Jean-Paul Sartre

Psychoanalysis and existential psychoanalysis

Betty Cannon

Throughout his work Sartre has demonstrated a deep and continuing interest both in psychological theory in general and psychoanalysis in particular. His writing on psychological themes began with his thesis at the École Normale Supérieure in 1927, which was later published in revised form as the first part of Imagination (Sartre 1936, 1972a). This was followed by two classical philosophical/psychological treatises, The Emotions: Outline of a Theory (Sartre 1939a, 1975) and The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination (Sartre 1940, 2004a). Sartre’s first major philosophical work, The Transcendence of the Ego (Sartre 1936–7, 1957a), is at least as significant psychologically as it is philosophically. Of course, Sartre devotes a section of his philosophical masterpiece, Being and Nothingness (Sartre 1943a, BN1, BN2), to the development of premises for an existential psychoanalysis.

Sartre’s interest in psychoanalysis took a new turn in 1956 when he did extensive research and reading based on a request from producer John Huston to write a screenplay on Freud’s life. Posthumously edited and published by Sartre’s friend and colleague, the eminent French psychoanalyst J.-B. Pontalis, The Freud Scenario (Sartre 1986a) is surprisingly vivid, favourable to Freud, and faithful to the Freud/Jones account of the birth of psychoanalysis (Jones [1953] 1961). A careful reading reveals that most of the evidence for the unconscious that Freud discovers can be interpreted in two ways – according to Freud’s theory of the unconscious and Sartre’s theory of bad faith. Sartre’s rereading of Freud at this time may have influenced his account of Flaubert’s hysterico-epilepsy in The Family Idiot (Sartre 1971–2, 1981c, 1987, 1989a, 1991a, 1993c). At the same time, Sartre’s account of Flaubert’s difficulties demonstrates a deepening of his own theory of bad faith to explain more fully the role of the body in the creation of symptoms. It may also be that when Sartre remarks in Search for a Method that only psychoanalysis “allows us to discover the whole man in the adult; that is, not only his present determinations but the weight of his history” (Sartre 1968: 60), he was thinking of his recent encounter with Freud in writing the screenplay.

Pontalis thought that one day the history of Sartre’s deeply “ambiguous relationship” with psychoanalysis “will have to be written and perhaps his work reinterpreted in the light of it” (Sartre 1979: 220). The truth is that Sartre gave Freud an enormous amount of credit while disagreeing with him on many crucial issues. Sartre is aware that existential psychoanalysis could not have existed without the prior invention of Freudian psychoanalysis. He understands that his version of existential psychoanalysis is only a set of principles and that it provides nothing like the application to work with patients that fills out the literature of psychoanalysis. Sartre’s psychobiographies provide examples, but they are not clinical examples. Existential psychoanalysis, Sartre says, has “not yet found its Freud” (EN: 734). Instead the “final discoveries” of ontology must become “the first principles of [existential] psychoanalysis” (EN: 735). Those principles are Sartrean, although Sartre has learned much from Freud. Later Sartre welcomed R. D. Laing’s work, which is deeply influenced by Sartre, as exemplifying a psychoanalytic perspective compatible with his own (Laing & Cooper [1964] 1971: 6; Sartre 1979: 204).

This chapter will compare and contrast existential with Freudian psychoanalysis, concluding with a brief consideration of how Sartre might be useful to psychoanalysis today.

Freud’s theory and method: the appeal to natural science

Freud, like many psychologists from various perspectives, from his time to ours, attempted to ground his approach in the natural science of his day. His position is fundamentally deterministic and materialist. He says that the intent of his early “Project for a Scientific Psychology”, which is part of his posthumously published correspondence with his friend Wilhelm Fleiss, is “to furnish us with a psychology which shall be a natural science; its aim, that is, is to represent psychological processes as quantitatively determined states of specifiable material particles and so make them plain and void of contradictions” (Freud [1950] 1953–74: 355). In other words, Freud’s aim is to reduce psychology to neurophysiology, an aim that is sometimes voiced by psychologists today.

