ON THE EVE OF WORLD WAR TWO, JEAN-PAUL SARTRE HAD already published Nausea, one of the major novels of the twentieth century. In it he narrates the subjective epic of an individual, one Antoine Roquentin, whose profound melancholy is linked to the melancholy of a world in disintegration.
Having resided in Berlin and witnessed the triumph of Nazism, Sartre apparently wanted to express metaphysical truths he had derived from his reading of the great phenomenological texts of the period, from Husserl to Heidegger, in the form of an excursion into self-analysis by a narrator who is adrift. In the course of his confrontation with the notion that “death must justify the living,” Roquentin comes to see that the nausea gripping him is nothing other than existence itself, an existence without anteriority or essence. He then forgets his past, bit by bit, and sinks into a present stripped of meaning and composed of “ferocious respectable folk,” the effect of whose ritualized gestures is to push him to the brink of complete collapse, all the more absurd in that it bears no relation to any causality.1
In 1937, when this novel was already written but not yet published, Sartre feared he would never attain glory. He wrote later: “At thirty-two years of age I felt as old as the world. How remote was the life of a great man I had promised myself. On top of that, I was not very satisfied with what I was writing, and yet would have been delighted to be in print. Today I can gauge the depth of my disappointment when I recall that at age twenty-two I had written this sentence of Töppfer, which caused my heart to beat faster, in my notebook: ‘He who is not famous at twenty-eight years of age must renounce glory for ever.’”2 Yet by the time the war broke out Sartre had become a writer, not a famous one, but at any rate the bearer of a great literary career to come. At one time he had thought that the notion of progress was nonsense. Unlike Canguilhem he had evolved toward a sort of integral pacifism that blinded him to the political importance of Munich: “I was caught between defenders and opponents of the pact of Munich, and here I must confess that I never had the intellectual courage to be one or the other. The pro-Munich crowd disgusted me because they were all bourgeois and cowardly, fearful for their own skins, their capital, or their capitalism. But the anti-Munich crowd seemed scary to me because they wanted a war.”3
Like Roquentin, Sartre was unreceptive to any form of real commitment in those years, so no heroic philosophy could have attracted him, given that the only acceptable attitude lay in not being with one side or the other, neither with the cowards nor with the combatants. Likewise he fatalistically accepted being called up for military service and held in a prison camp. It was only after the experience of prison life that he began to realize the necessity for commitment. Yet he never made the decisive act so well described by Canguilhem in writing about Cavaillès, the moment of choice in which an intellectual shows himself capable of dying for freedom, even at the cost of his own future oeuvre.
Sartre certainly realized, from the time he returned to Paris, that neutrality was no longer possible. That is why, during the summer of 1941, he, Simone de Beauvoir, and a few others constituted the group Socialism and Liberty with the aim of resisting Vichy, but its existence was fleeting. The fact is that throughout the entire occupation Sartre just went on writing and publishing, though he did maintain contact with writers of the Resistance, notably those grouped around Lettres Françaises, who were working in secret.
It was precisely the dialectic between liberty and servitude, as he lived it throughout the period of the war, that converted Sartre to a philosophy of commitment. Simone de Beauvoir’s discovery of the female identity took place against the same background: “That it made a difference whether one was Jew or Aryan was something I already knew; but I had never noticed that there was a female condition. Suddenly I encountered a large number of women who were over forty, and who, despite the hazards of luck and merit, had all gone through the same experience: they had lived as relative beings.”4
Similarly, it was through becoming aware of his situation as a captive subject—or relative being—that Sartre evolved, during the occupation and through a range of writings, including Being and Nothingness, from a pacifism that he was beginning to challenge toward a true commitment, which took concrete form only after the war. His conversion to a philosophy of freedom occurred with the publication of a celebrated article, “The Republic of Silence,” which includes these paradoxical words:
Never were we more free than under the German occupation. We had lost our rights, starting with the right to speak: they insulted us to our faces every day and we had to keep silent; they deported us en masse, as workers, as Jews, as political prisoners; everywhere, on walls, in newspapers, on the screen, we kept seeing the dirty and dull visage our oppressors wanted to give us of ourselves: because of all that we were free…. Thus the very question of freedom was posed, and we were on the brink of the most profound knowledge man can have of himself. For the secret of man is not his Oedipus complex, or inferiority complex, it is the very limit of his liberty, it is his power of resistance to torture and death.5
In paying homage to all those who had been genuine resisters (unlike himself), Sartre attacks a certain psychologization of man caused by the overused notion of the Oedipus complex; Canguilhem was to do the same thing in his own way. The act of resistance, Sartre says in substance, always relates to a radical stripping bare of the human condition, and it is on that basis—from out of exile, cruelty, torture, the unbearable—that every subject can gauge himself against a universal of liberty that requires no psychological “explanation.” In other words, the choice of a heroic death does not depend on any conscious decision but rather on a confrontation with the horror of a possible annihilation of the self.
One understands how this testament to the glory of those who had died caused Sartre to be seen as a pioneering figure of the anti-Nazi Resistance by the generations who made their mark in the second half of the twentieth century, though Sartre himself had been unable or unwilling to die for freedom. No imposture was at work! Sometimes words are so close to deeds that they catalyze the collective desire. From that perspective, the Sartrean “we” of 9 September 1944 overlaps with the famous words with which Charles de Gaulle put an end to the national humiliation on 25 August 1944: “Paris! Paris offended! Paris broken! Paris martyrized! But Paris liberated, liberated by itself, liberated by its people with the aid of the armies of France, with the support and aid of the whole of France, of the France that is fighting, of the only France.”6
Sartre and de Gaulle, whose destinies were interwoven throughout the second half of the century, incarnate the values inhering in the spirit of resistance, each in his own way. The combat that Sartre had not waged between 1940 and 1944 he did wage during the Algerian war, when he took the side of those who were struggling against colonialism. After de Gaulle had ended that war, Sartre took sides against him during the student revolt of May 1968 and contributed to his political defeat.
However, if Sartre was able to convert to the cause of freedom, that is because, during the darkest hours of the occupation, he had faced up to writing the 729 pages of Being and Nothingness.7 When this work appeared, daily life in defeated France was devoted to waiting and was sunk in ennui. It was divided between the hustle of the black market and the humiliation of living in the aftermath of total disaster. Only the handful of men whom Sartre would celebrate in September 1944 had retained the taste for freedom. But for the moment this combat had no other horizon than the certitude of approaching death. At Caluire the enemy had struck at the soul of the Resistance. Handed over to the Gestapo, tortured and killed, Jean Moulin had not had time to fulfill his mission to unify the leaders of the clandestine struggle. Yet on the fields of battle, victory was in the offing. In the south, the allies were approaching the coast of Sicily, and in the north the Red Army was preparing its grand offensive.
