Sartre and

Psychoanalysis
An Existentialist Challenge
to Clinical Metatheory

Betty Cannon

University Press of Kansas

 For Hazel E. Barnes
Teacher and Friend

© 1991 by the University Press of Kansas

All rights reserved

Published by the University Press of Kansas (Lawrence, Kansas 66045), which was organized by
the Kansas Board of Regents and is operated and funded by Emporia State University, Fort
Hays State University, Kansas State University, Pittsburg State University, the University of
Kansas, and Wichita State University

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cannon, Betty.
Sartre and psychoanalysis : an existentialist challenge to
clinical metatheory / Betty Cannon.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographicalreferencesand index.
ISBN 07006-0445-6
I. Psychoanalysis. 2. Sartre, Jean Paul, 1905-1980.
3. Existential psychotherapy. I. Title.
RC506.C29 1991
6i6.89'i7—dc20 9012993
CIP

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimumrequirementsof the American National
Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials 739.48-1984.
Contents

Preface ix

Abbreviations Used in Citing Sartre's Works xviii

1 Introduction I

2 Sartre versus Freud: Two Approaches to Metapsychology 16

The Nature of the Dispute 16

Similarities and Differences between Freudian and Existential
Psychoanalysis 18
Freudian Metapsychology: Psychobiological and
Neurophysiological Forces 25
Sartrean Metapsychology: Consciousness as the Pursuit of Value 35
The Implications for Psychotherapy 51

3 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Drive Theorists: A Crisis in

Psychoanalytic Metatheory 61

The Nature of the Crisis 61

The Discovery of New Relational Needs by Post-Freudian Drive
Theorists 66
Sartre's View of the Other as Subject and Object 80
A Sartrean Perspective on Developmental Theory IOI
The Implications for Psychotherapy 112
vi Contents

4 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Relational Theorists: Toward a

Psychoanalytic Theory of the Self Il8

What Is the Self? 118

Relations with Others and the Creation of a "Self": Three
Post-Freudian Views 124
Sartre's Concept of the Self 139
"Pure Reflection": A Sartrean Approach to the Self in
Psychotherapy 148
The Implications for Psychotherapy 156

5 Sartre's Later Philosophy and the Sociomaterial World: A New

Dimension for Existential Psychoanalysis 162

The Sartrean Dialectic and Existentialist Therapy 162

Praxis, Need/Desire, and Sartrean Developmental Theory YJO
The Practico-Inert: Serial Alterity and Negative Reciprocity as
Issues for Existentialist Therapy 182
The Regulatory Third Party, Fraternity-Terror, and the Family as
Group Praxis 205
Conclusion 221

6 A Challenge to Existential Psychoanalysis: Ego, Mirror, and

Aggressivity in Sartre and Lacan 223

Introduction 223
Hegelian Themes in Sartre and Lacan 227
Ego, Mirror, and Inter subjectivity in Sartre and Lacan 236
The Sartrean Ego: Possibilities for Transformation 240
Image, Reality, and "Normality" in Sartre and Lacan 246
Conclusion 254

7 Sartre and Lacan on the Nature of Language: Existentialist versus

Structuralist Metatheory 255

The Structuralist Challenge to Existentialism 255

Language and Desire: A Lacanian Revision of Freudian
Metatheory 260
A Sartrean Reply: Language as Practico-Inert 273
Conclusion 286
 Contents vii

8 Clinical Implications: Sartrean Revolutionary Praxis versus

Lacanian Amor Fad 289
Introduction 289
Lacanian Analysis: Transformation or Amor Fatil 290
A Sartrean Critique of Lacanian Analysis 301
Conclusion 311

9 Conclusion: Toward a Sartrean Clinical Practice 314

Sartrean Metatheory and the Practice of Psychotherapy 314
A Sartrean Case History: Martha the "Marvelous Mirror" 325
Some Directions for Future Inquiry 351

