human condition that is developed at the
individual level, so it can neither account for how people can come to behave in
ways that are typical of certain social groups, nor for how members of socially
oppressed groups typically develop ‘inferiority complexes’, which manifest
themselves in various self-sabotaging behaviours. Although we have seen that
bad faith can explain how an individual could conceal the choice of inferiority
from themselves – as in the case of the stutterer considered above – it cannot
explain how many members of marginalized social groups could make the same
choice of inferiority and express it similar in ways.
If the freedom of consciousness to choose its Self and the meaning of the
world for it is without any external constraints, the fact that people who belong
to the same social group or who have been similarly exploited or abused often
display similar qualities seems to be an ‘unexplainable coincidence’ (Webber
2018: 123–5). Without an appreciation of how environmental factors can
constrain subjects in their capacity to choose, there is no way to account for
the well-documented effects of oppression upon the behaviour of members
of oppressed groups.11 Feminist philosopher Sandra Lee Bartky uses the term
‘psychological oppression’ to denote the covert, systematic, social processes of
fragmentation and mystification that mediate oppressed people’s relationship
to their self. In this context, ‘fragmentation’ refers to the social mechanisms
that effectively split the subject’s image of her self into parts. Stereotyping, for
example, incites a conflict between a ‘true’ and a ‘false’ self by presenting the
subject with an image of her self that has no basis in her actions, whereas sexual
 The Development of Sartre’s Psychoanalysis 81

objectification presents the subject with a ‘degrading’ image of her body instead
of her self (1990: 23). ‘Mystification’ then refers to the systematic obfuscation
of these processes of fragmentation, which work to ensure that the members of
the groups targeted by them will blame themselves for their depreciated self
and live out their relation to it as ‘destiny, guilt, or neurosis’ (1990: 23). A final
result of psychological oppression, according to Bartky, is to deprive the subject
of ‘an autonomous choice of self ’ (1990: 31). Although Bartky concentrates on
highlighting the function of psychological oppression in Western patriarchal
societies, she also suggests that psychological oppression can occur within
the family unit.12 In what follows, I shall take up this suggestion by using the
term ‘psychological oppression’ to refer to the process through which social
macrocosms – i.e. societies at large – and social microcosms – families,
friendship groups, workplaces, etc. – make their members oppress themselves.
Sartre’s mature form of existentialism can account for the phenomenon of
psychological oppression because it can explain how the subject’s interpretation
of their self and their possibilities can be constrained by the objective features of
their situation. The change in Sartre’s conception of the situation from his initial
to his mature existentialism is perhaps best illustrated by the change in the way
that he describes the composition of ‘hodological space’ – a concept he borrows
from Gestalt psychology to signal the difference between the space that human
beings live in and Euclidian geometric space. Hodological space is composed
of pragmatic pathways towards ends determined by the subject: I apprehend
the space between the door and my body as ‘space-to-be-traversed’ if I am to
realize the possibility of leaving of the room, not as ‘three metres’. This leads
to a conception of the world as a ‘hollow that is always in the future’ (BN/EN:
433/362), which hints at the idea of a ‘mould to be filled’ without any suggestion
that this mould is set by anything other than the subject’s original choice. In the
Critique, however, Sartre offers an example of a situation in which ‘hexis’ (ëxis)
– i.e. inertia-like action that does not transcend the situation – ‘was primarily
a hodological determination of the lived space’ (CDR/CRD I: 358–9/462): the
Réveillon riots of 1789, in which the lack of unity and organization among the
protesters, combined with the topographical configuration of the Quartier Saint-
Antoine, all but guaranteed that troops would enter the district and massacre the
protesters there. There was already a clear pathway in the hodological space for
the troops, which ‘predestined’ their action. In Sartre’s mature existentialism,
then, the situation can no longer be considered as brute matter for subjects
to mould into a meaningful shape; it is more like a pre-prepared mould for
82 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

their selves. But what motivates this dramatic shift in his understanding of the
situation?
Sartre began to revise his initial existentialism in the wake of the Second
World War,13 and his ‘conversion’ to Marxism during the 1950s was obviously
instrumental to the development of his dialectical materialism. However, the
extent to which Simone de Beauvoir’s existentialism influenced his transition
from his initial to his mature form of existentialism is also beginning to be
brought to light (Simons 1986; Kruks 1995; Webber 2018; Kirkpatrick 2019a,
2019b; Edwards 2021). Notably, Beauvoir was the first to combine existentialism
with psychoanalysis and dialectical materialism to explain how women can be
made to accept a feminine destiny as their fate in The Second Sex (Le deuxième
sexe, 1949). Moreover, she integrates insights from psychoanalysis and historical
materialism into her existentialism after pointing out that women’s subjugation
cannot be accounted for in terms of a Hegelian Master-Slave dialectic (SS/DS
I: 6–17/18–34). Hegel, Marx, Freud: the very same triumvirate that guides the
development of Sartre’s existentialism after Being and Nothingness first appears in
Beauvoir’s existentialist analysis of women’s psychological oppression, where she
synthesizes insights from the Hegelian dialectic, Freudian psychoanalysis and
Marx’s (and Engels’s) historical materialism to show that the source of what she
calls the ‘feminine inferiority complex’ (SS/DS II: 627/443) lies in the systematic,
social processes that fragment women’s selves and mystify their consciousness
during their transition from girl to woman.
Beauvoir’s analysis of ‘Women’s Situation and Character’ in The Second Sex
is especially noteworthy in that it may have supplied Sartre with a blueprint for
his progressive-regressive method. The aim of this chapter is to offer a ‘synthetic
point of view’ of women’s situation to comprehend the ‘eternal feminine’ as an
upshot of women’s ‘economic, social and historical conditioning as a whole’ (SS/
DS II: 653/477, emphasis added). In it, Beauvoir examines specific features of
women’s situation within a patriarchal society to make the interplay between the
socio-material forces of domination and individual choice in their experience
comprehensible and to show that ‘woman’s whole “character”’ can be explained
by ‘her situation’ because her situation impairs her capacity to choose for herself
(SS/DS II: 677/511). As Michel Kail points out, it is through this endeavour
that Beauvoir supplies the foundation for a ‘new epistemology’ (2006: 117), one
that indicates how we can acquire knowledge of others through synthesizing
an objective analysis of their situation with an empathetic comprehension of it,
which, I believe, bears a striking resemblance to the ‘realistic epistemology’ that
Sartre turns his mature existentialism to support (see pages 73–6 above).
 The Development of Sartre’s Psychoanalysis 83

In the Critique, Sartre recognizes the possibility of ‘transcendence failures’

through acts that amount to no more than hexis, which does not effect any
positive change. His discussion of the working-class man who seeks to better
himself by taking up boxing as a profession shows that he also regards such
transcendence failures as a key symptom of oppression. This working-class
man’s exploitation in the market system ‘de-realizes’ his physical power in the
ring, in Sartre’s view, by making it a symbol of his ‘radical powerlessness’ outside
of it; yet, all this is mystified in his experience because he lives his violence ‘in its
explosive power’, even while it alienates him from his ‘sole emancipatory power’
(CDR II/CRD II: 46/56). His acts in the ring are hexis because they are co-opted
by the bourgeoisie and transformed into another commodity sold on the market.
Beauvoir’s concept of negative action is a clear precursor to Sartre’s ‘hexis’. In
The Ethics of Ambiguity, for example, Beauvoir argues that a ‘transcendence
condemned to fall uselessly back upon itself ’ because it only engages in negative
action is ‘what defines the situation of oppression’ (EA/MA: 81/102). Then,
in The Second Sex, Beauvoir offers the example of the housewife who dusts,
sweeps, mops, cooks, polishes and tidies but nevertheless ‘does nothing’ (SS/
DS II: 487/264) because the patriarchal institution of marriage dooms her to
repetition, routine and experiencing transcendence only in its ‘negative aspect’
(SS/DS II: 488/265).
This strongly suggests Sartre is greatly indebted to Beauvoir for having
provided the first model of how existentialism can be adapted to accommodate
the phenomenon of psychological oppression, support a realistic epistemology
and to appreciate the key significance of childhood for subjects’ self-formation.
And it is his later appreciation of how our conditioning during childhood
constrains what we can imagine, choose and become in our adult life which
represents the most important difference between Sartre’s initial and mature
forms of existentialism from a psychoanalytic perspective.

The spirals of self-formation

Sartre’s first psycho-biographical study was published in 1946 and its subject
was the poet Charles Baudelaire. This rather unflattering portrait of one of
France’s national institutions caused a scandal (Contat and Rybalka 1970: 143),
and the lack of objective measures in Sartre’s initial version of his existential
psychoanalysis led commentators to dismiss the study as a work of ‘subjective
criticism’ that reveals more about its author than its subject (Roditi 1950: 100).
84 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

Sartre also quickly dismisses Baudelaire as ‘inadequate’ when asked about it in a

1969 interview for New Left Review (IOT: 50). But we should not be so quick to
dismiss the significance of this first application of his psychoanalytical method,
as it offers important insights into the development of his psychoanalytical
thought.14
Firstly, Baudelaire supplies what, to my knowledge, is Sartre’s first depiction
of a circular process of self-formation. As if anchored to a fixed point, Sartre’s
Baudelaire suffers because he cannot become ‘other’ than what he is; he cannot
progress, only go round and round in circles, reaffirming that he is what he is.
However, Sartre presents this suffering as a result of Baudelaire’s own choice of
an unchanging, statue-like Self. Had Baudelaire not been in bad faith about this
choice, Sartre contends that he would have been able to move ‘forward’ in his
project of self-formation but, instead, he stifled the positive aspect of his freedom
‘to experience it in its negative form of non-satisfaction’, which effectively meant
that ‘the loop was looped’ in his life’s trajectory (B: 98/91) and he cut himself off
from new possibilities at the age of twenty-one, after which he did nothing new.
Herein lies one of the first major achievements of Sartre’s analytical method in
practice: the provision of an account for the so-called compulsion to repeat that
does not make recourse to the unconscious because it shows how bad faith can
lead a subject to become trapped in a circular movement.15 Although Beauvoir’s
summation of Baudelaire as ‘a phenomenological description’, which ‘lacks the
psychoanalytical dimension that would have explained Baudelaire on the basis of
his body and the facts of his life history’ is accurate (1963: 52), certain aspects of
it indicate that Sartre was already beginning to see the potential for the situation
to play a more active role in subjects’ self-formation. Most notably, Baudelaire
describes two traits that Sartre will later present as symptomatic responses to
psychological oppression: a ‘complex’ that constrains the subject in their self-
formation (B: 56/53) and a tendency towards escapism that is self-destructive.16
It is not until he writes Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr (Saint Genet, comédien
at martyr, 1952), however, that Sartre traces a circular form of self-formation to
the subject’s childhood conditioning. As a Parisian orphan being raised by foster
parents in a village community, Sartre proposes that Jean Genet was ‘condemned
to theft’ (SG: 58/73). Being both dimly aware of his own abandonment and
inculcated to see property as a cipher for goodness and legitimacy, young Genet
began to steal at an early age in order to feel like a legitimate member of his
community by acquiring property. However, Sartre argues that when Genet is
eventually caught in the act at the age of ten, this plunges him into the ‘crisis’
that led to him to make his original choice to be what this crime made him in
 The Development of Sartre’s Psychoanalysis 85

the eyes of others: ‘evil’ (SG: 59/74). If Genet was already a thief, though, why is
this incident the ‘crisis’ that sets the mould for his self? In brief, Sartre’s answer
is that it makes him shamefully aware of what he is for others for the first time.
Genet had not previously experienced his pilfering in defining him in any way; it
did not even seem real to him, as it had never had an adult witness. But as soon
as he is caught stealing, everything changes: his secret, unknown ‘inwardness’
becomes an objective, shameful quality of his self with a name: ‘thief ’ (SG:
18/27).
Two features of this event make it a crisis. One, Genet is not caught by one
of his parents but by another member of the community. If he had been caught
by his father, Sartre explains that he would have soon been able to overcome
his sense of shameful isolation because it is easy to dismiss stealing from one’s
own family as not really stealing and because his father’s critical Look would,
eventually, have given way to a loving Look. But because it is someone from
outside the family who exposes him, they expose him as a thief and a foundling
simultaneously by revealing an ‘evil’ principle within him, which can only be
‘explained’ by his shady origins outside the community along the following lines:
‘That little thief, where does he come from? He surely takes after someone. Only
a slut would abandon her son. A chip off the old block’ (SG: 19/28). So, this
shameful revelation appears to Genet as proof of what he had always suspected:
he does not belong. Two, Genet is caught at the tender age of ten, an age at which
adults still appear to be gods and children lack the ability to challenge parental
values. Had somebody called Genet a thief at the age of seventeen, Sartre says that
he would have by then had the means to reject other people’s opinions of him.
But at ten, Genet has no way to defend himself from the damning judgement of
the ‘honest folk’ who surround him; he is ‘trapped like a rat’ because he cannot
question their morality and so he becomes his own most zealous tormentor
because they ‘have penetrated to the very bottom of his heart and installed there
a permanent delegate which is himself ’ (SG: 21/31).
Rather than describe Genet’s choice to be what his situation made him as a
form of bad faith, Sartre presents it as a choice he had to make to continue to live
in his situation, as the only alternative was to allow it to crush him. He interprets
it as a form of ‘defensive aggressiveness’ that enables Genet to gain some
sense of autonomy in a situation that stifles it through determining ‘the inner
meaning of his pilfering’ (SG: 58/73). Notably, Sartre compares Genet’s defensive
aggressiveness to that which Beauvoir identifies in adolescent girls who make
themselves touch and eat revolting insects in performances that anticipate and
symbolize the ‘deflowering’ that they know they will have to endure, but which
86 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

they experience as a result of their own initiative (SG: 57/72 and see SS/DS II:
377–8/122–3) because he believes that what these young girls and Genet have
in common is that ‘their only recourse is to will what is’; their future is carved in
stone and they cannot refuse it, they can only ‘refuse to undergo it’ (SG: 57/72). But
to accept a destiny imposed upon one in an attitude of defensive aggressiveness
is ‘to place oneself in a prison without bars’ in Sartre’s view (SG: 69/85), since
its only effect is to make this destiny bearable through the affirmation of choice
in it when there was originally none. Acceptance in defiance is still acceptance,
and the final result of defensive aggressiveness is to allow oppressed subjects to
comply with society’s expectations of them, without feeling as though they are
complicit. Sartre proposes that the psychological mechanisms that facilitate this
in Genet’s case are ‘whirligigs’ (tourniquets) (SG: 333/372).17 Thinking through
whirligigs that trap his thought in circles enables Genet to conceal his continued
complicity with his destiny from himself by distracting him from hoping for
something different, better. He does not dare imagine ‘that he will someday
write’, for instance, because he has learned to make his life liveable by locking
his thoughts in a ‘circular prison’ (SG: 339/379). His psychological whirligigs are
therefore a consequence of his oppressive situation and a creative strategy for
surviving it at once.
What is most remarkable about (Sartre’s) Genet, then, is that he manages to
break free of the whirligigs that lock him in a vicious cycle of hexis. In the second
volume of the Critique, Sartre provides further clarification of his concept of
hexis when he describes it as ‘the mere interiorization of conditionings’ (CDR II/
CRD II: 199/210), which is externalized through actions that are in accord with
how the ‘common individual’ of that society would be expected to act (CDR II/
CRD II: 200/210). Genet’s life of crime before he became a writer thus represents
hexis insofar as it is entirely in accord with his social conditioning and others’ low
expectations of him. But Genet finds a way to break the mould his society made
for him through the entirely unexpected production of great literary works. To
achieve this, Sartre argues that Genet’s attitude towards others had to undergo a
‘radical conversion’ (SG: 425/473). Crucially, though, Genet’s conversion is not
attributed to a marvellous ‘instant’ of radical freedom wherein Genet abandons
his original choice for a new one,18 but to Genet’s ability to develop new ways of
pursuing the same original choice, which, eventually, lead him to a way of being
that enables him to play a more creative role in his self-formation and thereby
become something other than the criminal he was conditioned to become.
Genet’s writing does not evince a new choice of Self, then, but a new behavioural
interpretation of his original choice to be the no-good troublemaker society told
 The Development of Sartre’s Psychoanalysis 87

him he was. So, he is still, if only for himself, being ‘evil’ when he writes because
he conceives of his literary works as artful ‘snares’ (SG: 370/413), designed to
allure the reader so that they may infect them with the same evil principle that
Genet’s society found in him. Even though writing enables Genet to ‘transcend
all his contradictions’, to break free of his whirligigs, and to partake in ‘pure
freedom’ of the artist that knows neither Good nor Evil (SG: 422/470), he writes
when it is too late to change who he fundamentally is, as that matter was settled
for him when he was ten years old. Moreover, it is thanks to a ‘whirligig’, rather
than a positive choice to change, that Genet starts writing, since he writes his
first poem and reads it in public to inspire the contempt of others whom he
holds in contempt, so that he can take pride in their mockery of and contempt
for him and thus prove that ‘he who loses wins’ (SG: 430/478).
Although Sartre denies that he had all the ‘keys’ of his progressive-regressive
method of psychoanalysis when he undertook his study of Genet (IOT: 51),
what is present in this study that was missing in Baudelaire is the inclusion of
an objective, ‘progressive’ dimension. Sartre still understands transcendence
as a vertical movement, an ‘original arising’ of freedom that negates the facts
of the deterministic universe through its positive movement towards a chosen
possibility (BN/EN: 250/212), but he now situates transcendence in a socio-
material world, within that universe, where it is almost always bent, twisted or
even inverted by the mould that society makes for its members’ selves. Thus,
Saint Genet represents a milestone in the development of Sartre’s existentialism
insofar as it portrays Genet as a victim of psychological oppression, whose
situation imposed an original choice of Self upon him that he struggled to live
with.

Knowledge of another self

In Sartre’s mature existentialism, reciprocity replaces conflict as the fundamental

form of human relation. ‘Reciprocity’ simply describes the relation between two
persons ‘who recognise each other in their freedom’ (CDR I/CRD I: 110/222).
It can either be positive – in relations of love, friendship and solidarity – or
negative – in relations between rivals and enemies. In any case, it is the basis for
comprehension. Regardless of whether I wish another well or ill, recognizing
them as a free agent in pursuit of projects is what allows me to see their behaviour
as purposive. However, the ‘mutual recognition’ that Sartre now considers the
primary form of sociality tends to be corrupted by the socially determined
88 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

responses to scarcity: seriality and struggle among individuals, which, in a

capitalist society, lead to ‘exploitation and oppression’ (CDR I/CRD I: 110/222).
After writing Saint Genet, Sartre states that he regards love ‘more positively’
(IWS: 13) and, hence, sees more possibilities for escaping the sadomasochistic
circles described in Being and Nothingness. But he also sees the potential for
the structures of domination in a socio-material world to crush individuals by
turning their attempts to transcend their situation into circular hexis that only
embeds them deeper in it. Hell is not other people for later Sartre,19 it is the
circle that characterizes the experience of oppressed persons whose acts are only
hexis,20 whereas the living struggle is represented by a spiral that both preserves
and transcends the status quo.
Sartre’s views about the sources of interpersonal misery have changed. But
the problem of human loneliness remains a central concern for him as two
consciousness that look at one another still lies at the heart of his social ontology.
Reciprocity represents both the basis for, and the limit of, ‘unification’ between
people, since no matter how many projects two people share or how intertwined
their ‘synthetic totalizations’ (i.e. selves) become, ‘there will always be two
of them, each integrating the entire universe’, separately (CDR I/CRD I: 113–
14/226). So, by producing psychoanalytical biographies that aim to demonstrate
the possibility of gaining knowledge of another self, Sartre calls upon his
epistemology to mitigate the negative implications of his social ontology. The
view that Sartre’s biographies are at least partly intended to assuage the reader’s
loneliness is substantiated by his remarks in the conclusion to Saint Genet, where
he underlines the anguish we are likely to experience ‘when certain minds open
before our eyes as yawning chasms’ to reveal ‘what we considered to be our
innermost being’ – our selves – as a mere ‘fabricated appearance’ and that nothing
prevents us from having the qualities ‘that repel us most in others’ (SG: 589/650).
By imaginatively engaging with the processes through which Genet formed
his self, then, we become aware of the fundamental basis for our empathetic
comprehension of other people’s experience: our ontological selflessness. That
is, we realize that ‘Genet is we’ precisely because he is ‘our solitude carried to the
point of Passion’ (SG: 599/661). But, through gaining knowledge of Genet, we
can feel less alone without being any less alone.
However, Sartre’s biographical study of Genet makes for strange reading when
one realizes that Sartre and Genet were friends and that Genet read it. In a late
interview with Beauvoir, Sartre describes Genet’s reaction to the manuscript: ‘He
read it, and one night he got up and went over to the fireplace with the intention
of burning it. I believe he did throw some pages in and then plucked them out’
 The Development of Sartre’s Psychoanalysis 89

(1986: 273). He then notes that his relations with Genet ‘diminished’ afterwards
(1986: 274). Somewhat sadly, then, Sartre’s attempt to mitigate human loneliness
through supplying knowledge of a self had the effect of estranging him from
the very person he sought to know. His psychoanalytic ‘remedy’ for human
loneliness thus, arguably, increased his own personal loneliness by straining
his friendship with Genet. It is important to note that Sartre’s application of
his existential psychoanalysis to Genet was not intended as therapy for Genet.
Certainly, insofar as the conversion of ‘hexis into praxis’ can be regarded as a
major therapeutic goal of Sartre’s (revised) existential psychoanalysis (Cannon
1991: 171), it seems that one of the reasons why Genet interested Sartre as a
biographical subject was because he believed that Genet had achieved this goal
by himself. Genet was, for Sartre, an example of someone who was not in need
of existential psychoanalysis. So, he applied his method to Genet to prove a
point: that ‘freedom alone can account for a person in his totality’ (SG: 584/645).
Nonetheless, Sartre’s insertion of himself into the totalization-in-progress that
was Genet’s process of self-formation was evidently – and understandably –
experienced by Genet as an unwelcome intrusion. Indeed, Sartre’s observation
that Saint Genet ‘disgusted’ Genet because he felt that he was as described there
(1986: 273) suggests that reading the book supplied Genet with insights into
his self, but without the kind of trusting, caring relationship that supports the
subject in processing such insights in the context of psychotherapy. Despite his
plea that we, the readers of Saint Genet, ‘use Genet properly’ (SG: 584/645),
Sartre seems to have been oblivious to how inappropriate it is to ‘use’ any person
in this way.
As noted in the Introduction, Sartre never underwent any formal
psychoanalytic or psychotherapeutic training, nor had he been analysed
or completed his own self-analysis at the time he wrote Saint Genet. So, his
(mis)treatment of Genet in this work results from him approaching the project as
a purely theoretical enterprise. He treats Genet as an object because his principal
aim is to deliver knowledge of Genet and ‘one can only know objects’ (SG: 589/650).
But the living Genet is still a subject and his self, still an intimate object for him.
Putting aside the ethical issues involved in applying existential psychoanalysis
to another living person outside of a contracted therapeutic relationship, the
choice of a living subject creates problems for the epistemological claims of the
analysis too, given Sartre’s mature understanding of selves as dialectical objects.
As a living person plays the central creative role in the formation of their self
during their lifetime, the living Genet can still undermine Sartre’s assessment of
him through his acts, which do not merely become new facts that can be ‘added’
90 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

on to the end of the biography because they also re-totalize his self. It is due to
the profound unknowability and unpredictability of the human being that makes
its self that Sartre will later say that ‘psychoanalysis is not knowledge nor does
it claim to be, save when it hazards hypotheses on the dead’ ([1964] 2008/1972:
145), which is to say that psychoanalysis can only make claims to knowledge of
the dead for the reason that, in death, the subject passes the responsibility for the
continued totalization of the dialectical object that is their self to others.
Sartre’s final and fullest application of his psychoanalytic method, The Family
Idiot, responds to the question: ‘what, at this point in time, can we know about a
man?’ (FI I/IF I: ix/7). It aims ‘to prove that every man is perfectly knowable as
long as one uses the appropriate method and as long as the necessary documents
are available’ (OIF/SIF: 123/106) by communicating knowledge of a dead man’s
self. In this study, Sartre aims to present the results of years of intensive historical,
biographical, socio-political and psychoanalytical research into Gustave
Flaubert’s (1821–80) life and times in a book, which, he believes, will enable the
reader to gain knowledge of Flaubert’s self through a re-totalization of it.
 4

The Family Idiot and the objectification of a self

If we think of human history as a tapestry and the life of an individual as a single

thread, then we can say that The Family Idiot aims to examine the constitution of
Flaubert’s being, which may be likened to the fibres that compose a single thread
(Being); chronicle his psychological development as he weaves his way through
the structures that surround him, so as to facilitate an empathetic understanding
of the subjective meaning of his choices (Comprehension); and, finally, to trace
the pattern he made on history’s tapestry to establish the objective meaning of
his acts and illuminate the full dialectical significance of his situated choices
(Knowing).
This chapter concentrates on showing how Sartre’s application of his
existential psychoanalysis in The Family Idiot combines these three approaches
to understanding Flaubert’s self-formation, treating each separately under the
titles ‘Being’, ‘Comprehension’ and ‘Knowing’. It is not intended as a substitute
for the experience of reading The Family Idiot – the narrative of which plays
a crucial role in making Flaubert’s lived experience comprehensible. Rather, it
aims to show how this multi-volume biography represents the completion of
Sartre’s solution to the problem of other minds, as well as the most rigorous
application of his existential psychoanalysis, through its effort to synthesize the
objective and subjective aspects of Flaubert’s life and work and to, thereby, yield
knowledge of Flaubert’s self.

Being

Sartre identifies three fundamental relationships, formed at different stages of

Flaubert’s childhood, as having played a central role in shaping of his experience
at all levels. These are: ‘his relationship with his mother (action, language,
sexuality), his relationship with his father (being looked at by the Other), and
92 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

his relationship with his sister (spectre or the epic performance)’ (FI II/IF II:
15/665). This section focuses on Flaubert’s relationships with his mother and
father. It elucidates Sartre’s view that Flaubert’s parents ‘constitute’ him, before
going on, in the next section, to explore Flaubert’s process of becoming, through
which he responds creatively to his situation and to what his parents made of
him, a process which his relationship with his sister is integral to.

Flaubert’s passive constitution

The claim that Flaubert had a passive constitution is central to The Family Idiot.
As the notion of ‘constitution’ is entirely new to Sartre’s thought, it is vital to
have a clear understanding of what purpose it serves in his psychoanalysis.
Further, as Sartre presents Flaubert’s constitution as partly a result of how he was
nursed by his mother, the introduction of this notion represents a significant
progression in Sartre’s understanding of psychological development. Never
before has Sartre acknowledged the paramount importance of the mother-infant
relation to a person’s capacity for growth. As Hazel E. Barnes observes, prior to
his analysis of Flaubert, Sartre’s existential accounts of self-formation seemed to
imply that people ‘sprang forth from the ground of being in full maturity – like
Athena from the forehead of Zeus’ (1981b: 24). But the idea that the way we are
treated in our infancy could constitute us seems to run counter to the rejection
of psychological determinism at the heart of Sartrean existentialism, so it is
important to establish how Sartre integrates it into existentialism.
First of all, it is important to recognize that even though Sartre describes
Flaubert’s passive constitution as something he ‘received from his mother’ (FI
I/IF I: 223/231), it is not something he was born with; it is an almost inevitable
result of the situation he was born into. Gustave Flaubert was born in Rouen on
the 12th of December 1821 to Anne Justine Caroline Flaubert and Dr Achille-
Cléophas Flaubert, the director of the Hôtel-Dieu, a major hospital in Rouen.
In the nine-year interim between Gustave’s birth and that of his elder brother,
Achille, the Flauberts had two other sons, and both had died at an early age.
Another son arrived shortly after Gustave, only to die within a few months.
Sartre asserts that Caroline was not emotionally invested in Gustave, her fourth
son, partly because she feared that he might expire as quickly as his brothers
and partly because she longed for a little girl. Apart from the fact that Caroline’s
frequent pregnancies only ceased after she gave birth to a female, there is no
‘hard’ evidence to support the Sartre’s claim that she longed for a daughter. Hazel
E. Barnes regards it as plausible, though, but notes that Sartre is at his ‘most
 The Family Idiot and the Objectification of a Self 93

fascinating’ and ‘least excusable’ when he draws conclusions about Caroline’s

treatment of baby Gustave on the basis of these three infant mortalities (1981b:
38), as he does in the following passage:

Certainly infant mortality was severe at the time. However, the death of those
three young males has always seemed suspect to me. Without ‘mothering’ an
infant declines, in one month or three. Can we imagine that the virtuous and
‘glacial’ Caroline senior was the cause of their precipitous retreat? Struck by the
previous mournings, she would have made an effort in Gustave’s case. It is to this
that he owed his life. Just barely. But afterward, she might have cried: ‘Another
one!’ and the newborn, in the face of such a welcome, would have beaten a quick
retreat.
(FI II/IF II: 70n./723n.)

Although Barnes is certainly right to advise us to approach this kind of

speculation about Caroline’s mothering of her sons with caution, Sartre makes
no attempt to conceal the fact that he is voicing a suspicion in this excerpt,
which is taken from a footnote. In the main text, his analysis is more careful and,
importantly, the conclusions he draws from the picture he paints of Flaubert’s
infancy are corroborated later on, through the dialectic of The Family Idiot. With
this in mind, let us consider Sartre’s discussion in the third chapter of the first
volume on ‘The Mother’.
Sartre assures his readers that Caroline loved her sons, but with the
qualification that her love of them was secondary to, and derived from, her love
of her husband. It was out of duty to her husband that she cared for his sons.
Her love of them was, therefore, general, for ‘whatever the child, the seed was
the same’ (FI I/IF I: 85/95). ‘More a wife than a mother’: Sartre states that this
epithet fits Caroline Flaubert but suggests that ‘incestuous daughter’ is more apt
(FI I/IF I: 86/95). A brief biographical analysis of Caroline Flaubert is offered in
support of this rather startling idea. It underlines the facts that Caroline’s mother
died giving birth to her in November 1793 and that her father, Dr Fleuriot, died
ten years later, as key to comprehending Caroline’s character. What Sartre infers
from these facts is that Caroline’s earliest years must have been characterized
by a double-frustration. Without a mother, she would have adored her father;
yet, as his health began to deteriorate after his wife’s death, he was most likely
inattentive towards the daughter whom he seemingly did not love enough ‘to
want go on living’ (FI I/IF I: 73/82). While widowers may harbour feelings of
bitterness towards the child that ‘killed’ their wife, Sartre warns that there is no
94 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

way of knowing that this was so in Caroline’s case. Nor, he adds, is it possible to
know how Caroline experienced being orphaned at ten years old. What we can
know, though – because it is confirmed in the dialectic of Caroline’s life – is that
when her father died, Caroline decided that ‘she would marry only her father’
(FI I/IF I: 73/82) and hoped to have a daughter, so that she could compensate for
the frustrations of her own childhood by vicariously experiencing the happiness
of her daughter. This hypothesis explains many aspects of Caroline’s relationship
with her husband1 and it motivates Sartre’s claim that she reserved her tenderness
for the little girl that would follow Gustave.2
Although the evidence for Sartre’s conclusions about Caroline’s mothering
is somewhat slim, a remarkable piece of testimony seems to confirm them.
Caroline’s granddaughter states that, whenever they passed the Flaubert family’s
first home, 8 rue de Petit-Salut, in Rouen, her grandmother would declare that
it was there that she spent the best years of her life (FI I/IF I: 76/85). When one
realizes that the Flauberts lost two out of three children at their first address but
only one out of three at their second, it seems odd that Caroline would consider
the time she spent at the first address her happiest, as a crude arithmetic
comparison would lead us to expect her to have experienced twice the amount
of grief there. Sartre maintains that this mother’s nostalgia for her first residence
only makes sense if she did not truly suffer as a result of these first bereavements
because her happiness depended entirely upon her husband. If this is correct,
then Caroline’s closeness with her husband during the first seven years of their
marriage, before he took on a more senior role and the family took up residence
in the Hôtel-Dieu, would explain her sentiment.
There are some good reasons to accept Sartre’s view that Caroline Flaubert
nursed Gustave with proficiency but without tenderness. Although, arguably,
Sartre needed only to emphasize the point that Gustave arrived after two dead
sons, as it is almost self-evident that a mother trying to protect her infant
from death, but fearing that he might die all the while, would have been overly
cautious and somewhat remote from him. What remains to be shown is whether
this could cause her to ‘constitute’ her child in the way that Sartre argues
she does. Sartre’s argument for this view runs as follows. During his infancy,
Gustave would have been diligently handled, changed, washed and fed at regular
intervals, which meant that he would have never felt his physical needs urgently
and so he would not have had the impetus to cry out or break out of ‘the magic
circle of passivity’ (FI I/IF I: 131/138). Without tears or revolt, Gustave would
have felt a very particular frustration: ‘want of tenderness’ (FI I/IF I: 129/136).
What baby Gustave lacks is precisely the kind of reassurance regularly provided
 The Family Idiot and the Objectification of a Self 95

by less efficient mothers, who respond lovingly when their infant cries while
they try to determine what is wrong. He is handled as a delicate ‘thing’ without
having the compensation of also being recognized as a cherished subject.
As Sartre sees something like ‘the rudimentary form of a project and
consequently of action’ in infants’ expressions of their desires (FI I/IF I: 130/137),
he argues that Gustave’s situation deprived him of his earliest opportunity
to realize himself as an agent because it did not allow him to feel desire long
enough for him to learn how to communicate it through gestures and sounds.
Gustave would not have felt desire as a call to action but as ‘a prelude to an
agreeable an imminent surfeit’ (FI I/IF I: 130/137), so his response to desire
was simply to wait. Rather than bursting into the world of action with wails
and wordless demands, he lingers quietly outside of it. Sartre’s conclusion that
Caroline’s style of parenting3 is the source of Flaubert’s passive constitution is in
line with D. W. Winnicott’s influential theory that a ‘good-enough’ mother’s (or
primary caregiver’s) active adaption to the needs of her infant ‘gradually lessons’
(1971: 13), so as to give the infant the opportunity to adapt to the reality of being
separate from the mother and to bring forth creative gestures to communicate
their needs to her. It is also dialectically confirmed insofar as Flaubert’s later
passive behaviour becomes comprehensible when considered in relation to
Sartre’s picture of his infancy.

The paternal curse

Though Flaubert’s relationship with his mother is effective in explaining
Flaubert’s passivity, it is not, in Sartre’s view, enlightening with regard to Gustave’s
later expressions of defensive aggressiveness, his preference for the imaginary
over the real, or his eventual decision to become a writer. Sartre’s examination of
Gustave’s relationship with his father aims to shed light on these matters.
Sartre starts out by establishing what kind of man Dr Flaubert was. His
depiction of him as a good, irreligious, well-respected man of science, whose
short temper was infamous, seems accurate. Flaubert’s biographer Benjamin
F. Bart characterizes the hospital director similarly, noting that he might ‘have
been considered a saint, had it not been for the bite of his wit and the keenness
of his mind, which made him feared as the devil’ (1967: 6). Barnes agrees that Dr
Flaubert was ‘certainly anticlerical’ but queries Sartre’s ascription of the ‘atheistic
materialism of the eighteenth century’ to him due to a lack of grounds (1981b:
40). However, it is worth noting that the ‘loving portrait’4 Gustave provides of
his father through the character of Dr Larivière in Madame Bovary suggests that
96 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

Flaubert, at least, saw his father as one who subscribed to the philosophy of an
earlier time that replaced religious worship with a principled commitment to
physical science, since Dr Larivière is described as a man who belonged to ‘that
generation, now long gone, of philosopher-practitioners who cherished their art
with fanatical devotion’ (MB: 285/618).
The critical question for Sartre is, however, whether this great surgeon was also
a good father. Sartre’s response is ambivalent: yes and no, or rather, yes, then no.
He tells us that during the first few years of Gustave’s childhood, when Achille-
Cléophas is fooled into thinking that Gustave’s education is under control, he
was relatively affectionate. The period that lasted from Gustave’s third year until
his seventh is Gustave’s Golden Age (Age d’Or), in which he experienced being
the primary object of his father’s affections.5 This ended abruptly when, as a
consequence of his prolonged illiteracy, Gustave fell out of his father’s favour.
As all the love and validation in Gustave’s childhood came from his father, he
would have experienced Dr Flaubert’s turn away from him as a terrible blow.
Moreover, as his brother Achille was nine years his senior and absent most of the
time, little Gustave had forgotten to envy him during his Golden Age. However,
Gustave’s Fall commences from the moment that unflattering comparisons
between him and his scholarly elder brother begin to be made and it, therefore,
coincides with Gustave’s realization that he ought to envy the brother whose
share of the paternal heart is larger than his own. As Dr Flaubert was an old-
fashioned paterfamilias, Sartre affirms that the status of firstborn in the Flaubert
family is not merely a ‘minimal advantage that dims and disappears in bourgeois
families when the brothers had both reached adulthood’ (FI I/IF I: 334/345): the
firstborn was ‘born to be’ his father’s successor and so Gustave’s secondary status
was an immutable fact.
In addition to the obstacles presented by Flaubert’s passive constitution, Sartre
argues that Gustave sought to extend his Golden Age for as long as possible and,
as written language symbolized the first step on the path towards being sent away
to school for him, he ‘challenged this symbol with a symbolic refusal’ to learn his
letters (FI I/IF I: 355/367). Now, Gustave’s intention is not to vex his parents but his
awareness of his intention in his inability to learn his letters plunges him into feelings
of guilt and self-loathing. These feelings are intensified by Dr Flaubert’s response to
his learning difficulties, which is to take his son’s education into his own hands.
Though Achille-Cléophas succeeds in correcting the deficiency in the son that had
humiliated him (Gustave learned to read within a few months), Sartre accuses him
of having ‘bungled’ everything else in the process since the memories of this private
tutelage would haunt Flaubert for the rest of his life (FI I/IF I: 355/367).
 The Family Idiot and the Objectification of a Self 97

Sartre identifies overt submission (FI I/IF I: 376–86/388–99), combined

with passive resentment (FI I/IF I: 386–409/399–422), and envy (FI I/IF I: 409–
38/422–52) as the key features of Gustave’s response to his early humiliation
before his father. And, as Barnes notes, Sartre’s analysis of Flaubert’s juvenilia
‘does much’ to assuage the misgivings we may have about his hypothetical
reconstruction of Gustave’s Golden Age (1981b: 53). Further, Sartre maintains
that because his analysis of Flaubert’s juvenilia is the first to illuminate it in the
‘black light’ (lumière noire) of his earliest years (FI I/IF I: 46/57), it is also the
first to highlight its psychological significance as the chronicle of how Flaubert
experienced his Fall. As he puts it, ‘we are frankly learning what – as far as I
know – has escaped the experts on Flaubert: Gustave is subjectively certain that
he has lived the most atrocious and rigid life from the age of seven to twenty-
three . . . for having been exiled, frustrated, and tortured from the age of seven
by his family – in other words, by his father’ (FI I/IF I: 184/194). In Flaubert’s
adolescent writings, Sartre finds evidence that his experience of his illiteracy ‘as
trauma’ was pivotal to his eventual project to become a literary great. He singles
out Whatever You Want (Quidquid volueris, written in October 1837) as being
particularly useful for facilitating a comprehension Gustave’s determination to
‘overcompensate for the humiliations he could not forget’ (FI I/IF I: 30/41).
Whatever You Want is a story about a half-man, half-ape creature called
Djalioh, who is the issue of the rape of a slave-girl by an orangutan, orchestrated
by a gentleman, M. Paul, ostensibly in the name of science.6 Djalioh is raised
by M. Paul and his associates in Brazil until he reaches the age of sixteen, when
he is brought to France by M. Paul. In France, Djalioh passes for a man, even
though his strange appearance and mannerisms inspire aversion in all who meet
him. Djalioh does not speak in the story, except for once near the start, where
he utters a word so quietly that it is mistaken for a sigh. Chief among the things
Djalioh cannot communicate is his love for Adèle, M. Paul’s fiancée. This causes
him great distress. On the day of M. Paul and Adèle’s wedding, the pain of seeing
the couple exit the church triggers a seizure in Djalioh, in which his lips ‘became
animated as though he were mimicking rapid speech . . . and his eyeballs rolled
in his socket like those of an idiot’ (EW/OJ: 87/255).
After their wedding, M. and Mme. Paul de Monville move to a fashionable
district of Paris, where Djalioh lives with them for almost two years. One day,
however, he picks up the Monville child from his cradle and launches him at
the floor with all his might, killing him instantly. Then, he makes his way to the
salon, where Adèle is reading a novel. Again, he experiences extreme frustration
at not being able to communicate his passion for her; he stammers and strikes
98 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

his head in rage, as if to say: ‘What, do you mean I can’t even say one word to her
or detail all my torture and suffering, with nothing to offer her except the tears of
an animal or the cries of a monster!’ (EW/OJ 99/269). Djalioh’s display frightens
Adèle, who is evidently repulsed by him. After she shouts at him to leave her
alone, he sexually assaults her and kills her in the process. He then proceeds to
run around the room in a mad frenzy and to kill himself by running headfirst
into the marble fireplace. Flaubert concludes the tale by telling us7 that Adèle
was buried, Djalioh’s skeleton was put on display by the Ministry of Zoology,
and M. Paul remarried.
This ghastly tale certainly has a general adolescent appeal, but Sartre also
finds peculiarities in it which he reads to indicate that Flaubert, at fifteen, is still
reeling from the humiliations he endured at the hands of his father when he was
seven. He reads Djalioh to represent Gustave’s idea of his former self as asinine
child, ‘easily superior to the members of our species with regard to the depth
of his tender feelings’ (FI I/IF I: 22/32). Despite being unable to communicate
his emotions, Djalioh feels them so intensely that they affect his physical
health. Importantly, Sartre believes that when Gustave describes how Djalioh’s
somatizes his emotional response to the Monville wedding, he is re-imagining
one of his own childhood stupors (hébétudes) as seen ‘from the outside’ and that
he qualifies it as such by using the same words that were used to describe him
when he had them: ‘like an idiot’ (FI I/IF I: 24/34). Creating Djalioh, in Sartre’s
view, is Gustave’s means of indirectly denouncing the criminal thoughtlessness
of his parents, who had simply taken his stupors to evince idiocy and internal
vacancy, without realizing how they masked the most violent storms. In brief,
it is his way of saying ‘here is what took place inside me!’ (FI I/IF I: 24/34).
Flaubert regards the storms that rage inside Djalioh/Flaubert when he looks like
an idiot to others as ‘poetry’ (poésie), according to Sartre, because adolescent
Flaubert has a peculiar conception of poetry as ‘a silent adventure of the soul’
that operates not through language but ‘against’ it (FI I/IF I: 25/35). Djalioh is a
poetic being because, in him, ‘[l]ogic had given way to poetry’ (EW/OJ 82/250).
It is as if there is a finite amount of space for logic and poetry to share, so that
more logic means less poetry. What is more, the implication in Whatever You
Want seems not to be that Djalioh wants to speak and cannot, but that he refuses
to try because he knows that the poetry of his soul cannot be communicated
through language. This leads Sartre to conclude that, for adolescent Flaubert,
language involves the application of a reductive logic that ‘kills’ poetry by
making it commonplace – ‘words de-compose’ the poet’s exquisite sentiments
(FI I/IF I: 27/37).
 The Family Idiot and the Objectification of a Self 99

Barnes agrees with Sartre that the themes of ‘paternal malediction’ (in the
characterization of M. Paul) and ‘fraternal jealousy’ (in Djalioh’s murder of the
Monville child) are present in Whatever You Want (1981b: 54). Despite accepting
that Flaubert denigrates M. Paul’s character to the point that it becomes a literary
fault, though, she rejects Sartre’s claim that Dr Flaubert is the primary target of
young Flaubert’s attack. Instead, she takes M. Paul to embody ‘rational science’
and Djalioh, the ‘feeling soul’ (1981b: 55). This reading is largely based on the
comparison Flaubert invites between Djalioh – a natural monster, with limited
intelligence and an expansive, tormented soul – and M. Paul – a monster of
civilization, with great intelligence and a shrivelled soul – in which Djalioh
emerges as superior. This interpretation fits with Flaubert’s post-romantic
disdain for scientific materialism. That said, I believe that Sartre’s interpretation
is preferable to the one Barnes recommends because it does a better job of
explaining an important feature of this tale, as well as a particular feature of
Gustave’s response to his situation.
First, consider Sartre’s point that Gustave (mistakenly) holds his father
entirely responsible for the passive constitution he inherited from his mother
and the misery it causes him because it is only when he makes a serious effort to
enter into language that he begins to feel culpable and idiotic, and because he has
‘neither the means nor the desire’ to explain the suffering he endures as a result
of his mother’s behaviour (FI I/IF I: 225/233). This appears to be confirmed in
Flaubert’s decision to present M. Paul as the source of Djalioh’s pathos: Djalioh is
passive because he is part ape, he suffers because he is part man ‘and this explosive
mixture has been willed by his creator’ (FI I/IF I: 225/234). If resentment of his
father was not at the heart of this tale, Sartre maintains that some tragic accident
would have been presented as the cause of the unnatural union that produced
Djalioh. It is significant that it is M. Paul’s will, not chance, that creates a subject
who can only suffer. And Sartre’s explanation of this significance is convincing:
just as M. Paul ‘was not afraid to father that anthropoid’, Achille-Cléophas was
not afraid to father ‘a younger brother’ (un cadet); just as Djalioh is ‘irremediably
brutish’, Gustave is irremediably a younger brother (FI I/IF I: 225/234).
Second, if we read Djalioh as representing ‘a possible Gustave’ as Sartre
suggests (FI I/IF I: 211/219), parallels between Gustave’s Fall and Djalioh’s
misery become apparent: Djalioh’s agony begins as soon as he enters France,
which Sartre argues signifies culture in the tale because Djalioh was not made
to imitate a man in his childhood home of Brazil (FI I/IF I: 208/217). But while
culture is the catalyst for the realization of Djalioh/Gustave’s misery, M. Paul/
Achille-Cléophas is presented as the cause. Djalioh’s suffering thus results from
100 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

a ‘paternal curse’ (malédiction paternelle) that mirrors Flaubert’s own (FI I/

IF I: 400/413). Hence, the pessimistic message of Djalioh’s story: it is of little
consequence when you discover a failing in yourself if this failing ‘is a congenital
defect’ (FI I/IF I: 327/338–9). And, as we shall see, Sartre’s analysis explains
how Flaubert’s belief that he suffered from a paternal curse cements his passive
constitution by leading him to resign himself to his ‘fate’.