Freud did not publish the Project during his lifetime because he realized that the science simply was not there. Yet he did not abandon the attempt to ground psychoanalysis in natural science explanations and metaphors, as some post-Freudian theorists have claimed. He never followed his own precept that psychoanalysis should cleanse itself of everything but “psychological auxiliary ideas” (Freud [1916–17] 1953–74: 21). The four major hypotheses of his psychological metatheory are all scientistic postulates in the sense that they use natural science metaphors to try to establish the validity of psychoanalysis. The most experience-distant of these, the drive theory of the economic hypothesis, is based on energy flow, inhibition and displacement – metaphors derived from charge and discharge theories borrowed from physics, hydraulic metaphors adapted from the discovery of the steam engine, and Freud’s study with his mentors, Brucke and Meynert, in neurophysiology.

The flow of energy in the organism is first conceived in terms of psychobiological forces – libidinal and aggressive drives in the early Freud and, in his later work, life and death instincts, Eros and Thanatos. Freud believed that instinctual energy can neither be created nor destroyed, that it is at least theoretically measurable, that it can be condensed or displaced from its original objects to others (as in transference), that it can be “converted” from one form to another (as in hysterical blindness), and that it can be withdrawn from the external world towards the ego or a lost object (as in narcissism or mourning).

“Cathexis” is a concept implying the amount of energy attached to an object, an idea or ideas, or a body part. Before cathecting the mother and the breast, the infant is enveloped in primary objectless narcissism. Secondary narcissism involves investing in the ego rather than the object. A certain amount of narcissism is normal. Being in unrequited love drains energy away from the lover’s ego, and thus leads to impoverishment. The ultimate aim of the organism, according to Freud, is the return to zero energy charge. The pleasure principle is a mechanical principle involving the physical reduction of quantities of energy in the organism. As Freud says, it “follows from the principle of constancy” (Freud [1920] 1953–74: 9).

Although many current psychoanalysts dismiss or minimize drive theory, it is actually the engine that makes the Freudian machine go. The dynamic (conflictual forces in the psyche), topographic (consciousness, preconscious and unconscious) and structural (ego, superego and id) hypotheses all require it. The repository of the drives is the id, and the source of reality orientation is the ego, where drive energy is neutralized or sublimated or displaced or defended against. The internalization of prohibitions against drive satisfaction combined with castration anxiety leads to the development of the superego, which may get some of its virulence from aggressive drives originating in the id. Because they do not have castration anxiety, women do not develop adequate superegos (Freud [1930] 1953–74).

The neurosis develops when drives press for gratification and are met with resistance from the outside world and/or the superego. Substitute satisfactions in the form of symptoms result since energy cannot be destroyed but only displaced in the psyche. For example, compulsive hand-washing substitutes for the desire to handle faeces or other “dirty” activities. Or Freud’s patient Dora (Freud [1905] 1953–74) develops a hysterical cough as a substitute for her desire for oral sex. In psychosis, the ego may be overwhelmed by the drives and hence lose touch with reality.

In neurosis, defence mechanisms and resistance, as posed by the dynamic hypothesis, prevent the ego from seeing the disowned wishes (deriving from the drives) that are at the root of its troubles. The complex develops when intrapsychic conflicts and their substitute solutions are pushed into the unconscious and zealously guarded by the censor who stands sentinel between consciousness and the unconscious. Later Freud removed the repressive force from the censor to the superego and still later to the ego defences. Anxiety results when the disowned repressed material threatens to break through into consciousness.

On Freud’s view, the way in which the methodology of psychoanalysis works can be explained in terms of these hypotheses – indeed Freud would say that he developed the hypotheses as a way of explaining the clinical material. The aim of therapy is to trace the development of the person, explained by dynamics based on the above theory, from earliest childhood to the present. Fixations at various psycho-sexual stages (oral, anal, phallic and genital) and substitute gratifications leading to the development of symptoms are primary data to be analysed. In the course of therapy, defences must be analysed and resistances to unconscious material (often manifesting as resistance to the therapy) must be overcome. The Oedipus complex, castration anxiety, psychosexual fixations, and resulting fantasies and symptoms must be confronted. Symbols appearing in dreams and other material are often of a universal nature, resulting from their roots in the drives and fixations in psychosexual development, and can be interpreted accordingly in the course of analysis. Analysis of the transference of energy from early libidinal fixations onto the analyst becomes a primary avenue for cure.