Notes 361

Bibliography 373

Index 383
Preface

A preface seems to be the appropriate place to share with the reader my rea­
sons for writing this book, together with my decisions about certain practi­
cal issues which necessarily arise from an interdisciplinary endeavor of this
nature. The latter include choices about inclusion and exclusion of theo­
rists, usage of philosophical and/or psychological terminology, inclusion of
secondary sources, and determination of appropriate scope.
First of all, why did I write a book on Sartre and psychoanalysis? The
book primarily derives from my own experience as a psychotherapist com­
bined with my interest both in psychoanalysis and in Sartre. As a therapist
originally trained in humanistic psychology, I found myself more and more
interested both in Freud and in the post-Freudian theorists who discuss rela­
tional needs deriving from early childhood. It seemed to me that among
contemporary psychological approaches, only psychoanalysis provided a
comprehensive theory of the origins of human misery; but at the same time,
traditional psychoanalytic metatheory was somehow always strangely dis­
turbing to me. It appeared to me that it left out something important or that
it ever so slightly distorted even its most accurate clinical insights.
Perhaps my prior interest in existentialist philosophy, especially the phi­
losophy of Sartre, influenced my dislike of Freudian determinism and Freud­
ian metatheory. In any case, I constantly found myself translating the writ­
ings of Freud and contemporary psychoanalysts into Sartrean terms. I
especially remember listening to a lecture by Otto Kernberg in which he
seemed to be doing his best to describe human actions and meanings with a
psychoanalytic jargon which reduced them to things. To the extent that he
did not succeed, I found that he presented some exciting ideas. Sartre's ideas
about human reality, combined with psychoanalytic emphasis on the power
x Preface

of childhood experiences to influence present human interactions, have

shaped my own approach to clinical practice. In fact, as time goes on, I find
my clients more and more confirming my impression that though Freudian
theory often deals well with the past as ground, it does not adequately ad­
dress the significance of the future as meaning for all human endeavors. It is
in the area of respect for individual freedom and desire to create meaning or
value and of understanding how change occurs that Sartre has been most
helpful to me as a therapist.
Thus I decided to write a book about psychotherapy and philosophy—
specifically about how the ontological (being-oriented) metatheory of Sartre
can more adequately elucidate certain critical contemporary issues in psy­
choanalysis than the psychobiological metatheory of Freud. Obviously, a
metapsychology, or philosophy of mind or experience, based on the assump­
tions of existentialist ontology must be quite different from a metapsychol­
ogy based on the assumptions of positivistic science. My hope was to pin­
point those differences with some exactitude and in doing so to suggest how
Sartre's metatheory can provide solutions to certain contemporary issues
which plague psychoanalysis itself—issues relating to the interpersonal na­
ture of earliest experience and to the importance of the creation of a "self"
noted by many contemporary psychoanalytic theorists. In other words, I
wanted to produce a book which establishes a dialogue between psychoanal­
ysis and existentialist ontology—a dialogue which might lead to a new way
of thinking both about psychotherapy and about the human issues which
are inextricably connected with therapeutic practice.
My first decision involved the inclusion and exclusion of theorists. Obvi­
ously, there must be a comparison of Freud with Sartre. It also seemed clear
that it would be appropriate to exclude the Freudian theorists who estab­
lished new approaches of their own—Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, and Wilhelm
Reich, for instance—despite the intrinsic interest of their work. In addition,
there are a number of radical revisionists whose views are closer to my o w n -
George Klein, Roy Schaffer, Alice Miller, Harold Searles, and R. D. Laing,
for instance. Laing, whom I will mention in passing at various points, has
even attempted to revise Freud using Sartre's ontology. I decided for the
most part to stay with the mainstream theorists for purposes of clarity.
The great wealth of mainstream post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory and
theorists at first seemed both richly tempting and overwhelming. It also
seemed virtually inevitable that I would have to exclude or minimize my dis­
cussion even of some of my own favorite theorists—for example, Erik
Erikson and Edith Jacobson among the ego psychologists, Karen Horney
 Preface xi

and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann among the interpersonal theorists, and