Pessimism and religiosity without religion

Sartre argues that Gustave, like everyone else, must interpret his experience
through the ideologies that are available to him and that, for him, these were:
Christianity (from his early education, which Sartre attributes to his mother) and
scientism (from his father) (FI I/IF I: 439/453). He observes that, in nineteenth-
century France, genuine religious faith was no longer socially acceptable for the
bourgeois male, as it was regarded as the preserve of the irrational, the naïve and
the proletariat. A public show of religiosity was acceptable, though, and it was
required of the Flaubert family because a large proportion of Dr Flaubert’s clients
were Catholic, and he would have lost many of them if his family had refused the
holy sacraments. Flaubert’s father was, therefore, an atheist within the Christian
religion. He hypocritically observed religious rites, and he expected his sons to
follow suit.
Dr Flaubert’s decision to baptize Gustave would have been ‘unforgivable’ had
he known the consequences it would have in Sartre’s view (FI I/IF I: 492/508),
for it enabled Gustave to gain a sense of purpose that would be brutally snatched
from him when Achille-Cléophas felt the time was right to make his second son
swallow the antidote to faith: ‘the healthy principles of analytic atomism’ (FI I/
IF I: 493/508). Exposing Gustave to the autopsy was part of Achille-Cléophas’s
project to disabuse him of his religious beliefs. Sartre couches his discussion of
Flaubert’s early encounters with the autopsy in terms of alienation because he
claims that taking on his father’s ‘objective knowledge’ of bodies leaves Gustave
feeling alienated from what he feels he understands of himself ‘from the inside’,
as it leads him to view people, including himself, as ‘unsuspecting cadavers’ (FI
I/IF I: 459/474). Consequently, he comes to apprehend his self as unreal because
he has been made to believe that only the material objects that his father can see
and dissect are real.
Further, the time that Dr Flaubert thought was the ‘right time’ to rid his
younger son of his religious beliefs was quite possibly the worst time: around
the time of the Fall. So, just as Gustave becomes aware of his inadequacy in the
 The Family Idiot and the Objectification of a Self 101

eyes of his earthly father, his heavenly Father is exposed as a myth. If Gustave
was made to experience the Death of God while he was grieving his Golden
Age, Sartre contends that these two events would have seemed to him to be
fundamentally connected, with the result that the only things about him that
would have seemed real would be his failure and his stupidity, which his father
had discovered in him and which his father punished him for by killing his God.
Religion could have saved Flaubert from the neurosis he goes on to develop in
Sartre’s view. For had he believed in God, he could have substituted the ‘absolute
Eye’ for the ‘surgical eye’ and regarded his self not as an ‘unreal’ side-effect of
material events, but as the reality of his being in its ‘native transcendence’ (FI I/
IF I: 497/513).
Further, Sartre contends that Flaubert must have comprehended his great need
for faith because religion remained a ‘permanent temptation’ for him (FI I/IF I:
496/511) and that this leads him to interpret his inability to acquire faith as both
an extension of the paternal curse and confirmation of his pessimistic belief that
‘the worst is always certain’ (FI I/IF I: 512/529). What could be worse than God
not existing? God existing for everybody except you. Again, Sartre finds support
for this view in Flaubert’s adolescent work, particularly in Rage and Impotence
(Rage et Impuissance, written in December 1836), the tale of a man buried alive
who knocks on the wood of his coffin lid when he hears footsteps above but is
not heard and dies blaspheming. Sartre’s reading of this tale as an analogy for
Gustave’s own relation to God is apt. The man in the coffin needs to attract the
attention of those above him or die but, precisely because he has been put into
a coffin and buried, he cannot be heard. Compare: Gustave cannot reject his
father’s atheism if God does not reveal himself, but God only reveals himself to
the faithful so, precisely because he is in the thrall of his father’s atheism, God
will never exist for him. Nonetheless, Sartre contends that Gustave attempts to
reconcile the scientism of his father with the remnants of his faith by fetishizing
it, so that he comes to understand himself as ‘a piece of cursed matter’ (FI I/IF
I: 460/475).
By the end of Part I of The Family Idiot, Sartre has completed his exposition
of how Flaubert’s passive constitution is a consequence of his familial situation.
Flaubert was constituted as a passive agent by his mother during his infancy.
He could have re-constituted himself with the support of a father – earthly or
divine – whom he believed loved him unconditionally. He was unable to do
this, though, because Dr Flaubert showed him that his love was conditional, and
that God does not exist. Flaubert’s awareness of his father’s role in cementing
his passive constitution leads him to hold Dr Flaubert entirely responsible for
102 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

it and for the suffering it causes him, and to imagine that he is a victim of a
paternal curse, which then enables him to ‘justify’ his passivity by believing that
he was born to suffer. Still, Sartre maintains that ‘no one can be alive without
creating himself ’ and ‘going beyond what others have made of him’ in a way
that manifests his original choice (FI I/IF I: 627/648). Thus, constitution is not
predetermination. Let us now turn to consider how Sartre strives to comprehend
Flaubert’s response to his situation, including his constitution, by interpreting
his process of self-formation in terms of an original choice.

Comprehension

As Sartre interprets the pinnacle of Flaubert’s self-formation8 to be ‘the novel

he published’ (FI II/IF II: 7/658), the main objective of The Family Idiot is
to account for how Flaubert managed to make himself into The Author of
Madame Bovary. Having established how Flaubert suffers because of his passive
constitution, Sartre asserts that Flaubert’s self-formation must have continually
revolved around his attempt to integrate this malady ‘on the level of stress’ (FI
II/IF II: 9/659). Here, ‘stress’ refers to the disharmonious unity that results
from the apprehension of a ‘nonassimilable [inassimilable] element’ in the
self, as well as the subject’s ‘global defense’ against it (FI II/IF II: 5/656). Sartre
compares the fusillade of attacks deployed against a nonassimilable in stress to
the antibodies that charge through a transplanted organ, which ultimately do
more harm to the organism they seek to protect than the ‘threat’ they attack.
Despite the vast amount of collateral damage it causes, stress is effective because,
although it neither neutralizes nor eliminates the nonassimilable aspects of
the self, it allows the subject to oppose and surpass it. Hence, Sartre construes
stress as the typical response to a nonassimilable,9 which gives the process of
self-formation its typical spiral shape10 as subjects must continually strive to
assimilate nonassimilables through a totalizing movement that both surpasses
and preserves them. So, by retracing the circular pathways that brought Flaubert
to a nervous crisis in January 1844, then to the production of a masterpiece in
1856, Sartre believes that he can organize the biographical facts about Flaubert
in a way that provides the basis for a re-totalization of his self. To comprehend
the particular form of stress that characterizes Flaubert’s self-formation, Sartre
relies on the imaginative self-expansions he finds in Flaubert’s fictional works,
which, he believes, enabled Flaubert to gain a deep comprehension of his self
that he was unable to convert into self-knowledge.
 The Family Idiot and the Objectification of a Self 103

Autism, femininity and autoeroticism

From testimonial evidence, Sartre deduces that Gustave must have eventually
succeeded in learning to read and write between the age of seven and eight
(FI I/IF I: 6/16). As we have seen, he attributes Gustave’s early difficulties with
language not to any cognitive defect but to his constitution and to a related desire
to prolong his Golden Age. But he holds that Gustave’s passive constitution
still made learning how to read and write more difficult for him than for other
children. He defends this view by dividing the understanding of language into
two phases. The first is passive: recognizing the meaning of the words uttered.
The second involves a kind of action: reconstituting the meaning of the utterance
and making contextual adjustments. Unsurprisingly, Sartre’s contention is that,
before he learns how to read, little Gustave gets by without this second, active
phase of understanding. His passive constitution, which prevented him from
seeking to express himself as an infant, also prevents him from interpreting the
acts of others as expressions because his limited awareness of his own agency
makes it difficult for him to comprehend the intentions in the acts of others.
This theory that Gustave’s passivity is the source of his trouble with language
is not irrefutable, but it is compelling. If his passive, incomplete understanding of
words causes him to regard words as ‘things’ in themselves as opposed to ‘signs’
that point to something else, this would account for the reports of his extreme
gullibility in his early years.11 If little Gustave mistakes words for things, it would
not occur to him to consider the intentions of others as a factor in determining
their meaning. Moreover, if Sartre is correct about Gustave’s passivity being the
source of his infantile autism because it causes him to receive words rather than
interpret them, then it is no small wonder that written language eluded him
for so long. Although the gap between spoken language and written language
is significant for most children, oral communication is already an activity. But
for a child who had managed to participate in oral communication – albeit
poorly – for years, without applying the ‘reducing agent’ that would allow him to
appreciate speech as action (FI I/IF I: 156/163), the leap from spoken to written
language would be enormous because actual activity cannot be avoided in the
interpretation or the production of written language.
Flaubert had managed to make this enormous leap by the time he went to
school at the age of eight years, but Sartre argues that his constitutional passivity
continues to structure all his relationships and that this is clearly apparent in his
‘perverse’ sexuality (FI II/IF II: 32/684). Describing Flaubert’s sexuality this way
is not meant to indicate any negative moral judgement, however, as Sartre uses
104 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

the term ‘perverse’ to refer to ‘any erotic attitude that implies an unrealization
geometrically multiplied’, meaning any desire to push erotic imagining to the
limit in reality (FI II/IF II: 42/694). Because Flaubert feels that his self is a thing
in the hands of others, Sartre submits that he strives to reclaim it by making it
‘a fascinating object for his executioners and simultaneously for himself ’ (FI II/
IF II: 32/684). To become this kind of sexual object, Sartre argues that Flaubert
believes that he requires a change of sex, because it is women who derive pleasure
from being ‘taken’ (FI II/IF II: 33/685). If Flaubert fantasizes about being
‘taken’ as a woman, does this mean that he desires a man as a sexual partner? Is
Flaubert a homosexual? Sartre anticipates such questions and reminds us that a
commitment to ‘nominalism’ precludes us from resorting to ‘classifications’ as a
means of explanation (FI II/IF II: 34/686). It will not do to simply label Flaubert
a ‘homosexual’, as the aim of psychoanalysis is to understand Flaubert’s sexuality
in its particularity. Sartre’s efforts to comprehend Flaubert’s sexuality then reveal
why the label ‘homosexual’ is unsatisfactory, as they lead him to conclude that
Flaubert chiefly desires to be caressed by a ‘mother-goddess’ (déesse-mère)12 and
that if he sometimes desires a man, this is because he ‘endeavours to convince
himself in front of his mirror that he is of the other sex’ (FI II/IF II: 351/704).
To be sure, Sartre’s interpretation of Flaubert’s sexuality makes some
problematic, out-dated heteronormative assumptions. However, the idea that
Flaubert’s erotic desire is an upshot of a deeper, general preference for the
imaginary over the real is what is most important here. Sartre’s key claims are
that Flaubert desires the specific kind of sexual partners he does so that he may
imagine himself as a woman and that he takes most pleasure in playing ‘at being
masturbated’ (FI II/IF II: 43/695). These claims find strong support in Sartre’s
exposition of the theme of the mirror and the fetish in Flaubert’s literature
(FI II/IF II: 32–60/684–712) and in his analysis of Flaubert’s uncomfortable
relationship with reality. For a taste of the latter, let us briefly consider Sartre’s
discussion of Flaubert’s fetishization of Louise Colet’s slippers alongside Léon
Dupuis’s theft of Emma Bovary’s glove in Madame Bovary.
In the novel, Léon theft of Emma’s glove occurs during the period in which
he is infatuated with her but regards her as the virtuous wife of another, whom
he can never have any real romantic relationship with. To compensate for
unattainability of the real Emma, he turns to fetishizing things connected to
her, such as a rug she made and even her husband (!), whom he regards as the
‘unconscious support for the crystallization his wife has worked on him’ (FI II/
IF II: 65/718). One day, when Emma is sewing at Homais’s house, she drops one
of her gloves and Léon sneakily pushes it under the table. Later, when everyone
 The Family Idiot and the Objectification of a Self 105

else is asleep, he returns for the glove and takes it to bed with him. Reading
between the lines of Flaubert’s text, Sartre deduces that Léon then proceeds to
masturbate with the glove, imagining that hand inside it is ‘Emma’s virile hand’,
which illustrates the fetish of the ‘female hand and the phallus merged’ through
Emma’s glove functioning as a ‘transcendence object’ (FI II/IF II: 66/719). Then,
Sartre proceeds to argue that Louise Colet’s slippers served the same function
for Flaubert. Flaubert avoided meeting Colet in person whenever possible
because when she was there in person, she always ‘disturbed his dreams’ (FI
II/IF II: 67/719). Hence, he much preferred the company of his mistress’s little
brown slippers since, through the aid of these objects, he could find her in
the imaginary, ‘reduced to the muteness of inanimate matter and at the same
time, active, devouring, tractable’ (FI II/IF II: 67/719). Accordingly, Flaubert’s
sexuality is ‘perverse’ (in the Sartrean sense) because it is centred on his desire to
control the object that he is for the other by imagining the other being embodied
in an object, which, unlike a real other, does not hide its vision of him behind
a Look. In a word, Gustave is an ‘onanist’ because he desires to discover his
‘femininity in sexual excitement’ and while the other is the means to this end,
his eroticized, feminized image of his self disappears ‘if the other is too real’ (FI
II/IF II: 62/714–15).

A spectacle for his sister

The false belief that human being is justified in advance is necessary for
children’s psychological wellbeing in Sartre’s estimation, as it protects them from
discovering the existential truth that their being is unjustified before they have
had the opportunity to learn two other truths that enable them to cope with
it. The first of these is that humans are agents and the second is that human
being has a (human) meaning, even if it lacks a preordained purpose. Children
who learn the existential truth before having discovered to these two ‘protective’
truths are, Sartre believes, likely to view themselves as superfluous objects in
an absurd universe, without a ‘mandate to live’ (mandat de vivre) (FI I/IF I:
133/140). They may also fail to discover their positive power to infuse the world
with meaning. Sartre submits that an unhappy consequence of Flaubert’s Fall
and loss of faith occurring together is that he was one such child.
The belief that only objectively observable things are real is a key factor
in alienating Flaubert from his self on Sartre’s account. In ontological terms,
Flaubert’s ‘I’ is ‘another’ for him because he mistakes his being-for-others for
the primary form of his being. As he knows that he is real for others, he seeks
106 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

to discover his self by witnessing the object he is for others. But since nobody
can see their self from the outside, Flaubert needs something to ‘reflect’ his
self back to him. Sartre traces Flaubert’s fascination with mirrors to the period
that followed the Fall when he saw in the mirror the promise of being able to
see himself as others do. However, he holds this first iteration of ‘Operation
Reflection’ (l’Opération Reflet) was doomed to fail (FI II/IF II: 107/762) because
one cannot truly apprehend oneself as an object in the mirror, because one can
always anticipate (as a subject) the movements reflected.
What Gustave needs, then, is a human mirror, and he can find none better
than his little sister, Caroline. As a girl, Caroline is naturally inferior in the eyes
of the paterfamilias so, unlike Achille, she is not considered a rival. And while
she may be ‘docile and fascinated’, she is nevertheless ‘active’, which is enough
to allow him to ‘lose his reflection’ (FI II/IF II: 108/762). So, little Gustave acts
before Caroline and Sartre tells us that acting came naturally to him because he
believes that the only meanings he can make are those that he can make others
believe. With Caroline, Operation Reflection has a greater chance of success.
But success in this operation will not solve the problem of Flaubert’s alienation
from his self because he can never know for sure that his meanings are affirmed
in consciousness of another; the best he can hope for is to ‘believe’ that he is
believed (FI II/IF II: 22/673). More worryingly, this iteration of the operation
further alienates him from others precisely because it involves him acting, which
means that he apprehends his self as a being for others in the third person, which
precludes him from experiencing reciprocal relations in the second person;
Flaubert is for himself a ‘he’ who puts on a show for ‘them’. Sartre therefore
compares Flaubert’s experience during this second iteration of Operation
Reflection to that of the celebrated Shakespearian actor Edmund Kean13 as he
plays Hamlet insofar the intimate ‘you’ is impossible for each of them since
they both are ‘separated from their audience by the blaze of the imaginary that
envelops them even more than footlights’ (FI II/IF II: 109/764).
Sartre states that Caroline could have saved Flaubert from his miserable
alienation after his Fall, as well as from his eventual neurosis, as his performances
for her could have been the prelude to reciprocal love. But, because Caroline was
her mother’s pet, she needed no further love or validation; she did not need
Gustave as he needed her. She was content to let Gustave amuse her and to
receive his affection as a ‘delicious luxury’, but she did not feel a need to give him
anything in return (FI II/IF II: 80/733). This plunges Gustave deeper into the
imaginary because he is always aware that his sister’s gratitude is addressed to
 The Family Idiot and the Objectification of a Self 107

the character he plays when he says ‘I’ and this crystallizes his image of his self
as a ‘He’ instead of a ‘me’.
Barnes contests this interpretation and notes that, even if we grant Sartre
his premises, his conclusion about Caroline and Gustave’s relationship is too
pessimistic because Caroline gave Gustave something very precious indeed: a
positive role to play within the Flaubert family. Through his performances for
her, he chooses the acts through which he objectifies his self for the first time.
While Caroline did not prevent her brother’s crisis, Barnes makes the point that
she is, most likely, ‘one of the influences that led him to make of it a beginning
and not an end’ (Barnes 1981b: 97). Indeed, by Sartre’s own admission, to act
upon oneself in order to act upon others is ‘passive action’, but action nonetheless
(FI II/IF II: 21/672), and Caroline gave Flaubert an incentive to act in this way.
Hence, Barnes’s concern that Sartre understates Caroline’s positive influence
upon young Gustave is well founded, since it is in his relationship with Caroline
that Gustave gains his first opportunity to express himself as an agent, even if
his response to this opportunity is consistent with his passive constitution. It is
Caroline who facilitates Flaubert’s conversion from a silent, suffering ‘poet’ to a
child actor because playing the fool for her enables him to realize that, as well
as escaping into the imaginary, he can also turn reality into the imaginary. And
this realization puts him on the path that will eventually lead him to become a
creative writer.

Conversion from idiot to actor

Although Flaubert’s first project to become an actor is quickly abandoned,
Sartre considers it to be of tremendous significance for comprehending Flaubert
since the core element of this choice endures the first revolution of the spiral of
Flaubert’s self-formation and every one that follows: his original ‘choice of the
unreal’ (choix de l’irréel) (FI II/IF II: 10/660).
What is unusual about Gustave’s first choice of vocation,14 according to Sartre,
is that it represents a choice not to be but to pretend. His elder brother, for example,
wants to be ‘that heroic doctor’ and the fiction in this case – the imaginary self as
heroic doctor – holds the promise of future realization; it anticipates a ‘passage
from being toward being’ (FI II/IF II: 10/661). Flaubert’s theatrical ambition,
however, reverses ‘the “normal,” “healthy,” practical order of things by making
the real a means to unreality’ (FI II/IF II: 11/661). This first choice to be an
actor reveals the Flauberts’ younger son as ‘a suspicious character’ because it
shows that his first major move in his self-formation is to place himself ‘outside
108 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

humanity’ (FI II/IF II: 11/661). Although following his first vocation could have
saved Flaubert ‘at least some of the stress’ that would later make him a writer (FI
II/IF II: 118/773), Sartre argues that he was prevented from following his dream
of becoming an actor by his family’s silent disapproval. There was no need for
them to actively forbid little Gustave from following this dream, as the son of a
chief surgeon does not become a ‘buffoon’ (bateleur), he becomes a lawyer or a
physician ‘by force of circumstance’ (FI II/IF II: 214/873–4). So, it was not long
after Gustave’s entry into school that he abandons his project to become an actor.
The death of Flaubert’s dream to become an actor was, however, promptly
followed by the birth of the Garçon: a giant boy character that he and his
schoolboy friends invented to laugh at the follies of humanity. Flaubert
once described the Garçon as embodying ‘the spoof of materialism and
Romanticism’ (FI III/IF II: 151/1257), and Sartre finds this description telling
not only in relation to Flaubert’s response to the two dominant and conflicting
ideologies of the time, but also in relation to why this character gained general
popularity among Gustave’s schoolboy friends, who took turns at playing him.
Sartre explains that, for these boys, caught between the Romantic ideals of
the books they read and the materialist principles of the bourgeoisie in their
lived experience, it would have seemed to them that ‘the spoof of materialism
is Romanticism and the spoof of Romanticism is materialism’ (FI III/IF II:
152/1257). Hence, he reads the popularity of the Garçon as an indication
that Flaubert and his classmates were united in their struggle with the same
two ideologies, as the Garçon’s laughter provided them all with an imaginary
solution to ‘the antinomy of the century’ (FI III/IF II: 152/1258). To take one
example of the Garçon’s antics that Sartre analyses: every time the schoolboys
passed Rouen cathedral, one would remark that this fine example of Gothic
architecture ‘elevates the soul’, then whoever was playing the Garçon would
laugh loudly, agree that it is beautiful and announce that so too is Saint
Bartholomew’s Day, the Edict of Nantes and the massacres of Louis XIV’s
dragoon’s. Against the Goncourts, who see in the Garçon a prefiguration of
Homais in Madame Bovary and judge him to mock the bourgeoisie who would
call upon ‘a few massacres’ to condemn ‘Holy Religion and the works of art it
inspires’ (FI III/IF II: 152/1258), Sartre maintains that the Garçon’s laughter
cuts both ways, attacking bourgeois materialism and Romantic sentimentalism
at the same time; it laughs at all human projects by reducing its grandest
to folly. For if the religious instinct is the highest in humankind but it can
only find ‘fulfilment in fanaticism which leads inevitably to genocide’, then
human beings must be so monstrously constructed that their ‘love for Being’
 The Family Idiot and the Objectification of a Self 109

drives them to annihilate it (FI III/IF II: 156/1263). The Garçon is therefore
simultaneously sadistic, masochistic and nihilistic for Sartre. He even describes
him as the ‘reverse image’ of Jesus because while Jesus strives to save us, the
Garçon strives to reveal our damnation to us (FI III/IF II: 162/1268).
Although it brings them much joy, Sartre argues that the schoolboys’ creation
of the Garçon only provides them with an imaginary solution to the ideological
difficulties they face, which is to say no real solution at all. Moreover, by playing
the Garçon they do not enjoy an immediate, reciprocal relation with one another
since it is mediated by the imaginary. The imaginary functions as the basis of a
real bond for them; it ‘governs and vampirizes the individuals who perpetuate its
being’ (FI III/IF II: 215/1323). Playing the role of the Garçon may allow Flaubert
and his classmates to experience being part of a ‘group-in-fusion’ (groupe en
fusion) (FI III/IF II: 221/1329), but the Garçon is ultimately a trap because it
only brings those who create him together through imaginary action. Further,
Sartre infers that Flaubert’s anomalous relation to reality makes playing the
Garçon particularly damaging for him. Through an examination of what he
calls the ‘ego-ology’ of the Garçon (FI III/IF II: 186/1293), he concludes that
this giant boy is a caricature of the young Flaubert, which means that playing
the role of Garçon is yet another iteration of Operation Reflection for him,
through which he dissociates himself from his lived experience by assuming the
imaginary perspective of another consciousness. As Flaubert is likely to have
been one of the chief creator-curators of the Garçon, Sartre proposes that the
Garçon represents ‘a new spiral’ in the movement of his self-formation, for the
function of impersonating the Garçon is more specific than acting: ‘It tends to
make everyday reality a materiality without being’ (FI III/IF II: 341/1453). The
Garçon and his avatars become a permanent fixture in Flaubert’s life and works,
in Sartre’s view, because it is only through imagining himself as another that he
can approach the task of comprehending his experience. Despite the failure of
Flaubert’s initial project to become an actor, then, Sartre claims it drives first
revolution of his spiral and continues to play ‘a leading role’ in Flaubert’s self-
formation ever after (FI II/IF II: 118/773).

Magical behaviour and imaginary acts

Flaubert’s nervous crisis15 is the primary focus of Part Three of The Family
Idiot, entitled ‘Elbehnon, or the Last Spiral’. Sartre borrows the ‘Elbehnon’ from
the title of Mallarmé’s prose piece, Igitur or Elbehnon’s Folly (Igitur ou la folie
d’Elbehnon), which details its protagonist’s (Igitur’s) journey into nothingness,
110 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

death and spiritual discovery as he descends into a tomb. As Bettina Knapp

points out, circular symbols of eternity are associated with ‘Elbehnon’, or the
number eight (1977: 204). So, Sartre’s title hints that Flaubert’s ‘Last Spiral’ is a
‘looping of the loop’ that locks him in a closed, repetitive circuit. The reference
to Mallarmé’s piece is therefore an apt indicator of Sartre’s purpose in this part:
to present Flaubert’s illness as his means of becoming a great artist through an
intentional withdrawal from the world, which spells the end of the spiral motion
of his active life.
Flaubert’s nervous attacks are usually attributed to epilepsy, despite their
atypical presentation.16 However, Sartre concentrates on the atypical features
of Flaubert’s illness to arrive at an alternative understanding of it. He notes
that Dr Flaubert initially diagnosed his son with a minor apoplexy and only
much later settled on the diagnosis of epilepsy, due to the cyclical recurrence of
Gustave’s attacks. Dr Flaubert’s initial mistake was, he believes, ‘imposed on him
by the illness itself ’ since ‘nature of hysterical diseases is to look like what they
are not’ (FI IV/IF III: 113/1885). So, Flaubert’s psychological illness is certainly
‘hysterical’ in Sartre’s view, but he refuses to subsume it under any more specific
nosological category17 in a way that would preclude his analysis from unveiling
its full meaning for Flaubert. Indeed, as Sartre is concerned only with the human
meaning of Flaubert’s attacks, the medical title ought not concern us either.
What is important for us to consider here is the evidence for Sartre’s claim that
Flaubert’s illness has a meaning.
As we know, Sartre posits the human meaning of behaviour lies in its motive.
If he is to show that Flaubert’s illness is not the mere effect of a meaningless
mechanism, then he needs to establish a ‘motive’ for it – i.e. a reason why Flaubert
becomes ill that he is necessarily conscious of but not necessarily thetically aware
of. The ‘motive’ he proposes is that Flaubert’s family were pushing him towards a
future he wanted to resist but had no means to resist. ‘Doctor, barrister, solicitor,
magistrate, notary, subprefect, judge’: this is the range of family-approved
professions, which, due to his passive constitution, he deems to delimit ‘his
destiny’ (FI III/FI III: 366/1478). Despite holding this ‘motive’ to uncover the
presence of intention in Flaubert’s neurosis, Sartre is adamant Flaubert did
not knowingly will to become ill. As Flaubert’s constitution robs him of the
possibility of actively refusing anything his family imposes on him, revolt could
only have appeared to Flaubert as an impossibility and necessity at once since
he had to take up one of the family-approved professions but none of them
would enable him to pursue his own fundamental project. He cannot disobey
his parents, so the only way for him to escape the destiny they are forging for
 The Family Idiot and the Objectification of a Self 111

him is to magically change ‘his being’ (FI III/IF III: 369/1482). Unlike voluntary
and rational behaviour that results from deliberation about how to act, ‘magical
behaviour’ (conduits magiques) is Sartre’s term for a behaviour of escape that
aims to change a situation when all ordinary behavioural routes to change seem
to the subject to be blocked: fainting in terror is a prime example, as it aims to
‘eliminate’ a threat by eliminating the threat in the subject’s experience (BN/EN:
584/489).18
After establishing the ‘motive’ and the magical means, Sartre argues that
Flaubert’s neurosis was also ‘planned’ by showing that his crisis was prefigured
by at least two years in November (Novembre), a novella that Flaubert completed
in the winter of 1842. He highlights many similarities between this tale of a
life illuminated in the tragic light of the apparent necessity of an early death
and the particulars of Flaubert’s first attack in 1844. The accuracy of Flaubert’s
description of the depression suffered by the unnamed hero of this work has
been remarked upon (Unwin 2004: 46), but Sartre places special emphasis on a
peculiar feature of Flaubert’s description of the hero’s malady: his ‘deculturation’
(FI III/IF III: 610/1730), evinced by his neglect of basic human rituals of self-
care such as shaving, washing, changing his shirt, removing shoes if one’s feet
get wet, etc. He affirms that this deculturation is distinct from the kind of apathy
usually associated with depression, as it appears to be more of a symbolic refusal
than an effect of a general loss of desire. The unnamed hero of November also
achieves a remarkable death ‘by thought’ (FI III/IF III: 633/1754), which Sartre
reads to signal the presence of an intention in Flaubert’s later collapse. One of
the reasons for this is that the sudden, silent death of the hero, who is also first
narrator, gives way to the discourse of a second, who emerges ‘from nothingness’
to comment on and publish the hero’s incomplete work (FI III/IF III: 600/1721).
The schizophrenic character of this break in November is also noteworthy as
it invites the question of whether Gustave is already ill. For Sartre, it certainly
indicates that Flaubert is ‘preneurotic’ if not yet ill. Though transitions from
third- to first-person narration were common in the epistolary and confessional
novels of the time – e.g. Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des
jungen Werthers), which Flaubert had read before writing November – November
breaks the rule of this convention, which is that the second character must be
introduced at the beginning and return at the end. Further, as the narrative of
November repeats itself at various intervals and does not appear to conform to
any plan to offer clarity to the reader, Sartre thinks it reasonable to conclude that
the introduction of a second a narrator at the end is an ad hoc addition, which
testifies to its author’s disordered state of mind.
112 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

Sartre also suggests that Flaubert may have had a secondary, economic
‘motive’ for his crisis since being incapable of work would allow him to claim
his inheritance in advance. Though he anticipates the objection that he may be
going too far here, as this motive seems like a rational one, he maintains that
Flaubert’s illness cannot be understood at all unless it is interpreted primarily
as ‘the “stress” of a son of a good family for whom money earned is necessarily
vulgar and who can only accept bequeathed wealth’ (FI IV/IF III: 110/1881).
Of course, Gustave became a chronic patient, not an aristocrat, and Sartre
readily acknowledges that Flaubert’s crisis and continued illness reduced him
to the condition of a perpetual child, extreme dependence, and, all in all, to
an existence drastically dissimilar to – and, for most, significantly less desirable
than – that of an aristocrat. Nonetheless, he maintains that aristocratic-being
and patient-being were similar enough in a crucial respect for Flaubert: both
aristocrats and patients are excused from having to earn a living.
Additionally, Sartre finds the fact that Dr Flaubert had to forbid his younger
son from doing disturbingly accurate impressions of an epileptic beggar as
further evidence of Flaubert’s neurotic ‘planning’. Dr Flaubert, he explains,
would have been keenly aware of the fragility of the mind and would not have
doubted that mental illness ‘is catching’ (FI III/IF III: 615/1736), and, as Gustave
would have deferred to his father on all medical matters, we can infer that he was
testing his capacity for autosuggestion by aping an epileptic. Or, in other words,
he was ‘doing what he had to do to become mad’ (FI III/IF: 615/1736).
Comprehending the meaning of Flaubert’s first attack is key to comprehending
the meaning of his illness as a whole in Sartre’s view, as it results from Flaubert’s
intention to reject the future that was being made for him, which is reaffirmed by
all the later ‘referential attacks’ (FI IV/IF III: 16/1784).19 The first attack occurred
one night in January 1844, when Gustave and his brother were returning from
Deuville, where they had been to view the plot of the family’s future country
house. Gustave was driving the carriage when, suddenly, a wagon emerged
from the darkness and passed the carriage on the right, somewhere near Pont-
l’Evêque, after which Gustave let go the reigns, fell to his brother’s feet and
remained motionless. Achille, fearing that his brother might be dead or dying,
carried him to a nearby house, gave him emergency treatment, and drove him
back to Rouen that same night, once he had regained consciousness (FI IV/IF
III: 3/1771). The stimulus for the first attack appears to be the waggon that burst
out of the darkness and disappeared again. This event would have undoubtedly
given Gustave a fright, but there was no threat of an accident once the waggon
has passed. So, Sartre deduces that Gustave must have realized how devastated
 The Family Idiot and the Objectification of a Self 113

he was that there was no accident after he overcame his initial shock. If a fatal
accident could have satisfied Gustave, it is most likely to be because death is
an irreversible and a state from which he could never return to his miserable
situation. Madness is also irreversible and if Gustave’s intention is to ‘cut himself
off from his future being by a moment of irreversibility’, it serves his purpose
equally well (FI IV/IF III: 70/1840).
What is more, Sartre contends that Flaubert’s illness provides Flaubert with a
means of retribution for the paternal curse via passive, symbolic parricide because,
by martyring himself through his obedience to his father, he forces his father into
devastating grief and guilt over his son’s symbolic-social death. To support this
view, Sartre points to evidence in the correspondence that suggests that Flaubert
‘quite consciously’ experienced his father’s death as a deliverance (FI IV/IF III:
123/1895), reports that the frequency of Flaubert’s attacks reduced drastically after
his father’s death in 1846 (FI IV/IF III: 124/1896), and interprets Flaubert’s late
work, The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator (La Légende de Saint Julien l’hospitalier,
1877), to express his guilt for having wished for his father’s death and for having
symbolically killed him two years in advance (FI I/IF III: 128–38/1900–10).
Altogether, this leads Sartre to conclude that although the catastrophic nature
of Flaubert’s first attack may give the impression that it was accidental and
without reason, Flaubert’s nervous crisis becomes fully comprehensible when
it is treated as a conversion rather than a physiological affliction. Although
Sartre’s commitment to nominalism generally leads him to eschew diagnostic
categorization, he uses the term ‘neurosis’ to designate ‘an intentional adaptation
of the whole person to his entire past, to his present, and to visible forms of
his future’ and a way ‘of making oneself bearable’ (FI I/IF I: 168/176). Thus,
he presents Flaubert’s conversion to neurosis as an intentional adaption that
enables him to make his situation bearable through the passive-aggressive-
defensive acceptance of his self as the ‘loser who wins’,20 because being incapable
of pursuing a suitable bourgeoise profession allows him to devote all his time to
writing. Becoming a ‘man-failure’ (homme-échec) therefore allows Flaubert to
‘win’ by becoming an artist (FI V/IF 3: 7/13).

Knowing

Sartre contends that Flaubert comprehends himself ‘better than most people
do, though not better than those who know themselves’ (FI II/IF II: 68/721).
This is because he sincerely reflects upon his experience when he imagines his
114 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

self embodied in another – e.g. Djalioh, The Garçon, Emma Bovary. So, while
Flaubert only makes an insincere show of his self when he speaks or writes about
himself in real life, he expresses the subjective truth of his experience when he
creates ‘fabrications’ (FI I/IF I: 150/157). Reliving his lived experience through
the imaginary experience of imagined others may allow Flaubert to gain an
exceptional comprehension of the meaning of his experience, but it also enables
him to avoid turning this comprehension into self-knowledge because as soon as
he comes close to grasping an aspect of his self through this medium, he starts to
generalize and presents what he discovers as an aspect of human nature.21 Hence,
Flaubert’s strategy of comprehension ‘through fabrication’ only ever furnishes
him with the dawning of a reflection that could lead to self-knowledge, since
his projection of his own intentions onto others prevents him from engaging in
thetic self-reflection (FI III/IF III: 429/1544). Here is a remarkable passage in
which Flaubert appears to testify to this view:
I am a strange character . . . I thought to know myself for a time, but by dint of
analyzing myself, I no longer know at all what I am; also I have lost the silly
pretence of wanting to grope about in that obscure chamber of the heart that
is lit from time to time by a brief flash that reveals everything, it is true, but in
return it blinds you for a long time. You tell yourself: yes, I have seen this or
that, oh yes, I shall certainly find my way, and you set off and run up against all
the corners, you lacerate yourself on all the angles. If I know where this analogy
came from, I’ll be damned. It has been a long time since I have written anything,
and from time to time I need to exercise a little style. (Flaubert as quoted by
Sartre FI III/IF III: 433–4/1548)

Although it is taken from Flaubert’s correspondence, Sartre does not question

its sincerity. This is perhaps partly because it is taken from a letter Flaubert
wrote to his sister and Sartre concedes that there is ‘some truth’ in Flaubert’s
relationship with her (FI II/IF II: 110/764). But what more than anything else
would signal Flaubert’s sincerity here from a Sartrean perspective is the fact that
he generalizes what he says by switching to the second person towards the end,
so as to present what he has just described as if it were something everybody
experiences. Further, Flaubert also strives to retroactively ‘fictionalize’ what he
has written this experience by describing it as an exercise in ‘style’.
What precedes Flaubert’s dismissal through generalization and fictionalization
is, Sartre believes, a truthful admission, whose importance to a study of Flaubert
cannot be overstated. Of particular interest to Sartre is the way that Flaubert
describes the brief flashes of clarity he experiences as something that ‘happens’
to him because it reveals his conception of moments of luminosity, of personal
 The Family Idiot and the Objectification of a Self 115

revelation, as ‘visitations’ rather than intellectual achievements (FI III/IF III:

436/1551), which shows that he does not conceive of himself as an agent, not
even when he pursues self-knowledge. Moreover, as the bursts of light that
invade Flaubert’s psyche are described as blinding, Sartre reads this to suggest
that Flaubert identifies comprehension of lived experience with the ‘denial
of self-knowledge’ (IF III: 1551/FI III: 436), since all that is revealed is almost
simultaneously concealed, before it can be analysed, thetically understood and
known.
Nevertheless, Flaubert’s ‘fabrication approach’ to self-analysis is partly
successful in Sartre’s view since, without applying any psychoanalytical method,
Flaubert manages to deepen his comprehension of his lived experience through
the creation of stories about ‘others’. As Sartre sees it, Flaubert has already gone
as far as it is possible to go in terms of comprehending the subjective significance
of the acts that constitute his self via his literary form of ‘self-analysis’. Once
his analysis of Flaubert has ‘comprehended the comprehension’ contained in
Flaubert’s literature, then, Sartre believes its next task is to understand Flaubert’s
self ‘objectively’, so that the ‘subjective comprehension’ can be synthesized with
an ‘objective understanding’ of him.

The objective spirit

After uncovering the subjective meaning of Flaubert’s neurosis over the course
of the first two (original French) volumes of The Family Idiot, Sartre aims to
determine, objectively, whether Flaubert’s neurosis harmed or benefitted him
in the third. Although there are certainly some objective-progressive elements
in the first two volumes, the discussions of objective structures – e.g. the
institutional whole, historical contingencies, social class and the bourgeois
family structure – are, by Sartre’s own admission, ‘highly particularized’ there
as they are only examined insofar as they impacted the ‘familial intersubjectivity
of the Flauberts’ (FI V/IF 3: 4/10). Sartre also purposely refrains from passing
any judgement on Flaubert’s neurosis in the first two volumes to concentrate on
gaining an empathetic comprehension of it, before assessing the objective facts
of his situation. From the (mainly) subjective-regressive analysis in the first two
volumes, Sartre concludes that Madame Bovary is the work of a neurotic. This
provides the objective-progressive analysis with its main question: How can the
tremendous popular success of Madame Bovary be explained if it is a work of
‘neurotic literature’22 that would ordinarily have a limited, psychological appeal?
A satisfactory objective evaluation of Flaubert’s neurosis must, in Sartre’s view,
116 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

account for the ‘strange reciprocity’ between Flaubert and the French reading
public of his era that made it possible for a product of his neurosis to make
him the most celebrated author in all of France upon its publication (FI V/IF 3:
32/40).
To this end, Sartre considers it necessary to gain a sense of ‘the Objective
Spirit’ (l’Esprit objectif) in France during the second half of the nineteenth
century. He assures his readers that while the notion of the Objective Spirit has
its origins in Hegelian idealism, it does not refer to anything intangible when
it is reinterpreted within the context of historical materialism. In this context,
it denotes ‘nothing more than culture as practico-inert’ (FI V/IF 3: 35/43). Or,
more specifically, ‘the totality to this day (in any day) of the imperatives imposed
on a man by any given society’ (FI V/IF 3: 39/47). Sartre’s notion of the Objective
Spirit is perhaps best understood as a further development of the notion of
‘bewitched matter’ (matière ensorcelée) discussed in the Critique (CDR I/CRD I:
219/329), since it posits that every object of cultural significance appears with
objective ‘directions for use as an order’, as well as a subjective sense (FI V/IF 3:
39/47). Everyone’s basic, pragmatic interpretation of the objects that populate
their world is informed by the Objective Spirit, which may issue imperatives
such as ‘Shake before use’ if the object is a packaged consumer product, ‘Slow
down’ if it is a pedestrian crossing, or ‘Admire me’ if it is a celebrated artwork. The
Objective Spirit, then, appears everywhere in human experience as a ‘practical
seal imposed on the raw material’ (FI V/IF 3: 39/47).
In The Family Idiot, Sartre confines his analysis to just one dimension of the
Objective Spirit: the domain of literary production. He combines insights from
What Is Literature?23 with those of the Critique by drawing an analogy between
literary works and canned goods. The irredeemable changes that living thought
undergoes when it is transformed into a material product (the literary text) are
likened to those undergone by fresh fruit when it is immersed in syrup and
canned. The totality of ideas that the author unites to create a literary work
represents ‘a multiple and contradictory comprehension of our species as a
product of history, of present circumstances, and of the future that it is preparing
for itself ’, but once this totality transformed into a literary text, it becomes
‘canned thought’ (pensée de conserve) (FI V/IF 3: 40/48), awaiting re-totalization
at some later time by readers who will interpret it in new situations and find new
meanings in it. However, just as the processed peach still resembles the fresh
peach it once was, certain elements of the original living thought are preserved
in the literary text – ‘a skeleton of imperatives’ remains intact and directs the
reader’s thoughts (FI V/IF 3: 46/54). This understanding of the literary text
 The Family Idiot and the Objectification of a Self 117

supplies the theoretical basis for Sartre’s analysis of how the Objective Spirit
influenced Flaubert and his generation of aspiring writers by delivering a series
of imperatives concerning ‘literature-to-be-written’ (littérature-à-faire) through
‘literature-already-written’ (littérature-faite) (FI V/IF 3: 49/58).
Sartre’s exposition of the literary face of the Objective Spirit as it would
have appeared to the group of French, male, middle-class creative writers
born between 1820 and 1830 that he calls ‘Postromantics’ begins by
reconstructing the series of givens that situate this group in relation to culture
and, specifically, literature. The Postromantics, he argues, would have studied
many celebrated writers from the seventeenth century and earlier at school,
such as Racine, Bossuet and Shakespeare but these authors would have had
little influence on them, for they would have seemed ‘quite dead’ (FI V/IF
3: 57/66). The eighteenth century marks the beginning of ‘living literature’
for the Postromantics (FI V/IF 3: 58/67). Although the great authors of this
era were also dead, they were still relevant – the Postromantics would have
admired them because their parents did, even if they found their works
somewhat dated. Hence, Sartre compares the imperatives the Postromantics
encounter in the great works of the previous century to grandfatherly advice
and he argues that the overarching message of it is ‘Transcend your class if you
want to write’ (FI V/IF 3: 98/110).
The advice of the grandfathers, however, was not all the Postromantics had
to go on. Another set of authors, whose work published in the first half of the
nineteenth century, held even more sway over them: the Romantics. Sartre
considers the influence of the Romantics comparable to that of older brothers.
But here he identifies a problem: the sanction issued by the older brothers
contradicts the imperative of the grandfathers. The grandfathers instruct the
budding artists of the 1840s to transcend their class by writing, but the older
brothers tell them that they cannot write because they are not aristocrats. As the
imperatives issued by literature-already-written about literature-to-be-written
are contradictory, they cannot be reconciled by ordinary, rational means. Thus,
Sartre proposes that, in order to become the authors that their class membership
bars them from becoming, the Postromantics were forced to make recourse to
‘magic’ – i.e. they were forced to adopt a neurotic attitude towards literature.
As Sartre understands it, the ‘art-neurosis’ (Art-Névrose) (FI V/IF 3: 35/43) of
the Postromantics is a form of stress and, as such, it is an effort to assimilate a
nonassimilable with the means at hand. More specifically, it is the Postromantics’
effort to assimilate their class-being (the nonassimilable) into their selves by
manipulating their class ideology (the means at hand).
118 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

What was the class ideology the Postromantics had to work with? According
to Sartre, the bourgeoisie of the 1840s required a new form of ‘humanism’ for
their ideology to ‘justify’ their continued exploitation of the proletariat. As
the humanism of the previous century had affirmed the equality of all men,
it was clearly unsuitable. Thus, the new ideology that the bourgeoisie of the
mid-nineteenth century came to endorse is described by Sartre as ‘a black
humanism’ (l’humanisme noir) (FI V/IF 3: 264/286), on the basis that it is less
a humanism than a thinly disguised misanthropy, combined with aspects of
Darwinism (FI V/IF 3: 236/258).24 Briefly, the thought is that black humanism
enabled the bourgeoisie to affirm that they deserved to belong to the ruling class
because they had risen above their animal needs. The wretched conditions of the
disadvantaged classes then become ‘justifiable’ on the grounds that the people
in them were either incapable of or unwilling to transcend the animal condition.
From the perspective of black humanism, the proletariat represent ‘pure nature’,
which is not human nature but ‘animal nature in its pure inhumanity’ (FI V/IF
3: 229/249). The bourgeoisie therefore sought to emphasize their ‘distinction’
from the working classes through their ‘ostentatious denial of human animality’
(FI V/IF 3: 230/249) – through uncomfortable attire, through strict routines,
through ‘moderation’ pushed to the point of deprivation, and so on.
Having been conditioned as young bourgeois males, the Postromantics have
internalized black humanism. But they adapt it so that it ‘justifies’ their disdain
for ‘bourgeois nature’, which they imagine that they have risen above through
having developed a superior artistic-aristocratic sensibility. Accordingly, Sartre’s
Postromantics initiate themselves into an imaginary, aristocratic order that he
calls the ‘Knights of Nothingness’ (chevaliers du Néant) by refusing the bourgeois
utilitarianism of their fathers and vowing to write ‘for nothing and no one’ (FI V/
IF 3: 136/150). Their art-neurosis thereby allows them to ‘unrealize’ their lived
reality as young bourgeois males.
Sartre supports this interpretation of the Postromantics with a rich study of
their works, which highlights key points of harmony in their artistic output that
transcend the differences between individual artists and the formal features of
their works. One of the most significant points of harmony emphasized here
is the perspective of a ‘panoramic consciousness’ (conscience de survol), which
describes the human world from an inhuman ‘Absolute’ point of view (FI V/IF
3: 333/358). But what belies the inhuman nature of the Postromantic panoramic
consciousness is its expression of two ‘all too human’ attitudes: misanthropy
and misogyny. Further, the way that these attitudes are expressed in the work
of the Postromantics invariably exposes the author as a bourgeois male writing
 The Family Idiot and the Objectification of a Self 119

in the middle of the nineteenth century. The very desire to portray the world
from the perspective of a panoramic consciousness is misanthropic in and of
itself, as this perspective trivializes every aspect of human reality. Further, the
technical difficulties involved creating an artwork that describes the world
from this impossible perspective expose the misanthropy of the Postromantics
as being unmistakeably bourgeois in virtue of asserting the ‘primacy of the
ideal and of the human thing over the humble lived experience of daily life’ by
demanding the ‘sacrifice of the man to his product’ (FI V/IF 3: 352/379). Unlike
the art of the Romantics – who might claim to have written their masterpiece in
one night, ‘mingling ink with the tears they shed’ (FI V: 96/107) – the art of the
Postromantics requires painstaking labour.
The kind of misogyny present in the work of the Postromantics is also ‘typical
of the midcentury’, according to Sartre, because it demonstrates an inability to
reconcile ‘the sensual relations of the body with the human relations established
between couples’ (FI V/IF 3: 338/364). As sex and love were largely relegated
to separate spheres in this era, many bourgeois males (even those that were
married) would have used prostitutes to satisfy their sexual needs ‘in the shadow’,
because it was forbidden to ‘treat one’s wife like a mistress’ (FI V/IF 3: 338/364).
Among the toxic effects of the prevalent dichotomic conception of ‘woman’ as
either ‘angel’ or ‘beast’ (FI V/IF 3: 339/365) is the potential to render all women
despicable in the eyes of a nineteenth-century bourgeois, heterosexual male,
who is already ashamed of his sexual desires and frustrated by the fact that he
cannot satisfy them without feeling still more shame. It would not be surprising,
Sartre states, if this male should come to detest both kinds of woman: ‘the whore
in the name of the angel’ whom he is permitted to love but not to make love
to, and ‘the angel in the name of the whore’ he shamefully makes love to but is
forbidden from loving (FI V/IF 3: 339/366).
With this objective understanding of Flaubert’s situation as a Postromantic
writer in place, we can now turn to the question of whether Flaubert’s neurotic
literature is, in part, a ‘solution’ to the problem of his class-being is substantiated
by the way that Flaubert objectified himself in his literary works.