Freud’s method involves asking the analysand to commit to a process in which she says everything that comes to mind. This is called the “fundamental rule”. The analyst listens with an attitude of “evenly suspended attention” so as to allow the unconscious material to emerge without interference or preference. Usually this is done with the analy-sand lying on a couch with the analyst behind her in order to encourage the material to flow more spontaneously and uninhibitedly. The analyst interprets the unconscious material that emerges in the form of transference, resistance, defences, symptoms, symbols, fantasies, dreams, repetitive patterns and “acting out” so that it may become conscious. As Freud famously says, it is this making of unconscious material conscious that leads to cure: “Where id was, there ego shall be”. The flow has been restored by removing the blocks to consciousness and if possible finding realistic outlets or sublimations for the repressed drive energy. Because civilization is full of “discontents” in the form of blocks to instinctual gratification (Freud [1930] 1953–74), the cure may mean nothing more, as Freud says, than allowing the analysand to move from neurotic symptomatology to “common unhappiness” (Freud [1895] 1953–74: 305).

Sartre’s approach: phenomenological inquiry and the fundamental project of being

Although Sartre was always appreciative of Freud’s great discoveries (the impact of childhood on adult development, the pervasiveness of self-deception, and the use of the current relationship between analyst and patient to explore the depths of the analysand’s difficulties), he at the same time seriously objected to Freud’s metapsychology. His objections are rooted in existential phenomenology, which rejects the premises of positivistic science as applied to human beings. Phenomenology is first and foremost an answer to Cartesian dualism: it does away with the division between mind and body, self and world, of seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes – a perspective that has deeply influenced the development of modern science. The founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, poses a view of consciousness as intrinsically intentional and world-related. There is no self without the world, no world (in the sense of specified thises) without the self. By intentionality Husserl is not suggesting that consciousness has motives or intentions hidden away in the psyche, as in the ordinary use of the word “intention”. Rather he means that consciousness is always consciousness of some real or imagined object. The intention exists not behind the act of grasping the world in this way or that, but rather in that very act.

Sartre takes Husserl’s phenomenology a step further. Following Heidegger, who along with Husserl had a great impact on his philosophy, Sartre objects even to the “transcendental ego” of Husserl, which constitutes the world of meaning and objects. For Sartre and Heidegger, there is no transcendental ego. There is only consciousness (Dasein, or “being there”, in Heidegger’s philosophy) experiencing the world in this way or that. It is from the perspective of existential phenomenology that Sartre rejects Freud’s four fundamental hypotheses. From this perspective, there is no such thing as a psyche with substance and structure. There is no ego, superego and id, no consciousness, preconscious and unconscious, no psychobiological drives behind intentional acts, no internal dynamics that are separated from the world in which a person lives. There is only bodily lived consciousness grasping the world in this way or that.

Hence when Sartre says that existential psychoanalysis attempts to grasp an individual’s fundamental project of being, he is not simply talking about the Freudian complex in other language. As Sartre says, both the complex and the project are totalities rather than a collection of random responses, and both refer to an “infinity of polyvalent meanings” (BN1: 570; BN2: 591). Yet the complex is a pattern of emotions, memories, perceptions and wishes in the personal unconscious organized around a common theme and powered by drives. The project is instead an original gut-level bodily lived conscious choice of a way of being in the world. The complex is determined. The fundamental project is freely chosen, though that choice is always situated – that is, it is always a combination of what the world brings and what I make of what the world brings.

Both the complex and the original project are organized around desires, but the word desire means something different in each form of psychoanalysis. For Freud, desire refers to the sexual instinct and its objects, modulated through the psychosexual stages. For Sartre, desire refers to the fundamental lack of Being (nothingness or no thingness) that consciousness is. Sexuality is only one of its manifestations. My desire does not derive from a generalized drive that lies behind experience. It manifests in my experience as I relate to the objects of that experience in a variety of ways. It is motivated by the desire to fill the fundamental lack. It is the desire to use objects and other people to create a substantialized self.

The fundamental project, unlike the Freudian complex, is not fixed in childhood. It is less a totality in the static sense than a totalization, a continuous way of making sense of self and world that is always moving and changing. Its current meaning, though permeated by its childhood origins, is not reducible to those origins. As Sartre says in Search for a Method, a life develops in “spirals”; it “passes again and again by the same points but at different levels of integration and complexity” (Sartre1968: 106). We may even find abrupt breaks and “radical conversions” to a different way of being in the world. This happens, for example, when Genet, in Sartre’s biography Saint Genet (Sartre 1952, 1963) turns from the life of crime for which he seemed destined to make himself a writer – or when a person changes radically in the course of analysis.