In this context, the great philosophical edifice erected by Sartre and inspired by German phenomenology revealed how much the world at war was thirsting for liberty. And if liberty remained, in Sartrean terms, the stake in the battle between the opposing forces of alienation and existential intentionality, that was because it escaped pure mastery, because no subject was capable of choosing it in full responsibility. Liberty might be the finest flower of consciousness; that did not prevent consciousness from being riddled with mental processes authorizing the subject to shelter behind the deceptive screen of constant “bad faith.”
Sartre here expressed for the first time his philosophical position with regard to the Freudian unconscious, and he revealed what his reference texts were. It was evident that he had read the principal works of Freud translated into French between 1920 and 1940.8 Hence he possessed a wide acquaintance with the domains of dreaming, sexuality, transference, the impulses, repression, Freudian slips, and the Oedipus complex.
It is well known that Freud’s concept of the unconscious relied on two successive theories of psychical organization. The first, constructed at the beginning of the century, comprises three systems: the unconscious, the site of censure and repression; the preconscious; and the conscious. The last two systems form an organization called the general system of consciousness, which gives an incomplete view of human processes. The second theory, advanced in 1920, overlays the first, which it corrects by accentuating the primacy of the unconscious. It comprises the id, the center of the impulses; the ego, the site of representations; and the superego, which plays the role of judge with regard to the ego.
It is the ensemble formed by these two topographies that Sartre comments upon in part 1, chapter 2 of Being and Nothingness, without seeking to understand how Freud’s conception had undergone modification over an interval of twenty years. Sartre did not concern himself with questions of this kind because, in his eyes, the Freudian unconscious was a useless concept, too mechanistic and too biological in any case for thinking the secret intentionality that governs all human existence. So it was better to replace it with the notion of “bad faith,” which, integrated into the notion of consciousness, allowed him to define a sort of pathology of ambivalence, in which the subject is condemned to unite, in a single act, an idea and the negation of that idea, a transcendence and a facticity. In the same perspective, Sartre refused so-called empirical psychoanalysis—that of Freud himself—and preferred what he called “existential” psychoanalysis. He accused empirical psychoanalysis of denying dialectic and of failing to recognize the essence of freedom because of its emphasis on the initial affectivity of the individual (who thus becomes “virgin wax prior to history”). He saw existential psychoanalysis as having the capacity to abolish the unconscious and affirm that nothing exists prior to the original welling up of freedom.
Note that Sartre did not appeal to the usual figures of French anti-Freudianism in opposing the Freudian project. He did not liken the theory of sexuality to a pansexualism of German origin; he did not think the unconscious under the category of a subconscious in the manner of Pierre Janet; and finally he did not claim that psychoanalysis was incompatible with a Cartesianism putatively rational and “French” as opposed to being obscurantist and “German.” Actually he did not in the strict sense reject the Freudian unconscious, but he did subject it to a sort of doctrinal torsion for the purpose of showing that the mental processes that escape the consciousness of the subject do belong to the domain of the conscious—provided that it was conceived in phenomenological terms.9 Since Sartre made consciousness an intentionality, and man a project whose existence precedes its essence, it was possible for him to replace the topographic system, in which the unconscious predominates, with a transcendental system in which the phenomenon of the unconscious became in effect a latent consciousness. Hence the Freudian concept of the unconscious lost its usefulness, although the figures of repression and misrecognition were preserved in the register of consciousness.
Eugène Minkowski had tried before Sartre, but without success from the point of view of psychiatric knowledge, to forge a link between Freudian discourse and phenomenology. Lacan had subsequently been tempted by the same perspective. But from 1936 on, despite making considerable use of the phenomenological vocabulary, Lacan had chosen a different course, on account of the privileged place he accorded to the Freudian unconscious. This is why Sartre in 1943 was the first French theorist to propose a truly phenomenological reading of the Freudian unconscious. It is no surprise that he integrated it into a philosophy of human liberty, for as Michel Foucault showed, from 1929 on, two interpretations of Husserlian phenomenology were possible. One looked toward a philosophy of the subject (Sartre and Merleau-Ponty), while the other aimed at renewing a philosophy of concepts, of knowledge, and the history of science (Koyré, Canguilhem, and Cavaillès).10 Lacan’s position between these two filiations would remain paradoxical: in his nonphenomenological reformulation of the unconscious he showed that he was choosing the second, but his constant interrogation of the status of the subject shows that he did not break cleanly with the first (through it, in fact, his discourse intersected with Sartre ’s).
Right after World War Two the discovery of Marxism transformed Sartre ’s views on psychoanalysis, though without modifying his position on the uselessness of the Freudian unconscious. The philosopher then sought in the Viennese doctrine a method of understanding the individual in all his facets. He thus became a Freudo-Marxist, in the sense that he attempted to connect the two doctrines of emancipation—to change the subject, to change society—in order to interpret the historico-subjective meaning of human destinies. It was in a screenplay entitled L’engrenage that he explained his new project for the first time: “to figure out how the private and the public combine in the case of a statesman…. By combining Marxist and psychoanalytic analyses, it ought to be possible to show how a certain society and a certain childhood form someone who will be capable of taking and exercising power in the name of his group.”11
When Sartre was writing this screenplay, the international psychoanalytic movement was bearing the full brunt of the partition of Yalta. In the United States, thanks to the great waves of immigration, Freud’s teaching was expanding rapidly, but at the cost of blending into hygienist ideals foreign to its origins. In the Soviet Union, on the other hand, it was the target of a violent attack, even though its last practitioners there had vanished in 1930, and no new psychoanalytic movement had come into being.12 Soviet anti-Freudianism in the 1950s was a form of anti-Americanism. It was focused less on critiquing Freud’s theories as such, as in the 1930s, than on combating what was customarily called “American psychoanalysis,” meaning the kind of adaptive neo-Freudianism characteristic of psychoanalysis in the American setting, which the communists branded “a reactionary ideology in the service of American imperialism.”13
The anti-Freudian campaign conducted by the communists was rendered more virulent still by the attitude of the international psychiatric-psychoanalytic movement, which was attempting, through the World Health Organization, to promote the idea that the great dictatorships reflected the personal madness of their protagonists. In this psychologized interpretation of political phenomena, the origins of Nazism and Stalinism lay in Hitler’s hysteria and Stalin’s paranoia. At the Third International Congress on Mental Hygiene in London in 1948, some practitioners even went so far as to propose that statesmen be given treatment in order to reduce their aggressive instincts and preserve world peace.
Evidently the rapprochement effected by Sartre between Marxism and psychoanalysis was not unconnected to this polemic. But rather than playing the bipolar game of combating psychoanalysis in the name of the communist ideal and communism in the name of the “sound health” of heads of state, the philosopher preferred to bring the critical function of the Freudo-Marxism of the 1930s up to date by making it face the questions posed by the contemporary world.