Harry Guntrip among the British object relations theorists. I have also dis­
cussed only in passing certain theorists who are very important to the his­
tory of psychoanalysis—Heinz Hartmann, Rene Spitz, and Anna Freud, for
instance. And I have excluded certain very interesting contemporary ap­
proaches to psychoanalytic theory, such as Arnold ModelPs attempt to inte­
grate object relations and Freudian instinct theory or the work of J. Weiss,
H. Sampson, and their colleagues at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco.
I believe that I have chosen representative theorists from the best-known
post-Freudian psychoanalytic "schools" to illustrate the issues I wish to ad­
dress. The theorists discussed in the first four chapters of the book are for
the most part mainstream psychoanalytic theorists whose own influence is
considerable. The least orthodox of these is Harry Stack Sullivan, and his
impact on mainstream psychoanalytic theory with respect to the treatment
of psychotics has been enormous. Even Heinz Kohut, whose "self-psy­
chology" has caused so much controversy in contemporary American psy­
choanalytic circles, is a past president of both the American Psychoanalytic
Association (APA) and the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA).
The other theorists considered—Melanie Klein, Margaret Mahler, Otto
Kernberg, and D. W. Winnicott—are generally accepted as mainstream post-
Freudian theorists. What is interesting is the extent to which the views of
these seemingly orthodox post-Freudians have taken them, as we shall see,
in directions which ultimately seem more Sartrean than Freudian.
The notable exception which I make to this rule of choosing more or less
mainstream theorists is Jacques Lacan, whose work I consider in Chapters 6
through 8. Although Lacan has often been considered a renegade by ortho­
dox Freudians (Lacan himself considers his views to be the only orthodoxy),
I believed it important to discuss his work in some detail—primarily because
of his enormous influence as a metatheorist who presents an alternative
(structuralist) view to both traditional psychoanalysis and existential psy­
choanalysis. Also, with the exceptions of R. D. Laing and Freud himself, La­
can is the only theorist mentioned in this book with whose views Sartre
himself was familiar. And though Sartre admitted that he did not know La-
can's work well, he was nonetheless quite familiar with the structuralist chal­
lenge to existentialism through the work of his longtime friend and contrib­
utor to Les Temps Modernes, Claude Levi-Strauss. As for Lacan, he certainly
knew Sartre's early philosophy and may even have been influenced by it in
certain respects. Lacan's structuralist challenge seems to me to be the only
serious systematic metatheoretical challenge from within the psychoanalytic
xii Preface

community to either Freudian or existentialist metatheory. In comparing

Sartre with Lacan, I obviously do not accept the verdict of certain contem­
porary critics that existentialism has been rendered intellectually passe by
structuralism—or the concomitant idea that Lacanian structuralist psycho­
analysis is somehow more profound than Sartrean existential psychoanaly­
sis. But I do take Lacan seriously enough to give his work a thorough read­
ing.
My next decisions concerned terminology. I was well aware in making
them that in attempting to bring together two writers as comprehensive as
Freud and Sartre and two disciplines as different as psychoanalysis and phe-
nomenological ontology, I ran the risk of entering a terminological morass
from which there was no exit. My solution was to limit my discussion to the
essential terms, thereby hoping to relieve the reader of undue strain. None­
theless, certain philosophical terms, which are probably less familiar to the
general reader than psychoanalytic terms, were inevitable to an understand­
ing of my subject. I have used them while attempting to provide the reader
with readily accessible definitions and explanations. This problem with phil­
osophical terminology is further compounded by the fact that the later
Sartre introduces a whole new set of terms for his discussions of group inter­
actions and sociomaterial reality.
To avoid the confusion which might arise from a proliferation of terms, I
have restricted myself in the first four chapters largely to the terminology of
Being and Nothingness except where terms from the later philosophy provide
further insight into the ideas being discussed. Then, in the fifth chapter, I
provide a discussion of Sartre's later philosophy, as it adds a new sociomate­
rial dimension to existential psychoanalysis. Having thus introduced the
terminology of the Critique, I continue to use it (together with terms from
Sartre's earlier work) in the next three chapters to develop a comparison/
contrast between existential psychoanalysis and Lacanian structuralist psy­
choanalysis. Throughout this discussion, I maintain that while Sartre's basic
ontology does not change, his later social theory allows an understanding of
an individual's relations with series, groups, and the whole world of worked
matter which was not present in his earlier work.
The terminological difficulties arising from this proliferation of terms are
still further compounded in the later chapters by the fact that Lacan uses
terms previously identified as Sartrean with new meanings. For example, the
"Other" (capitalized) for Sartre is my human counterpart, while for Lacan it
is the linguistic unconscious; the other person in Lacan is the "other" (lower
cased). Similarly, Sartre believes that the "Look" (le regard) which fixes me as
 Preface xiii