The fundamental project, like the complex, has its origins in the past, which Sartre says is the “background-depth of all my thoughts and all my feelings” (BN1: 141; BN2: 164). Sartre even agrees with Freud that both forms of psychoanalysis must explore “the crucial event of infancy [or early childhood] and the psychic crystallization around this event” (BN1: 569; BN2: 590). The project is not, however, like the Freudian complex, determined by those childhood events. Rather the child chose (on the level of non-reflective basic intentionality) to live them in a certain way and hence developed the project. The child Genet, for example, chose to “be the thief they said I was” (Sartre 1963). Obviously, the choice is not always (and in the case of mental illness it may never be) a viable choice. But it is a choice. It is I who live my circumstances in this way or rather respond mechanically to them.

The reason present symptoms may seem determined by past circumstances is that we remember the circumstances vividly and see no other way that we could have lived them. This is partially so because we did choose to live them in this way and not in another. Interestingly Freud himself recognizes in a rather remarkable passage that determinism only works backwards. When one attempts to move from the present neurosis to the childhood origins, all seems inevitable. But when one gets to the original circumstances, one becomes aware that there could have been a different outcome and that this might have been just as understandable. Hence, as Freud says: “The synthesis is not nearly so satisfactory as the analysis; in other words, from a knowledge of the premises we could not have foretold the nature of the results” (Freud [1920] 1953–74: 267). Freud thinks that this failure to predict happens because we can never know all of the etiological factors in a neurosis. Sartre thinks it happens because we are free.

The fundamental project is not just past-oriented. It is present and future-oriented as well. The present moment is, of course, where we live and where change takes place. Sartre describes the present simply as “presence to being” (BN1: 121–2; BN2: 145). Any therapy that is going to be effective must be profoundly present to this presence – and must encourage those undergoing therapy to be increasingly present (rather than trying to escape into the past or the future). Yet the present is not a static something. The fundamental project is moving through time – actually, to be more precise, it is temporalizing. It is a pro-ject, or throwing myself forward out of the past toward the future. While the past is its ground, the future is its meaning. Hence Sartre says that existential psychoanalysis must be “completely flexible” and adapt itself to “the slightest changes in the subject” – recognizing that different approaches may be suitable for different analysands or for the same analysand at a different time in therapy (BN1: 573; BN2: 594). It must also be a deeply relational and collaborative venture – a joint undertaking in which “each person takes his chances and assumes his responsibilities” rather than a hierarchical process (Sartre 1979: 201). Ultimately, it is the “final intuition of the subject,” rather than the interpretations of the analyst, that is “decisive” in existential psychoanalysis (BN1: 574; BN2: 594).

In Search for a Method (Sartre 1968) and the Critique of Dialectical Reason (Sartre 1960c), Sartre proposes a methodology for the social sciences in general that he names the progressive-regressive method. The regressive moment is the usual method of social science inquiry. It analyses and attempts to bring to light all those seemingly objective conditions of a person’s (or group’s) situation, including historical and socio-material circumstances, even language and culture. The progressive moment instead uses comprehension, putting myself as a human being into the shoes of the other in order to understand the human meaning of a past event or action. This “pre-ontological comprehension that man has of the human person” (BN1: 568; BN2: 589) is also the beginning point of existential psychoanalysis. In looking at the past, this means not so much attempting to find causes and conditions as looking for motives and meanings. It means discovering the past as choice rather than as conditioning. This frees the future as well: If I was free, I am free. Often the future-directed dimension of a person’s project can be elicited by asking the question: “What does (or did) it do for you to do/feel/think/respond [in this particular way]?”

The fundamental project is always an attempt to try to solve the problem of being, rather than a merely mechanical response to internal forces or external conditions. This is the problem of needing to create a substantial self while yet remaining free – to be somebody or something, as we say colloquially. Sartre says that the meaning of this desire is “ultimately the project of being God” – the ens causa sui of Scholastic philosophy (BN1: 567; BN2: 587). Because it is impossible for a human being to be free and a substantial something at the same time, Sartre makes his famous statement: “Man is a useless passion” (BN1: 615; BN2: 636). Nonetheless, all our various ways of doing, being and having (with doing and having ultimately collapsing into being) are attempts to solve the problem of being – to create meaning down there in the future by bringing into existence a substantialized self as value.