Sex and death, eating and decay

Sartre posits that the misanthropy and the misogyny discoverable in Flaubert’s
literature have a basis in a very bourgeois disgust with human bodily needs. A
definitive feature of this disgust as it manifests itself in Flaubert’s work, though,
is that it is rooted in the recognition of a fundamental relationship between sex
120 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

and death. To take just one example of this attitude in one of his earliest works,
the narrator of Whatever You Want (1837) remarks, seemingly with pride, that
although Lord Byron may have felt revulsion at the sight of a beautiful woman
eating, he cannot even look at one without imagining her cadaver (EW/OJ:
96/265). Rather than being a temporary, adolescent preoccupation, this is a
recurring theme in Flaubert’s work. An excellent example is even discoverable in
one of his very last works, the final version of The Temptation of Saint Anthony
(La Tentation de Saint Antoine, 1874), where a graphic exchange between ‘Death’
and ‘Lust’ exposes their unholy allegiance:

I hasten the dissolution of matter!

‘I facilitate the scattering of the germs!’
‘Thou destroyest that I may renew!’
‘Thou engenderest that I may destroy!’
‘Active my power!’
‘Fruitful my decay!’ (Flaubert 1926: 158)25

In the last line of this excerpt, the word ‘fruitful’ (féconde) – which usually has
positive connotations: fertile, nourishing, life-giving, etc. – is linked directly
to decay. If Flaubert’s intention is to demoralize his reader, as Sartre argues it
is, then this line serves him well. Fertility and decay are typically conceived in
opposition to one another: one is productive, the other destructive; one gives
life, the other takes it; and so on. But, by assuming the imaginary perspective of
death, Flaubert shows that this opposition is only apparent; he reveals decay as
the ‘ultimate truth’ of organic life and living fruit as merely a temporary structure
in the cycle of decay.
Further, Sartre contends that the motif of shameful procreation26 in Flaubert’s
literary work indicates that sex has a deep association not only with death for
him, but also with defecation when it results in childbirth. As we have seen,
Sartre’s subjective-regressive analysis indicates that young Flaubert’s feelings
of helplessness, guilt and self-loathing led him to the conviction that his birth
was the result of wilful cruelty on his father’s part. This, Sartre believes, leads
Flaubert to believe that the sexual act becomes positively shameful when it
results in conception. So, while Flaubert’s misogyny may allow him to deflect
his shame about his sexual exploits onto women,27 Sartre proposes that if he had
procreated, he would have felt as though he had ‘made excrement – because his
father did when he engendered him’ (FI I/FI I: 208/216). And, indeed, Flaubert
certainly seems to express genuine terror at the prospect of Louise Colet being
pregnant with his child when he urges her to take the nineteenth-century
 The Family Idiot and the Objectification of a Self 121

equivalent of emergency contraction – a ‘remedy to bring on the Redcoats’ –

because she knows ‘how that monster lies in wait for his victims’ (1982/1973:
109–10/337–8).
Nutrition also has negative connotations in Flaubert’s literature, which Sartre
finds unsurprising since eating implicates the eater as an active participant in
the cycle of decay when considered from the perspective of death. The amount
of textual evidence in support of Sartre’s contention that pleasure in digestion
functions as an indicator of ‘spiritual mediocrity’ (FI I/IF I: 441/445) in Flaubert’s
literature is almost overwhelming. Characters portrayed as enjoying their food
include Ernest, the traitorous lover (EW/OJ: 110/282); Homais, the figurehead
of bourgeois mediocrity (MB: 286–7, 297/619–20, 630–1); Bournisien, the priest
who failed to save Emma’s soul (MB: 100, 297/427, 630–1); Dr Larivière, the
ineffective medical expert (MB: 286–7/619–20);28 Charles Bovary, the cuckolded
husband (MB: 39/363); Hannon, the self-serving Carthaginian general (S:
99/176); and the hypocritical Elders in Salammbô (S: 222/372). When these
characters take satisfaction in their digestion, they appear grotesque because
Flaubert uses gustatory satisfaction as a cipher for negative qualities such as
ignorance, complacency or self-absorption. Of special interest is Flaubert’s
tendency to depict representatives of religion as having ‘a fundamental relation
to food’ (FI IV/IF III: 173/1945), which Sartre reads as an upshot of Flaubert’s
resentment about his inability to take solace in faith. The feasting of the Elders
in Salammbô renders them particularly deplorable, as they gorge themselves
‘on the pretext of some devotion’, while the other citizens of Carthage starve (S:
22/372). Their eating thus symbolizes their hypocrisy and their complacency
with the suffering of others at once.
According to Sartre, Flaubert’s tendency to link the gratification of bodily
desires with the prolongation of suffering or the creation of new subjects of
suffering in his work evinces the depth of his comprehension of his own struggle
to live because it works on the assumption that life is suffering. However,
Sartre seeks to progress from the comprehension of the subjective meaning
of Flaubert’s disgust to knowledge of the role it plays in his self-formation.
By explaining Flaubert’s peculiar aversion towards biological processes as a
consequence of his early encounter with the autopsy, his fetishized materialism,
and his internalization of his class ideology, Sartre reveals that the ties between
Flaubert’s literary expressions of disgust towards the organic and his bourgeois
social conditioning run deep, and this is perhaps most apparent in the way
that Flaubert’s characters ‘distinguish’ themselves through suffering. As Sartre
observes, the only sentiments that find grace with Flaubert ‘are those that shatter
122 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

the individual’ (FI I/IF I: 322/333). Again, there is a vast amount of evidence
to corroborate this view, and the feelings that find grace with Flaubert may
be considered under two categories: (1) Masochistic devotion, which involves
self-denial and the desire to degrade, deprive or sacrifice oneself for another,
either earthly (romantic masochistic devotion) or divine (religious masochistic
devotion); and (2) Insatiable desire, which cannot be satisfied by earthly things
and which may be manifested through hedonistic behaviour, extreme ennui (if
the subject realizes that nothing on this earth can satisfy them), or it can evolve
into masochistic devotion.
Romantic masochistic devotion is a common theme in Flaubert’s fiction. It is
apparent in many of the early works Sartre analyses in The Family Idiot, especially
Passion and Virtue (Passion et vertu, 1837), where the female protagonist,
Mazza, murders her husband and two children to be with her lover, then kills
herself when she discovers he is engaged to another woman. It is also evident
in Whatever You Want, through Djalioh’s adoration for Adèle.29 There are also
clear examples of romantic masochistic devotion in Flaubert’s mature work,
such as: Mâtho’s slavish devotion to Salammbô,30 Justin’s adolescent worship of
Emma Bovary31 and Louise’s adoration of Frédéric32 in A Sentimental Education.
All these characters suffer for their love of another and their suffering seems
to distinguish them from other characters. Similarly, religious masochistic
devotion is a central theme in Flaubert’s portrayals of the hermit saints (in The
Temptation of Saint Anthony and The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator), as well
as in A Simple Heart (Un Cœur simple, 1877), the story of Félicité, a servant who
devotes herself to others all her life, then, finally, to Loulou, a parrot that appears
to her as the incarnation of the Holy Spirit.33
Masochistic devotion appears to result from an insatiable desire that serves
as the hallmark of a superior soul in Flaubert’s fiction. Sartre reads ‘Great Desire
– or infinite privation’ to be the hallmark of a noble kind of dissatisfaction with
the world in Flaubert’s literary-metaphysical schema (FI II/IF II: 435/1103).
He examines how it presents itself in the character of Mazza, before it evolves
into masochistic devotion, to show that Mazza represents a ‘black saint’ (Sainte
noire) for Flaubert by the rule that ‘if impossible gratification is the painful
mark of election for great souls, it is because they desire nothing less than the
infinite’ (FI I/IF I: 421/434), Mazza suffers because of the boundlessness of her
desire. Flaubert likens her to ‘those who drink seawater to quench a thirst that
it only increases’ (EW/OJ: 127/300) and, as it seems that nothing on earth could
quench her thirst, she will only find peace by destroying herself. Emma Bovary
appears to be a black saint like her predecessor Mazza, although, unlike Mazza,
 The Family Idiot and the Objectification of a Self 123

she is unable to transform her insatiable desire into masochistic devotion. We

will return to this issue in the next chapter but, for now, it is worth noting that
one of the indicators of Emma’s greatness-blackness is her ambivalent, even
pathological, relationship with food, which illustrates her dissatisfaction with
the life it sustains.34
Naturally, Sartre argues that Flaubert considers himself a ‘black saint’ (FI I/
IF I: 428/442). Flaubert’s choice to represent himself through black saints in his
literature would certainly follow from him having a conception of himself as
both a victim of the paternal curse and one of the literary-aristocratic elect, as
black souls are victims of the ‘profound injustice’ of being born into a world
that is too small for them and they are doomed to suffer this injustice ‘like the
most agonizing passion’ due to their superior sensibilities (FI I/IF I: 438/452).
Hence, one lesson we may draw from Sartre’s analysis of Flaubert’s literature
is that Flaubertian black saints suffer on account of their great desire for more
than the earth could ever provide them with, and that they will be driven to
self-destruction, unless they can channel their energy into religious masochistic
devotion, like Félicité and Salammbô (before she falls in love with Mâtho),35 or
to art, like Flaubert.

Flaubert’s choice of the imaginary

From the very beginning of The Family Idiot, Sartre affirms that understanding
the meaning of Flaubert’s childhood stupors (hébétudes) is key to understanding
his genius, since they are the condition for his eventual crisis at Pont-l’Evêque,
which enabled him to become a creative writer. Sartre’s idea is that if Flaubert
is constituted in such a way that the smallest demand, the slightest discomfort,
could plunge him into a daze through which he escapes his reality, then it is
possible to comprehend Flaubert as having a fundamental relationship to the
imaginary. This is not to say that Flaubert does not experience the world as real
in the same way as everyone else, only that he escapes it more frequently than
most because imagining is his default response to difficulty and discomfort. This
‘inclination’ towards the imaginary would also have to have been something that
Flaubert lived with and worked on in the years between his illiteracy and the
production of his masterpiece, Madame Bovary.
After revealing Flaubert as a Postromantic who writes to escape his
reality, Sartre calls attention to the irony in the fact that the Postromantics,
who produce artworks so that they may ‘transcend’ their class-being in the
imaginary, produce class literature in reality.36 He also underlines the point
124 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

that their works were erroneously received by the nineteenth-century reading

public as works of ‘realism’. It is extremely telling that the ‘sham desituating’
(désituation feinte) (FI V/IF 3: 278/301) of these writers who attempt to adopt
the perspective of a panoramic consciousness is taken for realism by the
bourgeois readership, in Sartre’s view, since it highlights an affinity between
these authors’ literary means of ‘desituation’ and the bourgeoisie’s means of
‘distinction’. What seemingly escapes the Postromantics’ first readers is that the
‘realist’, ‘disinterested’, ‘objective’, perspective of the panoramic consciousness is,
in fact, the derealized, misanthropic, self-loathing, perspective of a disillusioned
member of their class. Sartre explains that the ‘enlightened’ elite could only
mistake the bleak perspective offered by the Postromantics for ‘the’ objective
perspective if there were strong parallels between their own perspective and
that of the Postromantic panoramic consciousness. That is, the ‘black’ literature
produced by the Postromantics could only have been received as ‘realist’ if its
readers had been ‘blackened’ (noircies) by the history they had made (FI V/IF
3: 307/331).
Though both the Postromantics and their first readers were deceiving
themselves about the nature of their class-being, Sartre contends that the
presence of bad faith in both author and reader is not enough to explain
the kind of rapport that existed between Flaubert and the first readers of
Madame Bovary, who fitted together like ‘hand in glove’ (FI V/IF 3: 396/426).
This could only have been possible, he suggests, if both Flaubert and his
first readership shared the same ultimate concern, which allowed them to
discover their synchronism at a deeper level. Sartre’s suggestion is that not
only does black humanism provide the bourgeoisie with an excuse for their
moral failure (i.e. their continued exploitation of the proletariat) and – with a
few adaptations – Flaubert with an excuse for his personal failure (being the
‘idiot’ of the family), but both Flaubert and his readership had a history they
sought to forget as they had both experienced a moment that had pushed
them into hatred, guilt and self-hatred. This is why the nineteenth-century
reader of Madame Bovary, who reads this text as the realist work it was never
intended to be, can take reassurance in its black message: he can use this
portrayal of a radically evil world to excuse himself ‘in his own eyes, and to
present his own intentional hatred as an innocently other intention (of that
other, the author)’ (FI V/IF 3: 313/337).
Although the two failures that unite Flaubert with the bourgeois reading
public reach different points of crisis at different times – namely Flaubert’s
nervous crisis at Pont-l’Evêque in 1844 and the massacres of the of lower classes
during the June Days uprising of 1848 – Sartre asserts that Flaubert’s neurotic
 The Family Idiot and the Objectification of a Self 125

response to his crisis represents ‘a real anticipation’ of the bourgeoisie’s response

to theirs, so that the particularity of his neurosis is suppressed in ‘the singular
universality of the work in which it is recounted’ (FI V/IF 3: 398/427). This is
what allows Sartre to answer the question of how Madame Bovary, a neurotic
artwork, could have such popular appeal. It is because both Flaubert and his
first readers need to assimilate similar nonassimilables in a similar way, and it
is enough for them to have been conditioned by the same factors for the same
neurotic ‘solution’ to work for both of them. Therefore, Flaubert’s objectification
of his neurosis in Madame Bovary enables both him and his first readers to
relieve their stress, as well as their feelings of hatred, guilt and self-loathing by
imagining that this world is objectively wicked.

Flaubert’s failure
After assessing Flaubert’s neurotic solution to a situation that was unliveable
for him ‘objectively’, Sartre concludes that, until 1870, ‘Flaubert’s relation to
the (bourgeois) real is imaginary destruction’ because his commitment to ‘art
for art’s sake’ is nothing other than an imaginary ‘cover’ that he and his fellow
Postromantic writers drew over their class-being (FI V/IF 3: 619/658). Flaubert
was in need of such a cover, Sartre maintains, because he had to conceal the
nonassimilable aspects of his self from himself – his humiliation, his failure in
the eyes of his family, his class-being, etc. – in order to have the self-esteem
he needed to pursue his fundamental project and to make art. The society
of the Second Empire had provided Flaubert and other Postromantics with
security, validation and – importantly – a means of keeping their cover over
their bourgeois-being intact. During the liberal period of the Second Empire,
Flaubert was able to live his dream of déclassement37 by playing ‘the role of a
great writer recruited by the nobility’ (FI V/IF 3: 496/529) and he was as happy
as he could possibly be, according to Sartre, since his public success seemed to
validate his life-philosophy: the loser wins.
However, when the Second Empire fell in 1870, Sartre argues that it left the
Postromantics exposed. They were forced to integrate themselves back into the
reality that they had laboured to transcend in the imaginary. They had to take
ownership of their class-being and recognize that they shared in the fears of their
class: fears of occupation, of physical violence and of losing their property. For
Flaubert specifically, Sartre contends that the outcome of the Battle of Sedan had
the effect of unravelling the imaginary cover that had shielded him from having
to deal with his real self since 1844 and of returning him to ‘the primal scene’,
where it is as if the paterfamilias, resurrected, and looks at him once more with
126 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

‘icy scorn’ (FI V/IF 3: 556/592). Sartre argues that Flaubert wakes up in 1870, as
if from a long dream, to the realization that he still is – and never stopped being
– ‘the family idiot’ (FI V/IF 3: 556/592).
After this awakening, Sartre describes how Flaubert became melancholy and
came to regard his former hopes of achieving a place among the literary elite as
nothing other than ‘the dated dreams of a parasite nourished by a mirage society’
and his books as ‘false masterpieces that a false elite pretended to admire’ (FI
V/IF 3: 477/510). During the Prussian occupation of France in the early 1870s,
Flaubert believes he has taken ill with stomach cancer. He did not have cancer, but
Sartre argues that his real, physical symptoms provide even further evidence for
the view that Flaubert is neurotic. He interprets Flaubert’s sickness in the 1870s
as another important instance of his disposition towards magical behaviour. He
compares Flaubert’s almost daily bouts of vomiting during this period to the way
a pregnant woman ‘spits into the ashes’ when she refuses to accept her condition
on the grounds that it manifests a denial that Flaubert strives to make with his
‘entire person’, including ‘his underlying reality’ (FI V/IF 3: 460/491). What is
it that Flaubert is attempting to deny here? Sartre holds that Flaubert’s letter
to his friend Ernest Feydeau, dated 28th October 1870, provides an important
clue. Here, Flaubert writes: ‘Never, my dear fellow, have I felt such a colossal
disgust. I would like to drown humanity in my vomit’ (FI V/IF 3: 460/491). As
is the case with Flaubert’s nervous attacks in the mid-1840s, Sartre argues that
Flaubert’s ‘pithiatic belief’ (croyance pithiathique) that he is ill is his attempt to
‘get out of the game’ (FI V/IF 3: 460/492). This time, however, Flaubert’s denial
comes hand in hand with some admission of guilt since, while he takes revenge
on humanity by vomiting onto them, he also vomits ‘himself ’, which appears to
signal recognition of his culpability as a beneficiary of the imperial regime. This,
coupled with the fact that Flaubert took part in elections in 1871, leads Sartre to
conclude that – for the first time in his adult life – Flaubert has become a ‘realist’
in the sense that he recognizes his need to safeguard his ‘material interests’ and
his position as a landowner in order to write (FI V/IF 3: 468/500).
This analysis of Flaubert’s illness in the 1870s certainly offers more evidence
to support Sartre’s claim that Flaubert’s nervous attacks in the 1840s were
hysterical. This is important as the success of Sartre’s project in The Family Idiot
hinges on his account of Flaubert’s nervous crisis in 1844 as meaningful, since
his claim to have gained knowledge of Flaubert’ self through his existential
psychoanalysis rests upon the claim that this most decisive event Flaubert’s self-
formation originates in an intention and is, therefore, comprehensible in terms
of an original choice. Although Sartre accepts that Flaubert’s choice to fall at his
 The Family Idiot and the Objectification of a Self 127

brother’s feet that night in January 1844 was ‘irrational’ in the ordinary sense,
he refutes the idea that it is ‘arational’ by showing that it makes more sense to
interpret it as Flaubert’s intentional response to his situation and contending
that it is also a ‘dialectical necessity’ within the totalization that is Flaubert’s self.
Sartre’s describes his analysis of Flaubert’s illness in The Family Idiot as a
kind of ‘antipsychiatry’ (antipsychiatrie), since it treats Flaubert’s illness not as
the problem, but as ‘the solution to the problem’ (OIF/SIF: 118/100). Having
now surveyed this analysis, we are now able to see why Sartre believes that
Flaubert’s neurotic ‘solution’ to his problem in 1844 ultimately did him more
harm than good. If we can roughly summarize Sartre’s dialectical understanding
of Flaubert’s crisis thus: ‘Flaubert made himself a failure in reality so that he
may achieve superiority as an artist in the imaginary’, then we can summarize
his objective understanding of it thus: ‘Flaubert made himself a failure.’ Even
though Flaubert achieved real success as a writer during the Second Empire,
which allowed him to imagine himself as a member of the literary elite for over a
quarter of a century, Sartre compares Flaubert’s relation to the imaginary to that
of a man in a room that is on fire and whose only exit leads him back into the
same inferno. Flaubert’s imaginary traps him because it gives him the ‘crazy false
hope’ that he can escape from his situation by imagining that he is in another
(FI V/IF 3: 480/517). Putting an imaginary cover over his self for himself allows
Flaubert to live but it also, tragically, has the effect of allowing the inassimilable
features of his self to be the ones that most define him for those whom he makes
his self for: his ‘original others’. Although it is obviously false to say that Flaubert
is ‘a failure’ for us, his readers, his biographers, or for the many writers who have
been inspired by his work, Sartre’s key point is that Flaubert could never feel
authentically proud of who he really was due to his psychological oppression
within the microcosm of the Flaubert family who, collectively, looked at him
through the critical gaze of the paterfamilias and saw only an idiot.
 5

Objectivity in Sartre’s study of Flaubert

Perhaps the most serious objection to Sartre’s analysis of Flaubert in The Family
Idiot is that it cannot satisfactorily support its claim to deliver knowledge of
Flaubert’s self. Sartre’s progressive-regressive approach to gaining knowledge of
a self is radically new. It aims not merely to collate the biographical facts about
its subject, but also to highlight their subjective meaning in a way that facilitates
the ‘re-totalization’ of the subject’s self. On the one hand, this way of knowing
‘through re-totalization’ potentially dissolves the epistemological barriers that
have long been presumed to exist between ‘subject’ and ‘other’ by allowing us to
gain direct knowledge of other selves. On the other hand, it seems to grant the
subject doing the ‘re-totalization’ too much power in determining the nature
of their object for it to be regarded as an object of knowledge as opposed to a
subjective image.
This chapter addresses the objection that the method of analysis employed
in the first three volumes of The Family Idiot does not appear to be ‘objective
enough’ to support its claim to deliver knowledge of Flaubert’s self. It defends
Sartre’s progressive-regressive method by showing that the psychoanalytical
critique of Madame Bovary he intended to supply in the missing fourth volume
would have provided him with a valid means of confirming (or disconfirming)
the findings of the first three. Then, it uses the clues Sartre left behind about his
intentions for the fourth volume to provide a sketch of what a Sartrean reading
of Madame Bovary would have been like. Finally, it uses this sketch to assess the
extent to which this reading could have confirmed the findings of The Family
Idiot as it stands.

Why Flaubert?

At first glance, Gustave Flaubert appears to be a bad choice of subject for Sartre’s
project of showing that the self of another can be the object of our knowledge.
First, Flaubert was dead and had been dead for quite some time. Approximately
130 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

three-quarters of a century had elapsed since Flaubert’s death in 1880 and the
mid-1950s when Sartre commenced serious work on his study on Flaubert. This
ruled out the possibility of Sartre being able to interview anyone who had known
Flaubert directly. We have already seen why Sartre believes that psychoanalysis
can only deliver stable knowledge of a self if the subject is dead in Chapter 3.
However, the inability to interview the subject or people acquainted with them
also removes the ‘obstacle’ of testimony that may oppose the analyst’s view of
the subject – precisely the kind of obstacle that we would expect a balanced,
objective analysis to have to overcome.
Another reason why Flaubert, in particular, appears to be a bad choice of
subject for Sartre is that Flaubert actively contrived to make the task of any
future biographer a difficult one. He expressed a desire to make prosperity
believe that he never existed as a man distinct from his art, and he sought to
achieve this by cultivating a particular style of writing that works rigorously to
remove any traces of the author’s personality – a style which many of his first
readers mistook for ‘realism’. As Enid Starkie observes, writers of the Realist
school in the mid-nineteenth century aimed to be ‘locally and chronologically
true to their own age, so that the characters they created could not have lived
at any other time or in any other place’, but Flaubert ‘wished to depict what
did not pass, what was the same for every age, what was eternal’ (Starkie
1967: 351). Flaubert adhered to the principle that the author must be ‘present
everywhere and visible nowhere’ (1982/1980: 238/204), precisely because he
wanted his works to transcend the particular, and he believed that authors
who betray their own opinions, preferences and sentiments run the risk of
reflecting prejudices peculiar to their era and rendering their work irrelevant
to readers of the future.
Further, although a vast amount of Flaubert’s correspondence has been
published, Sartre regards it with a considerable degree of mistrust because
he believes that Flaubert is incapable of being sincere while being himself.
If Flaubert extracts himself from his fiction and his insincerity effectively
fictionalizes his non-fictional writings, then it would seem that he left no
reliable accounts of his personal experience behind and, hence, no material for
a Sartre’s ‘regressive’ analysis to analyse. This might lead us to think that the
dialectical object that is Flaubert’s self is unknowable for the Sartrean analyst
because there is insufficient evidence about Flaubert’s lived experience for them
to synthesize with the biographical facts. As a phenomenologist, though, Sartre
is acutely aware of the bad faith implicit in Flaubert’s attempt to narrate fictional
 Objectivity in Sartre’s Study of Flaubert 131

worlds ‘from nowhere’ because he understands the assumption of a ‘desituated’

perspective as impossible for any human being. It is even impossible to offer a
desituated perspective on fictional world in Sartre’s view because, to construct
a fictional world, one must use this world (and one’s comprehension of it) as
a model, which means that literary authors invariably reveal idiosyncratic
aspects of their ‘conception of the world’ in their work (SM/QM: 141/196). So,
Sartre is not deterred by Flaubert’s impersonal writing-style. To the contrary,
we have seen that he believes that the pretence of ‘falsification’ allows Flaubert
to disclose more truths about his lived experience in his fictions than in any
other context and that this is a significant part of Flaubert’s appeal to him as a
biographical subject.
There are, however, other reasons, not publicized, for Sartre’s choice of
Flaubert. In his Preface to The Family Idiot, Sartre teasingly remarks that
the first reason for his choice of subject is ‘very personal’, but, rather than
elaborating, he hastens to add that it has ‘long ago ceased to be as salient
as it once was in the origin of this choice’ (FI I/IF I: x/8). On the basis of
Sartre’s remarks about Flaubert in his autobiographical work, Words, one
could speculate that the ‘very personal’ reason he alludes to here is a desire to
avenge himself on the author he believed ‘poisoned’ him in his youth.1 Harry
Levin, for one,2 is convinced that The Family Idiot ‘marks the end of a lifelong
vendetta’ (1972: 643), and he is extremely critical of it as a consequence
in his review essay, ‘A Literary Enormity: Sartre on Flaubert’. Levin’s essay
begins by drawing an analogy between the presence of Flaubert in Sartre’s
writings and that of King Charles’ head in those of the befuddled Mr Dick
in David Copperfield (1972: 643). Now, we must concede that this analogy
is apt insofar as Flaubert’s name appears at regular and often surprising
intervals throughout Sartre’s oeuvre, outside of his actual study on Flaubert.
Sartre’s War Diaries recounts his critical reading of Flaubert’s A Sentimental
Education in December of 1939 ([1983] 1984/1995: 101–4/304–8). In Being
and Nothingness, a psychoanalytical biography of Flaubert is evidently
already under consideration. Fyodor Dostoyevsky is also suggested here as
a potential subject, but, as Dostoyevsky’s name only gets two mentions in
this text (BN/EN: 71, 746/67, 620), and Flaubert’s name appears twenty-
one times (BN/EN: 725–8, 746, 762/603–6, 620, 634), it already seems clear
which of these candidates will prevail. Further, Flaubert is mentioned twice
in Sartre’s posthumously published Notebooks for an Ethics (1983 [written c.
1947–8]: 108–9), seven times in What Is Literature? (WL/QL: xxii, 93, 95,
132 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

96, 100, 124, 139, 175/11, 128, 130, 131, 136, 165–6, 183, 227), where one of
his characters (Charles Bovary) is also discussed (WL/QL: 163/212). Sartre
discusses Flaubert at various points in the Critique (CDR I/CRD I: 199, 226,
754/309, 335, 833; CDR II: 408, 413/398, 412) and at length in Search for
a Method (SM/QM: 85–166/119–230). In Sartre’s autobiographical work,
Words, Flaubert is cited five times (W/M: 42, 43, 45, 101, 113/ 55, 56, 58, 131,
146) and his novel, Madame Bovary, three times (W/M: 37, 43, 67/48, 56, 89).
Although Flaubert’s name does not appear in Sartre’s fiction, his influence is
often apparent. Perhaps the most-striking example of this is Sartre’s famous
description of Roquentin’s encounter with the chestnut tree in Nausea,
which recalls the training exercise Flaubert assigned to the young Guy de
Maupassant, which Sartre we know that was aware of since he describes how
Flaubert sat Maupassant ‘in front of a tree and gave him two hours to describe
it’ in his autobiography (W/M: 101/131).
What is more, in a late interview entitled ‘Justice and the State’, Sartre
admits to having spent ‘the last seventeen years’ engaged in a study on Flaubert
‘which can be of no interest to the workers’ but which he is ‘committed to’,
meaning, in his words, ‘that I am sixty-seven years old, I have been working
on it since I was fifty, and before that I dreamed about it’ (1978a: 185). This,
together with Sartre’s numerous references to Flaubert, indicates that Sartre
probably did believe that he had a score to settle with Flaubert and that he
was determined to do so in his final major work. Hence, in his popular novel,
Flaubert’s Parrot, Julian Barnes has his fictional Flaubert biographer compare
Sartre to ‘some brawny, desperate lifeguard’ who ‘spent ten years beating on
[Flaubert’s] chest and blowing into his mouth; ten years trying to yank him
back to consciousness, just so that he could sit him up on the sands and tell him
exactly what he thought of him’ ([1984] 2009: 86). Even though Barnes’ work is
a fiction, this remark nicely captures the consensus among critics that Sartre’s
personal reasons for choosing Flaubert as the subject of his biographical study
should have struck him as reasons against choosing him, as they compromised
his ability to approach Flaubert as a disinterested observer. Regardless of
whatever Flaubert meant to Sartre personally, though, what is certain is that
Sartre goes to great lengths in The Family Idiot to ensure that his method is
as rigorous and as objective as possible and, while he admits that there are
elements of himself in the book, he maintains that ‘the essential thing is the
method’ (OIF/SIF: 121/104). So, it is only fair that we assess Sartre’s study on its
own merit here as his most thorough attempt to apply the innovative method of
psychoanalysis he developed throughout his career.
 Objectivity in Sartre’s Study of Flaubert 133

Is Sartre’s method objective enough?

Although the preceding chapters have explained the rationale for Sartre’s
progressive-regressive method, the sheer volume of criticism levelled at Sartre’s
study of Flaubert for its alleged lack of objectivity (e.g. Mauron 1962; Bart 1967;
Levin 1972; Barnes 1982) means that the concern that Sartre’s method does not
include enough measures to prevent its findings from being unduly influenced
by the biases of the analyst must be taken seriously.
Sartre emphasizes the importance of methodological flexibility in
psychoanalysis on the grounds that an adherence to strict procedures would
necessarily preclude the revelation of certain meanings (BN/EN: 743/619). Even
if we grant that methodological flexibility is required in the study of selves,
though, this goes no way towards providing us with assurances of the reliability
of Sartre’s method as a route to knowledge of selves. Without some form of
methodological standardization, what is there to assure us that all analysts who
apply Sartre’s method to Flaubert would arrive at the same conclusions? As the
subject of psychoanalysis – be it the unconscious or the unknown dimensions
of the self – is perhaps the most elusive subject matter conceivable, it is also the
most vulnerable to misinterpretation and corruption by the analyst. Freud was
acutely aware of this, which is why he hoped to claim for psychoanalysis the
disinterested precision associated with the natural sciences and to prevent, as
much as possible, the biases and the projections of the analyst from obscuring
the evidence presented by the analysand. The assumption here is that the
conclusions of psychoanalysis have a better claim to knowledge if its methods
can hold claim to the same objective validity that the natural sciences have by
preventing the subjectivity of the analyst from influencing the findings of the
investigation.
Sartre’s insistence that the course of the analysis should be determined by the
conscious experience of the analyst emphasizes the importance of the very thing
that Freud sought to exclude, as much as possible, from his psychoanalysis: the
subjectivity of the analyst. But Sartre’s denial that scientific objectivity should
be viewed an aspirational goal for psychoanalysts is not ‘unenlightened’. To the
contrary, Sartre joins Husserl in affirming that naïve positivism can lead us to
neglect to examine the fundamental structures of the life-world through which
all objects are given to us (Husserl [1936] 1970). His view that the dialectical
analysis of selves is, like phenomenology, concerned with the primary, internal
relations that constitute the life-world, or a reality that is first of all ‘for us’,
134 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

underpins his contention that while it is ‘legitimate for the natural sciences to
free themselves from anthropomorphism . . . it is perfectly absurd to assume
by analogy the same scorn for anthropomorphism where anthropology is
concerned’ (SM/QM: 157/218). And anthropology is most certainly concerned
in investigations into objects whose essence is determined by the ongoing
dialectic – i.e. by human being, as opposed to arational, natural forces. So,
the standard of objectivity required in the study of selves cannot exclude the
subjective; it must, rather, be intersubjective.
According to Sartre, the intersubjective validity of a dialectical truth can
be established by its appearing ‘as necessity’ within the investigation which
reveals it and by its provision of the key to ‘the intelligibility of the process in
question’ (CDR I/CRD I: 37/156). This makes the subjective experience of the
investigator ‘the test’ of the validity of a dialectical truth. Nevertheless, Sartre’s
articulation of two conditions for validity provides a clear demonstration of
how his development of dialectical reason enables him to supply a more robust
theorization of the processes that give rise to the ‘feeling of satisfaction’ which,
in Being and Nothingness, he proposed would confirm that the analysis had
reached its endpoint. Thanks to his theorization of dialectical reason in the
Critique, Sartre can now explain how even though intuitions are unquestionably
subjective, they have a claim to ‘objective’ status via intersubjective validity when
they are experienced within the context of a dialectical study. The assumption
here is that the capacity to comprehend the meaning of human action is universal
among humans, which we have already seen to be firmly grounded in a Sartre’s
theorization of what human being is. So, altogether, this implies that the Sartrean
analyst can find confirmation that they have not erred in their application of the
progressive-regressive method if their conclusions allow for the analysand’s acts
to be interpreted as part of a coherent totalization in which each act emerges as
dialectical necessity.
Even if it is granted that the standard of objective validity for claims to
knowledge of selves is intersubjective, it still seems as though Sartre’s biographical
analysis of Flaubert in The Family Idiot might not be ‘objective enough’, in
sense of being ‘neutral’ or ‘unbiased’, to support its claim to deliver knowledge
of Flaubert’s self. This is partly because it is heavily reliant upon hypotheses
concerning matters about which there is little to no objective evidence – about
how Flaubert’s mother nursed him as an infant, how Flaubert felt when he
looked at himself in the mirror, and so on. It is also partly because Sartre’s means
of qualifying his findings by revealing their dialectical necessity appears to be
questionable because the dialectic Sartre develops over the course of the three
 Objectivity in Sartre’s Study of Flaubert 135

published volumes is internally coherent precisely because it is both constructed

and contained within them. That is to say, Sartre does not verify his findings
in the first three volumes of The Family Idiot against something external to the
dialectic he constructs in them. In the absence of such verification, most people
would agree that Sartre’s findings cannot be considered anything more than
compelling hypotheses, so they cannot lay claim to intersubjective validity.
However, the very last lines of the published text of The Family Idiot note that
Flaubert denied that he was a novelist and affirmed that he was a ‘writer’, even
though he only wrote novels and The Temptation of Saint Anthony. Two questions
are then posed. The first asks what the meaning of Flaubert’s insistence that he is
a writer could be. The second asks how the idea of ‘pure art’ that Flaubert shared
with other Postromantic authors could have motivated him to produce the
particular works he did. Then, The Family Idiot closes with a promise to attempt
‘to answer these questions by reading Madame Bovary’ (FI V/IF 3: 621/665). It is
known that Sartre intended to write a fourth volume of The Family Idiot, which
was to be a literary critique of Madame Bovary (1978b: 20; IWS: 22; OIF/SIF:
126/109; Beauvoir [1981] 1984: 33). In an interview following the publication
of the first two volumes, Sartre states that an analysis of Madame Bovary would
supply The Family Idiot with an additional ‘objective’ element (OIF/SIF: 110/92).
In the same interview, he also remarks that ‘a moment comes when the text must
be confronted: this is the moment of victory. When I come to Madame Bovary, I
will also find moments of defeat’ (OIF/SIF: 125/108–9). Here, Sartre is speaking
of the capacity of Madame Bovary to provide Flaubert with his ‘moment of
victory’ by proving his genius; yet, Madame Bovary could have also provided
Sartre with one too; his proposed critique could have confirmed the successes
of his study of Flaubert and illuminated any defects. Much to Sartre’s regret,
deteriorating health and the onset of blindness forced him to give up writing
before he could complete The Family Idiot as he had hoped to.
In later interviews, Sartre downplays the value of the missing fourth
volume. In 1975, for instance, he states: ‘Someone else could write the fourth
on the basis of the three I have written’ (1978b: 20). Nevertheless, his earlier
insistence that Madame Bovary ‘illuminates Flaubert, not the reverse’ (CDR I/
CRD I: 226/335), shows that he originally assigned a central significance to
the study of Madame Bovary in understanding Flaubert. Further, the fact that
a reviewer of Carol Cosman’s English translation of The Family Idiot remarks
that the fourth volume would have ‘illuminated and dignified’ the rest (Brown
1982) highlights how important the fourth volume would have been from a
critical perspective. Finally, and most importantly for our concerns, a critique
136 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

of Madame Bovary would have provided Sartre with a means of confirming

the results of his dialectical analysis in the three published volumes of The
Family Idiot against something external to the dialectic in them. It would have
allowed Sartre to superimpose one of Flaubert’s mature texts, which is not fully
analysed in the first three volumes, upon those of his juvenilia, which are, and
to, thereby, assess the extent to which Flaubert’s objectification of his self in
Madame Bovary aligns with his objectification Flaubert’s self in the first three
volumes of The Family Idiot.

Madame Bovary: The missing fourth volume

As Barnes notes, it would be ‘idiotic’ to attempt to reconstruct the missing fourth

volume of The Family Idiot, despite Sartre’s claims that someone else could do
it (1981b: 341). Nonetheless, it is possible to use the information he left behind
in his notes for the fourth volume, the remarks he made in the later interviews,
his discussions of Madame Bovary in the first three volumes, alongside Barnes’
research into the fourth volume (1981b: 340–87), to sketch in outline what a
Sartrean reading of Madame Bovary might have been like. This section aims
to do just this. Then the next will use this sketch as a tool for a coarse-grained
assessment of the validity of the findings in the three published volumes of The
Family Idiot.

Style over substance

In a late interview, Sartre states that the fourth volume would concentrate on
the ‘style of Madame Bovary’ (1978b: 20). This is confirmed by the notes that he
left behind for it. Now, although these notes do attend to some of the formally
stylistic features of Madame Bovary,3 it must be remembered that, in the first three
volumes of The Family Idiot, Sartre argues that, for Flaubert, ‘style’ does not only
refer to formal techniques, but also to a way of communicating aspects of lived
experience that are otherwise incommunicable through ‘indirect expression’ (FI
III/IF III: 499/1616). Style is Flaubert’s central discovery, according to Sartre,
since the realization that it is not the ‘the saying that manifests the artist’s thought
but the way of saying’ enables Flaubert to see it that he is not confined to trying
to tell his readers about what he imagines; he can also employ style to make them
imagine what he imagines (FI III/IF III: 499/1615).
 Objectivity in Sartre’s Study of Flaubert 137

Further, Sartre holds that Flaubert comes to believe that style should dictate
the content of a literary work, not the other way around, because writing only
becomes beautiful when it employs style to offer an ‘indirect sign and symbol
. . . of the unreal beauty of the world’ (FI III/IF III: 500/1617). If this is correct,
Flaubert does not use style to reflect the real world, which he finds to be mediocre
and bad, but to institute an imaginary world, which is beautiful because it is ‘bad
to perfection’ (FI III/IF III: 462/1578). He would thus create something akin to
the Platonic Form of ‘world’, which this world is but an imperfect instantiation
of. Sartre believes that this aim is what characterizes Flaubert’s aesthetic once
he discovers style, after which he has only one subject: ‘radical Evil’, and one
mode of expression: ‘style’ (FI III/IF III: 500/1617). Baudelaire’s interpretation of
Madame Bovary lends support to this conclusion, especially as Flaubert is known
to have approved of it (Barnes 1981b: 342). According to Baudelaire, Madame
Bovary and The Temptation of Saint Anthony are analogous in that they are both
products of Flaubert’s ambition to write a book about nothing so that it may be
governed by style alone,4 although this ambition is more apparent in the latter
work, whose subject is an anchorite who literally does nothing but suffers from
imaginary temptations (Bart 1967; Starkie 1971). However, Sartre is the first to
my knowledge to maintain that Flaubert’s ideal of style is inextricably connected
to the subject of evil. From both The Family Idiot and the notes for the fourth
volume, it is clear that Sartre intended to investigate this connection further by
discussing Baudelaire’s interpretation of Madame Bovary in relation to Maxime
Du Camp and Louis Bouilhet’s criticisms of the first version of The Temptation
of Saint Anthony and the genesis of Madame Bovary (FI III/IF II: 177/1285; Notes
165, 166/177, 169/179; Barnes 1981b: 371–2), so let us investigate this a little.
It is likely that the negative feedback Flaubert received from Du Camp and
Bouilhet on the first version of The Temptation of Saint Anthony in 1849 brought
him to the realization that he must commence from the particular if he is to
realize his aesthetic goal of showcasing pure style, as style is best evinced through
the transformation of something mundane into something extraordinary.
This theory is supported by the difference between the fantastic nature of
The Temptation of Saint Anthony and the ‘realistic’, if not truly ‘realist’, nature
of Madame Bovary. Clearly, Madame Bovary has a particular subject: Emma
Bovary, the adulterous wife of a country doctor, who lives in a particular region
of France; yet, there is an important sense in which its subject is ‘general’, non-
specific, indistinct. The theme of adultery was not new to the reading public
in the nineteenth century,5 nor were the specific kinds of events recounted in
138 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

Madame Bovary, as Flaubert’s inspiration for Emma is thought to be Delphine

Delamere, second wife to Eugene Delamere, a former medical student under
Dr Flaubert (Bart 1967: 242). Even within the novel, the heroine is one of three
Madame Bovarys and the banality of her life is a great source of frustration for
her. Enid Starkie also suggests that Flaubert deliberately chose to set Madame
Bovary in a ‘vague locality, with no particular features’, so that it ‘could be
anywhere in France’ (1971: 389).
What is unique about Madame Bovary is the way it is told. Sartre describes
it as a ‘cosmic novel’ (FI III/IF II: 177/1285), as he believes that it uses style
to describe the events it relays from the panoramic perspective of an Absolute
being. It is because Flaubert associates style with the cultivation of this kind
of Absolute perspective that Sartre contends that subject of Flaubert’s mature
fiction – i.e. from 1856 onwards – is nothing other than evil. He asserts that the
inspiration for Madame Bovary arrives when Flaubert realizes that ‘an object
is necessary for the macrocosm to become incarnate in it, and that the object
is of no importance’ and that the only story to be told is that of ‘the tragic,
grandiose emptiness of a Godless universe’, but the only way to tell it is through
the adventure of a particular subject (FI IV/IF III: 193/1967). In short, then,
(Sartre’s) Flaubert realizes that he can show that the world is hell by perching a
saint on a summit and having a devil torment him, but he can also do it by taking
the adulterous wife of a health official and describing how the world tortures her.
Let us now assess whether Madame Bovary can be fruitfully read as a product of
its author’s aim to show that the world is hell through his distinctive style.