Nine years later in Questions of Method he gave philosophic content to his Freudo-Marxism.14 Existentialism was then conceived by Sartre as a philosophy interpreting human actions and human creativity. Consequently the solution to human destiny had to follow from a systematic exploration of infancy. Yet while asserting the need for a return to the origins, Sartre stigmatized psychobiography:
Today only psychoanalysis allows us to study in depth the process by which a child, feeling its way in the dark, tries to play, though it doesn’t understand, the social role that adults impose on it…. Psychoanalysis alone permits us to rediscover the whole man inside the adult, meaning not just his present determining factors, but also the weight of his history. And it would be quite mistaken to imagine that this discipline is opposed to dialectical materialism. Of course some amateurs in the West have constructed “analytic” theories about society and history which spill over in effect into idealism. How many times have we been served up the psychoanalysis of Robespierre? …In fact, dialectical materialism can no longer do without the privileged mediation that allows it to move from general and abstract determining factors to certain traits of the particular individual. Psychoanalysis has no principles, it has no theoretical basis: at most it is accompanied—in Jung and in some of Freud’s works—by a perfectly inoffensive mythology.15
Thus Sartre’s second reading of Freud followed on the one introduced in Being and Nothingness. But the philosopher was now employing Marxism as the critical weapon for his rejection of the empirical and “unprincipled” character of psychoanalysis.
But through this seemingly rigorous Freudo-Marxist approach, Sartre’s aim was always to define a subjectivity capable of uncovering its own thought and identity in those of another. Hence the Sartrean method, existential or Freudo-Marxist, was no longer adequate to the object it claimed to interpret. In reality it functioned at one moment as a doctrinal superego, through which Sartre sought authorization from psychoanalysis to deny Freudianism the essence of its own discovery, and at another as a Bildung that might allow him to tame the real object of his interpretation.
In this respect, the conflictual relation that Sartre always maintained vis-à-vis psychoanalysis and the figure of Freud is of the same order as the relation that he ended by establishing with Flaubert. You could even say that it was in order to know the writer who had dared to say “Madame Bovary c’est moi” that Sartre, from the time of Being and Nothingness, had dreamed of inventing a psychoanalysis capable of explaining the situation, both free and signifying, of the exceptional man.
Hence this existential psychoanalysis would be centered not on Freudian slips, neuroses, and dreams, but on accomplishments of style and thought. In sum, Sartre went so far as to imagine a possible psychoanalysis of the consciousness of self, with himself as its founding father: “This psychoanalysis has not yet found its Freud: at most we can detect the presentiment of it in certain particularly successful biographies. It is my hope to be able to supply two examples elsewhere, in connection with Flaubert and Dostoyevsky. But here it matters little for me whether or not it exists; the important thing for me is that it be possible.”16
The Freud/Flaubert symmetry functions perfectly here. Sartre basically announces that he will not succeed in writing his great work on Flaubert until he has become the Freud of a psychoanalysis that has jettisoned the unconscious. To put it another way, the composition of his work on Flaubert remains dependent, as far as he is concerned, on the invention of a method that will allow it to be composed. And the latter, so Sartre believed, he would be able to perfect following the war, by bringing Freudo-Marxism up to date. But the idea soon occurred to him of trying it out on himself, and he decided to write his autobiography: “I would like to avoid the novelistic approach, and even omit circumstantial details where they lack importance. These will be memoirs in which I shall define myself in relation to the historical situation, employing a version of psychoanalysis and the Marxist method as systems of investigation. It matters greatly to me to explain the reason for which I write…. I would like in this work to explain almost everything about myself, why it happens that I still wish to write according to a certain form of aesthetic, but have come to participate in social events: how I burst forth.”17
This research occupied Sartre for ten years. But between April and September 1957 he simultaneously began the writing of his great work on Flaubert and gave a Freudo-Marxist content to his existential philosophy. The appearance of Questions of Method,18 which served as a preface to his Critique of Dialectical Reason, coincided in effect with that of the earliest articles that were to become The Idiot of the Family.19 At this date Sartre seemed to have achieved the aspiration proclaimed in Being and Nothingness: to become the Freud of a psychoanalysis without the unconscious, fit at last to grasp man in his totality. To put it another way, he declares allegiance to a Freudianism of “bad faith” in order to initiate himself into a new interpretive method. But this double relation to a doctrinal superego and a Bildung allowed him neither to complete his autobiography nor to devote himself wholeheartedly to completing his study of Flaubert. It would seem that the intellectual toolkit he had assembled following Being and Nothingness did nothing but sterilize Sartre’s writing, and that it had to be made to implode so that the recital of himself and the biography of Flaubert could both “burst forth.”
It was the film director John Huston who in 1958 gave Sartre the chance to break out of his own system. When Huston commissioned Sartre to write a screenplay on the life and work of Sigmund Freud, elements of psychoanalysis had already found their way into the movies. But Hollywood’s psychoanalysis was not that of the psychoanalytic community in the United States, even though, as emigrants from old Europe, many American film directors had a shared background with the psychoanalysts who were members of the International Psychoanalytical Association.20
Exile had not, however, had the same effect on the two groups. Whereas the therapists had chosen to integrate into the American health system (which obliged them to pursue medical careers and become servants of a hygienist ideal21), the filmmakers had adopted Freud’s doctrine and transformed it into a powerful tool for criticizing the ideals of the American way of life. So it came about that Freudianism was made to serve the interests of an ideal of society on one hand and was used to criticize its adaptive aberrations or to reconnect with the high tradition of European psychoanalysis on the other. Examples of the latter would include Elia Kazan, who drew a daunting portrait of the puritan America of the 1930s in Splendor in the Grass, and Charlie Chaplin, who in Limelight re-created the London of his childhood in telling the story of an amorous dancer who is cured of her paralysis by a clown with a middle European appearance.22
Though he was American born, John Huston shared this dissenting and nostalgic ideal. His purpose in making a biography of Freud was to highlight the original moment of discovery. This is why, wishing to criticize the official psychoanalysis of American psychiatrists, he turned to Sartre, a man of the left and a philosopher of freedom not known for indulging in Freudian hagiography. Transformed into a Sartrean hero, Huston’s onscreen Freud thus had the potential to be a true adventurer of modern science, combined with a tragic hero of sorts straight from the pages of No Exit.23
At the end of 1958 Sartre sent Huston a ninety-five-page synopsis, which led to a firm contract. A few months later he completed a new version, but alas, it was too long to be filmed. Then in October 1959 Sartre traveled with Arlette El Kaïm to Huston’s home in Ireland, so they could work together on a final shooting script. The encounter turned into a bout of intellectual pugilistics. Incapable of either mutual understanding or mutual respect, the two men, so alike and yet so different, kept trying to dominate each other, until the final misunderstanding was hatched: a superb but unfilmable screenplay, and a fascinating failure of a film.24
Huston saw Sartre as a man completely unable to listen to anyone else, for whom the body did not exist:
He made notes—of his own words—as he talked. There was no such thing as a conversation with him; he talked incessantly, and there was no interrupting him. You’d wait for him to catch his breath, but he wouldn’t. The words came out in an absolute torrent…. Sartre was a little barrel of a man, and as ugly as a human being can be. His face was both bloated and pitted, his teeth were yellowed and he was wall-eyed. He wore a gray suit, black shoes, white shirt, tie and vest. His appearance never changed. He’d come down in the morning in this suit, and he would still be wearing it the last thing at night. The suit always appeared to be clean, and his shirt was clean, but I never knew if he owned one gray suit or several identical gray suits…. One morning he came down and his cheek was swollen. He had a bad tooth. I said, “We’d best get you to Dublin with that.” “No, no. Let’s just go in to Galway.” I didn’t know any dentist in Galway, but that didn’t matter to him. So we made an appointment with a local dentist and took him in. He was out in a few minutes, having had the tooth pulled. A tooth more or less made no difference in Sartre’s cosmos. The physical world he left to others; his was of the mind.25
As for Sartre, the gaze he cast on Huston’s world in his letters to Simone de Beauvoir was the ferocious one of a body snatcher:
Through a number of similar rooms wanders a tall romantic, sad and isolated: our friend Huston, perfectly vacant, literally incapable of speaking to those whom he has invited…. What a lot of babble there is here! Everyone has his own complex, ranging from masochism to animal fierceness. Don’t imagine, though, that we are in hell. It’s more like an enormous cemetery, full of corpses with their frozen complexes…. The inner landscape of my boss, the great Huston, is a lot like that: heaps of ruins, abandoned houses, plots of wasteland, swamps, a thousand traces of human presence. But the man himself has emigrated, I have no idea where. He isn’t even gloomy: he is empty, except in his moments of infantile vanity when he dons a red tuxedo, or goes horseback riding (not very well), or reviews his paintings and directs his workers. It is impossible to hold his attention for five minutes: he has lost the capacity for work, and he avoids reasoning.26
Nevertheless, Sartre and Huston were thinking along the same lines about what to feature in the life of Freud. Both wished to illustrate the groundbreaking moment when a scientist takes the step that will make him the founder of a new science. In Freud’s case this was the moment when he gave hysteria the status of a true neurosis by reintroducing into its etiology the question of sexuality, which Charcot had blanked out and detached from simulation, in order to make hysteria a functional illness. The foregrounding of sexual etiology guided Freud toward the discovery of an unconscious independent of consciousness and nonpsychological in nature, down a path opened up by the interpretation of dreams and the elaboration of the notions of fantasy and transference. This feat was not accomplished at one stroke, and Freud’s advance toward the truth was continuously disturbed by the shadows of error. As Sartre said: “To arrive at correct ideas, you have to begin by explaining false ideas, and that is a long process…. Which we tried to do—and that’s what interested Huston above all, not when Freud’s theories had already made him famous but the time when, at around age thirty, he had got things completely wrong and his ideas had led him to a desperate impasse.”27
To flesh out his protagonist, Sartre put to work all the knowledge of psychoanalytic culture that he had acquired since writing Being and Nothingness. But he also added three new sources previously unknown to him: the letters of Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, published in French in 1956 under the title La naissance de la psychanalyse, the Studies on Hysteria that appeared in the same year (comprising Josef Breuer’s account of the case of Anna O.), and finally the first volume in English of the monumental Freud biography by Ernest Jones, from which Michèle Vian had read him a number of chapters while she was working on the French translation.28 Through these works he became acquainted with Freud’s complex relationships with three of the major figures in his intellectual formation: Theodor Meynert, Breuer, and Fliess. He also discovered two versions of the story of Anna O., Breuer’s and especially Jones’s, which assigned this female hysteric a role that became legendary in the history of the psychoanalytic movement.29 Additionally there was the episode of Freud’s meeting with Martin Charcot at la Salpêtrière.
Sartre condensed into a unified drama events that had actually unfolded between 1885 and 1908, which I briefly summarize. Basing himself on Charcot’s theses, Freud had tried to demonstrate the existence of masculine hysteria to his Viennese colleagues. The point at issue was fundamental, because if it were once established that hysteria were a psychical illness unrelated to the uterus and thus to the genital organs, it would apply as much to men as it did to women, even though the symptoms might be expressed most severely in women. In order to detach hysteria from its genital substratum, Charcot moved away from a sexual etiology. In Vienna, Freud clashed especially with the redoubtable Meynert, his instructor in psychiatry, who in denying the existence of masculine hysteria was actually rejecting the modern conception of hysteria advanced by Charcot.30
In this great epic of genesis, in which Freud advanced toward a new conception of the unconscious, such conflicts amounted to more than mere abstract jousts. The opponents were men of flesh and blood, themselves suffering from the very symptoms whose existence they were debating. Meynert, an eccentric character, a liar, an alcoholic, and a neurotic, understood perfectly well what was at stake, even though he did not grasp its importance for the history of science. A good clinician, he knew that his own case was one of hysteria, and that therefore hysteria might very well occur in males. The struggle he waged against Freud over a matter of science was none the less neurotic or subjective for that. Before dying he confessed the nature of his “illness” to Freud and revealed his art of dissimulation to him.31
That Charcot had been forced to set aside the genital substratum in order to give a new definition of hysteria did not prevent the scientists of the late nineteenth century from accepting the importance of the sexual factor in the genesis of the neuroses. But none of them was able to theorize this hypothesis, which went back to antiquity. Freud alone proved capable of breaking through this barrier by shifting the whole problematic away from the terrain of genitality. In the initial phase, it was the interest he took in the case of a young woman of the Vienna bourgeoisie, Bertha Pappenheim, whom Breuer was treating using the “cathartic” method, that enabled Freud to locate the sexual origin of neurosis. He subsequently extended this diagnosis to other cases of female hysteria, while Breuer remained aloof. In the second phase, an even more audacious gesture was required, since Freud had to turn away from the spectacle of what could be observed, and imagine a reality all the more true in that it lay concealed behind the appearances of a deceptive evidentness.
Freud accomplished this gesture while in contact with the Berlin physician Wilhelm Fliess, between 1892 and 1902. Throughout their relationship, which he would later refer to as his self-analysis, he was continuously in error. And not content to propose and then refute erroneous hypotheses, he and Fliess traded patients who served as guinea pigs in Freud’s chaotic advance toward the truth.32
Reversing the position of Charcot, he accepted the evidence of sexual causality in the origin of the neuroses. Certain subjects, he said, undergo real traumas in childhood or during the course of their lives. In the street or in the family setting, children are often seduced, raped, or sexually exploited by adults and relatives. The memory of these traumas is so painful that they prefer to forget or repress them. Hearing such stories recounted by Viennese women, Freud came to accept the validity of what they were saying, and constructed his first hypothesis concerning repression upon the so-called seduction theory. He thought that, because they really had been seduced, hysterical women were afflicted with neurotic disturbances. He then proceeded to accuse fathers all over the world, including his own, of being perverts.