All our ways of relating to self and others are attempts to solve the problem of being. All our ways of temporalizing, spatialializing and relating to objects in the world, all our ways of inserting (or failing or refusing to insert) ourselves into language and culture, all our actions, mannerisms, tastes and gestures are ways of attempting to solve the problem of being. Sartre says, “there is not a taste, a mannerism, or a human act which is not revealing”. Our gestures, facial expressions, body stance, and all the various ways of living our bodies are attempts to solve the problem of being. As Sartre says, “A gesture refers to a Weltanschauung and we sense it” (BN1: 457; BN2: 479). It is the task of existential psychoanalysis to decipher that Weltanschauung.

In attempting to elucidate the analysand’s solution to the problem of being, however, the existential psychoanalyst is not looking for a solution that is first invented and then lived. The fundamental project is not rational but “prelogical” (BN1: 570; BN2: 591), and it can never be known in its entirety exactly as it is since it is no different from our gutlevel non-reflective way of living our lives in the world. It can, however, be known well enough to allow us to look at what we are doing and to shift and change. Hence the existential psychoanalyst will not just explore the usual data of psychoanalysis: “dreams, failures, obsessions and neuroses”. She will also and especially consider “the thoughts of waking life, successfully adjusted acts, style, etc.” (BN1: 575; BN2: 595). She will understand that a person “expresses himself as a whole in even his most insignificant and his most superficial behavior” (BN1: 568; BN2: 589).

The result of this investigation must be self-evident “not because it is the poorest and the most abstract but because it is the richest” and most concrete (BN1: 563; BN2: 584). We must explore the analysand’s unique way of solving the problem of being. If this person is psychotic, for example, we will want to know not only that he found the conditions of his existence intolerable and so needed to escape into fantasy or imagination. We will also want to know why he prefers to be Jesus Christ and not Adolf Hitler or Genghis Khan. We will want to encounter in so far as this is possible the very person, not a collection of drives or a bundle of unconscious wishes or generalized qualities or states. We must discover the person’s fundamental project not behind concrete lived experience, but in that very experience itself.

Sartre’s answer to the problem of self-deception

Existential psychoanalysis, like Freudian psychoanalysis, must account for the fact that the analysand’s life is riddled with self-deception. Freud explains self-deception in terms of unconscious dynamics and wishes. Sartre explains it in terms of the division between pre-reflective and reflective consciousness and the structures of bad faith. Pre-reflective consciousness is simple gut-level awareness, basic intentionality. It is bodily lived, conscious and intentional, but not necessarily even verbal since, as Sartre says, language is fundamentally for others. Sartre says that pre-reflective consciousness “is penetrated by a great light without being able to express what this light is illuminating”. This is so not because we are dealing with an “unsolved riddle as the Freudians believe” (BN1: 571; BN2: 591). Indeed all is there, luminous, available. What is lacking is the means that would allow conceptualization. The truth is not hidden in the unconscious. Indeed it is not unconscious at all but unknown in the sense of being not yet reflected on. The analysand, as Sartre says, must come to know what she already understands.

The reason that consciousness and knowledge are not identical is that there is a gulf of “impassable nothingness” between the consciousness reflecting and the consciousness reflected on (BN1: 274; BN2: 298). This gulf does not represent a resurgence of the Freudian unconscious by another name. The impassable gulf occurs because when consciousness turns and attempts to make a “pseudo” object of itself, the self reflecting and the self reflected on are not the same. This object of reflective consciousness is always a pseudo object because I cannot simultaneously see myself and be myself. At the moment of reflection, I am always reflecting on a past self. I am trying to grasp myself from the viewpoint of the other.

Hence arises the possibility for all kinds of distortions. Some of these come from my attempt to recapture my object self by looking at myself through the eyes of the other, especially the original powerful others, who were able to see me as an object out there in the world. The experience of what Sartre refers to as “the look” of the other makes me uncomfortably aware of this, since I experience the other’s Look first in shame and later also in pride (BN1: 252–302; BN2: 276–326). I also need the other to see me, so that the failure of the original powerful others to accurately see and validate me has a negative impact as well. Their looks, touches and words are important to my development as a person. All of us have experienced the distortions stemming from the looks (or failure to look) of the original powerful others. Our ways of criticizing or ignoring ourselves mimic theirs. Hence Sartre says that Flaubert, whose physical needs were taken care of but who was disregarded as a person, develops a passive personality. Lack of recognition as a person also plays a major role in Laing’s examples of “ontological insecurity” (Laing [1959] 1979). These include cases where psychotic patients, having not been treated as persons early on in their lives, come to treat themselves and/or others as not being real or as being objects rather than subjects.