The unlikely heroism of Charles Bovary

In 1971, Sartre remarks that after some time studying Flaubert, he came
to realize that Charles Bovary ‘embodies’ one of Flaubert’s ideals (OIF/SIF:
110/91). This explains why Sartre’s reading of Charles Bovary deviates from the
standard one of him as a one-dimensional moron, whose ‘bovine boorishness’
drives Emma to look elsewhere for love (Orr 2000: 31). Sartre’s reading takes
the fact that Madame Bovary begins and ends with Charles’ suffering to be
of key significance. That Charles is the first character to be introduced in the
novel would usually corroborate the idea that he is of central importance from
an authorial perspective. However, the first impression we are given of him
is that he is something of a fool; ‘we’ (nous) are even encouraged to join the
narrator in mocking the new schoolboy whose hat slides off when he stands up
to introduce himself to his classmates and who then garbles the pronunciation
 Objectivity in Sartre’s Study of Flaubert 139

of his own name: ‘Chabovari’ (MB: 6/329). We are also invited to observe the
affinity between him and his ridiculous piece of headwear, which is described as
being ‘of composite order, in which one recognises features of a military busby, a
lancer’s cap, a bowler hat, an otter-skin cap, and a cotton nightcap, one of those
pathetic objects, in fact, whose mute ugliness reveals great depths, like the face
of a halfwit [imbécile]’ (MB: 5–6/328). While Sartre acknowledges that Charles’
cap ‘bespeaks the stupidity of its owner to such a degree that Charles himself
is turned into a cap’ (FI I/IF I: 597/617), he argues that Flaubert identifies with
Charles to a degree. He interprets the mysterious ‘we’ at the start of the novel as a
manifestation of Flaubert’s strategy of ‘aggressive defense’ as it allows him to place
himself alongside the schoolboys in the class – with those doing the deriding –
and to distance himself from Charles, whose experience of isolation, humiliation
and trouble with language in this scene resembles his own childhood experience
(FI III/IF II: 96/1202). To comprehend the significance of Charles Bovary for
Flaubert, Sartre considers it essential to note his frequently expressed sympathy
for idiots. Though Charles is not truly an idiot, Sartre believes he embodies
the ‘profundity possessed by fools which Flaubert adores because it is his own’
(FI III/IF II: 97/1203). Indeed, from a Sartrean-analytic perspective, there are
striking similarities between Flaubert’s presentation of Charles’ difficulty with
language and the comprehension of his own that he gains ‘through fabrication’
in Whatever You Want, especially as Charles’ difficulty also later prevents him
from communicating his love for his wife, who mistakes his want of vocabulary
for lack of emotional depth.
Further, Sartre draws attention to the fact that it is Charles, not Emma, who
‘looks like a deflowered virgin’ the morning after their wedding night (Notes:
178/168). Evidently, this description is not meant to imply that Charles (having
already been married) was a virgin until this point. Rather, it indicates that
this couple’s first intimate encounter had a greater effect on him than it did on
Emma because he adores her, and his pure adoration of Emma is read by Sartre
to elevate him above the other characters in the novel. In his notes, he affirms
that Flaubert presents Emma as superior to her lovers but not to Charles (Notes:
187/175), which is almost certainly because he believes that Flaubert regards the
state of adoration in which the subject considers himself secondary to the one he
adores, or what I have called romantic masochistic devotion above, as ‘profound’
(FI I/IF I: 321/332–3).
Sartre also reads Charles’ fatalism to resemble Flaubert’s. When Charles asserts
that fate is to blame for Emma’s demise in a conversation with Rodolphe towards
the end of the novel, the latter, who believes he orchestrated Emma’s fate, finds
140 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

Charles’ resignation as foolish and somewhat despicable. But it is Rodolphe who

emerges as the fool in this scene not Charles in Sartre’s view (FI I/IF I: 321/333).
It is only because Rodolphe is utterly incapable of comprehending the depth of
Charles’ love for Emma – which enables him to sacrifice his pride and converse
amicably with the man who cuckolded him – that Rodolphe takes Charles for a
fool. That Flaubert depicts Charles as having just uttered his first-ever ‘memorable
phrase’ (grand mot) in this scene – ‘Fate is to blame’ – testifies to this interpretation,
as it suggests that Rodolphe is the fool for believing and that Emma would not
have ended up the way she did if it were not for him (MB: 311/644). Both Charles’
fatalism and his capacity to forgive Rodolphe signal his possession of Flaubertian
wisdom for Sartre, as he appears to acknowledge that ‘the worst is always certain’
not because of forces acting on humanity from the outside, but because ‘universal
human wickedness’ guarantees it (FI V/IF 3: 416/450).
Finally, at the end of the novel, Flaubert depicts Charles as being overwhelmed
by ‘the nebulous wafts of love that swelled his sorrowing heart’ (MB: 311/645) and
then being found dead by his daughter soon afterwards. The results of the post-
mortem indicate that there was nothing wrong with him physically, so readers
are left to conclude that he died of a broken heart. Or, put differently, Charles
dies a ‘death by thought’ because the thought of living on without Emma kills
him. On a Sartrean reading, this death is Charles’ crowning glory, which places
him among the Flaubertian ‘saints’. He dies without any organ being damaged,
just like the hero of November, who could only have gained his miraculous6
deliverance from misery if some all-seeing, all-powerful Absolute deemed him
worthy of it. Though Sartre might agree that Charles Bovary is ‘the man with no
imagination who is doubly destroyed by the imagination’ (Barnes 1981b: 360),
Charles’ lack of imagination does not impair his capacity to suffer, which is what
Sartre believes distinguishes him in his author’s eyes.
Altogether then, Charles’ hidden emotional depth, his suffering, his
acquisition of Flaubertian wisdom and his marvellous death render him the
unlikely hero of Madame Bovary on a Sartrean reading. Moreover, if Flaubert’s
pessimism dictates that ‘the value of a soul is measured by the number of
torments inflicted upon it’ (FI I/IF I: 545/564), then Charles’ suffering may be
taken as evidence that his author thinks him too good for the world.

‘I am too small for myself ’

Madame Bovary may be described as an inverted fairy-tale: Emma marries first;
then goes to the Vaubyessard ball, where she is charmed by the luxuries, the
 Objectivity in Sartre’s Study of Flaubert 141

rituals and the deceits7 of the aristocracy; then she lives miserably ever after.8
Emma’s memories of the Vaubyessard Ball work to exacerbate her melancholy
by providing her with material for imaginary escapes into a fantasy world,
which only highlights the paucity of her reality when she returns to it. After her
experience at the ball, Emma believes that she is without hope of happiness, or of
discovering ‘that marvellous passion’ that she has read of in novels, because she
is married to Charles, and she concludes that she has suffered a terrible injustice
at the hands of the almighty (MB: 60/352). Sartre reads this to imply that Emma
Bovary, like her author, subscribes to the belief that she suffers not because of
bad luck, or mistakes that she has made, but because she has been damned.
‘I am too small for myself ’ (Je suis trop petit pour moi). This phrase functions
as maxim for both Flaubert and Emma on a Sartrean reading (Notes: 185/174).9
It captures one of the most important and enduring themes of Flaubert’s works,
and it is ‘exhausted’ in Madame Bovary (FI I/IF I: 551/570). Sartre presents this
phrase as a Flaubertian twist of the title of Jean Sarment’s play, Je Suis trop grand
pour moi (I am too grand for myself, 1924),10 which is also the proposed excuse
for its lead character’s failures. However, while Sarment’s version contains the
possibility of hope – since the subject may be able to grow into their self, their ‘I’
– Sartre regards it a triumph to Flaubert’s pessimism that he manages to present
this idea in such a way that it precludes the possibility of growth improving the
subject’s situation because ‘it is already accomplished’ (FI III/IF II: 89/1297).
In the glimpses the reader is allowed of Emma Bovary’s stream of consciousness,
she is often expressing disgust with her reality or fantasizing about escaping it.
Throughout the first fifteen chapters of the novel, she feeds her Great Desire
for more than she has on daydreams. However, following Léon’s departure
for Paris, she changes tact. Flaubert’s account of this can be read as a fictional
representation of the kind of ‘instant’ in which a subject’s fundamental project
is dropped and replaced with a new one, which Sartre believed to be possible
in Being and Nothingness (BN/EN: 621/520–1). On this reading, the demise of
Emma’s fundamental project in this instant is marked by Emma’s funereal mood
and her experience of ‘that kind of brooding which comes over you when you lose
something forever, that lassitude you feel after every irreversible event, that pain
you suffer when a habitual movement is interrupted’ (MB: 110/437). What has
so far constituted Emma’s ‘habitual movement’, we might say, was her ‘original’
choice to compensate for a life that she finds intolerably dull by escaping into
the imaginary, which, according to Sartre, is her ‘one love’, although she does
not know it (Notes: 184/173). Again, this view finds robust support in the novel.
Charles, for instance, falls in love with Emma in all her particularity and in spite
142 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

of the flaws he perceives in her – e.g. he observes that her hand is ‘not beautiful’
(MB: 16/338) – but Emma strives to deceive herself that through Charles she
might be able to grasp ‘that marvellous passion which until then has hovered
like a great rosy-plumaged bird in the splendour of poetic skies’ (MB: 37/361).
Love, for Emma, appears to an abstract ideal, not a movement towards a concrete
other.
Léon’s departure ruptures the delicate tissue of grandiose fantasies that had
provided Emma with her imaginary ‘cover’ for her small, disappointing self,
which had enabled her to cope with her situation hitherto. Rather than repair
that cover, though, she endeavours to change her self. She resolves to become
one of the Romantic heroines she had previously only fantasized about being.
At the beginning, her new project seems to hold promise of success. During her
first affair with Rodolphe, she experiences ‘that poetic legion of adulteresses’
singing to her ‘with sisterly voices’ and she makes believe that she is ‘actually
becoming a living part of her own fantasies’ (MB: 145/474). At this moment,
Emma is pleased with her self. Her pleasure is, of course, short-lived. But it is
not her choice to commit adultery per se that sets her on the path to damnation
from a Sartrean perspective; it is the fact that the betrayal of her husband also
represents the betrayal of her one true love: the imaginary. Emma, by (Sartre’s)
Flaubert’s reason, is ‘the loser who loses’ through her failure to recognize the
superiority of the imaginary over reality. Unlike her author, she does not see that
the loser wins by ‘living through imagination’ (FI IV/IF III: 239/2013). What
secures Emma’s damnation, then, is her attempt to realize her fantasies, without
seeing that the mould that is set for her self in reality is ‘too small’ to allow her
to satisfy her Great Desire.

Sadism and laughter

Flaubert’s repeated invention of tormented characters, together with his
concentration on the details of their suffering, has led him to become renowned
as a sadistic writer (FI III/IF II: 221/1329; Tilby 2004). Madame Bovary seems
to offer a prime example of Flaubert’s sadism as its eponymous heroine is
continually disappointed, denied the romance she craves and ends up taking her
own life in the face of financial ruin. She also suffers an agonizing and gruesome
demise from arsenic poisoning, and Flaubert exploits his medial knowledge to
detail her symptoms with such precision that her deathbed scene is considered a
paradigm of ‘medicalized realism’ (Rothfield 1992: 45). Further, any hope Emma
has of reclaiming some dignity in her final moments is crushed by the loud, lewd
 Objectivity in Sartre’s Study of Flaubert 143

lyrics of the blind man singing outside. Thus, Emma’s suffering on her deathbed
far exceeds what may be considered ‘poetic’ punishment for her infidelities: their
abject failure and her financial ruin are sufficient for these purposes.
In addition to making Emma suffer exorbitantly, Sartre contends that Flaubert
mocks her throughout the novel. In The Family Idiot, he pays special attention
to Flaubert’s decision to locate the prelude to the notorious taxicab scene, in
which Emma and Léon consummate their love, in Rouen Cathedral (FI III/IF
II: 168–80/1275–87), and he evidently intended to pick up this discussion again
in the fourth volume (Notes: 186/175). In The Family Idiot, Sartre maintains
that Flaubert invites his reader to draw a contrast between the shady, adulterous
exploits of this couple and the holiness of place where they meet to degrade their
relationship. He then emphasizes how Flaubert’s refusal to grant this couple’s
first, long-awaited, experience of intimacy the dignity of any human perspective
also has the effect of dehumanizing them, as it is described from perspective that
sees only a shaky cab, rattling around the streets of Rouen. Even though Flaubert
attempts to banish all expression of his own opinions in his work, Sartre holds
that his ‘pantagruelizing’ (pantagruélisant)11 in this scene betrays him (FI III/IF
II: 178/1285): it shows that he cannot resist the temptation to make Emma and
Léon appear ‘objectively laughable’, so that he may distinguish himself from them
(FI III/IF II: 177/1284), so he allows his alter-ego, the Garçon, to write this scene
so that he may ‘laugh for him’ (FI III/IF II: 180/1287).
According to the theory of laughter Sartre outlines in The Family Idiot, the
primary function of laughter is to cast the object of laughter as a sub-human
‘permanently affected with the illusion of subjectivity’ and to, thereby, affirm the
humanity of the laugher, who recognizes the sub-human’s show of humanity as
a sham (FI II/IF I: 164/821). This means that laughter’s primary social function
is a conservative one, as the laugher’s own conformance to social norms is
the tacit basis for their claim to superiority over the ‘object’ of their laughter.
Society is therefore whole and present in the defensive aggression that laughter
is in Sartre’s estimation; it attacks individuals who fall short of its standards,
so as to defend those who meet them. However, Sartre affirms that Flaubert’s
laughter typically has a more complex function because he frequently makes
himself the object of it so as to reverse the terms of the relation it ordinarily
implies. By laughing at his own failure to meet social norms rather than feeling
ashamed, Flaubert ridicules the standards of social seriousness that others apply
to render such failures laughable (FI III/IF II: 106–7/1211). Flaubert’s laughter
functions as an instrument of his aggressive defensiveness because it undercuts
the laughter of those who would laugh at him by announcing that he ‘doesn’t
144 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

take himself seriously’ (FI II/IF II: 183/841). Flaubert’s recognition that he is a
sub-human pretending to be a human just like everybody else therefore elevates
him above those who take their pretence seriously and who would laugh at him.
After having worked so carefully to uncover the complex function of Flaubert’s
laughter,12 it is surprising that Sartre interprets the authorial laughter in the
taxicab scene as ordinary laughter. A more developed Sartrean reading of this
scene ought to interpret the laughter in it differently.
The text of Madame Bovary supplies us with guidance on how to produce
such a reading. The first thing to note is that laughter seems to have a peculiar
function in the novel. Take what is perhaps the most memorable instance of
it: Emma’s ‘ghastly, frenzied, despairing laugh’ on her deathbed (MB: 290/623).
Here, Emma’s laughter seems to be an entirely inappropriate response to her
situation. What makes it even more disturbing is that Emma seldom laughs.
The only other time she laughs in the novel is after reading Rodolphe’s farewell
letter, which puts an end to their romantic relationship (MB: 182/513). On both
occasions, Emma’s laughter strikes the reader as a bizarre response. This suggests
that a promising way to approach the laughter in this novel, including authorial
laughter, is to appreciate it as a signal for something that is not funny at all.
Approaching the laughter in Madame Bovary this way suggests that Flaubert
is reversing the ordinary terms of laughter here too, so as to make anyone who
would laugh at Emma, on the presumption that they are superior to her, the
butt of the joke. This makes it possible for us to detect a very human empathy
for Emma behind the façade of cosmic laughter in the taxicab scene. As Sartre’s
notes indicate that he intended to investigate the laughter in Madame Bovary
in some depth (Notes: 184/172), it is likely that he would have seen how this
interpretation does a better job of synthesizing his interpretation of the specific
function of Flaubert’s laughter with his theory that Emma is a ‘black saint’, like
her prototype Mazza. Further, it also allows us to read the difference between
Flaubert’s portrayals of Emma and Mazza as further evidence for Sartre’s
view that Flaubert would have deepened his comprehension of his experience
considerably in the twenty or so years between his creation of these characters.
His portrayal of Mazza is straightforwardly sadistic, but his portrayal of Emma
is also masochistic, and consciously so, for Flaubert famously says of Emma
that ‘She is myself!’ (FI I/IF I: 195/203). What is more, Emma is evidently more
‘distinguished’ than Mazza. This is perhaps most apparent in the way that she is
occasionally granted the privilege of a panoramic point of view, usually reserved
for the author himself, which is what enables her to laugh when it would be
more appropriate to cry. Emma can find ‘cosmic’ relief in moments of profound
 Objectivity in Sartre’s Study of Flaubert 145

despair because, in these moments, she seems to rise above her pitiful situation
to see it from a perspective that resembles her author’s ‘Absolute’ one. This would
appear to be why Emma is able to have the literal and figurative last laugh in the
novel; her recognition of the funniness of blind man’s unwitting sabotage of her
sham of religious seriousness on her deathbed allows her to claim a Flaubertian
‘moral’ victory before she loses her life.

Emma’s insincerity, Flaubert’s truth

Emma’s displays of affection always seem to be affected. This is evinced by her
prolonged mourning for her mother ‘with no more sadness in her heart than
wrinkles on her brow’ (MB: 36/361) and almost all her interactions with Charles
and her child. While she often succeeds in making a good show of religious
devotion – at one point she even inspires fear in the curé that her religious fervour
could progress to something that ‘verged on heresy’ (MB: 190/521) – she never
manages to go beyond the representation to what is represented. She has only
religiosity without religion. Significantly, one of her last acts is to kiss the crucifix
presented to her by the curé: she thrusts ‘her neck forward like someone parched
with thirst, and, fastening her lips to the body of the Man-God, she bestowed upon
it with every ounce of her dying strength the most passionate kiss of love that
she had ever given’ (MB: 288–9/621–2, emphasis added). The language in this
passage fuses the spiritual with the sensual, which has the effect of cheapening
Emma’s display. The reader is not convinced that she has finally found faith. As
Bart notes, Emma does not undergo a conversion on her deathbed, but she does
drag ‘the symbol of the cross down to her level’ by using it as a prop (1966: 101).
But this is not to say that she is entirely insincere in this scene. On a Sartrean
reading, she is as sincere as a black saint can be: she sincerely desires to feel what
people who are sincere in their faith do feel (FI I/IF I: 427/440).
Although, again, it may seem as though Flaubert has allowed the Garçon
to narrate Emma’s deathbed scene, it is also possible to detect empathetic
undertones in Flaubert’s description of her desperate and ill-informed attempts
to establish a relationship with God in this scene and throughout the novel. It
is significant that Emma’s lack of faith does not appear to be entirely her fault.
In one of her earlier moments of despair, she sought out the advice of a holy
man, the Abbé Bournisien. It seems that he could have saved her if he were not
such a stupid gourmand. When Emma seeks him out in her time of need, he
rather remarkably fails to realize that it is spiritual, not medical, guidance she
wants from him. Even after she tells him that she is not seeking ‘earthly remedies’
146 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

(MB: 100/427), he attributes her emotional turmoil to indigestion. If finding

faith could have led Emma towards salvation, then the foolishness she finds in
this man could only have pushed her in the other direction. Though Emma’s
desire for faith is sincere, she is not given proper guidance in matters of faith and
has only Romantic depictions of religious characters to work with. Hence, the
only way to faith she can see is by imitating the beautiful displays of religiosity
she has read of. As Sartre indicates some parallels between Flaubert’s and Emma’s
failed searches for faith in The Family Idiot, it is likely that the fourth volume
would have explored this point.13
Similarly, a sincere desire for love motivates Emma’s decision to embark on
an affair with Rodolphe, and subsequently Léon. She pursues this desire in the
same way that she pursues her desire for faith: by making a good show of it. She
works to convince her lovers, and herself, that she is in love, seemingly in the
hope she will be rewarded with the feeling that is supposed to correspond to
the expression if she does a good enough job of the expression. But all Emma’s
attempts feel through the expression of feeling fail. This is nowhere more
apparent than in her relationship with Rodolphe. Her attempts to articulate the
intensity of the love she longs to feel for him misfire because phrases such as
‘You are my King! My Idol!’ ring in the ears of this practised seducer as vain
attempts to add flourish to flimsy affections (MB: 169/500). Though Emma
sincerely strives to realize the intense passion she professes and would, as Sartre
points out, undoubtedly do anything for Rodolphe (Notes: 187/175), all her
attempts to communicate his importance to her fail. Again, the fault seems not
to lie entirely with Emma. This time, language is partly to blame, as it supplies
no adequate means of distinguishing between emotions that are called by same
name. As Emma has not discovered style, she can only express herself through
ordinary language, which Flaubert likens to ‘a cracked kettle on which we beat
our tunes for bears to dance to, when what we long to do is make music that will
move the stars to pity’ (MB: 170/500).
Sartre is convinced that insincerity ‘from emotional alienation’ is a trait that
Emma shares with her author.14 In The Family Idiot, he shows that Flaubert’s
passive constitution alienates him from his own desires in a way that makes him
insincere when he is being himself, not because he seeks to conceal his genuine
desires but because he genuinely does not know what they are. He contends
that Flaubert finds his truth in Emma, though, because through his depiction
of this specific form of insincerity through her experience, he supplies a sincere
expression of his experience. We have just seen that Emma is not entirely
responsible for her failure to connect with religion from a Sartrean perspective
 Objectivity in Sartre’s Study of Flaubert 147

and, as Sartre’s notes indicate that he also intended to explore the failure of
language as a theme in Madame Bovary (Notes: 178–9/167–8), this gives us
good reason to believe that his critique would have uncovered the evidence
exculpating her for her inability to make sincere love connections too, especially
given that he has already emphasized Flaubert’s view of language as a hopelessly
inadequate tool for conveying human emotion (FI I/IF I: 27/37).
On a Sartrean reading, then, the themes of the imagination and insincerity
in Madame Bovary, combined with Flaubert’s identification with its heroine,
suggest that Emma Bovary can be read to represent something like what Flaubert
imagines he would be like had he not discovered art. This means that Madame
Bovary is less a work of sadistic fiction than its author’s attempt to produce a
‘stylized’ counterfactual autobiography. What is more, its key message appears
to be that, at least for superior souls (like his), the world is hell and the only way
to ‘win’ in it is to recognize the superiority of the imaginary to the real. This
message is clearly in line with Sartre’s conception of Flaubert’s original choice, as
well as his interpretation of the function of style for Flaubert.

Sartre’s blind spots and their implications

Now we have gained a sense of what a Sartrean reading of Madame Bovary

might have been like, we may address the question of whether the proposed
fourth volume of The Family Idiot could have validated the findings of the first
three. To begin with, we can see that Flaubert’s original choice of the imaginary
finds its ‘objectification’ in what a Sartrean reading shows to be the key message
of Madame Bovary: the (real) world is hell. Moreover, the way in which this
message is communicated, through ‘style’, provides support for Sartre’s
specific understanding of how Flaubert pursued his original choice through
his behaviour and his writing. However, there are two important features of
Flaubert’s objectification of his self in Madame Bovary that do not map onto
Sartre’s objectification of it in The Family Idiot. The next sections identify these
features, before turning to assess their implications for the success of Sartre’s
study of Flaubert as a whole.

The positive counterpart to Flaubert’s misanthropy

In ‘Sartre’s (Mis)Reading of Flaubert’s Politics: An Unacknowledged Dialectic of
Misanthropy and Utopian Desire’, David Gross argues that Sartre acknowledges
148 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

‘only the misanthropy and pessimism, the l’art pour l’art escapism and the
apolitical’ in Flaubert’s fictional work and misses the crucial subtext of Flaubert’s
ostensible pessimism and political apathy (1985: 132). This criticism is valid.
Sartre presents Flaubert’s love of beauty as the ‘other side’ of his misanthropy
(FI V/IF 3: 353/380). However, his commitment to beauty cannot represent the
positive dialectical counterpart to his misanthropy on Sartre’s account because
it holds that Flaubert identifies beauty with radical evil, that he attributes all evil
to a self-interested (bourgeois) human nature, and that this is what explains his
(masochistic-)sadistic treatment of characters that he deems not to be evil. Here
we have not a dialectic but a circle in which Flaubert’s conception of beauty feeds
into the misanthropy he expresses in his literature, rather than opposing it.
Furthermore, Flaubert did not miss his ‘rendez-vous’ with Revolution in
1848 as Sartre claims (FI V/IF 3: 413/447). Gross calls attention to the fact
that Flaubert was engaged in political activities in 1847 and even went to Paris
specifically to witness the Revolution in 1848 (1985: 139). Although these
activities may well have left Flaubert feeling disillusioned and provided him with
the inspiration for his social critique in A Sentimental Education (1869),15 they
point to his hope for political progress, which represents an obvious dialectical
counterpart to his publicized misanthropy, especially because Flaubert appears
to have taken pains to conceal it. Instead of fully unpacking the significance
of Flaubert’s misanthropy in relation to its counterpart in his ‘utopian’ desires
though, Sartre neglects some of its complexities and contradictions. Clearly, this
runs counter to the aims of his progressive-regressive method, so it is curious.
Why is his dialectical exposition of Flaubert’s misanthropy in The Family Idiot
wanting in this way? Gross’ suggestion is that it is possibly because Sartre’s own
fiction, Nausea in particular, ‘is so much a part of the negative, critical modernist
movement he describes, his criticism is one-sided, his view incomplete’ (Gross
1985: 128). Sartre’s later desire to distance himself from his early uncommitted
literature may certainly have contributed to his inability to see the traces of
political commitment that belie Flaubert’s expressions of misanthropy. However,
this can only be part of the explanation, as Sartre also seems to have been
convinced that Flaubert represented the epitome of the uncommitted16 writer,
long before undertook his study on Flaubert, and this may have rendered him
susceptible to ‘confirmation bias’17 with respect to Flaubert’s political stance.
Over twenty years before the publication of The Family Idiot, in a note to
What Is Literature? Sartre states that he has so often been charged with ‘being
unfair to Flaubert’18 that he ‘cannot resist the pleasure’ of supplying extracts
from Flaubert’s correspondence to buttress his interpretation of Flaubert as the
 Objectivity in Sartre’s Study of Flaubert 149

uncommitted writer par excellence (WL/QL: 124n./165–6n.). These include:

‘I’m worth twenty Croisset voters’ (1871); ‘I have no hatred for the communards
for the reason that I don’t hate mad dogs’ (Croisset, Thursday, 1871); and
‘I believe that the crowd, the herd, will always be hateful. The only ones of
importance are a small group of spirits’ (Croisset, 8 September 1871) (WL/
QL: 124n./165–6n.). To be sure, these remarks are counter-progressive, bigoted
even. But it is vital to remember that a key finding of Sartre’s application of
progressive-regressive method to Flaubert is that Flaubert is incapable of being
sincere while he is being himself, which means that anything that he writes
in his correspondence must be cross-checked against his fictional work to
establish ‘whether it contains a biographical truth’ (SM/QM: 143/199, see also
FI I/IF I: 150/157). However, in the third volume of The Family Idiot, Sartre
again relies chiefly on remarks from Flaubert’s correspondence to support his
hypothesis that Flaubert writes novels not to promote progressive ideas or incite
change but to demoralize his readership (FI V/IF 3: 413–34, 468/443–65, 500).
Arguably then, Sartre’s analysis of Flaubert’s misanthropy in The Family Idiot
fails to match it with its true dialectical counterpart because Sartre’s view on
this matter was fixed long before he applied his analytical method to Flaubert,
and this effectively blinded him to important evidence contradicting it in both
Flaubert’s life and works.
A possible challenge to this idea may be found in Rhiannon Goldthorpe’s
examination of how Sartre’s interpretation of Flaubert’s late work, The Legend of
Saint Julian Hospitator (La Légende de Saint Julien l’hospitalier, 1877), can support
the ‘potentially surprising claim’ that Flaubert may be considered a committed
writer (1992: 140). Goldthorpe argues that Sartre’s analysis of The Legend of Saint
Julian Hospitator in The Family Idiot reveals how, for Sartre, Flaubert’s writing
can be ‘at once a revelation of his own and his reader’s situation’, which ‘not only
demoralizes but may also energize readers’, who may experience solidarity with
him and work to constitute the world that he invites them to imagine (1992:
174). Although this shows that Sartre can see some evidence of engagement in
Flaubert’s work, it is only of the most accidental kind, as he denies that Flaubert
is thetically conscious of having any political agenda when he writes fiction.
Moreover, as this late work comes after Flaubert’s ‘conversion’ between 1870 and
1871, through which, Sartre argues, he becomes a ‘realist’ (FI V/IF 3: 468/500),
Sartre can even accept that Flaubert had a political agenda in mind when he
wrote The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator but still remain blind to evidence of
conscious political engagement in all of Flaubert’s works written prior to 1870,
including Madame Bovary (1856). So, the question for us is whether a reading of
150 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

Madame Bovary can substantiate the claim that if Flaubert’s literary work written
prior to 1870 is committed, it is not committed on purpose.
Sartre recognizes that if Emma ‘were merely a déclassée provincial woman
who had made a poor match, Madame Bovary would not have been worth
an hour’s effort in the eyes of its author’, but he argues that Emma holds great
significance for Flaubert because she is a ‘beautiful’ artistic creation (FI III/IF
III: 473/1589). And yet, Flaubert’s commitment to beauty alone cannot explain
why he would go to great lengths to show that the suffering and lovelessness of
the human beings at the heart of the novel, Emma and Charles, have their source
in their decidedly bourgeois society. Emma’s immersion in Romantic culture, in
particular, gives her unrealistic expectations about love and about where human
happiness is to be found, which prevents her from finding anything loveable
in Charles, who truly loves her. Her internalization of the materialist values of
her society also leads her to attempt to assuage her misery with the purchase
of luxury items – a project that plunges her into debt. What is more, neither
the published volumes of The Family Idiot nor Sartre’s notes for the fourth pay
much attention to the character of Monsieur Homais, who is widely recognized
among Flaubert scholars as a caricature of the bourgeois male (Starkie 1967:
375–77; Tanner 1979: 273–84). Homais is a pharmacist who practises medicine
without a licence; pretends to befriend the Bovarys as he continually poaches
Charles’ patients; and pushes Charles to undertake risky, experimental surgery
on a clubfoot, the terrible failure of which ruins Charles’ credibility as a medical
professional. So obvious is the critique of bourgeois ideology worked into
Flaubert’s portrayal of Homais that Tony Tanner even reads Homais as less of
a person than ‘a toxic mental atmosphere that is pervading more and more
of the world around it’ (1979: 275). As Flaubert was a meticulous writer, who
constantly drafted and re-drafted his works, and the drafts for Madame Bovary
alone total over four-thousand pages (Bart 1967: 65), it is impossible that he
could have been only ‘non-thetically aware’ of the social critique implicit in his
portrayals of Emma’s and Charles’ suffering and the despicability of Homais.
A reading of Madame Bovary therefore shows that it is mistaken to interpret
Flaubert simply as a Postromantic who believes he writes ‘for nothing and no one’
(FI V/IF 3: 136/150).

Reading ‘like a man’

Sartre’s dialectical analysis of Flaubert’s misogyny in The Family Idiot is also one-
sided. Although a great deal evidence from both Flaubert’s life and literature is
 Objectivity in Sartre’s Study of Flaubert 151

supplied for the view that Flaubert’s masochism is related to his misogyny in The
Family Idiot, masochism cannot be the dialectical counterpart to his misogyny
as proposed because Flaubert is presented as being ‘a woman’ in his experience
(FI I/IF I: 432/445), which means that masochism would feed into his misogyny.
Thus, again, Sartre offers us a circle in place of a dialectical opposition: Flaubert
hates women because he is one and he hates himself because he hates women.
Further, the notion that masochism is what dialectically opposes misogyny
in Flaubert’s experience provides no means of accounting for the nuanced
understanding of the systemic nature of women’s oppression demonstrated in
Madame Bovary. Sartre rightly observes that Emma suffers because she desires
far more than she can realistically hope for. But, while Flaubert’s rendering of
Emma’s situation does seem to make her suffering inescapable, we have seen
that it does not imply that her suffering is all her fault. Even Homais notices
how Emma’s unusual talents are doomed to be wasted due to the lack of
opportunities that her situation as the wife of a provincial health officer afford
her (MB: 96/423). Emma’s situation is what makes her self too small for her, and
her reasons for wanting a son indicate some awareness of this:

[B]earing a male child was like an anticipated revenge for all the powerlessness of
her past life. A man, at least, is free, free to explore all passions and all countries,
to surmount obstacles, to indulge in the most exotic pleasures. But a woman is
constantly thwarted. At once passive and compliant, she has to contend with
both the weakness of her body and the subjection imposed by law. Her will,
like the veil attached to her hat, flutters with every breeze; always there is desire
inviting her on, and, always, convention holding her back.
(MB: 79–80/405–6)

Observe how Flaubert’s use of free indirect discourse here masks the intrusions
of his narrator in a way that give the reader cause to question whether the
thoughts expressed here are all Emma’s. This invites the reader to consider the
extent to which the sources of her oppression are mystified in her experience.
Sartre, however, reads Flaubert’s treatment of Emma Bovary to betray his
misogyny in a straightforward way. He characterizes Flaubert’s misogyny as
the view that women are costumed beasts playing a role, who trick men into
believing that they have spiritual depth when they do not because they are
deceitful whores ‘by nature’ (FI V/IF 3: 576–7/613). Sartre’s Flaubert therefore
takes sadistic pleasure in mocking Emma’s womanly beastliness by showing
that all the splendour of Rouen’s Notre-Dame Cathedral could not move her
152 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

towards virtue; yet, Léon’s remark that ‘Everyone does it in Paris!’ is enough to
steer her into vice (MB: 216/547). Even though adultery is a grave sin in the eyes
of Emma’s Catholic God, Léon’s reassurance that having (extra-marital) sex with
him in a taxicab cannot possibly be degrading because sophisticated Parisians
do it all the time is effective because it allows her to superficially reconcile this
act with her Romantic-aesthetic ideals. Or, as Sartre crudely puts it, it allows
her to ‘take her ass for her heart’ (FI III/IF II: 169/1276). Further, although both
Emma and Léon are dehumanized and rendered objectively laughable in the
scene that follows, through their absorption into an absurd object of the taxicab,
Sartre suggests that it is only Emma who is mocked at an existential level because
becoming the butt of this vulgar joke signals the failure of her fundamental
project to become the heroine of her own great Romance – a feminine project
par excellence.
Sartre’s view that Flaubert experiences his reality as if he were an oppressed
woman (FI I/IF I: 431–2/445–6) implies that Flaubert’s ability to successfully
portray female characters is due to a felt identification with them, rather than due
any intellectual achievement gained through reflections on women’s situation.
But Flaubert’s diatribe against marriage in November counts against this view. At
just fifteen years old, Flaubert observes:

[T]he man who, basing his actions on the Civil Code, forcibly enters the bed of
a virgin who has been given to him that same morning, thereby carrying out a
legal rape, that is protected by authority . . . [has] no counterpart among apes,
hippopotami, toads; they at least, male and female, copulate when common
desires lead them to seek out each other and unite, in such a way that there is
neither terror and disgust on the one side, nor brutality and obscene despotism
on the other.
(Nov/OJ: 91–2/824)

This shows that Flaubert recognizes marriage as a patriarchal institution that

harms women.
What is more, Flaubert’s imagining of married life from a woman’s perspective
in Madame Bovary displays a keen awareness of how sexist structures in
nineteenth-century France tended to preclude women from leading fulfilling
lives. The fact that Emma is married to Charles is merely a contingency, although
she mistakenly identifies it as the source of her misery. Her presumption that
other women are blissfully happy by virtue of having husbands who are not
like Charles (MB: 41/365–6) emphasizes, for the reader, the mystification of
 Objectivity in Sartre’s Study of Flaubert 153

women’s oppression and the romanticization of marriage in her society. Part of

Emma’s tragedy is that she fails to see that she already has the most that she could
realistically hope for, which is to be a second-class citizen as a someone’s wife, as
the only realistic alternative for her is to become a sub-citizen, through falling
into poverty or prostitution.19 Such an astute depiction of a woman’s socially
engineered misery, which exposes precisely the kind of mystifications that
Simone de Beauvoir shows ‘keep women in their chains’ (SS/DS II: 772/638),
cannot be adequately explained by a crude ‘felt’ identification with women.
Feminism, understood as a critique of patriarchal society, does a far better job
of synthesizing the contradictions apparent in Flaubert’s treatment of Emma. It
also allows us to give Flaubert credit for the social critique implicit in a novel
that mocks principles of patriarchal society and grants a mystified woman who
suffers for pursuing what seems to be the highest good available to her in the
context of that society – Romance – the last laugh.
Why does Sartre not detect Flaubert’s feminism when other commentators
have?20 Sartre may have had preconceptions about Flaubert’s attitude towards
women before he commenced work on The Family Idiot, but there is also
reason to believe that he may have had an emotional investment in emphasizing
Flaubert’s femininity, which may have blinded him to the positive, feminist
‘other side’ of his misogyny. This reason is that Sartre may have been biased
against acknowledging the similarities between Flaubert and himself. In a late
interview, Sartre says: ‘[Flaubert] began to fascinate me precisely because I saw
him in every way as the contrary of myself ’ (IOT: 52). Moreover, Sartre is a self-
avowed ‘macho’ (1986: 298), whom psychoanalytical commentators have found
to embody a somewhat anxious masculinity (Doubrovsky 1995; Boulé 2005).
Hence, Sartre may have had some emotional investment in reading Flaubert as
the ‘feminine opposite’ of himself. A remarkable scene from Sartre’s childhood
recounted in his autobiography lends support to this view, as it highlights an
important similarity between Sartre and Flaubert (although without explicitly
alluding to this similarity). Here, Sartre writes that he believed his mother
had wished he was a girl because she strove to give him ‘the sex of angels,
indeterminate but feminine around the edges’ by preening his long blond curls
(W/M: 65/86). One day, though, Sartre’s macho grandfather decided that he
could tolerate the ambiguous gender of his grandson no longer and took it upon
himself to take little Jean-Paul to get a haircut more befitting a boy. Upon seeing
‘the new him’ when he arrived home, Sartre’s mother shut herself in her room
and wept because, Sartre believes, her precious little girl had been changed into
a boy. This is also the moment that reveals Sartre’s ‘ugliness’ to him, as his pretty
154 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

curls had hidden his exotropic right eye. After this haircut, Sartre recalls going
through something akin to ‘the agonies of an ageing actress’ (W/M: 66/88). He
discovered that his new, ‘ugly’ and unquestionably male appearance meant that
he could no longer please others by his presence alone: he now had to make an
effort. From this, it is reasonable to conclude that Sartre’s entry into masculinity
was fraught. His first male haircut could even have been the ‘original crisis’ that
put him on his path to becoming a writer, for it taught him that he must act if
he is to justify his existence and, later, this imperative became more specific: he
must ‘write in order to be forgiven for being alive’ (W/M: 121/157).
Taking all this together suggests that Sartre’s constellates writing within a
network of interrelated, gendered binaries that serve a heuristic function for
him: feminine/masculine, passive/active, apathy/activism, imagination/reality,
reading/writing. If his self-esteem is hinged upon always being on the ‘right side’
of these binaries and if he views Flaubert as the opposite of himself, then Flaubert
must always fall on the left. Further evidence in support of this idea can be found
in the contrast between Sartre’s conception of his writing and Flaubert’s. Sartre
states that he conceives of his reader as a person ‘on whose duration I act’ (1986:
211). However, he describes Flaubert’s writing as a passive activity, more like
‘a dream of the pen’ than an act (FI IV/IF III: 223/1997). The gendered aspect
of Sartre’s interpretation of Flaubert’s writing becomes most apparent when he
portrays Emma Bovary and Flaubert switching places and (hetero)sexual roles
in Flaubert’s imagination as he writes Madame Bovary in the following remark:
‘la Bovary, this penetrates him from the outside and is discovered to be himself
in passivity; or, if you like, he is himself that great creature lying between the
lines, a creature that only the act of another will awaken’ (FI I/IF I: 166/174).

Implications
The first three volumes of The Family Idiot certainly reveal many aspects of
Flaubert’s character that find support in a Sartrean reading of Madame Bovary,
such as his passivity, his aesthetic, his identification with his characters, his
masochism, his misanthropy, his misogyny, his aggressive defensiveness and,
crucially, his original choice of the imaginary. However, Sartre’s view of Flaubert
as the apolitical, feminine opposite of himself, which he held long before he
applied his existential psychoanalysis to Flaubert, appears to have burdened
him with confirmation biases that effectively blinded him to the evidence for
Flaubert’s political commitment and feminism. Although Sartre’s critique of
Madame Bovary could have brought this to his attention and he could have
 Objectivity in Sartre’s Study of Flaubert 155

adapted the dialectic of The Family Idiot in the fourth volume, the sketch of a
Sartrean reading of Madame Bovary provided here shows that The Family Idiot,
as it stands, fails to provide the reader with a satisfactory basis for re-totalizing
Flaubert-the-author-of Madame-Bovary’s self.
But this by no means implies that Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis is not a
viable route to knowledge of selves. Having put Sartre’s most rigorous application
of his analytical method to the test that he himself recommends, this chapter has
shown only that it is incomplete, which we already knew. The fact that Sartre was
unable to complete his study on Flaubert makes it difficult to assess the success
of this project in a definitive way. It has been remarked that the unusual value of
The Family Idiot in its unfinished state is that it demonstrates the overwhelming
difficulty of the task it takes on since, despite nearing three thousand pages, this
book ‘seems too short’, precisely because Sartre goes into such detail and tries to
make all of his theoretical assumptions explicit (Grimaud 1982: 209); his attempt
to re-totalize Flaubert through the production of a monumental text illuminates
how much of Flaubert’s self is excluded from it. In a response to the remark that
the notion of lived experience is quite vague and not fully theorized in 1975,
Sartre replies: ‘I think that it would have come, little by little, in the volume on
Madame Bovary. But it is difficult to go very far into this area, because it means
really “breaking into” the other. I can talk about my lived experience [mon vécu],
but only at risk can I reconstitute yours’ (IWS: 22). This suggests that Sartre
may have come to acknowledge the overwhelming difficulty involved in gaining
knowledge of a self. Indeed, it may be impossible for any human – even Sartre –
to succeed in gaining complete knowledge of a self. Hence, The Family Idiot, the
work whose incompletion weighed upon Sartre like a kind of ‘remorse’ (1978b:
20), may be necessarily incomplete.
The necessary incompleteness of The Family Idiot does not render Sartre’s
attempt to show that everything about a self can be communicated a failure,
though. Certainly, The Family Idiot succeeds in communicating many aspects
of Flaubert’s lived experience that have historically been thought to be
incomprehensible and incommunicable. Therefore, the greatest accomplishment
of this work may be that it succeeds in showing that all aspects of a self are
potentially communicable, even if it is impossible to communicate them all.
Sartre once said that even if his study on Flaubert was a failure, he hoped that
it would ‘give others the idea of re-doing it, better’ (IOT: 51). In thinking about
what can be learned from his example by those who have this idea, it is worth
recalling Thomas R. Flynn’s remark that ‘if the moral of Sartre’s stories is that
there is always a moral to the story, their epistemological lesson is the ancient one
156 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

that methods determine the content; in other words, that one notices only what
one looks for’ (1997: 263). This ancient lesson appears reconfirmed by Sartre’s
final ‘story’ about Flaubert. Even though Sartre may have been able to address
the oversights in the first three volumes of The Family Idiot identified above had
he been able to write the fourth, the fact that these oversights appear to result
from his personal biases is instructive. It shows how the biases of the analyst
can blind them to evidence concerning their subject’s character, even when they
are adhering strictly to Sartre’s (revised) method of existential psychoanalysis.
Of course, the problem of analyst-bias is a general one, and Sartre’s existential
psychoanalysis does appear to avoid the problem about confirmation bias towards
psychoanalytical explanations that traditional psychoanalysis faces (Lacewing
2018: 100), as it does not have any ready-made explanations. Nevertheless,
Sartre’s application of his psychoanalytic method in The Family Idiot teaches
those thinking about ‘re-doing it, better’ of the importance of putting additional
checks and measures in place to ensure that their biases do not blind them to the
evidence before them.
 6

Imagining the selves of others

The previous chapters have illuminated the central role of the imagination
in Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis. This chapter aims to clarify that role.
Crucially, it will demonstrate how Sartre’s view that gaining knowledge of
another self requires us to ‘re-totalize’ it in our imagination does not conflict
with the theory of the imagination that he defends in The Imaginary, where we
find the claim that ‘one can never learn from an image what one does not know
already’ (I: 10/27). Further, it aims to make sense of Sartre’s view that The Family
Idiot is The Imaginary ‘at seventy years of age’ instead of ‘thirty’ (IWS: 15) by
showing how The Family Idiot develops key ideas from the earlier work about
the implications of different uses of language and the imagination for self-
formation and analysing how Flaubert’s ‘retreat’ into the imaginary shaped the
person he became.