Fliess did not push him in this direction, but tried to make Freud accept a conception of science in which error and experiment would have no place, with totalitarian certitude overriding genuine speculation. An adept of a theory of sexuality both mystical and organicist, Fliess related nasal mucous to genital activity,33 thought that life was conditioned by periodic phenomena related to the bisexual nature of the human construct, and had already noted the polymorphous character of infantile sexuality. Falling entirely under the spell of Fliess’s paranoiac seduction, Freud abandoned his own false seduction theory and evolved toward a conception of science capable of accounting for the reality confronting him.34
By dint of listening to hysterical patients, Freud came up against an impossibility: not all fathers are rapists, and yet hysterics are not lying when they say they are victims of sexual seduction on their part. He was therefore compelled to advance a hypothesis that could account for two contradictory verities. Freud accomplished this by retreating from hard evidence. He perceived two things: on one hand women invent, without lying or feigning, seduction scenes that never took place, and on the other, even if these seductions have taken place, they do not explain the outbreak of a neurosis. To explain these two facts and make them consistent, Freud replaced the seduction theory with the theory of sexual fantasy, opening the road to a doctrine of psychical reality grounded in the unconscious.
It is well known that all Freud’s contemporaries had conceived of the existence of this famous “other scene,” but there is no doubt that he was the first to indicate its function in resolving the enigma of sexual causation: sexual causation originates in fantasy, even when a real trauma has occurred, because the reality of fantasy is of a different kind than material reality. In taking this step, Freud freed himself from Fliess’s seduction, though Fliess himself had never been a follower of the seduction theory.
In 1958 the sources available to Sartre were incomplete. Not only had the correspondence with Fliess been expurgated by Freud’s heirs, to the point that it failed to convey the terrible mistakes into which Freud had been drawn, but Jones’s account of the history of Bertha Pappenheim did not conform in the least to the historical truth.35 Yet notwithstanding these deficiencies, Sartre’s Freud was both truer than life and less fictional than the Freud, part authoritarian and part tranquil paterfamilias, portrayed in the pages of Ernest Jones. Instead of riveting his hero to a putatively linear destiny, in the manner of psychobiography, Sartre pulled off the tour de force of portraying a Faustian scientist, a creature of light and shadow, haunted by desire and sexuality and in revolt against the established order. It is impossible not to be reminded of Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo in the theater and Alexandre Koyre’s Galileo in the history of science.36
Sartre was well aware of the unwontedness of his own position. He who had always denied the existence of the unconscious was now dealing at close quarters with its inventor—a Sartrean situation par excellence, so brilliantly did it illustrate the idea that one discovers in the other, and against the other, what one is oneself. Sartre ’s Freud was thus the contrary of Sartre: a paterfamilias of bourgeois lifestyle, he never had a woman other than his wife after marriage. Doubtless this was because sexual probity was a necessary condition of his advance toward a new definition of human sexuality. If Freud had had carnal relations with the hysterics who offered themselves to his gaze, he would have been unable either to theorize transference or understand the erroneous character of the seduction theory. Such was his destiny as a man of science.
Sartre accepted these evident facts. But he could not help attributing a Sartrean approach to the founding father. Freud, he said, “is a man who undertakes to know others because he sees it as the only way to know himself, and he sees that he must conduct his research on others and on himself. One knows oneself through others, one knows others through oneself.”37 A curious dialectical reversal, since in fact we know that Freud proceeded in exactly the opposite way. Not succeeding in knowing others, he had been forced to discover himself in order to find out about others. That the real Freud had not been “philosophically” Sartrean did not prevent Sartre from reconstructing a perfectly Freudian Freud: more rigorous, for that matter, and truer than the one Freud himself wished to portray in his Selbstdarstellung.38 For Sartre had at his disposal an instrument not available to Freud: a theory of the subject grounded in a philosophy of consciousness. That alone was capable of making this character exist as he journeyed from error toward truth along the twisting path of a ruse of the intellect.
As his counterpart, Sartre invented an astonishing Fliess, a sort of interwar Mephisto right out of the world of Thomas Mann. A doppelganger of Freud, a visionary like him, devilishly Nietzschean, he seems to belong to that race of scientists doomed to failure, who prefer making bargains with the dark powers to giving up their false hypotheses. As molded by Sartre, Fliess thus becomes Freud’s Mister Hyde, his impulsive archangel, his bad conscience. Here the philosopher readily plays on the opposition between the two antagonistic sites of Germanic culture: on one hand Vienna, the soft, carefree, vain, anti-Semitic city, and on the other the liberal city of Berlin, open to the Enlightenment and to progress. Each is here portrayed as jealous of the other, just as Freud was jealous of Fliess and vice versa. Filled with Prussian arrogance, the Sartrean Fliess has all the features of an ultraleftist of genitality, a sort of Wilhelm Reich before the fact, who pushes Freud to accept the false theory of seduction so as to avoid having to revise his own conceptions of sexuality. One is reminded of the von Gerlach family in The Condemned of Altona, a work for the stage written in the same period as the Freud screenplay.39 A believer in hygienism, Fliess is fundamentally presented by Sartre as a figure of the superego, disparaging Vienna and its disorder, and continually attempting to keep Freud from indulging in his favorite vice: tobacco.
As for Meynert, he appears as the living incarnation of the theory of bad faith Sartre had put forward in Being and Nothingness. Crushed for having lied to himself, this celebrated Viennese physician, in his Sartrean incarnation, at once resembles Fliess for extravagance and Breuer for submission to the established order. For the rest, Sartre presents him as a classic case of male hysteria, a character abject one moment and capable of arousing sympathy the next.
In this whole affair among men, in which Freud moved from a powerful revolt against his father to the invention of the Oedipus complex, meaning in Sartrean terms from alienation to liberty, women play an important role. There are the wives and mothers first of all: Amalia, Freud’s mother; Martha, his wife; Mathilde, the wife of Breuer. Bourgeois conformists, they are not depicted as ridiculous characters but as vanquished heroines incapable of acceding to freedom. Constrained by conjugal love and maternity, they contribute nothing, according to Sartre, to the intellectual adventure that torments the men whose existence they share. Thus they are both excluded from the realm of creativity and victimized by an inner terror that is no more than the expression of their alienation. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Sartre creates the splendid reign of the hysterical woman Anna O., here rebaptized Cecily.
In the screenplay she is made to bear the extreme unhappiness of the female condition at the end of the nineteenth century. Flesh girded with shame; speech rent with anguish; features reduced to a mouthed howl; incomprehensible movements; frenetic agitations; paralysis; deafness: these are the ravages inscribed on women’s bodies by the prohibition of pleasure. But in making a pact with witchery the Sartrean hysteric becomes a free subject, so strongly does her alienation exhibit the world’s madness compacted into the solitude of an individual madness. Thus do the wounds of an individual neurosis connect with the universality of the human condition, making the Sartrean subject a hybrid being, half man, half woman, charged with embodying the intermittent figures of desire and revolt. And it is at this limit point that she encounters the great listener, Freud.