an object originates in the Other (person), while Lacan insists that this same
phenomenon (le regard) originates in the Other (linguistic unconscious).
Sometimes the Lacanian Other (the linguistic unconscious) is written as the
"Other(A)"—the grand Other (le grande Autre). To avoid confusion, I follow
Lacan scholar Ellie Ragland-Sullivan in attempting to make consistent use
of this form to designate the linguistic unconscious—except where I am
quoting Lacan himself. Also, following Lacan translators, I refer to the Laca­
nian "Look" as the "gaze." Nonetheless, the realization that Lacan uses cer­
tain Sartrean terms with a twist leads to a discussion of the way in which La­
can may have appropriated—and twisted—Sartrean concepts to his own
ends.
Other terminological difficulties arise from mixing two forms of discourse
in an attempt to talk about psychoanalytic issues from a Sartrean perspec­
tive. For example, should I continue to use Freudian terms such as "transfer­
ence" and "resistance" when they imply Freudian metatheory? What about
the difference between the Freudian "psyche" and Sartrean "consciousness"
as descriptions of human reality? Also, what about the "medical model" on
which not only psychoanalysis but also much of psychotherapy in general is
based?
In answer to the first question, I have decided to use Freudian terms when
there is no comparable Sartrean term, simply because they are familiar to
most readers. But I have been careful to re-explain them from a Sartrean per­
spective. Second, in discussing Freud's view of human reality I refer to the
"psyche," whereas in discussing Sartre's view I refer to "consciousness."
When I am discussing human reality in general, I write "psyche or con­
sciousness" or use some more general term.
As for the medical model, my solution is mixed. I have used the Rogerian
term "client" when I refer to an existentialist perspective and to my own
work as a therapist mainly because that is the term I use in my practice and
because I prefer its nonmedical implications. But I have used "patient" or
"analysand" when I refer to the object of traditional psychoanalytic investi­
gations. When I am referring to both, I have used both terms. I have not
found comparable nonmedical terms for describing psychological distress or
for referring to the successful outcome of therapy—and have therefore spar­
ingly used "psychopathology" (and various Freudian and post-Freudian di­
agnostic categories) and "cure," usually in quotation marks. Sartre himself
uses the latter, but then he also uses "subject" or "analysand" rather than
"client."
I have encountered difficulties even with the terms "psychoanalysis" and
xiv Preface

"psychoanalyst" as they refer respectively to an existentialist and a Freudian

perspective. These difficulties derive neither from Freud nor from Sartre but
from my own perspective as the author of this book. Sartre said of himself
that he was a "fellow traveller" who was sympathetic to but not fully con­
vinced by psychoanalytic theory and practice (BEM, p. 199). Like many con­
temporary therapists influenced by psychoanalysis, I, too, consider myself to
be a "fellow traveller." Hence while I often use interpretation as a technique,
I also use techniques drawn from other therapeutic orientations—especially
from Gestalt therapy and psychodrama, body-oriented psychotherapy, and
Rogerian nondirectional therapy. All of my clinical work, however, is in­
formed by psychoanalytic theory about the origins of psychological difficul­
ties in childhood experience as modified by a Sartrean perspective. As a
result of these contradictions, I feel more comfortable talking about "exis­
tentialist therapy" and the "existentialist therapist" than about "existential
psychoanalysis" and the "existential psychoanalyst"—except where I am
specifically referring to Sartre's own use of these terms. In using either term,
I am, of course, referring to a Sartrean existentialist approach and not to a
therapeutic approach derived from other existentialist philosophers. I be­
lieve these distinctions will be perfectly clear within context.
My third decision concerned secondary sources. There is a wealth of criti­
cal commentary on Sartre, Freud, Lacan, and the various mainstream post-
Freudian psychoanalytic theorists. I thought that to include much of this
material, together with the number of primary sources cited, would be to
blur the lines of the argument with undue complexity. Thus, though I have
learned a great deal from this material, I have limited myself to citing only
those critics whose thinking has significantly influenced my own approach
to a particular topic—for example, I have cited Frank J. Sulloway's (1979) in­
tellectual biography of Freud in the first chapter, Jay R. Greenberg and
Stephen A. Mitchell's (1983) division of post-Freudian theorists into "drive/
structure" and "relational/structure" theorists in the second, and Ellie
Ragland-Sullivan's (1986) excellent explication of Lacan in the sixth through
the eighth. Otherwise, I have attempted to keep references to secondary
sources to a minimum.
The exception to this rule is my liberal quoting from Sartre scholar and
translator Hazel E. Barnes. I believe my use of her work is appropriate for
several reasons. First, it was Hazel Barnes, as a translator and critic, who in­
troduced Sartre as a philosopher to the English-speaking world. Second,
Hazel Barnes's attempt to construct an ethics along Sartrean lines in An Ex-
istentialist Ethics (1967) is similar in some ways to my own attempt to expand
 Preface xv