Bodies and books: Analoga for the self

Psychoanalytical commentators have criticized The Family Idiot for the

excessively rationalistic philosophy of consciousness that they believe
underpins it (Mouchard 1971; Pontalis 1985). Indeed, the very idea that one
can psychoanalyse a dead person seems to overlook the fact that a person is
an embodied consciousness. In the context of current psychotherapy and
psychoanalysis, the direct experience of empathizing with another who is present
tends to be a theorized as an experiential way of knowing: an ‘unmediated and
visceral knowing of the other’ (Ginot 2009: 301; see also Greenberg 2008: 51).
Although we have already seen that Sartre would deny that we can learn anything
about another merely through being in their presence since he denies that any
knowledge whatsoever can be gained ‘through being’, this is not the point of
the concern being raised here. The point is that knowledge that is – somehow
– based on observations of someone’s actions and gestures would appear to be
158 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

essential to a re-totalization of their self for the very reason that their self is
their objective being, their being as seen from the outside. As Sartre upholds that
others have an advantage over the subject with regard to knowledge of their
self precisely because they see the subject from the outside, it seems surprising
that he would uphold that it is possible to gain totalizing knowledge of a self
through analysing the records they made of their thoughts and the historical
evidence about them but without any first-hand observations of how they ‘live’
their body, especially as Sartre was influenced by Gestalt psychologists (Mirvish
2020), who emphasize the importance of attending to what subjects say through
their body and how this may belie what they actually say in order to gain a
holistic understanding of them.
For Sartre to be able to respond to the objection that his existential
psychoanalysis unduly neglects to attend to the embodied dimension of its
subject’s being, he must be able to show that first-hand observations of the
subject in the flesh are not essential for gaining totalizing knowledge of their
self. To begin to see how he can do this, let us recall that in Being and Nothingness
he affirms that we can gain self-knowledge despite being unable to observe our
body from the outside because our selves are objects of others’ knowledge and
so they are capable of being the object of ours (BN/EN: 455/331). He then offers
a tantalizing hint about how exactly we can learn about our selves towards the
end of his analysis of the Look, when he states that through language we can
gradually learn what others think of us and thereby gain knowledge of the object
that is at once ‘a source of fascination and of horror’ (BN/EN: 362/304): the
object that we are for them.
If the self is nothing other than the ideal unification of knowledge of the
subject’s objective being that is projected ‘into’ their body as Sartre contends,
then it would be possible to gain knowledge of a subject’s self without observing
their body because the body and the self are separate objects that exist in
mutually exclusive modes of experience. I submit that the conception of the
body-self relation that The Family Idiot presupposes may be accurately captured
in terms of Sartre’s early theory of the imagination thus: the body is an analogon
for the self. In The Imaginary, Sartre uses the term ‘analogon’ to refer to the
‘matter’ that acts as the ‘equivalent of perception’ for an image (I: 18/42). Now,
physical objects, such as photographs, portraits, as well as the bodies of actors
and impersonators, can function as analoga. Sartre explains how different kinds
of analoga can serve as the matter for the same image by arguing that the form of
the imaginary act through which I aim to make the face of the same absent friend
present is the same, regardless of whether its matter is a photograph, a caricature
 Imagining the Selves of Others 159

or ‘something’ that emerges ‘out of the void’ to fulfil my imaging intention (I:
18/43). Although the photograph and the caricature are physical things, with
properties that may be observed, whereas the matter for purely mental image is
consciousness itself,1 the experience of the image formed in each case will have
the same form so long as the object aimed at by the imagining intention is the
same.
Now, the view that physical analoga can serve as the matter for imaginary
objects does not contradict Sartre’s claim that perceptual and imaginary objects
do not mix in our experience because the analogon is not the intentional object
of the imaginary act, as the matter for the image is precisely what is negated and
surpassed by the imaginary act that brings forth an absent object. I can therefore
form an image of Princess Diana through the aid of a painting of her, but I cannot
observe the features of the painting and have an image of Princess Diana at the
same time; the disappearance of the painting before my eyes is the condition for
the appearance of her image. Moreover, Sartre’s theorization of the analogon,
combined with his view of the self as an imaginary object and his understanding
of the body as ‘the ultimate magical object’ (BN/EN: 468/391), implies that a
similar process occurs when we are in the presence of others, with the difference
that the bodies of others seem to present us with their selves ‘in the flesh’. My
meeting with Victoria yesterday, for example, may supply me with the matter for
my image of her today (e.g. a photograph), through which I aim to experience
her presence as I did yesterday. But I did not perceive Victoria’s self during our
meeting yesterday; I perceived her body, which seemed to be animated by her
self from the ‘inside’. Further, I can no more be conscious of Victoria’s self when
observing the features of her body than I can be conscious of my image Princess
Diana when observing the way that her face, eyes, hair, etc. are depicted in the
painting that is the matter for my image of her. Therefore, if we accept a Sartrean
understanding of the self, then the role of the body in social experience must be
that of a physical analogon for the self. Although Sartre acknowledges that letters,
photographs, memories, etc. are all poor substitutes for the physical presence of
loved ones, he believes that this is because we use these analoga to try to ‘replace
the weakening affective analogon’ that can only be rejuvenated by the presence
of the loved one in person (I: 145/279). This suggests that the bodies of others
are the most effective analoga for selves because of how we feel when we are
in their presence. But how can we explain this feeling if the self is not really
present in the body? I propose that, on a Sartrean account, it can be explained
as a result of the body being the primary analogon for the self in combination
with the illusion that the self animates the body we see before us ‘from within’.
160 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

This illusory appearance of the self ‘inside’ the body can then be attributed to
the body’s other function as the subject’s instrument of self-formation – as the
object through which the subject makes their self – which obscures its analogical
function for us and causes us to project the self ‘into’ it.
Although Sartre does not explicitly defend this view of the body as the primary
analogon for the self in The Imaginary, his exposition of how the body of one
subject can serve as the analogon for the self of another takes us part way to
this conclusion. Sartre describes how the whole body of the female performance
artist Claire Franconay becomes an analogon for the absent Maurice Chevalier –
despite the obvious disanalogies between her physical appearance and his – for
the observer who ceases to perceive her body and, instead, ‘reads’ her gestures
as part of a ‘signifying synthesis’ (I: 26/59). To read Franconay’s body this way,
though, Sartre contends that the observer must already possess knowledge of
how the real Chevalier comports himself, as this is what facilitates the synthesis
of the protrusion of her lower lip, the tilt of her head, the angle of her hat, etc. in an
image of Chevalier. Understanding this sort of prior knowledge as a prerequisite
for the ability to read Franconay’s performance this way enables Sartre to build
his case for the view that our prior knowledge shapes our perception of objects
by predisposing us to project certain affective qualities onto them, which we
then perceive ‘in’ them. Prior knowledge of Chevalier causes the subject to
perceive his body as having a specific affective ‘sense’ – a sense of ‘Chevalierness’
if you will. And so, what happens when an observer experiences Franconay’s
performance as an imitation of him is that their prior knowledge awakens the
affective reaction that constitutes the sense of Chevalier for them, which then
enables them to see her body as if it were ‘possessed’ by Chevalier (I: 29/64).
This discussion points to analogical function of the body in social experience
more broadly, which I believe his later study of Flaubert assumes in order to
hold that the ‘affective sense’ of Flaubert, which allows us to synthesize the
biographical facts about him in an imaginary re-totalization of his self, can be
gained by means other than direct observations of his behaviour. This is chiefly
because Sartre gives us no reason to deny that the body functions in same way
in ordinary interpersonal interactions as it does in Franconay’s impersonation,
except that we read others’ behaviour to express who they really are ‘inside’, their
real self, in ordinary interpersonal interactions. Of course, Sartre emphasizes the
phenomenological difference between seeing Pierre ‘in the flesh’ and forming
an image of him from other physical or psychical matter. However, a difference
in the phenomenological character of experiences is not always indicative of a
difference in their form on Sartre’s account. When I form an image of Pierre
 Imagining the Selves of Others 161

based on a portrait, I incorporate all that I perceive ‘into a projective synthesis

that aims at the true Pierre, a living being who is not there’ (I: 22/51, emphasis
added). But it seems that a projective synthesis must also be involved in my
experience of Pierre, the living being who is there too. Even though I can
perceive and interact directly with the body that symbolizes and creates Pierre,
what constitutes the ‘true’ Pierre for me – i.e. his self – is not really ‘there’, inside
his body, in this case either. This means that our ordinary experience of others’
presence ‘in person’ results from a form of ‘reading’ that resembles the reading of
Franconay’s body discussed above: the prior knowledge we have of others – even
if it is only the minimum knowledge gained via our first impression of them –
enables us to read their acts and gestures as expressions of their ‘inner’ selves.
An appreciation of the body’s function as an analogon for the self allows
us to understand how other bodies and other objects can serve as analoga for
the same self. If our experience of other people in person is deceptive, insofar
the imaginary constitution of them has phenomenal character that resembles
perception, and if the self is nothing more than an ideal totalization of knowledge
that is projected ‘into’ the body, then a subject’s body is not the only possible
matter for their self. Indeed, the potential of other objects to serve as analoga for
the self is a condition for the possibility of self-knowledge on Sartre’s account
since no subject can view their own body as the object it is for others. For us
to be able to form an accurate image of our selves based on what others tell us
about how we appear to them, then, it must be possible for words to function as
linguistic analoga for selves. Sartre writes of the power of a single word to prompt
an imaginary act: the word ‘moon’, he proposes, can represent the ‘central core’
of the analogon for the image of the moon if it is invoked as part of an intention
to synthesize the subject’s knowledge of the moon in an image of it (I: 85/169).
If a single word can feed into imaginary objects in this way, then it follows that
a series of words, all describing the same object can collectively function as the
analogon for an imaginary object such as a self. That is to say, we may be able
to read the self of another ‘in’ a book just as we read it ‘in’ their body. This is
precisely the view that, I believe, underpins Sartre’s later belief that a successful
biography can stand in place of the body and, hence, communicate knowledge
of its subject’s self in the absence of their body.
Still, a major obstacle for the claim that a book can stand in place of
the body as an adequate analogon for its subject’s self is the fact that other
people’s gestures, expressions and intonations play a significant role in
conveying that specific ‘sense’ of them as individuals, which is what allows us
to comprehend their actions and synthesize them in a coherent totalization.2
162 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

Sartre acknowledges as much towards the end of his early study of Baudelaire,
when he states that just a ‘glimpse’ of the living Baudelaire ‘could make us
feel that the characteristics mentioned here, one after the other, are in fact
built into an indissoluble synthesis in which each of them expresses itself and
all the others at the same time’ (B: 185/172). This remark testifies to Sartre’s
acute awareness of how it is much more difficult to comprehend someone
who is not present in person than it is to comprehend someone who is. The
rest of this chapter will be geared towards defending the Sartrean view that
it is at least theoretically possible to gain the kind of experientially based
comprehension of another person required to synthesize the biographical
facts about them in a re-totalization of their self without ever having seen
them ‘in’ the flesh.

Structure, language and Sartre’s ‘return to Freud’

To assess Sartre’s claim that a body of words can stand in place of another
person’s physical body as the basis of our knowledge of them, it is vital to gain
an appreciation of the special significance he ascribes to language as both an
objective structure in the world and a tool we use both to make sense of it and
to make our selves in it. As he regards human beings as radically social beings
who use language to acquire knowledge and whose perception of the world is
shaped by their prior knowledge, he treats language not as a medium through
which we relate to others and objects indirectly, but as a mode of direct access to
certain objects: objects of knowledge. He even describes language in biological
terms as a ‘third eye’ that enables us to see ‘into our neighbour’s heart’ because
we ‘perceive’ the language of others ‘as we perceive the limbs of others’ (WL/
QL: 12/26). Language takes on even greater significance in the context of his
mature existentialism, where it is theorized not just as a tool but as part of the
fabric of the world, alongside other ‘already signifying material’ such as ‘iron’
and ‘marble’, ‘which others animate with their movement from beneath, like
stage-hands creating waves by crawling around under a piece of canvas’ (CDR
I/CRD I: 182/293). Alongside marble and iron, then, language forms part of the
raw material out of which we, collectively, make the world through acts that
awaken meanings latent in it. And although language is a general structure that
precedes the individual, its inexhaustible potential for variation at the individual
level allows Sartre to uphold that it is one of the most important instruments of
self-formation. Language is therefore the focal point of his psychoanalysis and
 Imagining the Selves of Others 163

so it is unsurprising that his rapprochement with Freud in his later work is made
via Jacques Lacan’s ‘return to Freud’.3
Lacan’s psychoanalysis develops Freud’s by interpreting the unconscious
as embedded in language and having its most important manifestations in
language. Sartre hints at the influence of Lacan on his psychoanalytical thought
in an interview in 1969 when he states that ‘Lacan says that the unconscious is
structured like language, I would say that the language which expresses it has the
structure of a dream. In other words, comprehension of the unconscious in most
cases never achieves explicit expression’ (IOT: 49–50). This telling remark shows
that, by 1969, Sartre has come to see that language not only plays a key role in
structuring lived experience and knowledge, but that it is also what separates
what is known from what is ‘unconscious’ insofar as it is comprehended but
unknown;4 language is the means through which we objectify our lived
comprehension of our experience and comprehension can only become an
object of knowledge by first being objectified. This allows Sartre to buttress his
hypothesis that people make more meaning than they know because it allows
him to hold that a primary, linguistic comprehension of lived experience can
influence what people do, say and write, without them knowing about it on the
grounds that ‘nothing precedes language’ as a means for interpreting the world
as meaningful (FI I/IF I: 38/49). It also brings him closer to Freud’s position on
the capacity of the subject to thetically understand their experience and their
behaviour by enabling him to account for what we might call the phenomenon
of the unconscious ‘in’ lived experience without construing the unconscious as a
source of psychic causality outside consciousness.
Betty Cannon has, however, warned against overstating the influence of
Lacan on Sartre by showing that many of the apparent similarities between these
two thinkers’ psychoanalytical theories are merely apparent (1991: Chs. 6–7).
Cannon is certainly right to emphasize the point that Lacan’s psychoanalytic
theory replaces Freudian biological-physicalist determinism with a structural-
linguistic determinism in a way that makes it fundamentally incompatible
with Sartrean existentialism. Nonetheless, thinking with – and against – Lacan
was instrumental in leading Sartre to a fuller appreciation of how we relate to
others and our selves through language. To bring this out, it is helpful to briefly
consider Lacan’s views on the Mirror Stage in human psychological development,
which he believes occurs between the ages of six and eighteen months. Lacan
attributes the infant’s jubilant response to the recognition of their reflection in
the mirror to the capacity of this image to allow them to anticipate a mastery
over, and a unity with, their body, which they lack.5 Upon the apprehension of
164 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

their mirror-image, the infant’s self enters into their experience ‘in a primordial
form’, without the function of an I-subject it will take on once the infant acquires
language (E: 76/94). Put simply, the infant’s mirror-image serves a roughcast of
their self in Lacan’s view: it is a ‘gestalt’ that simultaneously symbolizes ‘the I’s
mental permanence’ and provides the template for ‘the imago of one’s own body in
hallucinations and dreams’ (E: 76/95). Crucially, though, Lacan understands the
infant’s identification with her mirror-image as a fundamental ‘misrecognition’
(méconnaissance) that serves as the foundation for the whole process of self-
formation. He interprets it as the first form of the stance of ‘not-knowing’ vis-à-
vis the (real) self and paranoically identifying with the (imaginary) other that the
‘I’ signifies, which represents the (languaged) human stance for him.
This summary of Lacan’s account of how the self enters lived experience
allows us to see that both Lacan and Sartre construe the subject-self relation
as one founded on alienation, although they each have different accounts
of the source of this alienation. For Lacan, it originates in the subject’s
misidentification with another person, whereas for Sartre it is an upshot of
the unbridgeable ontological gap between the being that reflects and the being
that is reflected upon. So, while Lacan regards the unification of subject and
self as a possibility – with ‘catastrophic’ implications (E: 379/454)6 – and self-
knowledge as an impossibility, Sartre regards the contrary to be true: unification
with self is impossible but self-knowledge is possible. Despite this difference,
both Lacan and Sartre regard the intrusion of inert factors in the subject-self
relation as a major source of psychological distress. Lacan writes that the ‘inertia
characteristic of the I formations’ can be taken to supply ‘the broadest definition
of neurosis, just as the subject’s capture by his situation gives us the most general
formulation of madness – the kind found within the asylum walls as well as
the kind that deafens the world with its sound and fury’ (E: 80/99). So, just as
oppressive situations capture subject and drive them to madness, the signifiers
that capture the self drive the subject into neurosis. Now, although Lacan is not
cited in Saint Genet, this insight can be seen to underpin Sartre’s analysis of
how ‘thief ’ functions as the ‘dizzying word’ that captures Genet (SG: 17–48/26–
60), and it clearly influences Sartre’s analysis of how language shapes Flaubert’s
relation to his self in The Family Idiot, where Lacan is cited at an early stage (FI
I/IF I: 15/25).
Unlike Lacan, though, Sartre is not concerned about the possibility of inert,
thing-like factors entering the subject-self relation through language because
he believes that they can further alienate the subject from the other whom she
(mis)takes for herself, but because he believes they can extend the ontological gap
 Imagining the Selves of Others 165

between the subject and her self by disempowering her as the agent of her self-
formation. This is because inert factors in the subject-self relation are unchosen
traits imposed upon the self from outside; in a word, they are ‘nonassimilables’
that must, somehow, be assimilated into the self because they already define it
for others – prime examples are the traits signified by the words ‘thief ’ and ‘idiot’
for Genet and Flaubert, respectively. An excess of nonassimilables in the self
may be regarded as the hallmark of psychological oppression in Sartre’s mature
existentialism, since the more inert factors present in the self, the less scope
there is for the subject’s choice to influence their self-formation. And, as we have
seen from the examinations of Saint Genet and The Family Idiot in the previous
chapters, the stress of having to assimilate many nonassimilables into the self is
what typically drives oppressed people to develop neuroses in Sartre’s view.
Although Sartre does not develop a satisfactory account of psychological
oppression until he writes Saint Genet, he first attends to the connection
between oppression and the inferiority complex in Anti-Semite and Jew, where
he writes that it is acceptable to use the term ‘Jewish complex’ to refer to the
specific inferiority complex that is peculiar to Jews. Although he qualifies this
by saying that it is only acceptable if the term ‘complex’ is not taken to refer
to something ‘received from the outside’ since the Jews who have this complex
also create it insofar as they have allowed themselves ‘to be persuaded by the
anti-Semites’ of their inferior nature and live out their situation in bad faith
(1948/1954: 94/114). In the context of his initial existentialism, then, Sartre
recognizes the inferiority complex as a response to an oppressive situation but
interprets it as chosen response, rather than one imposed upon the subject.7 In
Saint Genet, however, he holds Genet’s society accountable for burdening him
with numerous psychological complexes but cautions against interpreting his
complexes in standard psychoanalytical way,8 as he believes that to do so would
preclude a comprehension of them by explaining them in terms of ‘impulses’ and
overlooking the crucial fact that Genet continually acts ‘against these impulses’
in his attempts to regain his autonomy (SG: 157/180).
Sartre’s refusal to interpret subjects’ behaviour in terms of predefined
psychoanalytical complexes continues into The Family Idiot, where it seems
almost stubborn in relation to The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator since, as
William J. Berg notes, the parallels between this tale and the Oedipus myth are so
obvious that ‘even the most cautious critics have acknowledged them’ (1982: 10).
In fact, Sartre reads this tale to attest to Flaubert having been ‘Freudian in advance’
because it evinces his comprehension of his hero’s remorse as resulting from the
knowledge he has ‘in his heart’ that the parricide who kills his father by accident
166 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

is not innocent if he had hoped for his father to die (FI IV/IF III: 131/1903).
So, Sartre is certain that Flaubert had a complex that regulated his relationship
to his father and made him long for his father’s death but, rather than tracing
Flaubert’s ‘Oedipal’ desires to an Oedipus complex, he works to comprehend
them in relation to the humiliations his father subjected him to as a little boy and
to use this comprehension to make sense of the specific mixture of guilt and relief
Flaubert felt after his father died. Even though the Oedipus complex can be used
to describe a wide array of ‘loving and hostile wishes which the child experiences
towards its parents’ (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973: 282–3), Sartre resists the move
to employ this form of categorization as a means of psychological explanation
and his comments in later interviews indicate that the reason for this resistance
is that he views psychoanalytical complexes to function in an analogous way to
analytical concepts that permit only ‘interpretation without contradiction’ (IOT:
57). So, when a subject’s acts are interpreted to instantiate the Oedipus complex,
they become subdued under a general concept and the potential of language to
pick out the specific sense they have for the subject is lost because concepts can
only communicate part of its dialectical truth.
This points towards Sartre’s main misgiving about Freudian (and Lacanian)
psychoanalysis in his mature work: its lack of dialectical reason. Despite
accepting a version of the unconscious and becoming ‘convinced that complexes
exist’ (IOT: 47), he remains unconvinced that the source of our desires, emotions
and dispositions is fundamentally arational and unstructured. Neuroses and
complexes are, for him, rooted in reasons because he rejects the Freudian view
of reason as something that only appears at the surface-level of experience. Here
lies the limit to Sartre’s ‘return to Freud’ via Lacan: his refusal to abandon his
existential commitment to the view that all human acts are comprehensible all
the way down to their source in an original choice, no matter how mystified the
agent is or how limited their options are.

‘Show me your metaphysics!’

Sartre agrees with Freud that works of creative literature are a fecund source of
psychoanalytical material but disagrees with him about why. Freud compares
the creative writer to the daydreamer because he believes that dreams and
imaginative works originate in an unconscious wish. As Freud’s psychoanalysis
aims to make the unconscious conscious and regards the interpretation of
dreams as the ‘royal road’ to knowledge of the unconscious processes of the
 Imagining the Selves of Others 167

mind (CW V: 608), it posits the psychoanalytical value of creative works to result
from their similarity to dreams insofar as they originate in a ‘strong experience
in the present’, which ‘awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier
experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds
a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work’ (CW IX: 151). Thus, for
Freud, the same model used for interpreting dreams can be applied to interpret
creative works to reveal the unconscious wish that they seek to fulfil.
Sartre, however, denies that dreams are a privileged site of psychological
revelation. Dreams hold a psychological interest for him only insofar as they offer
insight into the operations of a consciousness detached from its situation but, for
the very reason that they are ‘desituated’, they hold little psychoanalytical interest
for him as the dreaming consciousness is one that is ‘captured’ by the imagination
and cut off from the world. Locked in an imaginary of its own making, it has
nothing to negate or transcend and its actions have no consequences. This
means that the freedom of dreamer has no dialectical opposition: it has ‘lost its
being-in-the-world’, which is the necessary condition for making any meaning
in the world (I: 170/329). While the waking subject’s reactions to their dreams
may well have important psychoanalytical significance for Sartre, the dreams
themselves do not. This means that he cannot follow Freud in explaining the
great psychoanalytical significance he attributes to creative works in terms of a
straightforward analogy between the creative writer and the dreamer.
As Sartre sees it, literary works are an invaluable resource for a psychoanalytical
study of their author for the reason they result from the effort on the author’s
part to relay events that transpire in an imaginary world and to use language to
construct analoga for the worlds that they imagine.9 Unlike the dreamer, then,
the writer of prose is a free agent, engaged in an activity that aims at the creation
of a ‘free dream’ for their readers (WL/QL: 37/57). To succeed in constructing
an object – a text – that can be used by others as a physical analogon for an
imaginary world, the author must make decisions about what the world they
want to communicate is like and they must also work out how to describe its
specific features to others. As the real world is the only model of a world that
anybody has, it seems that authors must draw upon their own experience of how
this world works to construct their own worlds in the imaginary.
This idea appears to motivate Sartre’s claim that it is possible to discover and
an author’s metaphysics in their literary works:

Criticism is a discovery, a certain manner of seeing the world, a way of

discovering how the fellow whose work you are reading and criticizing saw the
168 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

world . . . For me that was the critical idea. Finding out how the men who wrote
saw the world, each separately. They described the world, but they saw it in
different ways. Some in its plenitude, others from the side, narrowly . . . As I see
it, criticism is a double process. It must be an exposition of the author’s methods,
rules, and techniques, insofar as these techniques show me his metaphysics.
(1986: 208–9/297–9)

Here, Sartre uses the term ‘metaphysics’ in a peculiar way: to designate the
specific framework a subject uses to make sense of the world.10 Although he
does not offer a sustained defence of this view that an author’s literature reveals
their metaphysics in his philosophical work, the claim that literature is a special
mode of metaphysical communication is explicitly defended by Simone de
Beauvoir in her essay, ‘Literature and Metaphysics’. Because Sartre uses the term
‘metaphysics’ in the passage quoted above in the same peculiar way as Beauvoir
does in that essay, it is highly likely that he is building upon the argument she
offered there to propound his more radical view that literary works can provide
insight into their authors’ metaphysics. Therefore, I believe we can construct a
Sartrean argument for this view by taking Beauvoir’s argument in this early essay
as our point of departure.
Beauvoir commences from the premise that metaphysics is something
irreducible to abstract concepts because it is not a theoretical enterprise that
is concerned with objects of knowledge but a way of comprehending forms of
experience through being. More specifically, metaphysics is concerned with the
‘attitudes’ or perspectival stances through which we relate to the world. These
attitudes shape our experience in ways that cannot satisfactorily be expressed in
ordinary language because experience invariably exceeds what can be grasped
through reflective thought about it and, hence, anything that can be said about
it. However, Beauvoir holds that novels can communicate metaphysical attitudes
because they use language ‘to reconstitute on the imaginary plane this experience
itself as it appears prior to any elucidation’ (2005/1946: 270/1154), as opposed to
theoretical texts that use language to articulate thoughts produced by reflection.
If a novel succeeds in furnishing the reader with an experience, then it will present
the reader with a ‘flesh-and-blood presence’ (2005/1946: 270/1154); it will give
the reader an experience complete with a primary, pre-reflective comprehension
of it from a(nother) perspective. A novel can therefore acquaint its readers
with different metaphysical attitudes by furnishing them with the opportunity
to experience ‘foreign’ experience in the imaginary – i.e. to apprehend and
comprehend the irreducible, unsayable dimensions of an experience that is not
 Imagining the Selves of Others 169

originally theirs. Novels that achieve this end may appropriately be described
as ‘metaphysical’ in Beauvoir’s view as they offer a ‘disclosure of existence’ in a
manner that is unlike other forms of expression; they use language to mimic life
in its opacity and ambiguity (2005/1946: 276/1163).
In What Is Literature? Sartre argues for a specific ontological conception of the
literary work, which makes a sharp distinction between the ‘literary text’ that is
perceived and the ‘literary work’ that is created. Here, he takes literary texts to be
defined by the specific form of language that constitutes them: prose. This form
of language, he argues, functions in the same way as ordinary spoken language
does insofar as it has a specific meaning relative to a specific context.11 If we are
sketching a tree together and you have an eraser in your hand and I say, ‘Can you
pass me that, please?’ then the context tells you that by ‘that’ I mean the eraser
you are holding. The words in literary texts also refer to specific objects in Sartre’s
view, but to specific objects that populate an imaginary world. This means that
if the reader takes the author up on the invitation to work collaboratively with
them to construct to the imaginary world they describe, then the reader will
experience the literary work as a ‘disclosure-creation’ (WL/QL: 45/67). Thus,
Sartre views the literary text as a physical object that invites the reader to treat
it as an analogon for an imaginary world and to, thereby, bring the literary work
into existence as ‘a subjective thing which reveals itself under the aspect of the
objective, a discourse so curiously contrived that it is equivalent to silence’ (WL/
QL: 22/38). Accordingly, we can see that he agrees with Beauvoir that literary
texts can communicate metaphysical attitudes because, like her, he believes they
can ‘give’ imaginary objects to readers in a manner analogous to that in which
the world gives perceptual objects to us in real life – namely, as impregnated with
a specific sense, which is a function of the subject’s metaphysical attitude.12
But how does Sartre move from the view that it is possible to communicate a
metaphysics to the more controversial one it is possible to discover the author’s
metaphysics in their literary works? Before responding to this question, it should
be noted that this view was especially controversial when The Family Idiot
was published in the early 1970s, when the influence of structuralism13 – the
movement that pronounced the author dead – was at its peak. As structuralism
rejects the long-standing assumption of authorial ‘authority’ on the meaning
of their text not as merely as a falsehood, but as a falsehood generated by an
oppressive ideology, it is perhaps unsurprising that Sartre’s gargantuan study
on Flaubert was received by many as the product of an outmoded, ‘bourgeois’
interest in the person of the author. However, Sartre’s remarks in the later
interviews reveal his ambivalence towards structuralism and indicate why he
170 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

believes literary works invariably betray their author’s metaphysics. On the one
hand, he admits that ‘a moment comes in the research when the text must be
confronted . . . I want to do a totalizing critique: this is why the last volume [of
The Family Idiot] will be a textual or “literary” study of Madame Bovary, and
in it I will try to use “structuralist” techniques’ (OIF/SIF: 125–6/108–9). This
shows that he appreciates the value of certain structuralist insights vis-à-vis
the literary text and regards the use of certain structuralist techniques, which
examine the text in isolation from its origin, as an essential ingredient in his
proposed critique of Madame Bovary. On the other hand, when he is asked
whether he would still attempt to reconstruct Flaubert if all that remained of
him was Madame Bovary, he replies as follows: ‘I am completely opposed to the
idea of the text, and that is precisely why I chose Flaubert. By leaving us juvenilia
and an abundant correspondence, he offers the equivalent of “psychoanalytic
discourse”’ (OIF/SIF: 123/106). This shows that he is opposed to the structuralist
idea of a text as something that has broken free of all its connections with the
subject who wrote it. His response to the potential structuralist objection to his
psychoanalytical treatment of literary works may therefore be captured in his
reminder that ‘writers are alive before being dead’ (WL/QL: 23/40).
Because Sartre takes the language of literary texts to function in the same
way as speech does, believes that the author must draw on their comprehension
of this world to construct an imaginary one, and views the literary work as a
collaboration between one subject (the author) and another subject (the reader),14
he asserts that – at least for the psychoanalytic reader – the author silently
communicates the metaphysical dimensions of their own lived experience
through the ‘free dream’ of literary work in the reader’s experience. In relation to
Madame Bovary, in particular, Sartre affirms that the reader who knows where
to look can find within that work ‘a style of living’ that is ‘infinitely condensed’ in
a style of writing and, though this reader may not yet comprehend Flaubert, they
will divine that he is comprehensible because the work conveys something of his
peculiar ‘flavor, which is sensed immediately’ and which can ‘be reconstituted
by the end of a long acquaintance or biographical study’ (FI II/IF II: 8/658).

Literature as experience incarnate

As we have seen, much of the theoretical groundwork for Sartre’s revised

existential psychoanalysis is supplied in the Critique, which strives to identify the
conditions for the possibility of ‘knowledge of a History’ (CDR I/CRD I: 40/158).
 Imagining the Selves of Others 171

One of the conditions it identifies is the ability to breathe life into concrete past
events by gaining a comprehension of how they would have been experienced by
those who lived through them. It is only by attending to ‘incarnations’ of specific
historical moments that Sartre believes it is possible to grasp their dialectical truth
and thus incorporate knowledge of historical facts into totalizing knowledge of a
history. The ‘incarnation’ of the social ensemble is prioritized over the concept of
it because it is realized through events, which are not ‘instantiations’ of concept
but concrete moments in which the ‘totalization is individuated’ (CDR II/CRD
II: 28/37). As individuation is the definitive feature of reality for Sartre,15 the
analytical concept can never express the ‘synthetic unity of an event’ because
it must abstract from the concrete particulars of the lived dialectic (CDR II/
CRD II: 48). Be that as it may, Sartre expresses the hope that the ‘conceptual
formulation’ employed in totalizing analyses of a history will be dissolved in the
dialectic they reveal in the Critique (CDR II/CRD II: 41).
The Family Idiot pushes Sartre’s demand for the formal abstractions of history
to be ‘concretized’ to its full conclusion (Flynn 2014: 351). This work, which
responds to the question of ‘what, at this point in time, is it possible to know
about a man’ (FI I/FI I: ix/7), appears to implicitly concede that knowledge of a
history can only be acquired by way of a comprehension of how the historical
facts are totalized in and through the life of an individual. This is not to say
that Sartre abandons the idea that the movement of history is intelligible but,
rather, that he comes to question the idea that historical truths can be grasped
through the ‘disappearing self’ (moi qui disparaît) of the investigator (CDR I/
CRD I: 52/168), as the analysis of various historical moments in The Family Idiot
suggests that it is only through the re-totalization of another self that we can
fully comprehend the sense of a historical moment that we ourselves have not
lived through. Further, as Sartre interprets Flaubert’s life as an ‘oracular’ one that
also crystallizes the crisis of his entire class in advance (FI V/IF 3: 409/440), he
believes that the sophisticated comprehension that Flaubert gained of his lived
experience through his production of literary works offers the psychoanalytic
reader special insight into the sense of his life and times. For this reason, Sartre
denies that the sense of Flaubert’s lived experience is wholly peculiar to him. To
be sure, it results from, and can only be comprehended in terms of, his original
choice of the imaginary as a means of fleeing his unbearable reality. But, as
the rest of his class also find the reality of their class-being unbearable and are
equipped with the same tools as he is for responding to it, Flaubert’s way of
relating to the world is original without being unique. Hence, Sartre’s remark
in the Preface to The Family Idiot that no one is truly an ‘individual’ because
172 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

everyone is a ‘universal singular’ who is universalized by their epoch because

they must internalize its general structures in order to make their selves within
it (FI I/FI I: ix/7).
In a late interview, Sartre states that the most major challenge for existentialism
is that of working out ‘how to give man both his autonomy and his reality among
objects, avoiding idealism without lapsing into a mechanistic materialism’ (IOT:
46). He responds to this challenge by synthesizing the irreducible singularity of
the lived experience with the universal in the human being, and by reconciling
individual freedom with the notions of predestination and psychological
oppression in a book about a man who suffered from a constitutional passivity
and who found himself in a situation with very few options, but was nonetheless
able to progress, through use of the means that were available to him, from being
an insufficiently loved infant, to a slow learner, to the family idiot, to a ham
actor, to the celebrated author of Madame Bovary and one of the most influential
writers of his century. Moreover, this book aims to make the ‘scandalous
occurrence’ of an idiot becoming a genius (FI I/IF I: 41/51) comprehensible
by revealing the subjective sense of Flaubert’s illness as an ingenious solution
to an unbearable situation. It achieves this end by providing the reader with
reconstructions of Flaubert’s lived experience in the years leading up to his crisis
that are, for the most part, based on a psychoanalytical reading of Flaubert’s
early literary works. November, the novella that Flaubert wrote two years prior
to his crisis, is of central importance because Sartre believes it allows us to grasp
how Flaubert experienced his situation as a living hell and to comprehend –
through its disclosure of Flaubert’s metaphysical attitude – his intention to
become ill. The following passage illustrates how Sartre synthesizes an objective
understanding of Flaubert’s illness with the subjective comprehension of it that
he reads Flaubert to ‘incarnate’ in his depiction of the pathological ataraxia
(emotional disinvestment) and death of the hero of November:

Subjectively, ataraxia simply manifests the disappearance of desire in the face of

the mediocrity of the desirable . . . and as desire defines man, it barely precedes
burial. Besides the presentiment of death is merely the present ataraxia dreaming
of itself, like an external consciousness of nothingness; objectively, on the other
hand, ataraxia is merely anorexia, and this apathetic anorexia is a certain
psychosomatic state which reproduces itself spontaneously and intentionally in
a certain man. Subjectively, the journey toward death is merely the necessary
relation of the microcosm to the macrocosm, the abolition of the first being
the totalization of and the solution to the contradictions of the second; at issue
 Imagining the Selves of Others 173

is a metaphysical attitude. Objectively, the foreseen and sought-after insanity

expresses nothing about the relation of the individual to the world; it is the
way that one individual, characterized by a certain anomaly, tries to resolve the
contradictions that tear him apart.
(FI III/IF III: 630/1751–2)

The centrality of the subjective comprehension gained through engaging with

Flaubert’s literary works for Sartre’s psychoanalytic interpretation of Flaubert’s
illness is clearly underlined in this passage, which shows how a purely objective
understanding of it is incapable of appreciating how the choice to become ill
makes sense for Flaubert as form of social suicide and a means to escape from a
world he has no desire to live in.
Some may worry that Sartre’s analysis of Flaubert’s neurosis overestimates
the capacity of Flaubert’s intention to change his bodily relation to the world.16
But this concern seems less appropriate regarding Sartre’s analysis in The Family
Idiot than it might be in relation to his earlier descriptions of magical behaviour
for the main reason that it reveals an almost overwhelming amount of evidence
for the view that Flaubert’s illness was his neurotic solution to the problems
he faced. Any reader of The Family Idiot would, I believe, have to agree with
Hazel E. Barnes that its interpretation of Flaubert’s illness ‘so well supported’
by Flaubert’s writings that ‘this part of the book is the most effective in making
the reader feel that Sartre’s Flaubert is close to that real man whom we can
never know directly’ (1981b: 211). Plus, Sartre is not alone in recognizing how
Flaubert’s nervous illness was instrumental to his becoming a great writer. Enid
Starkie, for example, describes how Flaubert’s perpetual convalescence allowed
him to devote himself to his works, noting that Flaubert claims to have once
written ‘almost continuously for thirty-six hours’ (1967: 214), and even B. F.
Bart – who is almost certain that Flaubert suffered from epilepsy – ventures
that Flaubert ‘had perhaps unconsciously sought illness as a relief from a life
he loathed being forced to live’ (1967: 96–7). But it was not by some ‘happy’
chance or unconscious motivation that Flaubert became ill in Sartre’s view,
because Flaubert already comprehended his intention to become a ‘man-failure’
when he fell at his brother’s feet that night in 1844, even if he did not know it
(FI IV/ IF III: 43/1812), and Sartre’s psychanalytic readings of Flaubert’s literary
works – especially those written prior to his first attack – reveal a profound
comprehension of his illness as his means to become the loser who wins by
living in the imaginary.
174 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

Imaginary lives

As a sustained study of Flaubert’s choice to live an imaginary life, The Family

Idiot develops an important theme from The Imaginary: the dangerous
potential of the imagination to ensnare the very freedom it makes possible. An
understanding of this dangerous potential leads Sartre to propose that people
may be divided into ‘two great categories’ depending on whether they choose
to lead a real life or an imaginary one (I: 146/282). He argues that the choice
to lead an imaginary life does not merely express a preference for different
objects of experience than those that are available in reality but a preference
for a radically different form of experience too. So, people who live imaginary
lives in Sartre’s view do not strive to replace the mediocre content of real life
with an imaginary richness and beauty despite the fact that it is imaginary, they
also choose it partly because it is imaginary and because they find the feelings
and conducts associated with experience in the imaginary mode preferable to
those associated with the perceptual mode. The choice to live an imaginary life
is therefore a choice to be ‘in’ the imagination, to exist in another, private world,
cut off from the real world of risk and opportunity that we share with others.
The choice to live an imaginary life is a radical flight from being in this world
and everything that comes with it: its ‘character of presence’, the kind of actions
and reactions it demands of us, the overwhelming richness of perceptions, the
independence of real objects and others, as well as ‘the very way that our feelings
have of developing’ (I: 147/282).
This claim that the experience of imaginary objects must take place in the
imaginary mode of consciousness is key to understanding Sartre’s theorization
of the choice to lead an imaginary life as one that is often associated with serious
psychopathological conditions, such as schizophrenia. For what follows from it
is that imaginary objects do not only appear to be poor substitutes for real ones
for ‘us’, the people who choose to lead real lives: being a poor substitute for the
real objects they aim at is what characterizes imaginary objects ontologically.
The imaginary object is an object born of a desire for the ‘real thing’ that it is
also essentially incapable of satisfying. Hence, Sartre describes the function of
imaginary objects in lived experience as that of ‘deceiving desires momentarily
in order to exacerbate them’ and likens their effect to that of sea water on thirst
(I: 126/241). If this is correct, though, the choice of an imaginary life appears to
be incomprehensible – how can the choice to live in an inherently dissatisfying
state make sense? Who ‘in their right mind’ would make such a choice? Sartre
resists the move to dismiss the preference for an imaginary life as one devoid of
 Imagining the Selves of Others 175

all logic. An important clue as to why he does so is to be found in his statement

that although imaginary objects may be nothing but essentially impoverished,
inherently dissatisfying appearances, they nevertheless provide us with an
invitation flee from this world and all its constraints into an ‘anti-world’ with
as many or as few constraints as we choose to put in it (I: 136/261). This
indicates how an imaginary life may hold an irresistible appeal to those who
find themselves trapped in hopeless situations because the imagination gives
them the opportunity to experience their choices as having something like the
desired effects in the imaginary. The choice of an imaginary life can therefore be
comprehensible as the desperate choice of a subject to flee from a full, rich world
in which their choices count for nothing into a dull, dry, meticulous, empty one
in which their choice is everything.
The Imaginary argues that the pathological choice of an imaginary life can
be comprehended, and The Family Idiot shows that it can. It makes Flaubert’s
illness comprehensible by explaining how Flaubert saw only two ways out of
his unbearable situation: suicide or literature, but literature was not an option
that he could actively choose because he was incapable of acting in defiance of
the wishes of his family. It explains how Flaubert’s illness can be interpreted as
passive form of aggressive defensiveness that enables him to survive his situation
by analysing how Flaubert develops his own comprehension of his situation and
the options that are available to him. It is by writing the November that Flaubert
first begins to ‘realize’ his intention to end his real life through relaying the story
of the unnamed hero who manages to kill himself by ataraxia – by not caring
enough about his life to do the things he needs to do to sustain it, such as eat. By
killing off his alter-ego in the imaginary, then introducing a second narrator to
complete his tale and immortalize him as one who was ‘too great’ for this world,
Sartre reads Flaubert to evince his comprehension his intention to flee from this
life in which he only suffers through a form of suicide that enables him to live
on in ‘another life’ in which he can write and make believe that he is the loser
who wins.
Thus, Sartre’s psychoanalytic method takes important dimensions of
Flaubert’s lived experience to be incarnated in his literary works and uses
them to facilitate a comprehension of his choice to lead an imaginary life as
his solution to the problem posed by his unliveable life. By engaging with the
experiences afforded by Flaubert’s literary works and Sartre’s relaying of them,
the reader of The Family Idiot can, in theory, bypass the mediations of others’
(Sartre’s and Flaubert’s) reflective thoughts and gain a direct apprehension
of the sense of Flaubert’s lived experience in the imaginary. Then, they can
176 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

draw upon this comprehension to interpret Flaubert’s nervous attacks, and

subsequent withdrawal from bourgeois social life, (subjectively) as an original
strategy for self-preservation and (objectively) as self-destructive behaviour that
is symptomatic of psychological oppression.

A true novel: Knowing through imagining?

While The Family Idiot appears to be aptly described as a sequel to The Imaginary
insofar as it shows how an imaginary life can be comprehended as a choice, the
instrumental role Sartre assigns to imagining in the context of a work that aims
to communicate knowledge of Flaubert appears to stand in tension with one of
the key tenets of The Imaginary: that we cannot learn anything by imagining.
However, the apparent tension between Sartre’s theory in The Imaginary and his
practice in The Family Idiot dissolves once we appreciate how his early theory of
the imagination can accommodate his later understanding of selves as dialectical
objects.17
Let us begin by clarifying Sartre’s conception of the relation between the
imagination and knowledge in The Imaginary. As Robert Hopkins points out,
when Sartre states that we cannot learn from imagining, he should not be read
to mean that we cannot learn anything whosoever since imagining can, at the
very least, teach us ‘about our ability to imagine things’ (2011: 100). Indeed,
given Sartre’s commitment to a distinction between lived comprehension and
knowledge, the statement that ‘one can never learn from an image what one does
not know already’ (I: 10/27) is perhaps best interpreted to mean that we cannot
gain any new knowledge about real objects by imagining them. So, I cannot, for
instance, discover how many pillars the Panthéon has by imagining it because
I can only find in my image of the Panthéon as many pillars as I put in it, based
on the knowledge I already have. Imagining cannot yield any new discoveries
concerning the objective features of its object because its object is necessarily
absent and so cannot be observed; the only features to be found in imaginary
objects are those that the subject puts in them.
However, Sartre explains the intuition that imagining enlightens us by
showing that it typically furnishes us with some ‘affective clarification’ – i.e. a
deeper comprehension of the subjective sense that objects have for us. This view
is premised on the idea that our feelings behave in a similar way the face of
the imaginary as they do in the face of the real. More specifically, constituting
an imaginary object enables us to experience feelings that resemble the feelings
 Imagining the Selves of Others 177

we would feel in the presence of the real object it stands in place of, in certain
desirable conditions.18 Sartre illustrates this idea with the aid of a rather graphic
example: vomiting out of disgust. He posits that if I form an image of a rotten
plate of food, my knowledge of what this rotten dish is like provokes the affective
sense of this object for me. As such, my image of the dish already ‘knows (connait)
itself at present as disgust with this dish’ (I: 140/268–9) and does not deliver any
new knowledge. But it does bring an ‘affective dialectic’ into my experience, as
it allows the repugnance I feel in relation to this dish to respond to itself in the
absence of the dish. A similar sort of dialectic is involved in perception, although
the object has an entirely different function in each case. When I perceive a
disgusting plate of food, my repugnance guides my disgust and leads me to
‘discover in the real dish a thousand repugnant details’, which may make me sick
(I: 140/269), whereas when I imagine a disgusting plate of food, my disgust can
also intensify to the point of sickness, but it does so ‘of its own accord’ as it lacks
the input from the object itself (I: 140/269). Hence, the object is indispensable to
my feeling disgust in both cases, but in the former, it is as a stimulus and in the
latter, it is as a ‘witness’ (I: 140/269).
This illuminates what is distinctive about the feelings we experience in relation
to imaginary objects in Sartre’s view, which is that they are always anticipated
and so never truly ‘reactive’. Although he identifies ‘constitutive’ and ‘reactive’
layers within the imagining attitude, he argues that in most cases ‘the affective
factor is entirely exhausted in the constituent act’ because the absence of the
imaginary object means that ‘the whole body’ must actively collaborate in its
constitution (I: 137/264). He urges us not to misinterpret the well-documented
physiological changes that coincide with imagining – e.g. pupillary dilation and
contraction, nausea, vomiting, salivation and erections – as reactions to the
imaginary object since they form part of our effort to constitute it. Whatever
spontaneous reactions we experience in the face of the imaginary object (if any)
are incapable of revealing any new qualities in it: I can neither experience any
new affects in relation to the dish I imagine, nor can I learn anything further
about why it disgusts me, although I may be surprised that I managed to make
myself sick ‘because of nothing’ (I: 140/270).
So, it is always our love for absent loved ones that makes their face appear
to us, not the other way around. Our feelings ‘grope blindly at a moment in
order to understand themselves’; they generate the intention to imagine a
certain object they are associated with, so that they can become ‘enlightened’
through being connected with the knowledge we have of this object in our
image of it (I: 141/271). Imaginings therefore allow us to clarify the affective
178 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

sense objects have for us in our lived experience – or at least would have if
they were experienced in ‘the right’ conditions – by reproducing the affective
dialectic that constitutes the sense of them in Sartre’s view. It is due to this
capacity of imaginings to reproduce the affective sense of objects that Sartre
employs them in The Family Idiot, where he aims to supply his readers with both
the biographical facts about and an empathetic comprehension of their sense
for Flaubert. As Flynn points out, it is Sartre’s aim to communicate dialectical
truths of becoming that explains his sometimes ‘cavalier dealing with the facts’
in his biographical works, as it makes him far less concerned with the truth of
events as they actually happened than with the reproduction of the metaphysical
attitude or the ‘“way of comprehending the comprehension” of the subject in
question’ (2014: 5). Indeed, Sartre calls attention to several minor ‘factual errors’
in The Family Idiot before dismissing their significance by asserting that his
aim in The Family Idiot is ‘to show a method and to show a man’ (OIF/SIF:
111/93), which indicates that he sees the objective accuracy of the facts that are
united in the self as less important than the principle of their unification – i.e.
the comprehension that makes all of these facts make sense – since a self is a
dialectical object, a totalization or a gestalt, which is irreducible to the pieces of
knowledge it comprises.
An obvious challenge to Sartre’s use of the imagination as a means of gaining
an experience-based comprehension of a foreign experience is the view that
imaginary experience cannot provide the subject with this kind of insight
because it is not ‘real’ experience. L. A. Paul expresses this idea in the course of her
argument for the view we should not base our decisions about whether to have a
child, move to another country, study for a PhD, etc. on subjective projections of
our current selves into possible futures because imaginary exercises such as this
cannot provide us with a way knowing what experiences we have not had are like
or how they may change us. When considering the question of whether we can
understand what it is like to be a slave, a deaf person or a vampire, Paul argues
that we cannot gain this sort of understanding without having had the relevant
experiences of, for example, slavery, deafness or vampirism because these sorts
of experiences instigate radical changes in the subject’s lived situation, changes
that make their experience different not only in terms content but also in terms
of form or perspective. So, although it is perfectly possible to imagine having
experiences that you have not actually had in Paul’s view, she holds that it is
impossible to imagine having experiences in which ‘you’ are other, which means
that ‘imagining isn’t enough’ to give you knowledge of what it is really like to
be in a situation that is radically different from your own (2014: 8). And so, it
 Imagining the Selves of Others 179

follows that you cannot imagine experiences from another person’s perspective
because you have not had the relevant experience of being them.
Sartre can respond to this challenge by conceding that different subjective
experiences are, by their very nature, fundamentally inaccessible to one
another yet denying that this implies that it is impossible to gain an empathetic
comprehension of how another subject makes sense of their situation by using
the knowledge we have of their situation and how they responded to it as the
basis for our incarnations of their experiences in the imaginary. The production
of a new, imaginary experience formed on the basis of knowledge of objective
biographical facts furnishes the empathizing subject with a comprehension of
the dialectical sense of an experience for the original subject by way of a kind
of affective ‘deduction’ of the reasons why the original subject responded to
that experience in the specific way they did in Sartre’s estimation. So, the role
of empathetic imaginings in the context of his existential psychoanalysis is to
deliver neither knowledge nor an experience that is the same as the original
subject’s but to yield a human comprehension of how the original subject must
have made sense of certain objective facts. Accordingly, the naïve and possibly
indefensible epistemological claim that one can gain knowledge of another’s
experience by imagining it cannot justifiably be attributed to Sartre.19
The central role of the imagination in Sartre’s psychanalytical studies has led
some commentators to believe that he must have revised his earlier theory of
the imagination because they appear to blur the sharp distinction between the
imaginary and the real he insists upon in The Imaginary. Kathleen Lennon, for
instance, reads Sartre’s studies of Genet and Flaubert to take him closer to a
Merleau-Pontyan understanding of the imaginary and the real as blended in
experience because ‘the imaginary of the self ’ in these works is treated like a
‘dimension of the experienced body/world’ (2015: 102). Jennifer Gosetti-
Ferencei also reads Sartre’s ‘interpretations of literary works (by Flaubert, Saint-
Genet, and others)’ to signal his move away from his earlier position on the
grounds that they introduce the notion of the ‘possibilization of the real’ – i.e.
imaginings of possibilities that contrast with, but necessarily refer to, the real –
which, she believes, contradicts Sartre’s earlier view that the negation of the real
is a condition for the imaginary act (Gosetti-Ferencei 2014: 439). While both
Lennon and Gosetti-Ferencei are right to observe that Sartre’s later biographical
studies emphasize the potential of imaginary experiences to facilitate more
profound empathetic understandings, this section has shown why it is mistaken
to infer from this that he must have gone back on his earlier views about the
ontology of the imagination. Sartre’s biographical works use the imagination to
180 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

enlighten us about the affective sense of their subjects’ experience in a manner

that is entirely compatible with the understanding of the imagination as a state in
which consciousness produces an imaginary object out of nothing to experience
something like the feelings that would coincide with the real presence of that
object in certain conditions. Even the claim that imaginings can produce the
affective dialectic that constitutes the sense of an object for another subject is
consistent with this idea since the comprehension of another gained through
experiences in the imaginary does not, in itself, provide us with any further
knowledge. Rather, as knowledge is what animates imaginary objects on Sartre’s
account, knowledge can never be the result of an imaginary act; it is what enables
us to ‘read’ the imaginary objects we create, just as our prior knowledge allows
us to read objects we perceive. Further, although Sartre theorizes selves and
histories as imaginary and real dialectical objects in his later work, he affirms
that they exist only in the imaginary and that it is due to the existence of objects
that serve as analoga for them in reality that they have an objective truth.
The aim to present knowledge of Flaubert in a form that can serve as a
physical analogon for his self is why, I believe, Sartre takes great pains to present
the results of years of intensive psychoanalytical, biographical, socio-political
and historical research into Flaubert’s life and times in the form of a ‘true novel’
(roman vrai) (IWS: 27, OIF/SIF: 112/94). Even though he maintains that the
greatest part of human experience is comprehended without being articulated,
and that its richness can never be captured by concepts, he nevertheless believes
that it is possible to communicate objective biographical facts about Flaubert,
along with their subjective sense, through a book like The Family Idiot, whose
sentences are, like the sentences of a novel, ‘soaked with imaging knowledge
[savoir imageant]’ (I: 66/132). At the very end of his career, then, Sartre aims
to supply us with a textual basis for the re-totalization of another self in the
imaginary and, accordingly, complete his solution to the problem of other minds
by providing a demonstration of the psychoanalytical method that he believes
enables us to overcome our epistemic alienation from our own selves and those
of others.
 7

The future of Sartrean existential

psychoanalysis

So far, this book has emphasized the continuities between Sartre’s theoretical
writings and his psychoanalytical studies to highlight the latter as extensions
of his philosophical work. This chapter suggests some possible expansions of
his existential psychoanalysis into clinical psychotherapeutic practice. Let us
pave the way for these by summarizing the relevant achievements of Sartrean
existential psychoanalysis.
We have seen how Sartre’s psychoanalysis represents the final phase of his
longstanding project to solve the philosophical problem of other minds by
revolutionizing our way of thinking about our ‘selves’. His final work, The Family
Idiot, completes this project. Through synthesizing biographical knowledge of
Flaubert with a subjective sense of his reality, it aims to provide an analogon for
Flaubert’s self, which can reward readers who make the cognitive and emotional
efforts required to imagine Flaubert as he is described with the opportunity to
know him better than he knew himself, without ever having met him in person.
Though this is a rather ambitious aim, we have seen that Sartre’s theorizations
of the self, knowledge, the imagination and of socio-material human reality
support the possibility of its success in principle.
Further, by offering us a concrete example of how a text could, potentially,
provide the basis for the ‘re-totalization’ of another self in the imagination of the
reader, The Family Idiot underlines the rich therapeutic potential that Sartre sees
in language as a means of bridging the epistemological gap between ‘subjects’
and ‘selves’. Although language can exacerbate our alienation from our selves –
as the words ‘thief ’ and ‘idiot’ do for (Sartre’s) Genet and Flaubert respectively
– Sartre holds that language allows us to directly communicate knowledge
– including the knowledge others have of us – and indirectly communicate
the subjective sense of our experience. This means that while the ontological
gap between one person and other is unbridgeable, the epistemological gap
182 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

is bridgeable by language because the world we each experience derives its

meaningful structure from a language that is shared. Nothing meaningful
precedes language for Sartre as the only meaning that experiences can have is
one that is communicable through language. The acquisition of language pulls
us out of the ‘profound and solitary reality’ in which we live our first years (SM/
QM: 63/90) and plunges us into a shared world in which every object is infused
with latent meanings, where we are never ‘really alone’ because our ‘thoughts
are communicable’ (SG: 590/651). The Family Idiot pushes this understanding
of language to its most radical conclusion in its attempt to show that ‘everything’
there is to know about someone can be communicated (OIF/SIF: 123/106). This
is testament to Sartre’s belief in the great therapeutic potential of language: in
the context of successful biographies (and long acquaintances), it can serve as a
salve for existential loneliness; in the context of clinical applications of existential
psychoanalysis, it can provide a cure for psychological illnesses that have their
source in the subject’s epistemic alienation from their self.