Sartre wanted Marilyn Monroe to play Cecily in the movie. She would indeed have been magnificent starring opposite Montgomery Clift as Freud. Huston had already cast them together in The Misfits.40 In some respects the relation between Marilyn Monroe and psychoanalysis could itself have been made into a film focused on what Freudianism became in American society in the 1950s rather than on the nocturnal splendor of its origins. At the same time that John Huston was trying to bring to life a Freud divided between existential doubt and access to the truth, his heirs who had immigrated to the United States had turned into servants of a psychology of normality utterly unconnected to the great Viennese drama reinvented by Sartre.
Marilyn Monroe was first analyzed by Margaret Hohenberg beginning in 1954, at a time when she was using and abusing sedatives and sleeping pills freely provided by various doctors. Three years later Marilyn decided to try a different analyst’s couch. She had just married Arthur Miller, who was himself in analysis with the brilliant Rudolph Loewenstein,41 and she was advised by Anna Freud to enter analysis with Marianne Kris.
Personal history and family genealogy conspired to make Marianne Kris the daughter, so to speak, of psychoanalysis, and the direct heir of the saga of its origins that Huston wanted to film. Her father, Oskar Rie, had been Freud’s partner in the game of tarot in Vienna, and her mother was the sister of Ida Bondy, Breuer’s former patient and Fliess’s wife. Settling first in London and then in New York, Marianne Kris had become the guardian of the official historiography of Freudianism in the 1950s.
There is no doubt that her influence caused Marilyn to refuse to play the role of Cecily, although she said she was delighted to be offered the part by Huston. The fact is that Anna Freud disapproved of the project and had let her friend Kris know as much.42 Overwhelmed by the difficulty of Marilyn’s treatment, and evidently incapable of managing it correctly, Marianne Kris asked Ralph Greenson, who had settled in Santa Monica after his training on the couch of Otto Fenichel, to take charge of Marilyn during his visits to Hollywood. Greenson accepted and immediately sent her to one of his colleagues to receive prescription medicines by injection; nor did he hesitate to give her strong doses of psychoactive drugs of every kind himself. Characterizing her as “borderline, a paranoid drug addict, and a schizophrenic,” he tried to convince her to give up the acting profession and her love affairs. Worse, he convinced her to hire as her housekeeper a certain Eunice Murray, a woman with ties to the Jehovah’s Witnesses who soon began administering so called substitution treatments to Marilyn.
Drug-dependent and subjected to pressure from various psychoanalysts, themselves in difficulty and terrified at the thought that she might commit suicide, Marilyn drifted into a disastrous state of seclusion that led her to suicide. In August 1962, two months after the tragedy, Anna Freud consoled Greenson, who had sunk into depression: “I am horribly saddened about Marilyn Monroe. I know exactly what you are feeling…. One tries and tries in one’s head to think how one might have done better, and that leaves a terrible feeling of defeat. But you should know that in these cases I think that we really are defeated by something stronger than we are, compared to which analysis, with all its powers, is too feeble a weapon. When I read in the papers that she had lived with twelve foster families, it made me think of the children in the concentration camps whom we try to treat in our clinic.”43
Pondering now the impression of strangeness that would have resulted from the onscreen interaction of the two “sacred monsters” of the Hollywood star system, Montgomery Clift and Marilyn Monroe—both haunted by the meanderings of a deadly destiny—one can’t help but think that, if the actress’s psychoanalysts were unable to forestall her desire for death, they might at least have avoided getting so far lost in the arcana of official history as to be blind to the importance of Huston’s project.
As for Sartre, he did not lack boldness, since he dared to situate the scene during which Freud renounced his seduction theory partly in a bordello and partly on a bank of the Danube. In the screenplay, Cecily wanders through Vienna after having made accusations of rape against her father. She goes into a bordello, where Freud comes looking for her in order to take her home in a carriage. It is then that she tells him of the true memory she had repressed since childhood. One day, she relates, she surprised her father embracing her governess and fell downstairs. But when Freud, still believing in the validity of his own theory, shows his incredulity, she threatens to throw herself into the river. Only then does Freud, in a dramatic volte-face, confess his own error to her in turn. Here is the scene:
FREUD: Cecily, you never wanted to slander your father. It was I who forced you to it. You resisted me for as long as you could.
CECILY: Why did you force me?
FREUD: Because I had deceived myself.44
The veritable history of this true “scene” of renunciation is found in the correspondence of the real Freud with the real Fliess. It took place in written form, did not occur between a bordello and the Danube, and did not bring in the challenge of the female condition in so direct a manner. Yet the violence of the theoretical gesture, with the avowal made by one man to another in the privacy of written communication, is analogous to the violence of the nocturnal banquet imagined by Sartre, in which the confession is extracted by a woman from a man, who in this way frees her from her fetters by inventing transference.
Here, in the translation of Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, are some portions of the letter of 21 September 1897—called the “equinox letter”—so often commented upon by historians of Freudianism:45
I no longer believe in my neurotica [theory of the neuroses]. This is probably not intelligible without an explanation; after all, you yourself found credible what I was able to tell you. So I will begin historically [and tell you] where the reasons for disbelief came from. The continual disappointment in my efforts to bring a single analysis to a real conclusion; the running away of people who for a period of time had been most gripped [by analysis]; the absence of the complete successes on which I had counted; the possibility of explaining to myself the partial successes in other ways, in the usual fashion—this was the first group. Then the surprise that in all cases, the father, not excluding my own, had to be accused of being perverse—the realization of the unexpected frequency of hysteria, with precisely the same conditions prevailing in each, whereas surely such widespread perversions against children are not very probable…. Then, third, the certain insight that there are no indications of reality in the unconscious, so that one cannot distinguish between truth and fiction that has been cathected with affect…. Fourth, the consideration that in the most deep-reaching psychosis the unconscious memory does not break through, so that the secret of childhood experiences is not disclosed even in the most confused delirium…. [T]o be cheerful is everything! I could indeed feel quite discontent. The expectation of eternal fame was so beautiful, as was that of certain wealth, complete independence, travels, and lifting the children above the severe worries that robbed me of my youth. Everything depended upon whether or not hysteria would come out right. Now I can once again remain quiet and modest, go on worrying and saving. A little story from my collection occurs to me: “Rebecca, take off your gown; you are no longer a bride.”46
The version of this letter available to Sartre in 1958 is as incomplete as the account of it given by Jones. For one thing, it omits the passage in which Freud incriminates his father, who had died eleven months previously,47 and the whole concluding part in which he details, not without humor, the glorious situation that would have been his had his false theory been proven accurate. Now, Sartre reestablishes the truth in an almost excessive fashion. Making wonderful use of chronology—the death of Jakob precedes Freud’s abandonment of the seduction theory—he shows that Freud renounced his error too late to have had time to make peace with his father, upon whom the famous suspicion of seduction still weighs. So the only solution remaining for him is a “Freudian” one: posthumous reconciliation with the symbolic figure of paternity, which will lead him to elaborate the idea of the superego.