Sartre's comments on existential psychoanalysis to a full theory. And last

and most important, Hazel Barnes, as a teacher and friend, has over a num­
ber of years had such a pervasive influence on my own work on Sartre that I
am less concerned that I will quote her too frequently than that I will inad­
vertently consider some idea of hers, fully assimilated into my thinking, as
my own. I would not, of course, make her responsible for any difficulties
which the reader may have with this volume.
Finally, there was the issue of scope. I do not consider this book to be an
exhaustive treatment of Sartre's potential influence on psychoanalytic meta-
theory, and it certainly is not a comprehensive treatment of the impact that
a Sartrean perspective might have on clinical practice. Such a comprehen­
sive treatment would have required a book at least several times the size of
this one—and the reader probably considers it long enough as it is. Instead, I
have limited myself to a Sartrean view of what I believe to be some critical is­
sues in Freudian and post-Freudian metatheory. My intention is to present
Sartre's ideas in such a way that therapists already convinced of the value of
depth therapy might find Sartre's insights useful to their work with clients,
as I myself have done. I would also expect that Sartreans would find this en­
deavor interesting. Although a phenomenological or existentialist perspec­
tive on psychotherapy or even occasional applications of Sartre's ideas to
clinical practice are not new, what I believe is new in my approach is a sys­
tematic application of Sartre's ideas to contemporary psychoanalytic issues.
My hope is that this will be the beginning of a serious treatment of Sartre as
a psychoanalytic metatheorist, similar to the treatment of Heidegger by
Ludwig Binswanger, Medard Boss, and others.

In concluding, I would like to thank the many friends and colleagues who
have provided the support and encouragement that provoked me to com­
plete this project amid many more pressing duties and commitments. First
and most important is my friend and teacher Hazel E. Barnes, to whom this
book is dedicated. Seldom has a book owed so much to one person. It was in
working with Hazel Barnes as a graduate student at the University of Colo­
rado that I began to see the relevance of Sartre's philosophy for clinical the­
ory and practice. Those ideas, with Hazel's encouragement, eventually be­
came the core of this book. Her careful reading of the manuscript in all its
stages of completion, her advice on theoretical and practical matters, and
her warm personal interest have proved simply invaluable. I am deeply grate­
ful.
xvi Preface

I would also like to thank my own therapist and teacher, Dr. Laurence
Heller. Although Larry will probably disagree with a great deal of what I
have said about metatheory, I can only reply that it is from him that I have
learned by precept and example much of what I know about the practice of
a humanistically oriented psychotherapy which I have come to regard as ex­
istentialist. In addition, I would like to thank my clients, whose struggles to
be or to let go have engaged me deeply and who have generously agreed to
allow me to tell portions of their stories (slightly altered to prevent identifi­
cation) here. It is from their work with me that many of the insights of this
book derive.
I want also to thank the many friends and colleagues who have read por­
tions or all of this manuscript and who have discussed its ideas with me.
They include (in alphabetical order) Jan Abu Shakrah, Valerie Broin, Ralph
Buultjens, Mike Claussner, Mark Dubin, Marcus Edward, Paulette Feuer,
Haim Gordon, Joanne and Albert Greenberg, Frances Harper, Graham
Hereford, Julia Holloway, Judith Howell, Phyllis Kenevan, Sanford Krolick,
Patricia and Luke Lea, Patrea Mah, Polly Mahoney, Steve Martinot, Bill
Mattingly, Cynthia McLemore, Lee Morey, Bill Reinhardt, Annette Robin­
son, Ze'ev Sabar, Mary Schlesinger, Doris Schwalbe, Marc Weiss, and Elaine
Yarbrough. In addition to dialogue about ideas and personal support, some
of these people deserve thanks for special favors: Joanne Greenberg for her
enthusiastic encouragement and for allowing me to quote our taped conver­
sations in this book; Cindie McLemore and Pat Lea for final proofreading at
a point where I could no longer see errors; and Phyllis Kenevan, Paulette
Feuer, Mary Schlesinger, Cindie McLemore, and Pat Lea for being there in
moments of existential anguish when I began to doubt the value of the
whole enterprise.
I am grateful to Ernest Keen, Joseph Catalano, and Robert Stone for their
very useful professional reviews of the manuscript and their encouraging
written remarks. Robert Stone and Elizabeth Bowman also deserve thanks
for pointing out to me manuscript materials which proved important to my
argument in Chapter 5. I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. William
Philip, for patient listening and wise advice. Thanks also go to the Colorado
School of Mines for much-needed sabbatical and leave time and to the wait-
people in the Harvest Restaurant, where I spent many hours writing, for the
endless cup of tea. In addition, I would like to thank my son, Dylan Can­
non, for his continuing enthusiasm and support for this project.
Finally, two other people deserve special thanks for facilitating the timely
completion of this book. The first is my friend Gloria Riley, who not only
 Preface xvii