Sartrean existentialism: A new metatheory

In Sartre & Psychoanalysis: An Existentialist Challenge to Clinical Metatheory

(1991), Betty Cannon contends that replacing Freud’s biological model of the
mind with Sartre’s existential ontology can resolve the crisis she identifies in
psychoanalytic ‘metatheory’ – the theory about how and why psychoanalysis
works – by making it possible to accommodate insights brought forward by the
post-Freudian theorists on human psychological development and relational
needs, which cannot be satisfactorily incorporated into a traditional Freudian
theoretical framework. She also describes how adopting Sartre’s existential
approach to psychoanalysis can free practitioners of the obligation to explain
psychological issues that are comprehensible in terms of experiences of past
trauma, irresolvable conflicts and interpersonal failures in terms of an ‘experience-
distant’ theory of unconscious drives. The discussion that follows builds upon
Cannon’s work by teasing out further implications for psychotherapy from the
philosophical reconception of Sartre’s psychoanalysis offered in this book. It also
points out the potential for Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis to address new
challenges facing psychotherapists today. To start with, though, let us establish
how Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis can inform therapeutic practice.
Perhaps the most major advantage of grounding psychoanalytic practice in
Sartre’s existentialism is that it provides the therapist with a coherent theory of
 The Future of Sartrean Existential Psychoanalysis 183

how therapeutic change occurs. As Cannon points out, neither Freud’s biological
metatheory nor Lacan’s structuralist reinterpretation of it can adequately sustain
a theory of positive, therapeutic change because they are both deterministic
(1991: 34–5, 260–73). A problem that any deterministic psychoanalytic
metatheory faces is that of accounting for how insight, or corrective emotional
experiences, or the resolution of a transference neurosis,1 or, indeed, any
proposed cure can cure. If the ultimate source of human behaviour is taken to lie
outside of consciousness, it is difficult to see how we can do anything to change
the way it acts upon the subject. How can knowledge of my unconscious wish, for
example, stop it from tormenting me? Although there is, perhaps, more promise
in Lacan’s later thought – which suggests that slight alterations in the subject’s
structuration within the symbolic order, facilitated by psychoanalysis, may allow
them to transition from an ‘abnormal’ to a ‘normal’ mode of regulating their
desire – it is unclear how exactly Lacan believes this can be achieved (E: 700/826,
see also Cannon 1991: 272; Howells 1992: 338). As Sartre’s existentialism
construes human beings as the exception to the deterministic order and affirms
that knowledge is realized through action, rather than through the possession
of representations inside the mind, it offers a robust explanation of why self-
knowledge is the instrument for therapeutic change.
Put simply, the self-knowledge that Sartrean existential psychoanalysis aims
to deliver is ‘transformative’ because ‘getting it’ means that you cannot go on
being as you were before.2 A good illustration of how this works is Sartre’s
exposition of how Genet changes from being an aesthete to an artist through
the process of writing Our Lady of the Flowers. He describes this process as
being simultaneously a conversion, a detoxification and revelation of self for
Genet. Our Lady of the Flowers is not merely a material ‘witness’ to Genet’s ‘cure’,
it ‘concretizes it’ by realizing Genet’s knowledge of his original choice of Self
through effecting its conversion, which ‘makes and rejects itself, observes and
knows itself [se connaît]’ through his act of creating it (SG: 449/499). So, Genet
gains self-knowledge through the act of writing a novel, and this transforms him
in Sartre’s view.3
We have already seen that Sartre’s analysis of Genet is a philosophical-
therapeutic application of existential psychoanalysis not a clinical-therapeutic
one, and that Genet actually found it distressing to read Saint Genet. This
shows that the difference between these two kinds of applications of existential
psychoanalysis must be reflected by a difference in practice: the discovery of
transformative self-knowledge through existential psychoanalysis is not a purely
intellectual one. Sartre’s description of psychoanalysis as ‘a movement’ that
184 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

simultaneously ‘uncovers a neurosis and gradually makes the subject capable of

supporting it’ ([1964] 2008/1972: 145/300) in 1964 indicates his awareness that
transformative self-knowledge can only cure the analysand if it is discovered
in the right way – through a process that provides the subject with intellectual
and emotional resources to change their way of being. Although Sartre affirms
that the testimony of the analysand must be ‘decisive’ in clinical applications
of existential psychoanalysis (BN/EN: 745/620) and emphasizes the importance
of affect in the discovery of self-knowledge in Being and Nothingness, he does
not provide us with a clear picture of how existential psychoanalysis should be
applied in a clinical setting there. His 1969 Les Temps modernes essay, ‘The Man
with a Tape-Recorder’, does, however, provide us with some important clues as,
here, he uses a transcript of a psychoanalytic dialogue recorded by an analysand
(against the explicit wishes of the analyst) as the basis for criticizing some specific
features of traditional psychoanalytic practice. Putting aside questions about the
ethicality of the journal’s controversial choice to publish this transcript and the
extent to which Sartre could understand it as an instance of transference,4 let us
use Sartre’s analysis of this transcript to construct a sketch of what he believes
clinical psychoanalytic practice should be like.
The main target of Sartre’s essay is the lack of reciprocity in the relationship
between the analyst and analysand in traditional psychoanalysis, where, he believes,
the analyst monopolizes the status of subject within it by treating the analysand as an
object that they observe. Even though it is predominantly the analysand who speaks
in traditional psychoanalysis, their speech is denied the status of praxis because it
has no potential to instigate change within the relation as the analyst will not be
affected by anything that the analysand says.5 The analyst’s assumed perspective of
the expert and disinterested observer therefore has the effect of transforming the
analysand’s speech act into an object ‘even as it is uttered’ (MT/HM: 201/1815).
Moreover, the physical positions of the two figures in this relationship effectively
locks the analysand in the object position: he lies on the coach under the critical
gaze of the analyst, who is seated upright in a chair behind him and shielded from
his Look. The analysand must ‘emancipate himself ’ by working towards the end
of ‘self-discovery’, Sartre writes; yet, this is extremely difficult to achieve through a
process in which he experiences himself as a passive, dependent object, waiting to
be cured by an impassive, distant subject (MT/HM: 201/1815). Sartre regards it as
instructive that the man with the tape recorder’s feelings of deep frustration and
disempowerment in his relationship with his analyst develops to the point of crisis:
the lesson we can learn from reading the transcript of a tragicomic exchange that,
undoubtedly, puts an end to this therapeutic relationship is that psychoanalytic
 The Future of Sartrean Existential Psychoanalysis 185

interpretations should be offered in the context of a long joint ‘adventure’ (MT/

HM: 201/1815) – a process undertaken by two subjects united in their pursuit
of the same goal. This leads Sartre to conclude that the knowledge that cures in
psychoanalysis can only be gained through a relationship of reciprocity in which
both parties look at one another and make themselves vulnerable to being judged,
misunderstood and hurt.
In existential psychoanalysis, then, the (human-)expert-(dehumanized-)
object dyad is replaced with that of two human beings engaged in a joint project,
working face to face. Sartre’s remark that the man with the tape recorder may
find ‘valid interlocutors in England or Italy’ (MT/HM: 204/1818) supplies us
with a more specific suggestion about what the pursuit of this joint project might
look like in practice, as it is a clear allusion to Ronald D. Laing and others in
London and Franco Basaglia and his colleagues in Gorizia. Cannon has taken
up this suggestion by looking towards Laing’s treatment of a homeless paranoid
schizophrenic woman at the Milton Erickson Foundations Evolution of
Psychotherapy Conference in Phoenix in 1980 for inspiration. Here, Laing makes
a genuine effort to enter this women’s phenomenal world to understand what the
‘conspiracy’ she perceives around her is like, and she responds by admitting that
she does not believe that the conspiracy exists when she is not thinking about
it but that other doctors tend to make her ‘believe it again’ (Laing 1985: 14:05–
14:30). Cannon attributes the striking improvement in this woman’s coherence
during her discussion with Laing to the fact that the therapeutic relationship
he developed with her evinced what Sartre would call ‘positive reciprocity’.
However, Cannon stresses that facilitating positive reciprocity does not entail
any abdication of responsibility on the therapist’s behalf; Laing does not collude
with this woman’s delusion in an effort to be her ‘chum’, but he does display a
willingness to take the risks involved in entering into a genuine dialogue with
her, as well as a readiness to offer a different kind of ‘Look’ than the original
others, one which may enable her ‘to look at her life anew and to begin to live in
a radically different way’ (1999: 47).
This kind of positive reciprocity might be considered a form of ‘love’ insofar
as it represents a way of appreciating another for who they are, a curiosity about
how they experience the world, as well as genuine desire to nurture their growth
which does not seek to determine its direction.6 Indeed, elsewhere, Laing has
described how the therapist’s ‘love that recognizes the patient’s total being,
and accepts it, with no strings attached’ can be integral to ‘uniting the patient,
in allowing the pieces to come together and cohere’ ([1960] 1969: 165). The
founder of person-centred therapy, Carl Rogers, also believes that a ‘person who
186 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

is loved appreciatively, not possessively, blooms and develops his own unique
self ’ (1980: 23). Love is also written about in the psychoanalytic literature, where
it is often considered part of the process of analytic change in virtue of offering
the analysand new, corrective experiences that allow them to break problematic
patterns of thinking and relating (see, e.g., Fosshage 2007). However, the kind
of love offered by the existential psychoanalyst is distinct insofar as Sartrean
existentialism conceives of love as a positive reciprocal relationship that supports
the growth of both subjects, which means that neither can be reduced to a prop
supporting the other’s transcendence and both subjects experience themselves as
equals within the relationship.7 Hence, an existential psychoanalysis emphasizes
the importance of the presence of the therapist’s other human perspective as the
‘objective’ component that provides the necessary dialectical opposition to the
empathetic ‘subjective’ component of the therapeutic relationship.
Cannon provides a helpful clinical illustration of how an empathetic
engagement with the client’s perspective can be ‘opposed’ with the presence
of the therapist’s in her discussion of her application of Sartrean existential
psychoanalysis in her treatment of Martha, a psychotherapist in her early
thirties, who was undergoing an acute personal crisis when Cannon began to
treat her. Working with Cannon led Martha to the discovery that her original
choice to be a ‘marvellous mirror’ for others had been made in response to
her apprehension of parental love as being conditional on her provision of
emotional labour. Cannon notes that empathetic resonance along Rogerian
lines was important in the early stages of Martha’s treatment, as it helped Martha
to build the strength she required to cope with the anguish she experienced as
she came to acknowledge the role her choice had played in bringing her to her
current crisis. However, Cannon contends that empathetic resonance alone,
without the challenge to ‘face the ontological dilemma that all of us lack an
ego or self in the substantive sense’, would not have been sufficient to support
Martha in her capacity to change through behaving in ways that were both new
and uncomfortable for her: entering situations where she would be the centre
of attention, sharing herself more freely with others, etc. (1991: 345). Martha’s
treatment came to an end when she started to act in ways that allowed her to
make her self something other than what her situation had made her, to pursue a
fundamental project of becoming a certain sort of person for herself, rather than
a human mirror for others. Hence, the kind of love that an existential therapist
aims to offer is one that both prizes the client as a human being and pushes them
out of vicious cycles of hexis which prevents their choice from influencing their
self-formation.
 The Future of Sartrean Existential Psychoanalysis 187

Sartrean existential psychoanalysis in practice

Psychodynamic psychotherapists today generally emphasize the presence of two

subjects in the healing relationship and affirm that psychoanalytic interpretations
should be collaboratively constructed (e.g. Lemma 2003: 86–91; Fosshage 2007:
328–30). However, Sartre’s commitment to a phenomenological approach, his
insistence upon reciprocity in the therapeutic relationship, and his conception
of transformative self-knowledge as the goal of therapy mean that his existential
psychoanalysis is more aptly classified as a mode of ‘humanistic’ psychotherapy
– alongside person-centred, gestalt and other existential therapies – than a form
of ‘psychoanalysis proper’. Indeed, Cannon’s application of Sartre’s existential
psychoanalysis in her treatment of Martha shows that while its ‘subjective’
component involves the application of typical psychoanalytic regressive
techniques, they form just part of a multifaceted, heuristic approach, which
means that the findings obtained through their application are also interpreted
in a different way. Though many of Martha’s difficulties could be explained in
terms of psychoanalytic concepts, both classical – the Oedipal triangle between
her, her father and her mother; the compulsion to repeat; transference – and
post-Freudian – narcissistic issues, failed mirroring – Cannon does not do so.
Instead, she interprets Martha’s difficulties through an existentialist lens, which
emphasizes not the ‘regressive pull to a real earlier state of development’ but
Martha’s lived comprehension that her original others did not provide her with
the recognition she required to develop a viable fundamental project (Cannon
1991: 348).
It might be objected that Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis ought not to be
classified as a humanistic mode of psychotherapy because it treats the self as its
object, whereas all humanistic therapies emphasize subjectivity and resist the
‘view of the person as an object, to be seen objectively from an external vantage
point that ignores the individual’s existential reality’ (Rice and Greenberg 1992:
197). However, we have seen that Sartre’s construal of the self as a ‘dialectical
object’ of human making means that the objective method his psychoanalysis
employs does not view the person it analyses from a solely external vantage
point. To the contrary, it replaces the distant, disinterested objectivity of the
natural scientist with the ‘subjective objectivity’ of another human perspective,
which seeks to comprehend how the analysand’s experience of their situation
drives their self-formation; it holds that the way to understanding a person’s
qualities, quirks and ‘abnormalities’ is via empathetic comprehension, not clinical
188 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

observation. Accordingly, Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis refuses to employ

psychodynamic concepts – e.g. ‘resistance’, ‘transference’, ‘defense’, ‘compromise’
and ‘conflict’, etc. – and nosological categories – ‘neurotic’, psychotic’, ‘schizoid’,
‘narcissistic’, etc. – in the way that all psychodynamic therapies do (Lacewing
2018: 97; see also Wallerstein 1990; Cannon 1991; Hough 2014: 76–106), as it
takes this practice to presuppose a form of psychological determinism wherein
unconscious mechanisms are regarded as the ultimate ‘cause’ of the subject’s
current problems.
We have seen that Sartre regards the belief that psychoanalysis can cure in
the manner of the medical sciences to be based on the false assumption that
psychopathological symptoms and abnormal behaviours can be traced back
to mechanistic causes, which neglects the role of choice in shaping human
experience and guiding human action. In this respect, Sartre’s position is very
close to Laing’s. Laing articulates the existentialist criticism of the assumption of
a scientific kind of objectivity in psychotherapeutic contexts when he states that
the notion that knowledge of a person can be gained through the methodological
depersonalization of ‘the person who is the “object”’ of the investigation . . . is
just as pathetic a fallacy as the false personalization of things’ (Laing 1969: 24,
cf. SM/QM: 157/218).8 This quote is taken from Laing’s pioneering study of
schizophrenia, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness.
As the title suggests, this work was deeply inspired by existentialist philosophy,
especially Sartre’s.9 While Laing does not deny that biochemical elements may
factor into the development of schizophrenia, his chief aim in this work is to
show that the subject’s social milieu plays a far greater role in precipitating the
illness than any other factor. This view stood in stark contrast with the psychiatric
orthodoxy at the time, which drew a firm distinction between ‘neuroses’, or
affective disorders, and ‘psychoses’ on the grounds that the former result from
an excess or deficit of normal, ‘sane’ emotions, while the latter are characterized
by ‘insane’ behaviours that can only be explained by the subject’s mind not
working in the ‘normal’ – i.e. rational – way.10 Schizophrenia was typically held
up as the paradigm of psychosis (CW XIV: 196–204). Perhaps the most famous
articulation of this view comes from Karl Jaspers. As he puts it: ‘The most
profound distinction in psychic life seems to be between that which is meaningful
and allows empathy and what is in its particular way ununderstandable, “mad” in
the literal sense, schizophrenic psychic life’ (Jaspers [1913] 1963: 577). Although
Jaspers’ approach to psychiatry was phenomenological, he believed that the
bewildering strangeness of schizophrenic experience precludes us (sane people)
from gaining a subjective understanding of it through empathy, which led him
 The Future of Sartrean Existential Psychoanalysis 189

to conclude that the only way to understand it is by assuming an objective stance

that looks for causal explanations.
Without denying that ‘praecox feeling’, the profound sense of the inaccessibility
of schizophrenic experience, is a major obstacle for clinicians striving to
empathize with the schizophrenics they treat, Laing counters the conception that
schizophrenia is inherently ‘ununderstandable’ by offering numerous powerful
illustrations of how schizophrenics’ disordered speech becomes understandable
once efforts have been made to interpret it from within the schizophrenic’s
specific situation. Rather than taking schizophrenia to be beyond the scope
of human understanding, Laing places it on the continuum of human ways of
being by portraying the ‘insane’ schizophrenic position is a progression from
the ‘schizoid’ position, which is ‘sane’ but neurotic and, possibly, pre-psychotic
or ‘prodromal’. By emphasizing the continuities between these two positions
and the understandability of the latter as a withdrawal from a situation that
deprives the subject of the things that provide others with metaphysical comfort
– e.g. a sense of purpose, belonging, of being loved – Laing provides us with a
perspective from which we can glimpse at least some of the salient features of
the ‘inner world’ of the schizophrenic – an empathetic point of entry if you will.
The affinities between Laing’s and Sartre’s understandings of psychopathology
run deep. This is confirmed by Sartre’s Foreword to a selection of his works,
edited and introduced by Laing and fellow psychiatrist D. G. Cooper, Reason
and Violence: A Decade of Sartre’s Philosophy, 1950–1960, where he goes out of
his way to express his approval of the editors’ attempt to establish an existential
approach to treating mental illness in their other works. Significantly, he affirms
that, like the editors, he believes that mental illness is a strategy invented by
‘free organism, in its total unity’ for living in an unliveable situation (1964: 7).
Moreover, Laing and Cooper’s remark that Sartre’s Saint Genet serves as prototype
for a ‘clinical biography’ (Laing and Cooper 1964: 26) shows that it is highly
likely that Laing looked to Sartre’s application of his existential psychoanalysis
as a model for how to interpret mental illness. This, coupled with the fact that,
in the course of his depiction of the schizoid position in The Divided Self, Laing
describes the schizoid’s experience of the world as ‘a prison without bars’ (1969:
79) – the very same phrase that Sartre uses to describe the situation that drove
Genet to neurosis (SG: 69/85) – indicates that Laing’s study of schizoid and
schizophrenic positions in The Divided Self represents a valuable resource for
psychotherapists seeking more specific directives on how to analyse their clients’
situation, behaviour and speech along Sartrean-existential lines. However, Laing
stresses that this study is not a ‘direct application of any established existential
190 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

philosophy’ (1969: 9), and while he does not detail the differences between his
existentialist position and Sartre’s, I believe that it is important to bring some of
these out here to provide a provisional indication of how a specifically Sartrean
existential approach would depart from Laing’s.
Initially, the most significant difference between Laing’s and Sartre’s
approaches appears to lie in their vision of the goal of psychotherapy. For Sartre,
it is transformative self-knowledge whereas, for Laing, it is ‘ontological security’.
It is important to note that Laing strips the term ‘ontological’ of its existential-
philosophical connotations and uses it in an empirical manner to describe a
subject’s sense of their own being. ‘Ontological security’ therefore denotes the
state of experiencing oneself as a real, living person, whose being is stable,
whole and temporally continuous (1969: 39). ‘Ontological insecurity’ denotes
the opposite: a profound uncertainty about the reality of the self, its stability
and the boundaries between it and the world, and it is what lies at the heart of
schizophrenia according to Laing. But he also maintains that a key feature of
schizophrenia spectrum states is that they exist ‘in the light’ of the existential truth
of the human condition that ‘sane’ minds are shielded from (1969: 27), which is to
say that they are characterized by an acute awareness of ontological selflessness.
So even though, in the context of Sartrean existentialism, ‘ontological security’
would be impossible for any human being, whose ontological selflessness means
that their definitive existential characteristic is anguish – i.e. a form of ontological
insecurity – Laing’s empirical use of ‘ontological’ means that the two thinkers
are actually in agreement on the point that schizophrenics are not subject to
the ‘healthy’ delusion of an inner self that protects ‘normals’ from paralysing
anguish (see TE: 46–8/79–82). This also means that Laing’s conception of the
goal of psychotherapy is much closer to Sartre’s than it initially appears to be, as
is most apparent in Laing’s description of the relation of the schizoid subject to
their self as a ‘vicious circle’, whose overall effect is to prevent the subject from
living because their preoccupation with trying to affirm the existence of a self
that they experience as unreal, insubstantial and divided precludes them from
entering into meaningful ‘creative’ relationships with others (1969: 88).
The most important differences between Laing’s and Sartre’s therapeutic
approaches are therefore to be found in the particulars of interpretation. So, let
us now look to Laing’s analysis of the ostensibly meaningless ‘schizophrenese’
(Laing’s term) of Julie, a chronic schizophrenic patient. This analysis is preceded
by a ‘clinical biography’ that chronicles the development of her illness and sets
the stage for Laing’s interpretations of how Julie’s speech communicates her
terror of truly relating to others. For example, Julie states: ‘This child’s mind is
 The Future of Sartrean Existential Psychoanalysis 191

cracked. This child’s mind is closed. You’re trying to open this child’s mind. I’ll
never forgive you for trying to open this child’s mind. This child is dead and
not dead’ (1969: 202). Laing takes these remarks to betray Julie’s wish to remain
in her isolated state, which seems to her to be much safer than that of being in
relations with others. The paradox in the last sentence is particularly telling in
Laing’s view because it conveys Julie’s thought that ‘by remaining in a sense dead,
she can be not dead in a sense, but if she takes responsibility for being “really”
alive, then she may be “really” killed’ (1969: 202). The Sartrean existential analyst
would, I believe, agree with Laing on all this but they would depart from Laing
on the meaning of Julie’s pronouncements that she has the power to be anything
she wants: ‘I’m Rita Hayworth, I’m Joan Blondell. I’m a Royal Queen. My royal
name is Julianne’ (1969: 203). Laing emphasizes the contrast between Julie’s
claims to complete control over her being and her lack of ‘freedom, autonomy,
or power in the real world’ and infers from this that she is ‘a girl “possessed”
by the phantom of her own being’, which suggests that her consciousness is
‘inhabited’ by a foreign force, albeit a very familiar one (1969: 203). The Sartrean
analyst would agree with Laing on the significance of the contrast between Julie’s
imaginings and her reality, but rather than follow Laing in inferring that she
is, in some sense, ‘possessed’, they would interpret Julie’s avowed beliefs in her
ability to be anything she desires as behaviour that attempts to ‘crystallize’ her
imaginings and as part of her project to keep the imaginary cover she draws over
her reality intact.
Another difference between a Sartrean and a Laingian approach is to be
found in Laing’s interpretation of Julie’s paranoid belief that he was stealing her
thoughts, which Laing articulates in syllogistic form:

She is thinking thoughts a, b, c.

I express closely similar thoughts a1, b1, c1.
Therefore, I have stolen her thoughts. (1969: 199)

Laing deems Julie’s accusation of his having her brains in his head to be
‘completely psychotic’ (1969: 199). And of course, when it is articulated in this
form, Julie’s conclusion does not follow from her premises. But Laing does not do
full justice to the understandability of Julie’s position here, seemingly because he
takes analytical logic as the gold standard for assessing the rationality of a belief:
Julie’s belief that he can steal her thoughts is ‘completely psychotic’ because it
cannot be supported by analytical logic. Because the Sartrean existential analyst
replaces analytical logic with dialectical reason, though, they would be able
192 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

to go further than Laing in comprehending Julie’s belief from her perspective.

They would be able to see how for Julie, who lives in an imaginary world where
phenomena such as thought broadcasting, thought stealing, thought insertion
are everyday occurrences, her conclusion is not entirely unsupported by her
experience. Further, if we can comprehend how the alternative to Laing being
able to steal her thoughts – i.e. ontological solitude – is too terrifying for Julie
to countenance, then we can see how this would give her a strong motivation
to regard her view that Laing steals her thoughts as being rooted in a kind of
argument from ‘best explanation’.
These two examples highlight what I believe to be the two main ways that
Sartre’s interpretive approach would differ from Laing’s: it would draw on Sartre’s
theory of how the imaginary functions as an alternative to reality in various
psychopathological conditions and it would use dialectical reasoning to uncover
the human motivations for ‘irrational’ beliefs and behaviours. There is also a
third way in which Sartre’s interpretations would depart from Laing’s that is
worth calling attention to here, which concerns the family. While both thinkers
underline the importance of subject’s family to their self-formation, Laing, at
least in The Divided Self, puts the larger sociological issues ‘in parentheses’ on
the grounds that they are not of ‘direct and immediate relevance’ to the question
of why any individual becomes psychotic (1969: 180).11 Sartre, however, raises no
doubt as to ‘the priority of institutions’ in his psychoanalysis, which regards the
family as ‘a certain individual manifestation of the family structure appropriate
to such and such a class under such and such conditions’ (SM/QM: 61/87).

Existential principles for integrative psychotherapy

‘Integrative psychotherapy’ does not denote a specific mode of psychotherapy

but rather an international movement that strives to overcome the limitations of
‘single-school’ approaches to psychotherapy, as well as the lack of constructive
dialogue between these schools in the twentieth century (Goldfried et al.
2011). Although many psychotherapists have not given up their allegiance
to a single school, the vast amount of evidence suggesting that the different
modes of psychotherapy taught by each of these schools are equally effective
(Frank and Frank 1993; Wampold et al. 1997; Luborsky et al. 2002), coupled
with that finding that psychotherapy is generally effective (Lambert 2013),
has led to an increased scepticism in the field about the possibility ‘of finding
any one psychotherapy that can deal with all psychological and relational
 The Future of Sartrean Existential Psychoanalysis 193

problems’ (Goldfried et al. 2011: 289). Consequently, an integrative approach to

psychotherapy has been hailed as a ‘zeitgeist’ in the field (Castonguay et al. 2015:
365) and even as the sixth ‘paradigm’ or ‘force’ in psychotherapy – following
psychoanalysis, behaviourism, humanistic-existential approaches, various
‘transpersonal’ approaches and social justice (Fleuridas and Krafcik 2019).
Even though integrative psychotherapy is thought to have been motivated in part
by the proliferation of psychotherapeutic schools (Norcross 2005), the movement
has led to further proliferation, with numerous integrative psychotherapies being
established in recent years, including, for example, Multimodal Therapy (Lazarus
2005), Cyclical Psychodynamics (Wachtel 1997), Cognitive Analytical Therapy
(Ryle and Kerr 2002), Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (Linehan 1993), Cognitive-
Behavioural Assimilative Therapy (Castonguay et al. 2004), Mindfulness-Based
Cognitive Therapy (Teasdale et al. 2000) and Assimilative Psychodynamic
Therapy (Stricker and Gold 1996). Furthermore, as a ‘promiscuous “mix and
match”’ of interventions and techniques has been found to produce poor outcomes
(Albeniz and Holmes 1996: 569), therapists who seek to engage in integrative
practice without aligning themselves with any particular school of integrative
psychotherapy face the problem of which ‘pathway’ to choose. At present,
there are four established pathways to psychotherapy integration: atheoretical,
effectiveness-based ‘technical eclecticism’; the ‘theoretical integration’ of two or
more therapies; ‘assimilative integration’, which supplements a primary therapy
with specific elements from other psychotherapeutic systems; and the atheoretical
‘common factors’ approach, which emphasizes the therapeutic impact of factors
shared across psychotherapeutic modalities over those that distinguish them
(Castonguay et al. 2015).
Altogether, this means that the task of navigating the many routes to
psychotherapy integration is one of the greatest challenges facing psychotherapists
today. The aim of this section is not to present Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis
as an integrative (existential-psychoanalytic) psychotherapy that is somehow
‘better’ than others, nor to propose it as another pathway to psychotherapy
integration. Rather, it is to indicate how integrative therapists of all stripes may
look to Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis for new principles to enhance their
practice. Precisely because it is a heuristic method, without any fixed principles
of practice, but which is rooted in a single, coherent existentialist theory, it
can provide psychotherapists with theoretical principles that support their
integrative practice, which can also acknowledge the value of a plurality of
psychotherapeutic techniques as well as the centrality of ‘common factors’ to a
positive psychotherapeutic outcome.
194 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

To offer a specific example, let us consider how Sartre’s existential

psychotherapy could help practitioners of existential-integrative therapy.
Kirk J. Schneider has developed a methodological framework for existential-
integrative psychoanalysis, partly in response to the ambivalent reception of
existential psychotherapy in the profession. He reports that he finds the reasons
for ambivalence expressed in the ‘mixed reaction’ of psychotherapy students
who are, on the one hand, profoundly moved by existentialist insights into the
human condition and, on the other, perplexed about how to translate them into
therapeutic interventions (2007: 1). As part of his project to provide a clear
framework for an existential-integrative approach, Schneider outlines both its
conception of consciousness and of psychopathology in a sketch that spans
just twelve pages. This sketch of the theoretical basis of existential-integrative
psychotherapy also attempts to unite the thought of a range of thinkers as
diverse as behaviourist B. F. Skinner, post-Freudian ‘self psychologist’ Heinz
Kohut, and Christian existentialist Paul Tillich, whose views about the nature
and reality of the self are at least prima facie incompatible. Thus, unless the
existential-integrative psychotherapist engages in extensive further reading and
takes on the difficult task of reconciling the ideas of the various thinkers cited
in Schneider’s sketch, they can only look to his hypothetical seven-level model
of consciousness and condensed account of the existential goal to ‘maximize’
freedom as the theoretical basis for their practice. Like Schneider’s approach,
Sartrean existential psychoanalysis has the capacity to be both ‘complementary
to’ and ‘integrative of ’ other psychotherapeutic modalities (2007: 3), since its
only essential practical feature is the presence of positive reciprocity in the
therapeutic alliance. But it has the advantage of being able to supply therapists
with a rich, coherent psychological theory, built upon the insights Sartre won
through a long career studying consciousness.
Now we have seen how Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis can help theoretical
psychotherapy integration, but can it do anything for atheoretical approaches? In
short, I believe it can by supplying them with a flexible theoretical basis to support
their integrative style. Atheoretical integrative approaches run the risk of reducing
the effectiveness of the very techniques they select for their effectiveness when they
extract them from their theoretical context. As Safran and Messer note, the attempt
to extract common principles of practice can lead one to ‘lose sight of important
features of the overall therapeutic system and the process through which it works’
(Safran and Messer 1997: 143). Although research over the last few decades
certainly supports Bruce E. Wampold’s (2001) conclusion that the factors common
to all established modes of psychotherapy make a greater contribution to client
 The Future of Sartrean Existential Psychoanalysis 195

outcome than specific techniques (Lambert and Barley 2001), the conclusions of
such studies are not fine-grained enough to serve as a guide for psychotherapy
practice (Fromme 2011). The growing evidence for the efficacy of common
factors cannot, therefore, be held up as evidence for the dispensability of specific
techniques. To be sure, the therapeutic relationship or ‘alliance’ between therapist
and client is the quintessential common factor across all modes of psychotherapy,
and large-scale studies of client outcome indicate that a strong alliance catalyses
positive therapeutic outcome and may even be a curative factor in its own right
(Lambert and Barley 2001; Flückiger et al. 2018). But this does not imply that
the same kind of alliance is effective across the board, for all clients. Recent meta-
analyses point to an association between the satisfaction of the humanistic ‘core
conditions’ of the therapeutic alliance – i.e. therapist empathy, unconditional
positive regard and congruence – and positive treatment outcome (Elliot et al.
2018; Farber et al. 2018; Kolden et al. 2018); yet, the alliance and the specific
techniques that therapists employ are, as Lundh observes, partly overlapping
categories since ‘the use of technique for the purpose of helping another person
achieve certain psychological goals’ is what sets the therapeutic relationship apart
from other interpersonal relationships (2017: 61). Therapists working within
different modalities can satisfy the core conditions while also conceiving of their
role within the relationship differently and behaving differently as a consequence:
cognitive-behavioural therapists will direct clients to more ‘adaptive’ cognitions,
person-centred therapists will be nondirective, psychodynamic therapists will
interpret their client’s unconscious communications, etc.
Further, the finding that the person of the therapist plays a significant role in
determining the outcome of psychotherapy12 points to the need for therapists
to possess a robust theoretical framework that gives them confidence in their
approach and makes it meaningful for them. The dominant explanation for the
phenomenon of ‘therapist effect’ in the psychotherapeutic literature is that the
most effective, ‘expert’ therapists possess the ability to produce theoretically
coherent conceptualizations of their clients’ difficulties (Betan and Binder
2010). One author even proposes that the ‘route to maximum effectiveness for
any therapist’ is to experience the therapy they practise as theirs by serving as a
means through which they can express their own ‘deeply held view of the human
condition’ (Simon 2006: 343). I submit that Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis
provides therapists with the theoretical tool they need to produce coherent
case conceptualizations and to work in ways that allow them to express their
existential views, without constraining them in the methods they choose to treat
and build their relationships with their clients.
196 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

By way of concluding this discussion of how Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis

can provide principles for integrative psychotherapy, it is important to illustrate
how it is compatible with the application of therapeutic techniques other than
those of traditional psychoanalysis. To my mind, it is clearly compatible with
the application of techniques from Transactional Analysis (TA), a school
of psychotherapy founded by Eric Berne (1910–70), whose treatment for
depression has recently been manualized (Widdowson 2016). TA has its roots
in psychoanalysis but uses simplified terms such as ‘Adult’, ‘Child’, ‘script’, ‘game’
to enhance communication and empower clients (Stewart and Joines 2012: 8).
It also recognizes, as Sartre’s mature existentialism does, how habitual forms
of thinking can trap subjects in vicious cycles of behaviour that prevent their
choice from influencing their process of self-formation. It theorizes these
habitual forms of thinking as ready-made ‘life scripts’, which are either forced
upon subjects or taken up by them in the course of their socialization. The goal
of TA is autonomy,13 which it proposes can be gauged by the extent to which
subjects can be themselves or ‘off script’ when they are with others. Through
the systematic analysis of transactions, TA strives to make clients aware of their
life scripts so that they can abandon them and ‘get-on-with’ living in the present
(Stewart and Joines 2012: 123). The use of the tools honed by transactional
analysts to identify scripts and to liberate people from them can be supported by
a case conceptualization along Sartrean-existential lines, as a rigid adherence to
a script can be interpreted as a form of defensive aggressiveness that places the
subject in ‘prison without bars’.
A helpful clinical illustration of TA is provided by Mark Widdowson in his
study of the treatment of Alastair, a forty-two-year-old senior executive who
suffered from anxiety and depression. In the tenth session, Alastair was invited
to explore the origins of his sense that ‘he should be different to who he was’
(2014: 69), which the therapist took to represent part of Alastair’s life script –
specifically, his ‘Don’t Be You’ injunction. Alastair recounted occasions during
his childhood when he felt ‘not good enough’ and remarked that although he
no longer felt this way, he feared that he was not liked by others. The therapist
then brought this feeling into the ‘here and now’ by asking Alastair what it was
like to ‘be in therapy with someone who he felt disliked him’, to which Alastair
responded by stating that he had no reason to think he was disliked by his
therapist and ‘lots of reasons to think the opposite’ (2014: 69). This example
highlights some core characteristics of TA practice: the identification of ‘scripty’
feelings, the analysis of transactions between therapist and client, and the
therapist challenging the client to re-evaluate his life script, as well as providing
 The Future of Sartrean Existential Psychoanalysis 197

a protective environment in which the client feels permitted to transcend ‘the

programming of the past’ (Berne 1964: 162). This manner of analysing a client’s
lived experience and challenging their beliefs from another human perspective
would be justified by a Sartrean-existential conceptualization of Alastair’s case
that works to comprehend his ‘Don’t Be You’ injunction as part of the strategy he
developed to cope with his situation.

Existential e-therapy

Psychotherapists and psychoanalysts today must negotiate ever-increasing

demands for ‘e-therapy’, that is, therapy through electronic forms of media. As
I am writing this book during the world crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic, the
inability of therapists to deliver in-person care, combined with the fact that
anxiety and depression appear to be common psychological reactions to the
pandemic (Rajkumar 2020), has meant that this demand has been experienced
by many as an urgent need. Although large-scale clinical trials assessing the
effectiveness of various e-therapies have yet to be conducted, evidence suggests
that face-to-face therapy and e-therapy are similarly effective in treating clients’
symptoms (Backhaus et al. 2012; Hilty et al. 2013; Norwood et al. 2018). However,
therapists continually rate the effectiveness of e-therapy as lower and report that
they find it much harder to develop strong alliances with the clients they treat via
electronic media (Norwood et al. 2018; Cataldo et al. 2021).
In her book-length study of computer-mediated psychoanalysis and
psychotherapy, psychoanalyst Gillian Isaacs Russell argues that while e-therapy
is useful in situations where in-person care cannot be provided, it should be
recognized as a poor substitute for face-to-face therapy because mediating
the therapeutic relationship invariably degrades it. Russell’s argument for her
pessimistic view of e-therapy is mainly built upon her understanding of the
role of ‘presence’ in the therapeutic relationship. In brief, Russell takes the
goal of psychotherapy to be to ‘establish an authentic sense of self ’ (2015: 134)
and she conceives of the self as the unity of the body-mind, whose integrity is
determined by the extent to which the subject experiences herself as a whole,
bounded, agential being in the world. Accordingly, Russell argues that a person’s
sense of self is inextricably linked to ‘presence’, understood as a subject’s sense
that they are a discrete, spatiotemporally situated being capable of realizing their
intentions through actions that alter their environment in ways that can win
them recognition from others. The mere illusion of presence or ‘telepresence’ that
198 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

characterizes computer-mediated relations can never offer clients a satisfactory

substitute for real presence in therapy, since shared space is the condition for
truly being with, and being vulnerable before, another. In face-to-face therapy,
the potential to ‘kiss or kick’ the therapist is there, in the room. This potential is
of the upmost importance to the end of self-discovery for the client in Russell’s
view as it represents the client’s potential to test their therapist’s ‘capacity to bear
the impact of their love and hate in the flesh and not protected by the barrier of
the screen’ (2015: 181).
Without denying that people can comprehend one another much more
easily when they are ‘co-present’, Sartre’s existentialism provides grounds for
(cautious) optimism about the potential to develop effective computer-mediated
therapeutic relations for the main reason that it denies that people’s selves are
really present ‘in’ their bodies to begin with. While Russell views therapy as a
process ‘directed toward patients becoming able to know themselves and their
feelings, to feel fully present inside and outside, to be whole selves’ (Russell
2015: 148), Sartre’s ontology places the self outside the subject and denies that
it can ever be unified with the subject who continually creates it. Further, as the
goal of Sartre’s psychoanalysis is transformative knowledge of the self, gained
through an awareness and acceptance of the self as the objective product of the
ongoing dialectic between the subject and the world, the electronic mediation
of the therapeutic relationship does not represent an insurmountable obstacle
to the attainment of that goal. However, a Sartrean psychoanalytic approach
would emphasize the importance of appreciating how the therapist and client’s
joint adventure involves different possibilities, limitations and risks when it is
undertaken through an electronic medium. Although e-therapy removes certain
possibilities and risks, it introduces new ones: the client may, for example,
surreptitiously record the therapy session and then share it out of context.
Kicking and recording are both potential ways to wound the therapist, but
the key difference between them from a Sartrean perspective is that they each
attack a different analogon for the therapist’s self. Kicking assaults the physical
body, while producing and sharing the recording assaults the virtual one – i.e.
the collection of information and images that stand for the self in cyberspace.
As the virtual body is arguably more important to the therapist’s professional
reputation and esteem than their physical body, e-therapy may involve greater
risk to the therapist’s self than in-person therapy.
This may provide an important clue about the solution to the puzzle posed
by the disparity between clients’ generally positive and therapists’ generally
negative evaluations of videoconferencing therapy (VCP) (Cataldo et al. 2021).
 The Future of Sartrean Existential Psychoanalysis 199

One proposed explanation for the finding that the working alliance in VCP is
inferior to that in face-to-face therapy but VCP and face-to-face therapy are
equally effective is that increased ‘client empowerment’ in VCP compensates for
the inferior alliance (Norwood et al. 2018: 805). This suggests that the lack of ‘co-
presence’ may be compensated by a more balanced relationship, more conducive
to positive reciprocity. Indeed, Cataldo and colleagues conclude from their
literature review of the therapeutic relationship in VCP that VCP may be more
cognitively demanding for therapists, who have to work around the new (tele)
presence, lower levels of confidence and reduced control over the environment
enveloping the therapeutic relationship, which suggests that clients may have to do
more to support their therapists emotionally (2021: 9). Findings that clients tend
to feel less inhibited and are more likely to disclose personal information when
therapy is delivered electronically (Jerome & Zaylor 2000; J. Simpson et al. 2001;
Himle et al. 2006) may therefore be interpreted as the fruit of greater reciprocity
between therapist and client in electronically mediated therapeutic relationships.
Altogether, this supports the view that functions of face-to-face therapy can be
‘potentially analogued’ (Walther and Hancock 2005), so long as both parties are
prepared to trust and support one another when they work with one another
this way. If this is correct, then Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis lends itself
to practise through various forms of electronic media because it interprets the
human body as one analogon for the self among others and supplies us with tools
to analyse the ways that other objects can function as analoga for selves.