Self-deception arises from the desire to view or make myself into a particular kind of object – for myself and/or others. Actually, the very belief that I can be an object like other objects in the world, a substantialized self as a table is a table, is a distortion. It is an act of what Sartre calls bad faith, or lying to myself about the nature of my existence, because I am not an object but a free subject. Hence all those attempts to grasp myself as an object, leading eventually to the development of the ego in the Sartrean sense as a construct of reflective consciousness (not a seat of reality orientation, as in Freud), are in bad faith. They deny my position as a free subject. While it is not possible or even desirable to live without an ego (one would probably be either psychotic or a mere weather vane moving about with every wind), a rigidly developed ego is a primary source of self-deception (see Barnes 1991 on the positive aspects of the ego). Hence Sartre says in The Transcendence of the Ego that “perhaps the essential role of the ego is to mask from consciousness its very spontaneity” (Sartre 1957a: 100).

Even viewing myself as a miserable, bad, inferior, ineffective, selfish or otherwise objectionable object is a matter of bad faith. Yet such a position, like all solidifications of the ego, serves the purpose of giving me at least a sense of identity. It allows me to imagine that I am something and to avoid the nothingness that I actually am. Hence people often stubbornly cling to such identities. Furthermore many of the Freudian defences emanate from this desire to objectify the self. We have already seen how introjecting the original others aids me in developing a solid (if distorted) sense of self. Similarly, Sartre describes in Saint Genet and Anti-Semite and Jew how the despised or “evil” other confirms the “just” man or the bigot in his sense of solid superiority by projecting all those potentially disowned qualities onto Genet the thief or the Jew as an outsider (Sartre 1963, 1965b). We are not dealing here with unconscious processes, but with manoeuvres in bad faith.

Since there are two poles to human reality – freedom and facticity – there are actually two poles to bad faith. What I actually am is a freedom in situation, not a simple facticity or an ungrounded freedom. If I find myself unwilling, for whatever reason, to accept the tension implied in these two poles, freedom and facticity, I may try to escape in one direction or the other. I may overemphasize facticity, trying to make myself into a solid something, as in the form of bad faith discussed above. Or else I may try to escape into ungrounded freedom, pretending to be absolutely free in the sense of not being impacted by my present circumstances, my past, my socioeconomic conditions, my relationships, and so on. This second form of bad faith, in its more extreme forms, might lead to mania or psychosis – just as the other form might lead to severe depression or the grandiosity of narcissism. In milder cases, the second form might lead to “commitment phobia” or denial.

Both forms of bad faith help to explain the phenomena of self-deception without resorting to the unconscious – though of course existential psychoanalysis does not deny that there is a personal history that provokes one to adopt one strategy or the other. The strategies themselves, however, are not from a Sartrean perspective unconscious processes but ways of fleeing the truth of the human condition in one direction or the other.

“Purifying reflection” and change

Reflective consciousness is not, however, something to be avoided in favour of an impulsive spontaneity. Indeed, reflection cannot be avoided. Sartre describes a certain kind of reflectivity that actually reveals to us our freedom. So far we have discussed reflectivity only on the plane of what Sartre calls accessory or impure reflection. It is “impure” because it is contaminated with the desire to make myself an object. Yet there are two other forms of reflection that Sartre discusses briefly in Being and Nothingness. They are pure reflection and purifying reflection. It is these forms of reflection that can lead a person to recognize the image of himself “as if he were seeing himself in a mirror” (BN1: 573; BN2: 594) – and thereby make a new choice of a way of being in the world. This indeed is the aim of psychoanalysis, Sartrean or Freudian, according to Sartre.