In other words, in the screenplay Sartre was playing the card of a Freudian Freud against himself, the better to demonstrate that in Sartrean terms the acceptance of such a figure and such a notion is impossible. Doubtless it was because he had invented this Freud, conforming rigorously to the reality of the history of Freudianism, that he freed himself from the doctrinal superego of his own existential Freudo-Marxism, which was hampering his writing, his autobiography, and the completion of his great work on Flaubert.
The Sartrean act of liberation could then be expanded in The Words, in the course of a vehement diatribe by the narrator against his father literally marked by Freud’s action in renouncing the seduction theory. But instead of a reconciliation with the symbolic figure of the dead father, this act leads the narrator to a radical anti-Freudianism that, in the form of a refusal of the superego and its theory, expresses the major thesis of Sartre ’s philosophy with complete coherence: the access to liberty lies in refusal of the moral law and the annihilation of oneself in the other.
The death of Jean-Baptiste was the central moment of my life. It put my mother back in fetters and gave me liberty. There is no good father, that is the rule; we ought not to reproach human beings, but rather the bond of parenthood, which is rotten. There is nothing better than making children; having them is a great iniquity. Had he lived, my father would have lain upon me at his full length, and would have crushed me. By chance he died young. Amid all the Aeneases bearing Anchises on their backs I pass from one bank to the other, alone and hating these invisible progenitors who sit astride their sons throughout their lifetimes. I left behind me a man who died young, who did not have time to be my father, and who today might be my child. Was this a good or an evil? I do not know; but I willingly accept the verdict of an eminent psychoanalyst: I have no superego.48
A reading of Nausea first, then The Words, and finally the Freud screenplay shows clearly that, if Sartre found a way to link the philosophy of concepts and the philosophy of the subject, he also found a way to embody in fiction a conceptuality that would never have attained such incandescence if it had only been conveyed in works of pure philosophy. But doubtless Sartre also had to be a philosopher to be capable in this way of making intimate obsessions that are never the pure illustration of a system of thought leap forth in his works of fiction. In The Words he wrote: “I was Roquentin, I depicted the warp of my own life in him, with no softening. At the same time I was myself, the chosen one, the analyst of hell…. Phony to the core, and mystified, I joyfully wrote about our unhappy condition. Dogmatic, I doubted all save that I was the chosen one of doubt. I restored with one hand what I destroyed with the other, and I regarded uneasiness as the guarantee of my security. I was happy.”49
In this respect, this paradoxical and uneasy autobiography is one of the high points of twentieth-century literature. It pulverizes the rhetoric of intimate recital and of what is today called by the flat term “autofiction.“ With its purified and almost mystical style, this text, written entirely in the passé simple verb tense, as if the narrator were regarding his own birth, life, and death from the vantage point of the hell in which he has sunk his pen, or from that childhood which he exposes to public ridicule—this text impresses itself on the reader’s unconscious, causing a symphony of signifiers to vibrate inside him, penetrating him in a strange and almost vampiresque fashion.
Sartre ’s Words is somehow fragments of memory, or portions of books, that direct every subject back to whatever consciousness she may have of her relation to herself and the world. And in this sense, in its quest for a ceaselessly interrupted subjectivity, this Sartrean autobiography, stripped clean of any tincture of the novelistic, bears a striking resemblance to a Freudian odyssey, with its origins in dreaming, its destiny in language, and its narrative support in nothingness. It is also the prototype of every first-person recital. This is why no one can read it without immediately yielding to the desire for a writing of the self repeated to infinity.
An astonishing reversal of “the childhood of a leader” and a fantastic exorcism!50 Like many of Sartre ’s projects, the Freud screenplay remained unfinished, primarily because Sartre and Huston were unable to produce a collaborative work. Moreover, there exist several versions of the text, and many still-unpublished drafts. The main reason, though, is that, once he withdrew his name from the film credits, Sartre tended to regard this interminable work as something of a castoff, good for nothing but a boost to his bank balance. When he was asked “were there works that you wrote primarily to earn money?” Sartre replied: “There were. I can think of one in any case. It was the Freud screenplay I wrote for Huston. I had just found out that I had no more money. I think it was when my mother had given me twelve million old francs to pay my taxes. They were paid, and I had no more debts, but I didn’t have a sou either. Just then I was told that Huston wished to see me. He came round one morning and said, ‘I am offering you 25 million to collaborate on a film about Freud.’ I said yes and I got 25 million.”51
From the point of view of the history of psychoanalysis, the Sartrean exorcism had the effect of desacralizing the body of Freud. Reading this screenplay twenty years after it was written (unfortunately it was published posthumously) and a century after the birth of Sartre, one is struck by the way it manages to free the real Freud from the rigid repetition of official history. If examples are needed, I could cite the admirable scenes in which Sartre makes the protagonist confront the hysterical woman’s desire and then the Sartrean demon of transgression, or his portrayal of the moment at which Freud renounces sexual desire in order to gratify one stronger still: the desire to elucidate the sexual causes of desire. Never had any commentator on the Viennese saga succeeded so well in eroticizing the gesture with which Freud advances from error toward truth.
In choosing to show Freud at the moment at which he accomplishes the theoretical gesture that opens up the domain of the unconscious to modern thought, Sartre contradicts his own thesis, posited in Being and Nothingness and then in Questions of Method, to the effect that psychoanalysis has neither principle nor theoretical grounding. You could put it this way: through a Freud more Freudian than the original, Sartre in part renounces his own former anti-Freudian philosophical stance, and links a conceptual moment to an act of subjective liberty. Only in part, though, because this renunciation leads him to an even more radical anti-Freudianism, in which the only thing that counts is the welling up of a free and creative subject, stripped of any form of superego. This explains why, every time the question of psychoanalysis was raised, he tended to speak and act as if the event of the Freud screenplay had never taken place, as if the Freudian conceptual moment could never connect with the Sartrean act marked by subjective freedom.
In 1963, in a letter addressed to R. D. Laing and David Cooper, who had just published a study on him, Sartre extols the merits of an existential approach to mental illness, the only one capable, according to him, of humanizing psychiatry.52 Without referring to Freud by name, he criticizes positivism and psychoanalysis in the best traditions of Being and Nothingness. Three years later, in the course of a violent clash with what he called “structuralism,” Sartre once again brandished the torch of his existential Freudo-Marxism. He began by adopting a formula of Lacan, “the unconscious is the discourse of the other,” which he regarded as clarifying Freud’s ideas to a certain extent. But he immediately robbed it of its conceptual value by conceiving it in terms of intentionality and bad faith: “In these conditions—and to the extent that I am in agreement with Lacan—intentionality must be conceived as fundamental. There is no mental process that is not intentional, nor is there any that is not gummed up, betrayed, and deflected by language. But reciprocally, we are complicit in these betrayals, which constitute our depth.”53
Sartre subsequently shifted into full polemical mode, indiscriminately charging Foucault, Althusser, and Lacan with a concerted refusal of history in the name of structure and a rejection of man for the sake of decentering the subject. But those whom he regarded as the real specialists in structure, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Emile Benveniste, and Ferdinand de Saussure, were spared the full force of this blast. Though on this occasion he left out the name of Georges Dumézil, he did nevertheless acknowledge an authentic Freudian fidelity in Lacan. The approach here is the same as in Being and Nothingness, but it is structure that is accused, in 1966, of the sin once laid at the feet of Freudian psychoanalysis. And against structure Sartre mobilizes, in overblown fashion, a Marxist commitment that evokes the two extreme figures of the Freud scenario: the ultraleftism of Fliess and the bad faith of Meynert.