Suggestions for further research

This book has shown that Sartre’s development and applications of his
psychoanalytic method enabled him to complete his original response to the
problem of other minds and to refine his existentialist conception of the self. This
conception aims to revolutionize our understanding of the self-other relation
and, thereby, provide the basis for more profound empathetic understandings
of existential loneliness, anguish and psychological oppression, as well as of the
role of the imagination in self-formation. In this final section, I wish to highlight
some avenues for future inquiry opened by this exposition of the philosophical
significance of Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis, but which could not be
explored within the scope of this book.
The first and perhaps most important of these concerns Sartre’s
understanding of the role of the imagination in the precipitation of psychological
200 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

illnesses, which he takes to be characterized by a pathological preference for

the imaginary over the real, one which is objectively ‘mad’ but subjectively
comprehensible as a strategy for surviving in an unliveable situation. This leads
him to endorse Laing’s view that schizophrenia ought to be reconceived of
as a comprehensible response to a specific social situation. A cursory glance
at the criteria for schizophrenia provided in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), however, shows that the
mainline psychiatric view of the illness has not changed significantly since the
1960s, when Laing described it as the view that schizophrenics ‘suffer from some
inherited predisposition to experience and to act in a predominantly meaningless
way, and that an unknown genetic defect acts in some as yet undetermined
biochemical-endocrinological-organic manner to produce a change’ (Laing
1964: 186).14 The definitive characteristics of schizophrenia listed in the DSM-
5 are (1) delusions, (2) hallucinations, (3) ‘disorganized speech (e.g. frequent
derailment or incoherence)’, (4) ‘grossly disorganized’ or ‘catatonic’ behaviour,
and (5) other ‘negative symptoms’, such as ‘avolition’ or diminished capacity for
emotional expression, with the presence of either (1), (2) or (3) being necessary
for diagnoses (American Psychiatric Association 2013: 99). From this, we can
see that what defines schizophrenia from a medical perspective are its negative
features: namely, the lack of reason, will and/or stable connection with reality,
which dispose the subject to act in ways that are devoid of meaning. And yet the
status of schizophrenia as a meaningless biological disease appears to be belied
by the continued failure of the ‘medical model’ to treat it well,15 which was one of
the main reasons for Laing’s (1964) denial that it should be treated as a somatic
disease.
Recent developments in the field of phenomenological psychiatry suggest
that there is a growing recognition of the value of phenomenological approaches
to the study of psychopathologies in the English-speaking world.16 Josef Parnas
and Peter Handest have, for example, offered a detailed study of the anomalous
experience reported in the prodromal phases of schizophrenia to highlight how
an understanding of the positive, subjective features of the illness represents an
‘embarrassing psychopathological lacuna’, which, they believe, blinds clinicians
the first symptoms of the illness (2003: 121). By attending to the subjective
features of schizophrenia – e.g. a profound sense of alienation from others and
the world, a sense of the self as unreal, fragmented experience, and impaired
higher cognitive function – phenomenological researchers have identified two
core abnormalities in schizophrenic experience: exaggerated self-consciousness
or ‘hyper-reflexivity’ and the dissolution of the first-person perspective at the
 The Future of Sartrean Existential Psychoanalysis 201

pre-reflective level (Uhlhaas and Mishara 2007; Parnas and Sass 2011). This
has led them to conceive of schizophrenia as a pathology of the self, which
has already delivered promising results: self-pathologies have been found to
be effective in discriminating schizophrenia-spectrum diagnoses from others
(Parnas et al. 2005) and predictive of new schizophrenia-spectrum disorders
(Parnas et al. 2011).
Now, although Sartre’s early work on the ontogenesis of the self is often cited
in passing in the phenomenological literature on schizophrenia, scant attention
has been given to his theorization of schizophrenia as a pathology of the
imagination.17 But Sartre’s later conception of the self as an imaginary dialectical
object could provide the basis for a new, ‘self-centred’ approach to treating
schizophrenia that could enable analysts to go beyond establishing the general
structures of schizophrenic experience towards gaining a comprehension of
its ‘metaphysical tenor’ for individual schizophrenics. Parnas and Handest
hint at this potential in their summary of Peter’s transition from prodromal
schizophrenia to schizophrenia, where they note that Peter progressively infuses
his self with more imaginary content through delusions that they note have a
‘metaphysical taint’ that is specific to schizophrenia in virtue of involving the
subjectivization of the world – i.e. the placement of the self at the centre of the
universal system of meaning rather than just a personal one – as well as an acute
sense of selflessness (2003: 131). This paradoxical excess and deficiency of self
in schizophrenic experience also makes it amenable to interpretation through
Sartrean psychoanalysis, which can work to uncover its particular dialectical
sense for individual schizophrenics in a way that could provide important clues
about how their illness functions as a solution for them.
A second potential avenue for future research concerns Sartre’s revelation of
the family as an agency of psychological oppression. As Sartre sees it, aspects of
the broader social context are intensified and reinterpreted within the family
unit: the social microcosm within the macrocosm. As each individual’s family
represents their point of entry into the social macrocosm and provides them
with the first framework for interpreting their social being, an individual’s
mode of insertion into the social microcosm of the family is taken to have a
significant bearing on the way they perform within the macrocosm. Hence,
Sartre’s psychoanalysis concentrates on ‘the process by which a child groping
in the dark, is going to attempt to play, without understanding it, the social role
which adults impose upon him’ (SM/QM: 60/85). Through its concentration on
the politics of looking as it is figured within the family, it can appreciate both
the alienation from self we experience when we try to make ourselves a certain
202 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

object for others for ourselves – that is, when we try to be who we want to be –
and the deeper, more disempowering form of it we experience when we try to
make ourselves a certain object for others for others – when we try to be who our
parents (and other significant others) want us to be based on the social norms
and expectations they have internalized – a way of being that Sartre believes can
literally drive people mad and which he thinks characterizes the experience of
psychological oppression.
Although Webber notes that Sartre’s interpretation of Genet’s family as an
‘immediate instrument’ for the wider society is limited in that it neglects to
attend to the way that social prejudicial ideas tend to be both perpetuated and
reinterpreted within families over generations via specific family rituals, stories,
expectations and behavioural styles (Webber 2018: 202), Sartre’s attention to
Flaubert’s proto-history – i.e. Flaubert’s parents’ family backgrounds – shows
that the most developed form of his existential psychoanalysis does attend to
this and can therefore help therapists interpret clients’ situation in terms of both
the social macrocosm and social microcosms. For example, Sartre argues that
the critical Look Flaubert received from his father due to his learning difficulties
condemned him to experiencing himself as a passive object in his relations with
others for the rest of his life. But he also offers an explanation of why Dr Flaubert
was so infuriated by his second son’s prolonged illiteracy, which draws on a
discussion of Dr Flaubert’s background and which reveals him as a man with a
point to prove ever since his employment as a surgeon enabled him to become
a first-generation member of the middle class. Hence, Sartre’s explanation of
his anger: ‘out of seven children, four are dead and one of the living has no
brain. What he loved in Gustave was his own spermatic power; if the pretty little
boy is brainless from birth, that success becomes a failure’ and the paterfamilias
is ‘unmanned’ (FI I/IF I: 357/369). Gustave’s learning difficulties are thus
interpreted by his father as a wound to his pride due to the specific way that the
social class and gender expectations he has internalized shape his outlook.
This highlights the centrality of the politics of looking as it is played out
within the family to a subject’s self-formation as well as how experiences of
personal distress and interpersonal conflict can be imbued with social meanings
that subjects may not be aware of. The psychological oppression that occurs
within the microcosm of family is therefore connected, in Sartre’s view, to the
structures of domination and control within the macrocosm, but not in any
simple way. Psychological oppression within the family unit may drive subjects
to self-harming hexis as it does in the cases of Genet and Flaubert, but it may
also conceivably drive them to sadistic hexis too. People who are psychologically
 The Future of Sartrean Existential Psychoanalysis 203

oppressed by their family but occupy positions of privilege within their society
may, for example, try to compensate for the feelings of inferiority they experience
in the microcosm by exploiting their membership in oppressor groups in the
macrocosm, as Lucien, the protagonist of The Childhood of a Leader, appears
to do. I believe that a greater understanding of the dynamics between the
psychological oppression of individuals within the family and the structures
that support the oppression of groups within society could furnish valuable
insights into how prejudicial ideas are internalized and perpetuated, and the
extent to which familial factors can protect individuals from or increase their
vulnerability to them.
A third avenue for further investigation that is opened by this study of Sartre’s
existential psychoanalysis also concerns the politics of looking. Cannon identifies
different categories of experience of the Look, noting that it can be experienced
through actual looks but also through words and touches or the absences thereof,
since all these are ways through which others can communicate the value we have
for them. People may have been deprived of certain categories of the Look and
not others and Cannon notes that it is important for therapists ‘to discover which
category of the Look wounded the child or which kind of response was denied to
him’ (1991: 113). If, however, our capacity to Look is partly determined by our
general outlook, which partly determined by our situation, this could impair
therapists in their capacity to provide their clients with the alternative Look that
allows them to see their selves in a new light. We have seen an example of this in
Chapter 5, where Sartre is shown to have been blinded to the positive dialectical
counterparts to Flaubert’s misanthropy and misogyny. Although Sartre appears
to have been unaware of the biases that limited his capacity to see certain aspects
of Flaubert, he may have been more aware of how his own metaphysical attitude
tainted his perspective had he himself been analysed by another. But whether
existential analysis can uncover the prejudices individuals harbour in ways that
allow them to counter them remains an open question.
This leads to my fourth and final, and most tentative, suggestion, which is
that the existentialist approach to ‘reading’ objects as analoga for selves could,
potentially, be extended beyond bodies and texts18 to any object through which
a subject makes their mark on the world, including the corpus delicti or body
of the crime. Sartrean existential psychoanalysis may offer a way of accounting
for what many expert criminal profilers already do but which remains relatively
undertheorized. Expert criminal profiler John Douglas is often asked about how
he develops such specific descriptions of likely suspects by examining the crime
scene alone. His answer is that ‘if you want to understand Picasso, you have
204 Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

to study his art. If you want to understand a criminal personality, you have to
study his crime’ (Douglas and Olshaker 1995: 366). Douglas conceives of his
approach to understanding the criminal mind as the inverse of the one generally
adopted by mental health professionals who start from personality theories. His
team start by examining behaviour, then they make inferences about personality
from that perspective, which is to say, they derive their ideas about the subjective
from what is objectively given, as Sartrean psychoanalysis does. While rivalling
personality theories can constrain the thought of profilers (Kocsis 2007),
existential psychoanalysis is not another personality theory. It teaches us that
if we want to be able to predict how someone will act with some degree of
accuracy, we need to know what their projects are, not what their personality
type is. As Sartre writes of Genet, we can try to reduce the vices of a criminal to a
‘psychological defect’ but to do so would be to ignore their being as ‘an absolute
consciousness which approves of itself and chooses itself ’ (SG: 588/649) – their
human being, which is also ours. Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis strives to
show us that we are entirely capable of comprehending criminal, mad and
morally monstrous human beings if we have the courage to accept that it is only
because we have made different choices that their qualities are not ours.
 Notes

Introduction

1 To my knowledge, there has been no book-length treatment of Sartre’s relationship

with psychoanalysis from a philosophical perspective in either French or English.
Betty Cannon’s book Sartre and Psychoanalysis: An Existentialist Challenge to
Clinical Metatheory is the only book-length study of Sartre’s psychoanalysis in
English. As the title suggests, it approaches Sartre’s psychoanalysis from a clinical
perspective, with a view to instigating developments inspired by it in therapeutic
practice.
2 Sartre did, however, make a genuine attempt at self-analysis when he was writing
his autobiography, Words (1964). During this time, he also asked Pontalis to analyse
him, but Pontalis refused on account of their long friendship (Hayman 1986:
363–4).

Chapter 1

1 See Avramides (2001: 1–18), Dreyfus and Tayler (2015: 1–26) and Ryle (2009:
1–13) for discussions of Descartes’ tremendous influence on the picture of our
relation to the world, others and ourselves that is typically taken for granted in
Western society.
2 The last lines of ‘Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology’
gesture towards the view that there is no self within consciousness; The
Transcendence of the Ego offers a rigorous argument for this view, aspects of which
are further developed in Being and Nothingness (see, especially, Pt. 2, Ch. 1); and,
throughout his career, Sartre maintains that consciousness does not have contents
or an interior life, that it is irreducible to a self and that the self is an object for
consciousness (SG: 589/650; IWS: 11; OIF/SIF: 117/100).
3 Not all pure reflection is phenomenological in Sartre’s view (TE: 23/48),
although all genuine phenomenological reflection is pure. The performance of
the phenomenological reduction facilitates a form of pure reflection that yields
apodictic certainty concerning the form of the consciousness reflected on for
Sartre. But his understanding of the phenomenological reduction differs from
Husserl’s in important respects. Notably, Husserl presents it as a method that
206 Notes

enables him to apprehend himself ‘purely’, ‘as Ego’, with his ‘own pure conscious
life’, ‘in and by which’ the whole objective world exists for him ([1931] 1960: 21),
whereas Sartre views it as a reduction to consciousness ‘purified’ of anything apart
from its being as an intentional relation to its object.
4 Husserl distinguishes between the epochē and the phenomenological (or
transcendental) reduction. He describes the former as the bracketing of ‘naturalist’
claims that rest on the assumption of the ‘General Thesis according to which the
real world about me is at all times known not merely in a general way as something
apprehended, but as a fact-world that has its being out there’ (Husserl [1913] 2002:
56), and the latter as the leading back from constituted phenomena towards the
constituting, that is, transcendental consciousness, understood as a ‘self-contained
system of Being’ (Husserl [1913] 2002: 95). But this distinction is not upheld
neatly by Sartre in the Transcendence of the Ego, which presents the epochē and the
phenomenological reduction as one and the same. After he writes The Transcendence
of the Ego, though, Sartre discovers that the epochē and the phenomenological
reduction are distinct reductions, abandons the Husserlian idea that the epochē
is a prerequisite for the phenomenological reduction, and performs some
phenomenological reductions from within the ‘natural attitude’ (Flynn 2014: 80).
5 Husserl later outlines how he arrived at this discovery as follows: ‘If I put myself
above all this life and refrain from doing any believing that takes “the” world
straightforwardly as existing – if I direct my regard exclusively to this life itself, as
consciousness of “the” world – I thereby acquire myself as the pure ego, with the
pure stream of my cogitationes’ (Husserl [1931] 1960: 21).
6 As all reflection involves a shift from pre-reflective to reflective consciousness, it
invariably ‘modifies spontaneous consciousness’ (TE: 13/32). Indeed, no reflection
upon spontaneous consciousness can truly yield knowledge of it, since even pure
reflection introduces ‘a division within consciousness insofar as its structure makes
of consciousness an object to itself ’ (Richmond 2004: xix–xx).
7 Although Sartre does not explicitly describe pure reflection in these terms in
The Transcendence of the Ego, he affirms that the ‘I’ of the Cartesian cogito is ‘not
apodictic’ (TE: 15/35) and attributes the failure of Husserl’s reflection on the
‘I think’ to deliver an accurate picture of the self-consciousness relation to its
impurity (TE: 15/35). In Being and Nothingness, he describes the phenomenological
form of (pure) reflection that he believes yields apodictic evidence in detail (Pt. 2,
Ch. 2: §3).
8 In phenomenology, the term ‘intentional’ does not mean the same thing as ‘willed’;
rather, it denotes the essential feature of consciousness as an awareness, as always
being ‘of ’ or ‘about’ something. For Sartre specifically, intentionality also implies
that consciousness depends on its objects for its own existence because it exists only
through its relation to them, by always going beyond itself towards them, without
being anything in itself or having any ‘inside’ ([1939] 2002/1990: 383/10).
 Notes 207

9 For his early interpretation of Husserl’s phenomenology (as well as his later critique
of it in Being and Nothingness), Sartre is indebted to Martin Heidegger. His early
rendering of intentionality may be considered Heideggerian insofar as it interprets
the Husserlian consciousness as a ‘consciousness-in-the-world’ ([1939] 2002/1990:
383/11), whose fundamental relation to its objects is pragmatic. Thomas R. Flynn
observes that Sartre’s early (mis)interpretation of Husserl’s phenomenology seems
to respond to Heidegger’s main objection to Husserl’s phenomenology – namely,
that it construes our primary relation to the world in a theoretical manner rather
than a practical one – ‘in advance’ (2014: 64).
10 Contrary to Sartre’s claim that Husserlian phenomenology is concerned with ‘de
facto problems’ (TE: 4/17), Husserl holds that phenomenology is ‘not as a science
of facts’ but ‘a science of essential Being’ that aims to establish ‘“knowledge of
essences” (Wesenserkenntnisse) and absolutely no “facts”’ through its assumption
of a transcendental attitude that ‘purifies’ the phenomena of everyday experience
([1913] 2012: 3). Further, while Sartre affirms that phenomenology grants us
access to a ‘real’ consciousness (TE: 4/18), Husserl regards his phenomenology as
‘a theory of essential Being’ that deals ‘not with real but transcendentally reduced
phenomena’ ([1913] 2012: 4). All appearances that have been subjected to the
process of transcendental purification via the epochē are ‘non-realities’ in Husserl’s
estimation because all of their connections with the ‘real world’ have been severed
so that they may be studied not in ‘their singular particularity’ but in ‘their essential
being’ ([1913] 2012: 4). Sartre’s early misinterpretation of the aims of Husserl’s
phenomenology is explained by Sartre’s later admission that he initially read
Husserl as a metaphysical realist (IWS: 25).
11 Sartre’s insistence that the being we each call ‘I’, ‘with its personality, is . . . a centre
of opacity’ (TE: 8/25, emphasis added) overlooks the extent to which the self that
survives Husserl’s phenomenological reduction is scathed. As Dan Zahavi puts it,
Husserl’s transcendental ego is both ‘pure’ and ‘poor’ (2014: 83); it is a self stripped
of all the factors that individuate it, and so it does not resemble anything like the
personal, historical, character we each call ‘I’. Although, to my mind at least, Sartre’s
phenomenological argument against the existence of a transcendental ego still
holds for the ego that appears within Husserl’s phenomenological attitude – which
is merely as a formal correlate to the flux of experiences that replace one another –
insofar as it is only discovered through a reflection that extends beyond an instant
of pre-reflective experience.
12 As Sarah Richmond suggests, it is likely that Sartre intended to exploit the potential
of the title, The Transcendence of the Ego, for a double reading, since this work aims
to both establish the self as a transcendent object for consciousness and convince
his readership to ‘transcend’ the mistaken conception of the self that the Cartesian
philosophical tradition has imposed upon us (2004: x).
208 Notes

13 In The Transcendence of the Ego, Sartre describes anguish as a ‘fear of oneself ’ that
he believes to be ‘constitutive of pure consciousness’ (TE: 49/83). In Being and
Nothingness, he characterizes it as freedom’s apprehension of itself (BN/EN: 79/74).
14 Although we might be tempted to interpret ‘consciousness of consciousness’ as a
‘knowledge of knowledge’, Sartre urges us to resist the idea that the non-positional
consciousness that consciousness has of itself is a form of knowledge (BN/EN:
10/18). Knowledge, for him, can only ever be knowledge of objects, so ‘knowledge
of consciousness’ could only ever describe ‘a consciousness that is complete in itself
and directed toward something that it is not’ (BN/EN: 10/18).
15 By the time he writes Being and Nothingness, Sartre believes Husserl misunderstood
the ‘essential character’ of intentionality and this is what led him to locate part
of the self inside consciousness in a move which turns consciousness away from
the world and back into itself. Rather than returning to ‘the things themselves’ as
promised, Sartre reads Husserl’s phenomenology to revert to the orthodox view
that our cognitive powers cannot reach beyond our subjective representations of
things to the things themselves. On this basis, Sartre criticizes Husserl for having
become a ‘phenomenalist’ (phénoméniste) who dissolves objects of consciousness in
thought, for never passing ‘beyond the pure description of appearance as such’ and
for locking consciousness inside the cogito (BN/EN: 121/109).
16 Kenevan also acknowledges problems with her proposed modification. In
particular, she notes that the possibility of such a spilt appears to reinstate the
notion of there being two worlds: one of inner appearances and one of outer
reality, which is precisely what Sartre tries to reject through his interpretation
of intentionality. This leads her to conclude that the problem of authentic self-
consciousness may be part of a broader problem associated with the very notion
of a ‘non-positional awareness of existence that is more basic than what is given
through intentional objects’ (1981: 208).
17 I borrow this term from Matthew Ratcliffe, who proposes that our sense of reality, in
combination with our sense of belonging, ‘is the “world” that we take for granted in
the natural attitude’ (2012: 482). Support for Sartre’s understanding of the centrality
of a stable sense of self for psychological wellbeing can be found in phenomenological
studies which show that a loss of the usual sense of self (‘depersonalization’) typically
coincides with a compromised sense of reality (‘derealization’) in schizophrenia. See
Laing (1969), Uhlhaas and Mishara (2007), Parnas and Sass (2011), Sass and Ratcliffe
(2017) and Ch. 7 of this volume for further discussion.
18 An ‘internal negation’ for Sartre denotes ‘a relation between two beings, where
the one that we deny in relation to the other qualifies the other, at the heart
of its essence, precisely by its absence’ (BN/EN: 249/211). Hence, all relations
of consciousness take the form of internal negations in his view because
consciousness is a nothingness that depends on objects that are not it for its own
 Notes 209

existence. For a clear and helpful exposition of the function of internal relations in
Sartre’s phenomenological ontology, see Morris (2008: 43–6).
19 Indeed, Sartre once characterized Being and Nothingness as an ‘eidetic analysis of
self-deception’ (Sartre as quoted by Cumming [1981: 61]). Simone de Beauvoir
also states that Being and Nothingness is largely a study of ‘the serious man and
his universe’ (EA/MA: 46/60), where the term ‘serious’ refers to a particularly
deplorable form of bad faith. For a further discussion of this view, see Howells
(1988: 14–26).
20 To name but a few book length studies of bad faith in English: Bad Faith, Good
Faith and Authenticity in Sartre’s Early Philosophy (1995) by Ronald Santoni; Good
Faith and Other Essays: Perspectives on a Sartrean Ethics (1996) by Joseph Catalano;
and Sartre Explained: From Bad Faith to Authenticity (2008) by David Detmer.
21 This is with the notable exceptions of Betty Cannon’s observations in Sartre
& Psychoanalysis and Jean-Pierré Boulé’s analysis of Sartre’s own search for
authenticity in Sartre, Self-Formation and Masculinities.
22 Social characteristics such as ‘waiter’, ‘waster’, ‘judge’, ‘dentist’, ‘Jew’ and ‘woman’
are ‘unrealizables’ for the existentialist philosopher because consciousness cannot
be anything in-itself for-itself. ‘As I exist for myself ’, Sartre writes, ‘I am no more a
teacher or a café waiter than I am handsome or ugly, Jewish or Aryan, witty, vulgar
or distinguished’ (BN/EN: 685/572), for it is only when I am objectified in the eyes
of another than I take on such characteristics. Beauvoir also presents femininity as
an ‘in-itself that is unrealisable’ (SS/DS: 595/ II: 401).
23 Indeed, the location of Sartre’s analysis of conducts of bad faith at such an early
stage in the work, prior to the analysis of human sociality in Part III, has been
recognized as a major source of confusion and misunderstanding concerning the
function of bad faith in the secondary literature (Eshleman 2008a).
24 Matthew Eshleman, however, suggests that analogy between the attitude of bad
faith and the natural attitude is helpful in comprehending the former, which he
characterizes as a ‘natural’ overestimation of the power of language to define us
(2008a).
25 Sartre states that there are two ways that we can attempt to flee anguish: through
trying to apprehend oneself either ‘as an Other’ or ‘as a thing’ (BN/EN: 84/78).
26 ‘Conflict is the original meaning of being-for-the-Other’ (BN/EN: 483/404).
27 Sartre’s examples of conducts of bad faith in the second chapter of Being and
Nothingness are considered in isolation from the rest of the subject’s life and, as
Robert Solomon points out, with the possible exceptions of the discussion of a
case of a frigid woman borrowed from Wilhelm Stekel’s La femme frigide (BN/EN:
96–7/88–9) and the analysis of sadness (BN/EN: 105–6/95–7), they are neither
based on real experience nor phenomenological (2006: 155–63). Rather, they are all
illustrations of proposed prototypical conducts of bad faith.
210 Notes

28 The ‘nature’ we have for others escapes us and is ‘unknowable as such’ (BN/EN:
360/302).
29 Beauvoir develops the concept of seriousness by considering its social function,
which leads her to affirm that serious people are dangerous because they are
dogmatic in their views. It is ‘natural’, she writes, for the serious man to make
himself a tyrant because by contriving to ignore ‘the subjectivity of his choice, he
pretends that the unconditioned value of the object is being asserted through him;
and by the same token he also ignores the value of the subjectivity and freedom of
others, to such an extent that, sacrificing them to the thing, he persuades himself
that what he sacrifices is nothing’ (EA/MA: 49/65).
30 This view that the moustache is a marker of a bourgeois brand of bad faith for
Sartre appears to be confirmed in the final volume of The Family Idiot, where Sartre
insists that the garbs and the aesthetic of the bourgeoisie are part of the intricate
cover that the whole class has collectively fabricated to conceal their responsibility,
hatred and self-hatred from themselves (FI V/IF 3: 230/249).
31 Sartre affirms that the object that I am for others is ‘not an image cut off from me
and vegetating within a foreign consciousness’ but a being that is ‘perfectly real’; it is
‘my being-outside’, not in the sense that it comes to me ‘from the outside’, but in the
sense that is it ‘taken up’ by me and ‘recognized as my outside’ (BN/EN: 388/325).
32 As Moran sees it, a ‘report’ has an explanatory structure, it is ‘grounded in evidence’
and does not necessarily imply the reporter’s commitment to its truth, whereas an
‘avowal’ does not require an explanatory structure or evidential basis as it is simply
‘the expression of one’s own present commitment to the truth of the proposition in
question’ (2001: 86).
33 See O’Brien (2003: 376–82) for further discussion of the need for Moran to specify
the epistemic model that his account of self-knowledge employs.
34 Moran suggests that psychoanalysis cures by allowing the analysand to (re)discover
the avowal route to self-knowledge. He illustrates this point by emphasizing the
crucial therapeutic difference between a merely ‘intellectual’ acceptance of a
psychoanalytic interpretation in the context of psychoanalytic treatment – which is
usually considered a form of ‘resistance’ – and the process of ‘working-through’ –
which yields a full, felt apprehension of the truth of an interpretation and effects a
change in the analysand’s mental life as a whole. This, for him, signals that the key
aim of psychoanalysis is to provide the analysand with ‘self-knowledge that obeys
the condition of transparency’ (2001: 89–90).

Chapter 2

1 Although notable exceptions to this rule include Webber (2018, 2009), Catalano
(2010) and Lennon (2015).
 Notes 211

2 The kind of creatures that philosophers generally refer to as ‘zombies’ are different
from the creatures of the same name in popular culture in the important respect
that they do not seem to be mindless (Kirk 2019). Outwardly, ‘philosophical
zombies’ – or, rather, philosophy’s zombies – function exactly as ordinary human
beings do but the conscious experience that accompanies human functioning is
absent in them. So, as David Chalmers puts it, there is ‘nothing it is like’ to be this
sort of zombie (1996: 95).
3 No major philosopher has provided a serious, sustained defence solipsism.
Bertrand Russell writes that the logician Christine Ladd Franklin was an avowed
solipsist, but he does not report the details of her argument for this view, which he
dismisses on the grounds that it is ‘psychologically impossible to believe’ ([1948]
2009: 161).
4 The argument from analogy was a popular response to the epistemic problem
of other minds throughout the twentieth century. See, for example, Ayer (1946),
Hampshire (1952), Hyslop and Jackson (1972) and Russell (2009), and there has
been at least one recent attempt to reinforce it (Sollberger 2017).
5 For an informative discussion of this point, see Hyslop (1995: Ch. 1).
6 As the argument from analogy does not solve the epistemological problem of other
minds, its popularity and persistence are most likely due to two other factors. The
first is that attempting to justify an inference to other minds appears to be the
best means of responding to the epistemological problem of other minds from the
first-person perspective (Chalmers 1996). Second, the argument from analogy also
offers an intuitive solution to another problem about other minds: the ‘descriptive’
problem, which is concerned with describing the processes through which we
actually come to attribute minds to others, but not with whether these processes
provide sufficient rational justification for our doing so.
7 An attitude of resignation is, perhaps, one of the most common responses to the
problem of other minds in contemporary philosophy. The recent resurgence of
interest descriptive problem of other minds – which questions how we actually
acquire knowledge of other minds but brackets concerns about the justification
of such knowledge – has, for example, been interpreted as part of a general trend
of ‘leaving behind traditional epistemological concerns with radical scepticism’
(Avramides 2019).
8 This is with the exception of Heidegger, who is criticized, in the main, for
his proposal that ‘Mitsein’ or ‘being-with’ is the fundamental form of human
relation, which Sartre believes to be contradicted by the phenomenology of social
experience (BN/EN: 340–4/286–9).
9 I am indebted to Emmy van Deurzen and Clair Arnold-Bakers’ depiction of the
process of intentionality (2018: 31) for my depiction of Sartre’s conception of the
structure of consciousness’s relation to the other-as-object.
212 Notes

10 Shame is the primary form of being-for-others in Sartre’s view because relating to

others-as-objects requires bad faith: I must constantly employ ‘ruses’ to distract
myself from the certainty that others can look at me in order to ensure that they
remain objects for me (BN/EN: 402/336).
11 Sartre does explicitly state whether he is referring to others as subjects or objects at
numerous points, though (BN/EN: 352–3, 376–7, 397–402/296–7, 315–16, 332–7).
12 In his fifth Cartesian meditation, Husserl observes that what appears to another
cannot be given to me since then ‘it would be merely a moment of my own essence
[qua subject of experience], and ultimately he himself and I myself would be the
same’ ([1931] 1960: 109). Sartre reiterates this point in his statement that ‘the
only consciousness that can exist [for me] without in any way apprehending or
refusing me’ and, thereby, being part of the structure of my consciousness ‘is not
a consciousness isolated somewhere outside the world, but my own’ (BN/EN:
387/324).
13 Further evidence that Sartre is not attempting to supply a positive metaphysical
result in response to the epistemological problem of others minds in his chapter
‘The Other’s Existence’ is his admission that it is possible to experience shame when
nobody is in fact there, looking. His examples of shame even have this possibility
worked into them since they depict shame as being triggered by the perception of
objects that refer to the other-as-subject: ‘the convergence of two eyeballs towards
me’, the rustling of branches, the movement of a curtain, the sound of footsteps, a
farmhouse at the crest of a hill, etc. (BN/EN: 353/297). It follows from this that the
solipsist’s nightmare is a possibility: all the eyes that look at me could be artificial;
there may never actually be anybody at the other end of the Look I experience.
14 Perhaps the most often quoted line of Sartre’s is that spoken by the character Garcin
towards the end of Huis clos: ‘Hell is . . . other people!’ (2000: 223). Certainly, Sartre’s
depictions of human interactions in Being and Nothingness emphasize the misery of
relations lived in bad faith (Webber 2011), but his later work also attends to positive
authentic relations, such as love and solidarity (see Chapter 3). So, interpersonal
relations need not be hellish in Sartre’s view, although they often are.
15 Jesse M. Bering defines ‘epistemic social anxiety’ as any ‘negative affective state
that is associated with someone else knowing about – or threatening to know
about – the self ’s undesirable attributes’ (2008: 4), and so it has more in common
with ‘shame’ in the ordinary sense of the term, insofar as its object is the self as
a shameful object, which Sartre construes as a derivative of the ‘pure’ shame of
oneself as an object that he concentrates on (BN/EN: 392/328). See Dolezal (2017)
for a helpful analysis of ‘pure’ Sartrean shame as the basis for negative socially
mediated affects.
16 See Morris (1998) for a discussion of the view that Sartre construes knowledge
narrowly as empirical knowledge in Being and Nothingness.
 Notes 213

17 As Wittgenstein denies that his philosophy yields discoveries because it is focused

exclusively on improving the way we represent what we already know (see 2009:
§401–2), it is difficult to justify its claim to ‘therapeutic’ status, since this rules
out the possibility that it can cure through the enlightenment of the subject.
Peterman suggests that it is possible to provide a ‘rough and ready’ justification for
Wittgenstein’s therapeutic method through ‘an appeal to one’s own experience of
thinking through and helping others think through philosophical problems’ (1992:
121). Although a fully satisfactory justification would need to supply empirical
evidence in support of Wittgenstein’s hypothesis that the viewpoints that give
rise to traditional philosophical problems impair our ability to live and that the
provision of alternative viewpoints can improve our ability to live. I am unaware of
any empirical investigations into this hypothesis.
18 Psychoanalysis is often classified as an ‘insight-orientated’ therapy. Traditionally,
insight into the unconscious has been viewed as ‘the sine qua non of
psychoanalysis’ and ‘the most powerful agent’ of its curative process (Blum 1979:
43). Some psychoanalytic therapists today may dismiss the view that insight is the
most important or even a necessary factor in engendering therapeutic change,
though, as more emphasis tends to be placed on the curative power of therapeutic
relationship, narrative and the provision of corrective emotional experiences
(Lemma 2003: 73–93).
19 The psychoanalytic unconscious is distinct from the kind of ‘automatic’,
‘procedural’, ‘implicit’, ‘re-attentive’, or ‘nonconscious’ processes involved in
language acquisition, depth perception, facial recognition, etc., which are often
referred to collectively as the ‘adaptive unconscious’ in cognitive and social
psychology today (Wilson 2002), for the main reason that psychoanalysis is
principally concerned with unconscious thoughts that it regards as having a central
role in the generation of psychopathological symptoms.
20 In this case study, Freud discovers that it is only when he reiterates his clinical
interpretation in the course of an interpretation of the Rat-Man’s projection of a
trait of his father onto him – i.e. an episode of ‘transference’ – that the Rat-Man
could accept it because it enabled the Rat-Man to re-experience the affect that
belonged to ‘the very episode from the past which he had forgotten, or which had
only passed through his mind unconsciously’ within the context of the therapeutic
relationship ‘as though it were new’ (CW X: 199).
21 Like the behaviourists, Sartre rejects the view that there is anything inside
consciousness and he interprets behaviour in terms of the ‘situation’, but he
criticizes the behaviourists for having lost sight of the meaning of the situation,
which is determined by the subject’s projects (BN/EN: 399/333).
22 Although Richmond translates ‘compréhension préontologique’ as ‘pre-ontological
understanding’, I use the term ‘pre-ontological comprehension’ here to emphasize
214 Notes

the point that it involves the intuitive grasp of the sense of the object as an
experiential Gestalt as opposed to a theoretical understanding, which necessarily
abstracts from what is pre-reflectively comprehended.
23 Sartre’s early reading of Henri Bergson’s Les données immediates de la conscience,
translated as Time and Free Will, was a major source of inspiration for his
conception of human being as a flight into the future (Hayman 1986: 186; Flynn
2014: 22–3). Breeur even interprets Sartre’s pre-reflective consciousness as a
radicalization of Bergson’s idea of duration (2001: 178).
24 This dyad is not without psychoanalytical precedent. Indeed, the distinction
Freud makes between the ego and the ‘ego ideal’ or super-ego is analogous to that
which Sartre sets up between self and Self in the important respect that it makes
a ‘contrast between what is real and psychical, between the external world and
the internal world’ (CW XIX: 36). However, rather than functioning as a kind of
‘conscience’ that enforces internalized social standards, the Sartrean Self haunts
consciousness by continually making it aware of the gulf between it and the Self it
strives to be.
25 ‘Cathexis’ is an economic concept in Freudian psychoanalysis that refers to the
‘psychical energy’ that mental representations of the instincts possess and which
some analysts believe connects psychoanalysis to the field of neurophysiology
(Laplanche and Pontalis 1973: 62–5).
26 In his 1926 Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on ‘Psycho-analysis’, Freud makes
it clear that psychoanalysis construes instincts as the ultimate source of human
behaviour. He states that ‘psycho-analysis derives all mental processes (apart from
the reception of external stimuli) from the interplay of forces, which assist and
inhibit one another, combine with one another, enter into compromises with one
another, etc.’ and that all of these forces are ‘originally in the nature of instincts’ and
therefore have an ‘organic origin’ (CW XX: 265). In his essay on ‘The Claims of
Psycho-analysis to Scientific Interest’, he also states that he regards the concept of
‘instinct’ as being ‘on the frontier between the spheres of psychology and biology’
(CW XIII: 182).
27 Le Mystère en pleine lumière is the title of Maurice Barrès’ 1926 novel.
28 Because it posits the Other as an object from the very beginning, Freud’s
metapsychology has an epistemological problem about Others: Freud admits as
much when he states that our assumption of consciousness in other persons must
rest upon an inference from analogy and so ‘cannot share the immediate certainty
which we have of our own consciousness’ (CW XIV: 165).
29 In Chapter 3, we shall see that the objectivity of the Sartrean existential
psychoanalyst is a special, dialectical objectivity, which differs significantly from the
objectivity of the natural scientist.
 Notes 215

Chapter 3

1 I follow Jonathan Webber in distinguishing between Sartre’s ‘initial’ and ‘mature’

forms of existentialism (2018, 113–30). I take the former to find its fullest
articulation in Being and Nothingness (1943) and the latter in the Critique of
Dialectical Reason (1960).
2 Sartre’s terms ‘being-for-itself ’ and ‘being-in-itself ’ carry much the same sense
as Hegel’s terms ‘being-for-self ’ and ‘being-in-itself ’ in Phenomenology of Spirit,
where they are used to designate the two essential aspects of the appearance of an
object or the internal relation between consciousness and an object that constitutes
a moment of consciousness. However, Hegel construes this relation as a relation
of knowledge (Hegel 1977: §82), rather than a relation of being, which is what ties
Hegel’s phenomenology to an idealist metaphysic in Sartre’s view.
3 Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel’s work was a source of inspiration for Sartre.
Although Sartre did not attend Kojève’s famous lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology
of Spirit in the 1930s (Flynn 1997: 24), he frequently refers to the published version
of them, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Introduction to the Reading of Hegel), in
his Notebooks for an Ethics (1992/1983: 17, 56, 58–9, 62, 64, 68–9, 71–2, 90, 164,
452/24, 62, 64, 68–9, 73, 97, 172, 467).
4 Hegel regards consciousness as the ‘immediate existence of Spirit’ because it is
through being consciousness (of objects) that ‘Sprit becomes object because it just
is this movement of becoming an other to itself ’ (1977: 21). Consciousness is thus
but a moment of Spirit in the Hegelian system; hence, the consciousness of an
individual counts for very little in his picture of reality.
5 ‘Objective’ is placed in ‘scare quotes’ here because, as we shall see, Sartre’s dialectical
notion of objectivity is different from scientific objectivity in that it does not
exclude subjectivity.
6 Sartre describes Hegel’s identification of knowledge with its object as ‘Hegelian
dogmatism’ (CDR I/CRD I: 21–2/141).
7 Sartre believes that his synthesis of the insights of Hegel with those of Kierkegaard
allows him to offer what he takes to be essentially ‘the same reproach’ to Hegel as
Marx (SM/QM: 13/20). See McBride (1991: 74–80) for an informative discussion of
Sartre’s interpretation of Marx’s political philosophy.
8 Hazel E. Barnes translates Sartre’s ‘matérialisme réaliste’ as ‘realistic materialism’
(1981a: 662), rather than ‘realist materialism’ as Alan Sheridan-Smith does (CDR I:
29). I follow Barnes’s translation here because Sartre’s endorsement of a materialist
position in his mature work does not also commit him to metaphysical realism.
9 The validity of psychoanalysis’s claim to scientific status remains the subject of
much critical dispute. Some commentators deny that psychoanalysis meets the
216 Notes

criteria for a scientific discipline (Wittgenstein 1969; Popper 1983; Grünbaum

[2002] 2015); others contend that psychoanalysis is, or at least has the potential to
be, a science (Wallerstein 1986; Petcocz 2015; Lacewing 2018); while others argue
that it should be categorized as a form of hermeneutics (Habermas [1968] 1971;
Ricœur 1970) or a development of common-sense psychology (Gardner 1995).
10 Freud’s note that his topographical conception of the psyche ‘has for the present
nothing to do with anatomy’ in his essay on ‘The Unconscious’ strongly suggests
that he envisions that developments in scientific technology will permit us to
connect the mental apparatus it identifies to particular regions of the body (CW
XIV: 175).
11 See, for example, SS/DS, Fanon ([1952] 1986), Beauvoir (1972/1970), Bartky
(1990), Liebow (2016) and Manstead (2018).
12 For example, Bartky observes that the way society treats psychologically
oppressed persons is similar to the way in which psychiatrist R. D. Laing proposes
schizophrenic children are treated by their parents: ‘professing love at the very
moment they shrink from their children’s touch’ (Bartky 1990: 31).
13 In 1975, Sartre affirms that the war initiated the ‘great change’ in his thinking (IWS:
12).
14 Sartre argues that the young Flaubert forces his emotions ‘just the young Baudelaire
did’ in The Family Idiot (FI II/IF II: 27/679), which suggests that he did not reject
all the conclusions of his earlier study and that his experience of analysing of
Baudelaire’s childhood informed his approach to Flaubert’s.
15 The notion that transcendence could become trapped in a circular movement allows
Sartre to account for the so-called compulsion to repeat without making recourse
to unconscious instincts. The hypothesis of a repetition compulsion is deployed by
psychoanalysts to explain why subjects put often themselves into the same sorts of
distressing situations time and time again but believe these situations to be ‘fully
determined by the circumstances of the moment’ (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973: 78).
Laplanche and Pontalis also observe that disagreement among psychoanalysts about
which instincts are responsible for the compulsion to repeat is the source of a great
deal of confusion in the psychoanalytic literature. As Cannon points out, from an
existentialist perspective, the compulsion to repeat may be ‘reconceived as a desire
for the security of the known over the fearful confrontation with a self who never is
but is instead always in the process of becoming’ (1991: 317).
16 Sartre maintains that Baudelaire’s dandyism expresses his membership in an
imaginary ‘suicides’ club’, which allows him to think of himself a member of an elite
group of artists whose existence was justified in advance, in a way that excuses him,
in his mind, from action and interaction (B: 146/136).
17 Sartre tells us that Genet’s whirligigs employ the same pattern of circular sophistry
as The Argument of Epimenides, which goes, ‘Epimenides says that Cretans are
 Notes 217

liars. But he is a Cretan. Therefore he lies. Therefore all Cretans are not liars.
Therefore he speaks the truth. Therefore Cretans are liars. Therefore he lies’ and so
on (SG: 332–3/371).
18 Being and Nothingness describes ‘instants’ as ‘marvellous moments in which the
prior [fundamental] project collapses into the past in the light of a new project
which arises on its ruins’ (BN/EN: 621/520–1). But Sartre abandons the notion
that subjects can be liberated from their original choice by the time he writes Saint
Genet, where he states that he distrusts ‘illuminations’ since what we often take for
discoveries are familiar thoughts that we have not yet recognized (SG: 406/453)
and speaks instead of ‘conversions’ and the assumption of new behavioural ways of
interpreting the original choice, which may be more or less ‘adaptive’ (see, e.g., SG:
49–52, 425, 449/63–6, 473, 499, and Webber 2018: 125–30 for discussion).
19 Nor, arguably, was hell other people for earlier Sartre since the sadomasochistic
circles that characterize human relations in Being and Nothingness are a result of
bad faith (Cannon 1991: 99; Webber 2011).
20 For example, Sartre describes the struggle of the proletariat as a ‘circle of hell’
on account of their progress being continually undone by the bourgeoisie’s
modification of prices (CDR II/CRD II: 45/55).