Pure reflection, which Sartre describes as the “simple presence” of the consciousness reflecting to the consciousness reflected on (BN1: 155; BN2: 177), is both “the original form of reflection and its ideal form”. It is the original form since without it no other forms could exist. It is the ideal form because it does not try to create an object self. The impassable gulf between reflective and pre-reflective consciousness does not disappear, but it is not contaminated by the motive to construct an object self. Purifying reflection goes a step further. It allows us to grasp all of those reflective distortions, with their roots in childhood, that keep us entangled in the structures of bad faith that form the neurosis. Sartre says that the nothingness that consciousness is cannot be known to pre-reflective consciousness nor grasped as a psychic object by impure reflection, but that it “is accessible only to the purifying reflection” (BN1: 199; BN2: 222).

Sartre associates purifying reflection with play (BN1: 582; BN2: 602). He says that “play as contrasted with the spirit of seriousness appears to be the least the possessive attitude” (BN1: 580; BN2: 601). The spirit of seriousness, of course, is that materialist deterministic bad faith position in which I claim to be an object rather than a subject. Play, on the other hand, allows for a lightness rather than a heaviness of being. Sartre says that play is able to “make manifest and to present … the absolute freedom which is the very being of the person” (BN1: 581; BN2: 601). Hence, as I have suggested elsewhere, it might be appropriate to describe the antidote to the spirit of seriousness as the spirit of play (Cannon 2009, 2011, forthcoming). Indeed it might be appropriate to describe existential psychoanalysis itself, as D. W. Winnicott ([1971] 1985: 38) describes psychoanalysis, as “two people playing together” – or, where one of them (hopefully the analysand) is unable to play, learning to play together. The analysand would thereby be able to escape from the constraints of the “serious world” and to create something that is not a mere repetition of the past, but something irreducibly new.

Purifying reflection, in conjunction with play, can therefore be said to create a space for radical change in therapy. It can lead to the appearance of one of those psychological instants that Sartre says “furnish the clearest and most moving image of our freedom” (BN1: 476; BN2: 498). They are moments of “double nothingness” (BN1: 435; BN2: 457), where past and present, self and world, change together as I move towards the future in a new way. Often they are accompanied by feelings of anxiety as well as lightness and playfulness. The anxiety that arises at such moments is not neurotic anxiety about the “return of the repressed”. It is instead existential anxiety about the encounter with nothingness, with one’s freedom. The existential psychoanalyst, in moving toward the “cure”, will be careful to encourage the client not simply to move from one sense of a solidified self to another. Rather she will keep in mind Sartre’s idea that the “principal result” of existential psychoanalysis must be to make us “repudiate the spirit of seriousness” (BN1: 626; BN2: 646). Its task is to allow us to move to a place where we take freedom itself, our own and that of others, as value.

Freud’s method, which Sartre says is “better than its principles” (BN1: 573; BN2: 594), may actually encourage purifying reflection. The fundamental rule and evenly hovering attention may create the space for a person to engage in purifying reflection by setting aside the demands of everyday reality and the motive to appear in a certain way in favour of a simple curiosity about what is going on (see Thompson 1994a, 1994b for an existential perspective on Freud’s technique). Sartre, in fact, notes that Freudian psychoanalysis “is often in sight of an existential discovery, but it always stops part way” (BN1: 573; BN2: 594). Certainly that sense of gut-level recognition that the analysand experiences when the analysis has reached a certain point and the analysand feels he is seeing himself clearly as if reflected in a mirror is an existential discovery. This experience is no mere intellectual reconstruction. Sartre says that the analysand does not merely agree to a hypothesis. Instead he experiences its truth: “he touches it, he sees what it is” (BN1: 574; BN2: 595). The analyst finds the “involuntary testimony of the subject” to be “precious” since he can now “pass on from the investigation proper to the cure” (BN1: 573; BN2: 594).

Where Freudian psychoanalysis falls short is not so much in its method as in providing principles that might explain what has happened. Sartre says that the experience of the analysand cannot be explained in terms of unconscious material becoming conscious. If the complex were really unconscious, if it existed in a realm apart from consciousness, the analysand could not recognize it. Instead the “enlightenment” of the subject “is truly understandable only if the subject has never ceased being conscious of his deep tendencies; better yet, only if these drives are not distinguished from his conscious self”. In other words, the analysand’s experience only makes sense if “the traditional psychoanalytic interpretation does not cause him to attain consciousness of what he is; it causes him to attain knowledge of what he is” (BN1: 574; BN2: 595). It only makes sense if the analysand is able to articulate on the reflective level what he had previously only experienced pre-reflectively.