The episode of “the man with the tape recorder” [l’homme au magnétophone] is inscribed in an identical trajectory. This manuscript, published by Les Temps Modernes in 1969 and inspired by The Sequestered of Altona, has a well-known history. It features a patient who rebels against his analyst and insists on having a tape recorder running during their session, of which the text is supposedly a transcript. Despite the opposition of his two friends Jean-Bertrand Pontalis and Bernard Pingaud, Sartre decided to be really provocative; he claimed that he was emphasizing the irruption of the subject into the psychoanalyst’s study and thus reversing the excessively univocal relation of the subject to the object: “I am not a false friend of psychoanalysis, but a critical fellow traveller. I have no wish—and for that matter no means—of ridiculing it. This dialogue will raise a smile: one always enjoys watching Guignol thrash the commissioner. Personally I don’t find it amusing.”54
Guignol doesn’t actually succeed in thrashing the commissioner, but that doesn’t mean that Sartre was not genuinely attempting to ridicule psychoanalysis. Why should he have denied himself this transgression? A year after the revolt of May 1968 he was seeing an expanding market in France for psychoanalysis (Lacanian and anti-Lacanian) catering especially to the social elite. This was something Gilles Deleuze also condemned, on the basis of a Freudo-Marxist theory of Reichian inspiration, as did Foucault through his unfailing support of Deleuze’s position.55 Sartre for his part relied on his own well-honed weapon, the ideal of the free subject, rather than desiring reason or the claim that Freudianism was drifting closer to repressive psychiatry. And though he was not blind to the derisory aspect of the false freedom of the man with the tape recorder, he continued to believe in the redemptive value of subjective freedom, the only true freedom there is. That is why he defended English antipsychiatry, itself inspired by his own philosophy, so stoutly. But this meant that the Freud screenplay, a genuine intellectual event, got buried even more deeply. Apparently he failed to see how much the publication at this time of this Faustian and nostalgic text could have done to elevate French Freudianism. It is easy to imagine the Lacanian generation of the 1970s (or a part of it at least), the generation that had been Sartrean at the time of the war of Algeria, being drawn to this screenplay, if only it had had the chance to read it during the author’s lifetime.
I have had occasion, taking remarks made by Michel Foucault to Didier Eribon as my point of departure,56 to reflect on the intertwined history of those two masters of freedom, Sartre and Lacan, who were confronted at around the same age with the French student revolt of May 1968, especially with Maoist radicalism. Sartre was caught up in the imaginary of revolution to the point of denying himself and was saved only by the writing of Flaubert, while Lacan entrenched himself in a species of baroque severity the better to understand, in the aftermath of verbal terror, the collapse of the militant ideal.
On one hand a Marat of sorts, with Girondin traits; on the other a species of Tocqueville with Thermidorian virtues. “Our alternating contemporaries,” Michel Foucault called them. For the heirs of both the season had passed for saying with the Sartreans that the subject was radically free, or with the structuralists that he or she is determined by social or intrapsychic conditions. Better at this point to try to understand what lay hidden behind the very notion of subject—that complex and fragile thing of which it is difficult to speak, but without which there is no speaking.
What Foucault has to say is especially interesting because it appears to modify the stance he had taken in an interview with Madeleine Chapsal in 1966: “We experienced Sartre’s generation as a generous and courageous one of course, with a passion for life, for politics, for existence; but we discovered something else for ourselves: the passion for concepts, and for what I would call system.” And Foucault went on to emphasize in 1966 that his generation had broken with Sartre at the point when Lévi-Strauss on one hand and Lacan on the other (the former for societies, the latter for the unconscious) had shifted the primary goal of analysis from the mirroring of significations to the system that commanded them.57
That Foucault could thus oscillate between two passions, one for the philosophy of concepts and the other for the philosophy of commitment, before ultimately combining them in a unified project—and this can be traced in the unfolding of his own oeuvre—shows clearly that one cannot exist without the other. On condition, however, that they both serve to anchor a radical refusal of any philosophy of submission.
It is not in fact certain that, in terms of the generational lineage of the philosophers whose sources and critical influence I am trying to reconstruct, Sartre could have existed without Lacan. For the bond that symbolically unites them arises as much out of the history of the twentieth century as it does out of the philosophical filiation they created. Both were part of an antichauvinistic movement in the 1930s that authorized French thinkers to make a fresh approach to German philosophy. Neither was subsequently active in the Resistance, but during the course of the war both discovered, in the spectacle of a radical anti-Nazism to which they had not subscribed, the conditions for their own future thinking about the questions of commitment and freedom.
It is well known that soon after the liberation of France, in a celebrated text in response to No Exit, Lacan emphasized that man is not free to choose his chains because there does not exist any original welling up of freedom. Thus, in order to become free, he is condemned to integrate into the human collectivity by logical reasoning. In other words, only the fact of belonging to a group grounds the relation of the subject to the other, and only the virtue of logic leads man to truth, meaning to the acceptance of the other in accordance with a dialectic of recognition and misrecognition. So Lacan was taking his stance, in the Husserlian tradition and like Sartre, in favor of a philosophy of concepts into which he tried to integrate a nonsubjective philosophy of the subject, or as he put it, “an existential indetermination of the I.”58 Hence he made human liberty depend not on a logical choice escaping any psychology of the subject (as Georges Canguilhem does in relation to Cavaillès), but on a temporality: the temporality that authorizes every subject to submit to a logical decision when the “time for understanding” arrives.
That Sartre and Lacan were shaped by two of the major forces grounding our modernity—the Freudian revolution and the Marxist revolution—also shows that after having traversed the tempest of the war dreaming of a liberty for which they had not fought, they found the way to combine doctrinal adhesion with the spirit of dissent. Sartre was no more an orthodox communist or Marxist than Lacan was a legitimist Freudian. And it was thanks to this provocative stance, and it alone, that they became, for the generation of May 1968, masters capable of testing the limits of their own teachings. Having never had a word to say to each other while they were alive, either about the unconscious or the revolution, they left a shared silence as their legacy to a common posterity.
To that posterity it now falls to imagine a new Freud of the outset and a new Sartre of commitment, the one and the other torn free from error between a bordello and the shadowy banks of the Danube.