Chapter 4

1 Aspects of Achille-Clèophas and Caroline’s relationship that become more

understandable in the context of an ‘exceedingly incestuous’ marriage (FI I/IF I:
80/89), include: Achille-Clèophas sending Caroline back to boarding school and
only permitting her to leave on the eve of their wedding (FI I/IF I: 76/85), and
Caroline not displaying any signs of vexation when her husband paid a visit to a
former mistress and left her standing outside, in the street, with their children (FI I/
FI I: 87–8/96–7).
2 Sartre notes that, ‘thanks to analysts’, the tendency of a deprived childhood towards
repetition with other children is well documented and so, ‘if the former orphan
who had recovered an incestuous father could succeed in creating an ameliorated
version of her own childhood with a child of her own sex’ (FI I/IF I: 81/90), she
could supplement her images of own unhappy childhood with images of her
daughter’s happy one. He also takes the fact that Caroline gave her name to her
daughter as further evidence for this view.
3 Some may worry that Sartre’s choice to blame the mother for the son’s misfortunes
may be more a consequence of patriarchal logic than of dialectical reason.
Additionally, Sartre admits in an interview that he does not like Flaubert’s
mother (OIF/SIF: 114/96), so there could be reason to assert that Sartre’s negative
218 Notes

assessment of Caroline Flaubert’s mothering is a case of the investigator finding

what he is looking for. However, as we shall see below, Sartre holds Flaubert’s
father (who in the same interview Sartre admits to liking) equally accountable for
Flaubert’s constitution because he could have saved him but did not, which shows
that Sartre is also critical of the male parent.
4 Sartre notes that ‘even the most lucid critics’ have been duped into thinking that
Flaubert’s portrayal of Dr Larivière has only one dimension (FI I/IF I: 440/454,
see, for example, Bart 1967: 6). Had Flaubert simply wanted to paint an admirable
portrait of this physician, Sartre contends that he would have introduced him at
any juncture other than the one he did: when it is too late to save Emma’s life. To
the question of what Dr Larivière actually does in the novel, Sartre’s answer is that
he makes a grand entrance, makes a correct diagnosis, humiliates his colleague,
then flees from the scene. Thus, Sartre concludes that this portrait of Dr Larivière is
‘black and white’ (FI I/IF I: 443/457).
5 Lest the term ‘Golden Age’ should seem deceptively positive, Sartre assures us
that, in reality, it was most probably ‘a period of rather gloomy estrangement’ in
which Gustave experienced the ‘the intermittent presence and rather lukewarm
tenderness of an overworked father’ (FI I/IF I: 348–9/360).
6 The scientific reason for this cruel experiment was to settle once and for all the
question that had troubled the Academy: whether a human and an ape could
produce offspring. However, M. Paul also has less ‘honourable’ motivations: pride
(he had made a bet that he could pass and ape off as a man) and revenge (the slave
girl he locks in the room with the orangutan had previously rejected his sexual
advances) (EW/OJ: 89/256–7).
7 In the conclusion of this tale, Flaubert abruptly switches from the third person to
the second person. Speaking directly to the reader, he writes: ‘You probably insist
on a conclusion, don’t you?’ (EW/OJ: 102/272) – a technique he will famously use
again at the beginning of Madame Bovary.
8 In The Family Idiot, Sartre refers to the process of self-formation as ‘personalization’
(FI II/IF II: 8/658). But I use the term self-formation in this study for consistency.
9 The two other strategies Sartre suggests render the subject’s original relation to the
world unreal. The first interprets the nonassimilable aspect as a reproach of another
(which may be false or flawed), while the other projects the nonassimilable aspect
onto others (FI II/IF II: 5/655).
10 Sartre uses the image of a spiral to describe the totalizing movement of self-
formation: ‘[W]e might well conceive of this movement in a three-dimensional
space as a multicentered spiral that continually swerves . . . making an indefinite
number of revolutions around its starting point’ (FI II/IF II: 7/657).
11 Although Sartre views Caroline Commanville’s claim that Flaubert once obeyed
Pierre the chef when he asked him to ‘[r]un to the kitchen . . . and see if I’m there’
 Notes 219

as a fabrication (IF I: 17–19/FI I: 7–9), the evidence indicates that little Gustave
suffered from what Sartre calls a ‘disease of truth’ (maladie de la Vérité) (FI I/IF I:
156/164).
12 Sartre shows that Flaubert’s preference for motherly women is reflected by his
infatuations with Elisa Schlésinger and Louise Colet, who were both mothers and
older than he (FI II/IF II: 52/704).
13 This choice of comparison is not random, as Sartre’s 1954 adaption of Alexandre
Dumas’ play, Kean, explores the idea that people may be drawn to acting because
it allows them to experience ‘ideal’ emotions, which are less ambiguous and more
aesthetically appealing than those of everyday life.
14 Against the criticism that it may be improper to speak in terms of a ‘vocation’ in
relation to someone so young, Sartre notes the zeal with which Gustave launched
all his energies into his project to become a great actor – building by himself a
miniature stage and compiling a repertoire of nearly thirty plays in just two years
– and concludes that if he thrust himself into this venture, it is because ‘it gave him
something he was looking for, though without knowing it’ (FI II/IF II: 120/775).
15 Here, ‘crisis’ refers to Flaubert’s first attack at Pont-l’Evêque. Although Sartre
sometimes also refers to this event as a ‘fall’ (see, e.g., FI IV/IF III: 111/1883), to
avoid confusion with Flaubert’s first Fall (from the graces of his father), Flaubert’s
first attack will only be referred to as his crisis.
16 Critics who agree that Flaubert’s illness was most likely epilepsy include Enid
Starkie (1967: 116), Geoffrey Wall (2006: 138) and Timothy Unwin (2004: 49).
Notably, Benjamin F. Bart, in his attempt to settle the matter, submitted his report
of Flaubert’s symptoms to Dr Arthur Ecker, a clinical professor of neurological
surgery at The Upstate Medical Center, Syracuse, New York, who confirmed the
diagnosis of epilepsy (1967: 753–3n).
17 Sartre does, of course, also describe Flaubert’s illness as a ‘neurosis’, but we shall see
that Sartre does not offer this term as a ‘diagnosis’ but, rather, as part of an attempt
to offer a precise description of the form of ‘stress’ that characterizes Flaubert’s self-
formation from 1844 onwards.
18 Sartre remains committed to the view that, in desperate situations, the body can be
magically ‘raised to the level of behaviour’ (STE/ETE: 51/99), which he first argued
for in his Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. In The Family Idiot, Sartre interprets
Flaubert’s first attack in 1844 as an instance of ‘magical behaviour’ through which
he ‘turns his back danger so that it will be annihilated’ (FI IV/IF III: 43/1812).
19 If we are to take Maxime Du Camp’s word for it, Gustave’s later attacks literally refer
to the first, as he recalls that Flaubert would habitually cry ‘Drop the reins; here
comes the wagoner, I hear the bells! Ah! I see the lantern of the inn!’ (FI IV/IF III:
15/1783). This, among other factors, including the less sudden nature of the later
attacks, leads Sartre to conclude that the moment of the first attack is the only one
220 Notes

that counts, as this was when ‘the neurosis is chosen, structured, realized’ and
that the purpose of the later attacks is merely to reaffirm this choice (FI IV/IF III:
16/1785). Flaubert’s referential attacks say: ‘I’m still just as sick’ and defend him
against feelings of guilt by reconfirming his illness (FI IV/IF III: 119/1891).
20 Sartre argues that ‘Loser Wins’ (Qui perd gagne) is Flaubert’s life-philosophy, which
allows him to establish enough ‘hope in the depths of [his] desperate soul’ for him
to continue to live (FI V/IF 3: 7/13).
21 Sartre cites many examples of this kind of generalization in Agonies and Diary of a
Madman (Mémoires d’un fou) (FI III/IF III: 422–4/1536–9). Numerous instances
are also discoverable in November, such as: ‘I was exactly what all of you are, a
certain man, living, sleeping, eating, drinking, laughing, wrapped up in himself ’
(Nov/OJ: 19/770, see also 24/774, 28/777).
22 ‘Neurotic literature’ is in ‘scare quotes’ here, as Sartre does not consider Madame
Bovary a morbid work that is underserving of its canonical status but, rather, as
emerging from a specific historical moment in which ‘neurosis was the royal road
to the production of a masterpiece’ (FI V/IF 3: 33/41).
23 In What Is Literature? Sartre theorizes the function of literature as the author’s
‘appeal’ to the reader’s ‘freedom’ (WL/QL: 122/163).
24 Sartre regards the great success of Darwin’s work, On the Origin of Species (1859),
as being partly due to the ideology of the ruling class, who approved of both its
mechanistic approach and its popularization of ‘two deliciously inhuman and
pessimistic ideas, the struggle for life and the survival of the fittest’ (FI V/IF 3:
236/256).
25 –Je hâte la dissolution de la matière!
–Je facilite l’éparpillement des germes!
–Tu détruis, pour mes renouvellements!
–Tu engendres, pour mes destructions!
–Active ma puissance!
–Féconde ma pourriture! (Flaubert 1951: 188)
26 Notably, two of Flaubert’s most famous protagonists respond with revulsion at first
sight of their offspring: Emma Bovary turns her head away from her new born
daughter (MB: 80/406), and Frédéric Moreau sees only ‘a yellowish-red object . . .
[that] had an unpleasant smell and was emitting loud wails’ when he first looks
upon his son (SE/ES: 419/506).
27 Sartre argues that Flaubert deflects his disgust about satisfying his sexual needs
with prostitutes in his correspondence with Louise Colet by employing a distinctly
bourgeois kind of misogyny. Flaubert is not embarrassed about attaining ‘dissolute
pleasures on the cheap’, he maintains, because his ideology allows him to project
his shame of his needs onto the female who is degraded and whose body is ‘on the
market’ (FI V/FI 3: 341/367).
 Notes 221

28 The fact that Flaubert presents the god-like physician, Dr Larivière, devouring a
hearty meal at Homais’s house immediately after he retreats from the dying Emma
Bovary’s bedside lends further support to Sartre’s claim that Flaubert’s portrayal of
his father through this character is ambiguous (FI I/IF I: 441/445 and see note 4
above).
29 It may be contested that what Djalioh feels for Adèle cannot be categorized as
masochistic devotion because he sexually assaults her and kills her at the end of
the tale; yet, it is worth noting that Djalioh, who is only half-human, may not have
been aware of the consequences of his actions and that he kills himself immediately
after his crime.
30 At one point Mâtho cries about Salammbô: ‘I need her! Its killing me . . . I would
like to sell myself and become her slave’ (S: 42/82).
31 Although Justin is aware that he is insignificant to Emma Bovary, he takes pleasure
in cleaning her boots (MB: 167/463) and feels ‘an immeasurable sorrow’ after her
death (MB: 303/602).
32 Louise’s love is described as ‘both as pure as religion and as violent as hunger’ (SE/
ES: 272/335).
33 A Simple Heart reads like a hagiography, as the protagonist, Félicité, has
apparitions of the both the Virgin Mary and the Holy Spirit, leads a life of devotion
and dies a supernatural death. Bart notes that Félicité attains ‘effortlessly’ the
sanctity that Flaubert’s Saint Julien could accomplish only by enduring ‘unbearable
pains’ (1967: 697). Sartre too recognizes Flaubert’s presentation of Felicité’s
simplicity as admirable since she ‘puts her genius into life’ and does not reason but
‘understands [comprend] because devotion itself is a kind of understanding’ (FI I/
FI I: 321/332).
34 At the end of the first part of Madame Bovary, during Emma’s first spell of
depression, meals sicken her because ‘it seemed to her that all the bitterness of life
was served up to her on her plate’ (MB: 59/385) and she begins drinking vinegar
‘to lose weight’ (MB: 60/386). Further, after Emma is rejected by her first lover,
Rodolphe, she despairs about having to eat a meal with her husband (MB: 183/513).
35 Romantic devotion seems to lead to self-destruction too. To explain this, Sartre
suggests that Flaubert’s black saints appear to be made of ‘such delicate stuff . . . that
they transform into infinite torture what for insensitive natures might be pleasure’,
so it is unlikely that the object of their affection will be able to understand them (FI
I/IF I: 424/437–8). For example, Ernest is the object of Mazza’s devotion, but we
are told that he is not an ‘exceptional soul’ (EW/OJ: 103/275). Equally, all of Emma
Bovary’s lovers seem to be unworthy of her. Mâtho and Salammbô appear to be
well matched, but their brief relationship ends in calamity when Mâtho is captured,
tortured and killed by the people of Carthage and Salammbô dies of shock after
witnessing it (S: 275–82/458–69).
222 Notes

36 Sartre uses the term ‘class literature’ to designate ‘a literature subservient to the
needs of the upper classes’ (FI V/IF 3: 273/296).
37 There is no English equivalent of ‘déclassement’ (IF 3: 531). Cosman translates it as
‘changing class’ (FI V: 499).

Chapter 5

1 Sartre recalls his delight in reading Madame Bovary as a child even though he
was oblivious to its ‘poisonous’, adult significance (W/M: 37/49). He also suggests
that he holds Flaubert partly accountable for his own, possibly neurotic, attitude
towards writing when he states that the noxious, ‘ancient bile of Flaubert’ he
devoured as a youth led him to confuse ‘literature with prayer’ and make a ‘human
sacrifice’ of it (W/M: 113/146–7).
2 Other critics who find noting coincidental about Sartre’s concentration on Flaubert
include Julian Barnes (1982) and Leon S. Roudiez (1982).
3 In particular, it seems that Sartre intended to comment on the ‘ugliness’ of
Flaubert’s choice of verbs in connection with the sense of temporal vagueness he
creates in his works (Notes: 188/176).
4 In an oft-cited passage from a letter to Louise Colet, Flaubert states: ‘What seems
beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing, a book
dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the internal
strength of style, just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing
external for its support; a book which would have almost no subject, or at least
in which the subject would be invisible, if such a thing is possible’ (1982/1980:
213/31).
5 Tony Tanner’s classic study, Adultery and the Novel: Contract and Transgression
(1979), illustrates how many of the novels of the nineteenth century that have since
been canonized concentrate on the theme of adultery.
6 Earlier on in November, the narrator affirms that the sufferings of the soul ‘don’t kill
you’ and that only suicide can deliver one from them (Nov/OJ: 98/828).
7 Emma observes with intrigue the way that a woman at the ball drops her fan, then
artfully drops a note into the hat of the gentleman who kneels to pick it up for her
(MB: 47/372–3).
8 Mary Orr proposes that Madame Bovary is, specifically, Cinderella-in-reverse:
Emma ‘pretends to be Cinderella for the night by refusing to allow Charles to dance
with her, as if she were single once more’ and the tragedy implied by this formula is
further compounded by the fact that ‘the “bad” fairy godmother of fate’ allows her to
taste of the kind of life she dreams of after she is married, not before (Orr 2000: 37).
 Notes 223

9 Sartre argues that this statement does not merely capture one of Flaubert’s literary
motifs, but a belief that is lived by the author as a ‘permanent subject of anguish
kept alive by self-loathing’, caused by contrast between the grand ambition he is
instilled with as a member of the Flaubert family and his lived sense of inadequacy
(FI I/IF I: 551/570).
10 No English translation of this play exists. It is worth noting that Sartre also refers
to it in Being and Nothingness to illustrate his notion of bad faith because it
commences from our transcendence only to then ‘imprison us suddenly within the
narrow limits of our de facto essence’ (BN/EN: 99/91).
11 This is a reference to the one of the two fictional Giants created by François
Rabelais in his series of novels La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel (The Life of
Gargantua and of Pantagruel). ‘Pantagruelizing’, as a verb in Sartre’s use, refers to
the act of viewing something from the perspective of a giant and abstaining from
making negative moral judgements about the things one witnesses.
12 Sartre investigates Flaubert’s laughter in detail in The Family Idiot, especially in
sections: ‘The Mirror and Laughter’ (FI II/IF II: 23–32/674–84) and ‘Laughter as
the Fundamental Structure of the Garçon (or the Sadism of the Masochist)’ (FI III/
IF II: 144–95/1251–1303).
13 Sartre deduces that at some point between 1837 and 1838 Flaubert would have
wanted to consult a priest and that he quite probably did. However, Sartre asserts
that priests during this period of triumph for bourgeoisie would have been aware
of their unpopularity and would have had little interest in converting the son of a
‘family of freethinkers’; hence, any advice he received is likely to have been dull and
uninspiring (FI I/IF I: 513–14/530–1). Such an experience, he suggests, may have
left Flaubert with a grudge against priests because they failed to provide him with a
satisfactory alternative to the scientism of his father.
14 In his notes for the fourth volume, Sartre also indicates that he intends to compare
Emma’s writing to Léon to Flaubert’s own experience of writing love letters to a
woman he did not love (Notes: 187/176).
15 The character of Dussardier in this novel may be considered Flaubert’s mouthpiece
for his despair over the political situation at this time. Towards the end of the work,
he cries out: ‘[I]f only people would make the effort! If people were sincere, we
could get on alright together! But they’re not!. . . And there’s no remedy, no way
out, everybody’s against us . . . If it goes on like this, it’ll drive me mad! I’d like to get
killed!’ (SE/ES: 434/522).
16 What separates the committed (engagé) writer from the uncommitted (désengagé)
writer, according to Sartre, is that the former ‘knows that words are action’, that ‘to
reveal is to change and that one can reveal only by planning to change’ (WL/QL:
14/28).
224 Notes

17 ‘Confirmation bias’ is the term used in the psychological literature to refer to the
phenomenon whereby individuals unwittingly seek out and/or interpret evidence
in ways that inappropriately bolster beliefs or hypotheses whose truth is in question
in favour of their extant beliefs (Nickerson 1998).
18 Sartre’s bibliographers describe how Sartre caused a scandal in 1966 by claiming
to hold Flaubert and Edmund de Goncourt responsible for the repression that
followed the 1871 Paris Commune (Contat and Rybalka 1970: 428).
19 Flaubert offers us literary descriptions of these two other possibilities for women
through his depictions of Félicité, the servant in ‘A Simple Heart’, and Rosannette, a
kept woman in A Sentimental Education.
20 Hazel E. Barnes (1981b: 364–5) and Mary Orr (2000) have uncovered feminist
sentiments in Flaubert’s literature.

Chapter 6

1 More exactly, Sartre proposes that the matter for the imaginary object is affectivity
and, sometimes, also the feeling of bodily movements in Part II of The Imaginary.
2 We know, for example, that the way people say things is often, if not always,
more important than what they say in facilitating our comprehension of their
meaning. Albert Mehrabian and Susan Ferris’s frequently cited quantitative
study found that ‘the combined effect of simultaneous verbal, vocal, and facial
attitude communications is a weighted sum of their independent effects – with
the coefficients of .07, .38 and .55, respectively’ (1967: 252). This is the source of
the famous ‘7-38-55’ formula that aspirational politicians and businesspeople are
instructed to bear in mind when thinking about how they can enhance their ability
to communicate the ‘right’ messages to others.
3 Lacan describes his approach to psychoanalysis as a ‘return to Freud’ but many
scholars view this ‘return’ as a structuralist reinterpretation of Freud (e.g. Cannon
1991; Zafiropoulos 2010).
4 Sartre now recognizes no ‘unconscious’ apart from what is lived and comprehended
but unknown because it has not been articulated. We may interpret Sartre’s
acceptance of a version of the unconscious here as the culmination of a long
‘conversion’ to a more Freudian view of consciousness since, while no substance
and no ‘thing’ is ever granted entry ‘into’ the Sartrean consciousness, its clarity
is continually reduced. In 1940, Sartre defines consciousness as ‘transparent to
itself ’ (I: 6, 26, 72/19, 57, 143). In 1943, though, he describes consciousness as
‘translucent’ rather than transparent (BN/EN: 84, 89, 116/78, 82, 104, passim).
Then in 1969, he affirms that consciousness is a ‘lived experience’ (le vécu) and
a ‘presence to itself ’ that is ‘so opaque and blind before itself that it is also an
 Notes 225

absence from itself ’ (IOT: 50), from which point he accepts opacity as a feature
of consciousness. Nonetheless, he preserves his notion of (preontological)
comprehension into his mature existentialism, where it is theorized as ‘a silent
adjunct to lived experience, a familiarity of the subjective experience with itself, a
way of putting components and moments in perspective but without explanation’
(IF III: 1544/FI III: 429).
5 According to Lacan, a significant factor contributing to the independence of
human knowledge from the field of desire, relative to other animals, is their
‘fetalization’ – i.e. the premature birth of the human being as evinced by the human
neonate’s motor uncoordination and anatomically incomplete pyramidal system
(E: 78/97) – since this creates the conditions for the formation of the infant’s desire
for unification with their body as imaged. So that, even prior to their entry into
language, human beings’ ‘organic inadequacy’ disposes them ‘paranoiac knowledge’,
which is his term to describe the way that, developmentally, human knowledge is
acquired only through an imaginary – and false – ‘objectifying identification’ with
the self-other (E: 91/111), which the subject must anxiously protect from all the
evidence that threatens to undermine it.
6 Lacan argues that instead of satiating the subject’s desire to overcome her feelings
of alienation, her unification with her self will further alienate her from her desire
because it is a unification with the other that she mistakes for herself. Hence, he
compares it to treating a limp by amputating the affected leg (E: 379/454).
7 Sartre observes that the anxiety associated with the Jewish complex takes a
special form: unlike psychaesthenics who are plagued by fears that they might
commit atrocious or obscene acts, a Jew with the Jewish complex lives in fear
that she will conform to the negative stereotype others have of her. The fear of
behaving like a Jew therefore overdetermines her behaviour according to Sartre,
but it overdetermines her ‘from the inside’ because she allows it to, because she
inauthentically plays at not being a Jew in response to it (1948/1954: 95/115).
8 It should be noted that Freud explicitly rejects the theory of complexes that he
associates with the Swiss School of psychoanalysis, although he accepts that the
term ‘complex’ can sometimes be indispensable in descriptive summaries of
psychological states (CW XIV: 29–30).
9 Sartre describes the function of literary text as a physical analogon in the
experience of the reader as follows: ‘an entire world appears to me as imaged
through the lines of the book . . . and this world encloses my consciousness, I
cannot disengage, I am fascinated by it’ (I: 168/326).
10 Although this use of the term ‘metaphysics’ is consistent with Sartre’s use of it in
Being and Nothingness, where it is presented as being concerned with the reasons
for being – the ‘why’ of it – rather than what being is (BN/EN: 801/667) and his
view that each individual develops their own metaphysics to interpret the world as
meaningful (BN/EN: 782/650).
226 Notes

11 Sartre excludes poetry from his conception of literature because he believes that
poetic language lacks specific referents. He likens the poet’s use of language to
painter’s use of colour as the poet uses language to construct an art-object to
behold but, by refraining from attaching specific meanings to her words, the poet
surrenders them to ambiguity and so they become ‘words-things’ (WL/QL: 8/22).
Thus, though painters and poets may present a hovel, Sartre contends that only a
literary author can describe it and make it seem like ‘a symbol of social injustice
and provoke your indignation’ (WL/QL: 4/16).
12 While Sartre does not explicitly state that the affective sense of objects is a function
of the subject’s metaphysical attitude in What Is Literature? he does endorse a
Beauvoirian view of metaphysics as a ‘living effort to embrace from within the
human condition in its totality’ as opposed to ‘sterile discussion about abstract
notions which have nothing to do with experience’ (WL/QL: 171/222). And I
believe that this, taken together with Sartre’s singling out D. H. Lawrence’s works
for their potential to convey the affective sense of objects that constitutes ‘their
deepest reality’ for the fictional observer-subject while seeming only to describe
their physical properties in The Imaginary (I: 69/139), and his discussion of how
psychoanalysis reveals the ‘metaphysical tenor’ of qualities of objects (BN/EN:
782/650), justifies the ascription of this view to him.
13 Structuralism is an intellectual movement that may be characterized by the aim to
provide scientifically rigorous analyses of social multiplicities and complex systems,
a tendency to privilege whole systems over their individual elements, and a focus
on language as an objective structure with its own rules of operation and means
of signification. In various ways, structuralism seeks to expose the ubiquitous and
multifarious effects of socio-political structures, systems of power and domination,
and what Barthes calls ‘the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society’
in people’s everyday lives (Barthes 1977: 148/1994: 45).
14 Sartre emphasizes the role of the author’s and the reader’s freedom in his discussion
of the literary work when he states: ‘[T]he unique point of view from which the
author can present the world to those freedoms whose concurrence he wishes to
bring about is that of a world to be impregnated always with more freedom’ (WL/
QL: 47/70).
15 In The Imaginary, Sartre explains that the ‘primary reason’ why the world of
imaginary objects cannot truly constitute an alternate reality is that they are not
‘individualized’ through their concrete relations with all the other objects in their
environment as real objects are (I: 135/260).
16 Despite championing Sartrean existentialism as a metatheory for psychotherapeutic
practice, Cannon regards Sartre’s concept of magical behaviour as the residue
of an ‘overly rationalist strain in his early philosophical thinking’ because, while
she accepts that emotions result from (pre-reflective) choice of being and cannot
 Notes 227

therefore be described as something one undergoes, she denies that emotions are
a magical way of changing the world through changing the subject’s experience
(1991: 352).
17 Sartre’s comments about the relation between The Imaginary and The Family Idiot
in later interviews indicate that he stands by the theory he put forward in the
earlier work. In one interview, for example, he suggests that The Family Idiot is a
development of The Imaginary that reflects the shift in his philosophical interests
as he matured (IWS: 15). In another, he says that The Imaginary sought ‘to prove
that imaginary objects – images – are an absence’, while The Family Idiot studies
‘imaginary persons – people who like Flaubert act out roles’ (IOT: 53).
18 The conditions in which it is possible to feel the way one wants to feel about the
object of the imaginary act may be impossible in real life, hence Sartre’s contrast
between imagining punching one’s enemy with really punching one’s enemy. The
former is enjoyable while the latter is not because, in the imaginary, this act will
either not draw blood or will draw ‘just as much’ as one wants, but this is something
one cannot control in reality (I: 146/281).
19 Sartre’s conception of empathetic imaginings is, I believe, close to Matthew
Ratcliffe’s conception of radical empathetic experiences insofar as they are ‘self-
affecting’ in virtue of resulting from the empathizing subject’s suspension of their
own metaphysical attitude and, hence, their openness to the experience of the
world as having possibilities and meanings for another (2012: 488).

Chapter 7

1 A transference neurosis is the unconscious projection of qualities of a significant

person from one’s past – typically a parent figure – onto a person in the present,
which leads the subject to react to their own projections, rather than the actual
behaviour of the person in the present. Transference neuroses are reported to occur
frequently in psychotherapeutic contexts, where they are often viewed by therapists,
or at least psychoanalytical and psychodynamic therapists, to provide an invaluable
opportunity to ‘work through’ the client’s past issues in the present.
2 I borrow this concept of knowledge from David J. Kahane who argues that feminist
knowledge is ‘transformative’ because ‘getting it’ means that you can no longer see
or live your life in the same way (1998: 216–17).
3 Creative writing cures Genet but not Flaubert, in Sartre’s estimation, because
Genet’s writing fails where Flaubert’s succeeds. Instead of furnishing him with
an experience in the imaginary that feels more real than his daydreams, writing
Our Lady of the Flowers makes Genet’s dream present on the page before him as
a signification and, thereby, delivers his self to him as an object. So, as he writes,
228 Notes

Genet does not continue to feel the feelings that his imaginings produce in him
as he hopes to, he ‘ceases to feel’ and ‘knows that he did feel’ (SG: 459/510). As
he works to assume the role of a God-like creator, he ‘connects with himself as
a real creator of an imaginary world’; as he strives to lose himself in imaginary,
he discovers his self as ‘a man and a captive’; as he seeks refuge in lofty, proud
solitude, he becomes suddenly aware of his yearning for others; as he describes
the characters he creates out of nothing, he realizes that he needs readers to give
them flesh (SG: 480/533–4). Writing his first novel therefore pulls him out of his
onanistic inversion. Creative writing does not have the same effect on Flaubert,
though, because Flaubert’s alienation from his self is more total. Genet’s solution
to his unliveable life was to distract himself from desire for love by making it his
project to be evil and unlovable, but his writing makes him confront that desire
by objectifying his intention to connect with others. Flaubert’s solution to his
unliveable life, however, is to annihilate his self in his experience, which means
that his writing only pushes his project of ‘imaginarization’ to the limit (FI II/IF II:
265/926); it allows him to continue dreaming by crystallizing his imaginary self.
November, for example, allows him to imagine himself as a ‘cosmic child’ who ‘does
not love because nothing of what exists is worth the trouble of loving’; it covers
rather than reflects his real self as a child who lacks the love he longs for (FI II/IF II:
258/919).
4 The issue of Les Temps modernes in which the transcript and Sartre’s analysis of it
were published also contains responses from eminent psychoanalyst J.-B. Pontalis
and B. Pingaurd, two editorial board members who disagreed with the journal’s
decision to publish the transcript and resigned because of it. In his response,
Pontalis contends that Sartre’s interpretation of the transcript in his essay betrays
a fundamental misunderstanding of psychoanalysis. Indeed, because Sartre
lacked first-hand experience of psychoanalysis in a clinical setting, he could not
fully understand the phenomenon of ‘transference’ – the client’s projection of
qualities they associate with ‘original others’, such as parents and siblings, onto the
analyst. Nonetheless, Cannon rightly observes that we can appreciate that Sartre’s
understanding of transference is limited and still recognize that his existentialist
perspective allows him to offer insights on the transcript that Freudian perspective
cannot deliver (1991: 319).
5 It should be noted here that Sartre appears to be basing his criticism on a classical
model of psychoanalysis that many psychoanalysts had already moved away
from. D. W. Winnicott (1949), Paula Heimann (1950) and Margaret Little (1951),
for example, had all published influential pieces emphasizing the importance of
‘countertransference’ – how the analyst is impacted by the client – as a tool in the
work of psychoanalysis. Further, it should be noted that even the neutrality of the
classical psychoanalyst is not indifferent or uncaring stance but a ‘nonjudgemental’
one (Eagle and Wolitzky 1992: 119).
 Notes 229

6 The family therapist, Salvadore Minuchin, describes the positive changes he

witnessed in the woman during her conversation with Laing as an effect of ‘love’
(Laing 1985: 52:45).
7 Kate Kirkpatrick notes that the Sartrean concept of reciprocity ‘should not be
called “Sartrean” without caveats’ for the reason that Beauvoir was first to develop
this concept (2019b: 30). Beauvoir’s conception of love as a relation between
two independent subjects is perhaps most apparent in her discussion of why
love cannot flourish in the context of a traditional heterosexual marriage, where
the husband does not invite his wife to ‘transcend herself with him’ but instead
‘confines her to immanence’ and the hexis of housework, which only supports his
transcendence (SS/DS II: 481/256).
8 Laing is, however, much more willing to acknowledge the continuities between
his existential analytic approach and Freud’s than Sartre. He states that Freud was
a ‘hero’, who had the courage to descend into ‘Underworld’ of the troubled psyche
and survived to bring back the knowledge upon which modern psychoanalytic
practice is based, and he urges psychotherapists and psychologists to explore this
Underworld further ‘without using a theory that is in some measure an instrument
of defence’ (Laing 1969: 25).
9 Laing points out that he is also indebted to Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Heidegger,
Binswanger and Tillich for existential understanding of schizophrenia. However,
Sartre is cited more than any of these other philosophers in The Divided Self – on
eight separate occasions (1969: 39 n., 47, 52, 84–5, 94 n., 95, 120), including one in
which Sartre’s discussion of the difference between the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’ self
is quoted at length (1969: 84–5).
10 In clinical psychiatry, ‘psychosis’ is used as a catchall for a broad range of illnesses
whose origin may be either organic, such as general paralysis, or obscure, such as
schizophrenia. In the narrower field of psychoanalysis, though, ‘psychosis’ denotes
psychopathologies that are characterized by a disturbance in ‘the relation to reality’,
such as delusional disorders, schizophrenia, paranoia, melancholia and mania
(Laplanche and Pontalis 1973: 370).
11 As Laing’s thought progressed in the 1960s and 1970s, he placed increasingly more
emphasis on the role of society in ‘madness’. Hence, in his note to the Pelican
edition of The Divided Self in 1964, he notes that he was ‘still writing in this book
too much of Them, and too little of Us’ ([1965] (1969): 11).
12 Studies suggest that the person of the therapist contributes more to the variation
in psychotherapy outcome than the specific form of treatment delivered
(approximately 5 per cent) and, on average, most effective therapists were twice as
effective as least effective therapists (Baldwin and Imel 2013; Johns et al. 2019).
13 TA’s founder, Eric Berne (1910–70), characterizes the autonomous person as one
who possesses awareness, ‘the ability to see a coffee pot or hear the birds sing
in one’s own way, and not the way one was taught’ (1964: 158); spontaneity or
230 Notes

‘liberation from the compulsion to play games and have only the feelings one was
taught to have’ (1964: 160); and capacity for genuine intimacy, which is ‘much more
rewarding than games’ (1964: 162).
14 Although the DSM-5’s recognition that the rates of schizophrenia are higher in
urban environments and ‘for some minority ethnic groups’ (American Psychiatric
Association 2013: 103) demonstrates some acknowledgement of socio-cultural
predisposing factors.
15 Antipsychotic drugs remain the primary treatment for schizophrenia in the UK
and the United States. However, a significant proportion – up to 40 per cent – of
schizophrenics treated with antipsychotic drugs respond poorly and continue to
display moderate-to-severe psychotic symptoms (National Institute for Health and
Care Excellence 2014: 29).
16 With the notable exception of Laing and his colleagues, the continental
phenomenological psychiatric tradition has had little influence on the Anglophone
one until recently. For a discussion of this point, see Uhlhaas and Mishara (2007)
and Parnas and Sass (2011).
17 Parnas and Sass, for instance, acknowledge the view that the presence of the self
in experience is ‘precisely that of an absence (as Sartre often implies)’ before
going on to state they endorse an alternative view that there is a sense of self in all
experience (Parnas and Sass 2011: 527). The view of the self that Parnas and Sass
endorse is Zahavian in the sense that it posits the presence of a minimal subjective
self in all experience. Although Zahavi acknowledges his debt to Sartre for his
view, he is critical of Sartre on the grounds that he cannot account for the first-
person perspective (2000: 56–64). However, in Chapter 1, I have shown that Sartre’s
account of the body as consciousness has the first-person perspective built into it,
which makes Sartre’s position much closer to Zahavi’s than Zahavi recognizes and,
hence, also compatible with the phenomenological conceptions of schizophrenia
as a pathology of the self discussed in this chapter, so long as the pre-reflective
sense of selfness is clearly distinguished from the self which can only be present to
consciousness as an object.
18 In his study of existentialism, Webber suggests that theoretical texts can be telling
for the existential psychoanalyst too. While such texts may not be capable of
providing the same kind of insight into their author’s metaphysics as literary texts,
they nevertheless result ‘from the author’s pursuit of their chosen values, where this
pursuit is more or less tempered by social influences’ (Webber 2018: 207). Through
the production of a theoretical text, the author aims to make a contribution to
knowledge by redressing what they see as an absence. So, at the very least, it could
serve as an indication of what appeared to them as a ‘lack’ and an opportunity for
them to be the person who did something about it.
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 Index

analogon 158–61, 167, 169, 198–9, 180, and dialectical reason 67–8, 70, 134
181 discussion of Flaubert 131
anguish 2, 16–18, 20–1, 22, 26, 28–31, 33, influence of Hegel 69, 82
39, 88, 190 on the possibility of taking up a new
antipsychiatry 127 fundamental project in 141
Anti-Semite and Jew (Sartre) 165 and the problem of other minds 3, 41,
Arnold-Baker, Clair 47n 46, 66, 88, 158
argument from analogy 42–4 and Sartre’s theory of the self 2, 7,
Askay, Richard 65 22–3, 35
authenticity theorization of consciousness 26
anguish as a prerequisite for 16–17, 21, being-for-others (objective embodiment)
26, 28–9 23–5, 47, 49, 105
in self-formation 27, 33, 34, 127 Bergson, Henri 61n
Bering, Jesse M. 51n
bad faith 27–9 Berne, Eric 196, 196n
as distinct from the natural black saint(s) 122–3, 123n, 144–5
attitude 19 Boulé, Jean-Pierré 27n
of Flaubert and his first readers 124 Bourget, Paul 60–1
implicit in the assumption of a truly Breeur, Roland 61n
objective or ‘desituated’
perspective 130 Cannon, Betty 27n, 163, 182–3,
as an obstacle to self-knowledge 54 185–7, 203
and oppression 80, 85–6, 165 A Case of Hysteria (Freud) 76
and the puzzle of self-deception 56, Catalano, Joseph 27n, 41n
59–60 Chalmers, David 42n, 43n
in Sartre’s reading of Freud 57 Charmé, Stuart Z. 57
in self-formation 30–4, 84 Chevalier, Maurice (entertainer) 160
Barnes, Hazel E. 72n, 92–3, 95, 97, 99, 107, ‘The Childhood of a Leader’ (Sartre) 30,
136, 153n, 173 33, 203
Barnes, Julian 131n, 132 cogito 9–10, 36, 49
Barrès, Maurice 63n comprehension
Bart, Benjamin F. 95, 110n, 145, 173 in applications of existential
Bartky, Sandra Lee 80–1, 81n psychoanalysis 88, 187, 201
Baudelaire (Sartre) 33–4, 83–4, 87, 162 of Flaubert’s lived experience 91, 97,
Baudelaire, Charles 33, 60, 83–4, 137 102, 114–15, 121, 139, 144, 166,
Beauvoir, Simone (de) 2–4, 6, 32, 80, 82–5, 172–3, 175, 178
88, 153, 168–9 and knowledge of a self 4, 82, 64, 171
Being and Nothingness (Sartre) literature and 116, 131, 168, 170, 176,
bad faith in 19, 27–30, 33 179–80
critique of Freud 54–60 preontological 61
description of existential Sartre’s account of 60, 62–3, 67, 75, 78,
psychoanalysis 54, 78, 184 87, 162–3, 165
 Index 249

constitution The Family Idiot (Sartre) 1, 4–5

of the ego 18–22 achievements of 155–6, 171–3, 181–2
Flaubert’s 91–2, 95–6, 99–103, 107, aims of 90–1, 102, 178, 180
110, 146, 172 analysis of Flaubert’s literature 122,
of an image 177 137, 143, 146, 165, 169–70
of the self (see self) analysis of Flaubert’s nervous crisis
Coorebyter, Vincent (de) 15, 18–19 109, 115, 126–7
Critique of Dialectical Reason (Sartre) concept of Objective Spirit 116
discussion of Flaubert 132 on constitution 92–3, 101, 146
introduction of a new form of objectivity of 129, 131–2, 134–6,
rationality 67–8, 77, 134 147–51, 153–4
Sartre’s revisions to his existentialism as a re-totalization of Flaubert’s self 160
3–4, 81, 170–1 theorization of laughter in 143
terminology 72–3, 83, 86, 116 treatment of Flaubert’s childhood
‘stupors’ and difficulties with
Descartes, René 2, 7, 9, 36, 43 language 123, 164–5
Detmer, David 57n treatment of freedom 79–80
Deurzen, Emmy (van) 5, 47n treatment of the imaginary 157–8,
dialectic 173–6
as a dialogical method 68 Farquhar, Jensen 65
of The Family Idiot 4, 136, 147–8, femininity 28n, 82, 103–5, 152–4
178 feminism 153–4
historical 3, 68–72, 75–6, 134, 171 Ferris, Susan 161n
(Hegelian) Master-Slave 82 Flaubert, Achille 106, 112
between the subject and the world 70, Flaubert, Achille-Cléophas 92, 96, 99–100,
80, 177, 180, 198 202
dialectical objects 4, 74–5, 77–8, 89–90, Flaubert, Caroline (junior) 106–7
130, 176–8, 180, 187, 201 Flaubert, Caroline (senior) 92–5
dialectical reason 3, 67–74, 77–9, 134, 166, Flaubert, Gustave 4–5, 60, 90, 91–127,
191–2 129–56, 157, 160, 164–6, 169–76,
The Divided Self (Laing) 188–9, 192 178–80, 181, 202–3. See also The
Dolezal, Luna 51n Family Idiot
Dostoyevsky, Fydor 131 Flaubert’s Parrot (Barnes) 132
Flynn, Thomas R. 11n, 155, 178
eidetic reduction 23, 65 Franconay, Claire (performance artist)
ego 160–1
Freudian 55–9 Freud, Sigmund 2, 55–60, 62–6, 76–8, 82,
Husserlian (transcendental) 9–12, 133, 162–3, 166–7, 182–3
15 fundamental project 61–2, 64, 86n, 110,
Sartrean 2, 8, 12–25, 62n, 186 125, 141, 152, 186–7
The Ego and the Id (Freud) 55, 58
engaged writing 148, 167 Garçon, character of 108–9, 114, 143,
epochē 8–9, 8n, 19–20 145
Eshleman, Matthew 62n Genet, Jean 4, 84–9, 164–5, 179, 181, 183,
e-therapy 197–9 189, 202, 204. See also Saint Genet:
The Ethics of Ambiguity (Beauvoir) 83 Actor and Martyr
existential psychotherapy 5, 52–4, 187–92, Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (von) 111
194–7. See also psychotherapy Goldthorpe, Rhiannon 149
Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer 179
faith (religious) 100–1, 105, 121, 145–6 Gross, David 147–8
250 Index

Handest, Peter 200–1 Lacan, Jacques 163–4, 166, 183

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 2, 47, Laing, Ronald D.81n, 185, 188–92, 200
69–72, 74, 82 The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator
Heidegger, Martin 11n, 47, 47n, 50, 61, (Flaubert) 113, 122, 149
188n Lennon, Kathleen 41n, 179
Heimann, Paula 184n Levin, Harry 131
hexis 81, 83, 86, 88–9, 186, 186n, 202 Lipps, Theordor 51
hodological space 81 Little, Margaret 184n
human-reality 61–2, 75, 79 the Look 23–4, 29, 47–9, 85, 105, 158, 184,
Hume, David 42 202–3
Husserl, Edmund 2, 8–12, 15, 17, 19, 47,
133 Madame Bovary (Flaubert) 4, 95, 102, 104,
hysterical illness 110, 126 108, 115, 123–5, 129, 132, 135–42,
144, 147, 149–52, 154–5, 170, 172
id 56 magical behaviour 111, 126, 173
idealism 47, 69n, 70–2, 116, 172 Malcolm, Norman 44–5
imaginary 105–7, 142, 147, 157–8, 160, Mallarmé, Stéphane 109–10
167–8 Marx, Karl 2, 71–2, 75, 79, 82
experience and knowledge 176–80 masculinity 153–4
objects 4, 18, 23, 74, 159, 160–1, 169, materialism 71–2, 75, 82, 95, 99, 108, 116,
174–7, 201 (see also dialectical 121, 172
objects) May, Rollo 5
self (see self) Mehrabian, Albert 161n
‘solutions’ 108–9, 118, 120, 124–5, The Metamorphosis (Kafka) 32
141–2, 191 Mill, John Stuart 42
worlds 137, 141, 167–70 Minuchin, Salvadore 185n
The Imaginary: A Phenomenological misanthropy 118–19, 124, 147–9, 154, 203
Psychology of the Imagination misogyny 118–20, 150–1, 153–4, 203
(Sartre) 5, 157–8, 160, 174–6, Moran, Richard 36–40
176n Morris, Katherine 52n
imagination 1, 4, 140, 142, 147, 154,
157–8, 167, 176, 178–80, 181, 199 natural attitude 8, 19–21, 28
pathology of 5, 174–5, 191–2, 200–1 neobehaviourism 44–6, 49, 52
Sartre’s treatment of Flaubert’s neurosis 4, 76, 81, 101, 106, 110–13,
relationship with 4–5, 95, 104–9, 115–18, 125, 164, 173, 183–4, 189
114, 120, 123–7, 137, 147, 154, 157, nonassimilable 102, 117, 125, 165
171, 173–6 non-positional consciousness of
internal negation 26, 48 consciousness 12–17, 25–6
November (Flaubert) 111, 140, 152, 172, 175
Jaspers, Karl 188, 188n
‘Justice and the State’ (Sartre) 132 objective spirit 116–17
juvenilia (Flaubert’s) 97, 136, 170 objectivity 49, 133–4, 187–8
oppression 87–8, 151, 153
Kafka, Franz 32 psychological 4, 80–4, 87, 127, 165,
Kahane, David J. 183n 172, 176, 199, 201–3
Kenevan, Phyllis Berdt 15–17, 17n original choice 61–7, 70, 81, 84, 86–7, 102,
Kierkegaard, Søren 71–2, 72n, 188n 107, 126, 141, 147, 154, 166, 171,
Kirkpatrick, Kate 186n 183, 186
Kojève, Alexandre 69, 69n Orr, Mary 141n, 153n
 Index 251

Parnas, Josef 200–1 Sartre’s re-totalization of Flaubert’s

perverse sexuality 103–5 self 98, 100–9, 113–15, 119, 121–7,
Peterman, James 53, 54n 129–30, 134–6, 147, 149, 151, 155,
phenomenological reduction 8–9, 11 172–6, 181, 202–3
eidetic 23, 65 Sartre’s revised account of the self (as
Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand 1, 5n, 62n, 184n a dialectical object) 22–6, 75, 130,
postromantics 117–19, 123–5, 135, 150 178, 187, 198–9
practico-inert 72–3, 116 self-consciousness or positional
praxis 72–3, 77, 89, 184 consciousness of the self(-as-object)
psychoanalytic metatheory 5, 59–60, 65, 10, 14, 16, 34, 48–50
182–3 self-deception 27, 29, 37, 55–7, 59–60,
psychosis 188, 188n 121
psychotherapy 5, 52–4, 89–90, 157, self-destruction/-sabotage/-harm 80,
181–99 123, 175–6, 202
self-formation, process of 19, 21,
Ratcliffe, Matthew 21n, 179n 26–30, 30–5, 67, 78–80, 84, 86,
reciprocity 87–8, 116, 184–5, 187, 194, 199 91–2, 102, 107, 109, 121, 126, 162,
Richmond, Sarah 9, 15n 165, 192, 196, 199, 202
romanticism 108 self-in-progress 15–17, 21–2
Roudiez, Leon S. 131n self-knowledge 16, 21–3, 27, 31, 35–41,
Russell, Bertrand 42n 63–4, 71, 102, 114–15, 158, 161,
Russell, Gillian Issacs 197–8 164, 183–4, 187, 190
self-loathing/-hatred 96, 120, 124–5
Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr (Sartre) 4, selfness 11–12, 23, 35
84, 87–9, 164–5, 183, 189 sense of self and psychological illness
Salammbô (Flaubert) 121 20, 197–201
Santoni, Ronald 57n A Sentimental Education (Flaubert) 122,
Scheler, Max 51 131, 148
schizophrenia 174, 185, 188–90, 200–1 seriousness 30–3, 32n, 143, 145
Schneider, Kirk J. 194 shame 2, 23, 27, 29, 47–51, 66, 85, 119–20
The Second Sex (Beauvoir) 82–3 situation(s), impact on the subject 1,
self 1–5, 141–2 4, 23–5, 28, 37, 40, 51, 54, 67,
alienation from 50, 100, 105–6, 146, 78–9, 81–4, 111, 116, 141, 167,
164, 180–2, 201 175, 178–9, 186–7, 189, 197, 200,
of another person (or the other-as- 202–3
object) 2, 35–6, 54, 73–4, 87–90, Emma Bovary’s 142, 144–5, 151
129–30, 157–62, 171, 180–1 Flaubert’s 92, 95, 99, 101–2, 113, 115,
constitution of 3, 25, 70, 102, 161 119, 125, 127, 149, 172, 175
and freedom to choose 34, 62, 67, Genet’s 85–7, 189
79–83, 85–7, 107, 165, 174–5, 186, oppressive 81, 83, 86, 88, 164–5
204 women’s 82, 152
ideal (Moi/Self) 61–2, 62n, 64–7, Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions
86–7 (Sartre) 111n
imaginary 18, 158–62, 164, 201, Solomon, Robert 30n
179–80 Starkie, Enid 110n, 130, 138, 173
reality of 15, 18, 24–6, 31–2, 34, 62–4, Stein, Edith 51
160–1, 164, 190, 194 Stekel, Wilhelm 30n
Sartre’s departure from standard model Stroud, Barry 46
of the self 7–11 super-ego 57–9
252 Index

The Temptation of Saint Antony (Flaubert) Sartre’s rejection of 55–7, 59–60, 65,
120, 122, 135, 137 166, 182–3, 188
The Transcendence of the Ego (Sartre) 2,
8, 14–15, 17–19, 21, 23, 25, Wampold, Bruce E. 194
28, 35 Webber, Jonathan 28, 57–8, 67n, 202,
totalization(s) 70, 74–5, 78–9, 88–90, 127, 203n
134, 161, 171–2, 178 Widdowson, Mark 196
re-totalization 102, 116, 129, 158, 160, Williford, Kenneth 13–14
162, 171, 180–1 Winnicott, Donald 95, 184n
Transactional Analysis 196 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 44, 52–3, 54n
Words (Sartre) 5n, 131–2
unconscious 19, 61, 84, 104, 133, 173,
195 Yalom, Irvin D. 5
Freudian 30–1, 55–60, 77, 166–7
Lacanian 163 Zahavi, Dan 11n, 13, 201n