spent long hours correcting and preparing the manuscript in its various
stages but who also encouraged, (kindly) nagged, and otherwise provoked its
author to complete it. The other is Michael Briggs, acquisitions editor at
the University Press of Kansas, who is everything an editor should be—
enthusiastic, supportive, demanding, and encouraging. In addition to care-
fully reading and commenting on the manuscript, checking on my progress,
and sending me useful reviews on anything that related to my subject, it was
Mike Briggs who encouraged me to include the chapters dealing with
Jacques Lacan that I now believe are an integral part of my argument for the
power of Sartre's metatheory over existing metapsychological approaches.
Abbreviations Used in Citing
Sartre's Works

B Baudelaire FI The Family Idiot [LIdiot de la

BEM Between Existentialism and famille] (vols. I and 2)
Marxism [Situations VIII and FS The Freud Scenario [Le Scena-
Situations IX] rio Freud]
BN Being and Nothingness [UEtre IF LIdiot de la famille (vol. 3)
et le Neant] L/S Life/Situations [Siiaations X]
C A The Condemned of Altona [Les N Nausea [La Nausee]
Sequestres d'Altona] NE No Exit [Huit clos]
CDR Critique of Dialectical Reason SG Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr
[Critique de la raison dialec- [Saint Genety comedien et mar-
tique] tyr]
DH Dirty Hands [Les Mains sales] SM Search for a Method [Questions
E Existentialism [UExistentialisme de methode]
est un humanisme] TE The Transcendence of the Ego
EOT The Emotions: Outline of a
[La Transcendance de VEgo]
Theory [Esquisse d'une theorie
W The Words [Les Mots]
des emotions]
I ♦ Introduction

This is a book about psychotherapy and philosophy. Specifically, it is an at­

tempt to deal with what I see as a crisis in contemporary psychoanalytic
metatheory by suggesting a change in metatheoretical models. This "crisis,"
which is often obscured by the propensity of psychoanalytic theorists to use
Freudian terminology to gloss over difficulties, arises from the discovery by
post-Freudian psychoanalytic theorists working with severely disturbed pa­
tients and with children of a whole new set of human needs which have
nothing at all to do with Freudian drives. These needs may basically be de­
scribed as consisting of two (interrelated) sets: relational needs for holding,
mirroring, positive regard, and emotional responsiveness and needs for the
development of a coherent and flexible sense of "self." Since the presence of
these needs is not explained by Freudian drive theory and since they are
mostly assumed to exist from earliest infancy, it seems obvious that contem­
porary psychoanalysis requires a more human approach to human reality—
an approach which is not, I submit, provided by the counter position of
Lacanian structuralist psychoanalysis. I believe that Sartre's ontology, en­
riched by the sociomaterial insights of his later philosophy, does provide
that more human approach.
Before describing the structure of this book, however, I think it might be
helpful to define "metatheory" and "ontology" as these terms will be used
here and to discuss my choice of Sartre over other existentialist philosophers
for developing a systematic metapsychology. I will also respond to a number
of questions which people have asked me about the advisability of using
Sartre's philosophy as a basis for this enterprise—questions which seem to
reflect a skepticism which has echoes in critical commentaries as well. Let us
begin with metapsychology. Clinical metatheory or metapsychology refers
2 Chapter One