Sartre and contemporary psychoanalysis

I have discussed the implications of Sartre’s philosophy for post-Freudian psychoanalysis up to 1991, when Sartre and Psychoanalysis was published (Cannon 1991). There I suggest that Sartre’s ideas about the look of the other and the importance of relationship explain better than Freudian drive theory the relational and mirroring needs of infancy and early childhood discovered by many of the post-Freudians. I think the revolution in psychoanalytic metatheory has only accelerated since then. Contemporary relational, intersubjective, and interpersonal psychoanalysts have continued the abandonment of Freudian drive theory that had begun with the analysts discussed in Sartre and Psychoanalysis. In doing so, they have developed an even stronger relational emphasis (see Mitchell 2000). Following Daniel Stern (1985), many dismiss Freud’s idea of “objectless primary narcissism” – noting that research shows infants to be relational from the beginning of life. Many also criticize the hierarchical nature of the classical analytic relationship along lines similar to Sartre’s criticism, insisting that analysis must be a “two-person” venture.

Some contemporary psychoanalysts consider the unconscious itself to be “relational” (see especially Bromberg 2006, 2011). If they mean by this that there is a nonverbal bodily lived connection between analyst and analysand that must be explored, then Sartre would agree with the idea if not with the terminology. Indeed many contemporary analysts are now attending to the nonverbal aspects of analysis, to “implicit” as well as “explicit” knowing (including interpersonal knowing), to the body and the intuitive “right brain” as well as the rational “left brain”, as important sources of analytic information and as important to understanding how analysis “cures”. Researchers are even comparing “pre-reflective” interactions between mothers and infants with similar interactions in analysis (see Beebee et al. 2005). There is also an emphasis on spontaneity and novelty in the analytic interaction. One thinks of Philip Bromberg’s emphasis on the importance of “surprise” and “novelty” and of Daniel Stern’s (2004) “now moments”, which remind one of Sartre’s psychological instants. On the other hand, contemporary analysts sometimes mix levels of discourse, conflating biological body-brain language with the language of experience, in a way that Sartre would have objected to. Sartre, for example, would object to the idea of “right brains communicating with right brains” (Schore 2011). As he and R. D. Laing ([1959] 1979) after him insist, we do not experience brain structures but people communicating – albeit with the brain as an underlying substratum to consciousness.

Some contemporary analysts actually go beyond Cartesian dualism to develop a rapprochement with phenomenology and existentialism. They are beginning to refer to their work as “post-Cartesian psychoanalysis” (Stolorow 2011). Among these are Robert Stolorow and George Atwood, who we find discussing such things as the “pre-reflective unconscious” (Stolorow & Atwood 1992). According to my understanding, what they have in mind is something very close to Sartre’s idea of pre-reflective consciousness. Donnell Stern’s (2003) idea of the unconscious as “unformulated experience” and Christopher Bollas’s (1987) conceptualization of the “unthought known” also remind us of Sartre’s idea of pre-reflective experience. Certainly Roy Schafer’s (1976) “action language,” influenced by the work of Sartre, had long attempted to restore agency to the “unconscious”. Yet the continued use of the word “unconscious” for “nonverbal” seems to me to be problematic in all these writers, especially since most of the bodily lived experience being described has little to do with the dynamic unconscious of Freud. It is actually pre-reflective in Sartre’s sense: It is bodily lived and experienced, personally and interpersonally, but not conceptually or reflectively known.

Sartrean existential psychoanalysis has not yet found its Freud. No current psychoanalyst has used Sartre’s philosophy to develop a systematic approach. Indeed no one since Laing has done so. With the exception of Roy Schafer, Roger Frie (1997) and myself, few have taken Sartre’s work on existential psychoanalysis seriously. Current psychoanalysts interested in phenomenology and existentialism, like Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss before them, have been more often drawn to Heidegger than to Sartre. This group includes Robert Stolorow and M. Guy Thompson. Although I have developed a psychodynamically oriented approach based on the work of Sartre, it is not pure psychoanalysis. Applied existential psychotherapy (AEP) is instead a synthesis of existential and psychoanalytic insights with interventions drawn from Gestalt therapy, body-oriented psychotherapy, and other experiential approaches.

Sartre’s work nonetheless appears to be fertile with insights and suggestions that could be useful to psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy today – along with other forms of depth therapy.