to those premises beyond validation by empirical observation which provide

a philosophical framework for clinical hypotheses and constructs.
Freud himself considered metapsychology important, noting as late as
1937 that nothing could be achieved without consulting the "Witch Meta­
psychology." Indeed, Freud says, "without metapsychological speculation
and theorizing—I had almost said 'phantasying'— we shall not get another
step forward" (Freud, 1937, p. 225). The economic (drives, permutations of
libido), topographical (conscious, preconscious, unconscious), and struc­
tural (ego, superego, id) hypotheses of Freud, together with his developmen­
tal theory, his ideas about psychodynamic conflicts, and his postulates con­
cerning life and death instincts, are all metatheoretical constructs.
Contemporary psychoanalysts have difficulty particularly with the eco­
nomic hypothesis, so much so that some (see Guntrip, 1971; Schafer, 1976)
have even proposed that drive theory should be superseded by more hu­
manly understandable constructs. Psychoanalytic theorist George Klein
(1976), noting that it is difficult to find empirical tests for Freudian metathe­
ory, suggests eliminating metatheory altogether in favor of a purely clinical
psychoanalytic theory, while G. Pribram and M. Gill (1976) argue that the
metapsychological basis of psychoanalysis is a positive handicap.
What many of these theorists find difficult is the excessively mechanistic
language of Freudian metatheory—a point Bruno Bettelheim (1982) has
taken up by suggesting that the mechanicalness is the result of English trans­
lations and that Freud in the original German is much more humanistic.
Roy Schaffer (1976) has even gone so far as to propose a new "action lan­
guage" to replace the mechanistic terminology of traditional Freudian
metapsychology—a language which would take into account human inten­
tions, meanings, reasons, and subjective experience in a way that Freudian
metatheory ignores. More orthodox Freudians, including many of those dis­
cussed in this volume, still speak the language of the drives, though they of­
ten either argue for specific modifications (see, for example, Modell, 1981) or
use the old language with new meanings'—a point to which I return in later
chapters.
I do not propose to eliminate metatheory since I believe that metatheoreti­
cal assumptions are unavoidable in clinical practice. The question is not
whether one has a metatheory but whether one has done some critical
thinking about the nature of that metatheory and its effects on clinical prac­
tice. Even behaviorism, which purports to reject metapsychology altogether,
is actually a "philosophy of mind" which denies the existence of "mind." As
the materialist side of Cartesian dualism carried to an extreme, it is, as
 Introduction 3

Sartre says, "really only solipsism as a working hypothesis" (BN, p. 229).

Freudian metatheory, by contrast, does not reject mind as such. Indeed, it
glories in the discovery of new regions of the mind, such as the preconscious
and unconscious and the ego, superego, and id.
"Vet at the same time, classical psychoanalysis insists on reducing con­
sciousness to an epiphenomenon of unconscious psychic forces guided by
scientific laws of cause and effect. In doing so, Freudian metatheory looks
behind human experience for explanations which lie outside that experi­
ence. For this reason, I suppose one could say that it is a kind of metaphysi­
cal metapsychology. And, indeed, J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis comment
on the connection between "metapsychology" and "metaphysics" in Freud's
own mind (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973, pp. 249-250). Freud himself de­
fines metapsychology as a scientific endeavor to redress the constructions of
metaphysics, which he sees as similar to superstitious beliefs or paranoiac
delusions, by "transform[ing] metaphysics into metapsychology" (Freud, 1901,
p. 259). One wonders whether Freud has replaced metaphysics with meta­
psychology or merely produced a metaphysical metapsychology which dis­
guises its first principles as scientific positivism.
The alternative, as I see it, is an ontological metapsychology which is
closer to the human experience it attempts to describe. The word "ontol­
ogy," which means simply "philosophy of Being," has itself throughout
most of the history of philosophy been considered synonymous with me­
taphysics or the study of first principles. Ontology, however, came to have a
different meaning in the works of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre,
both of whom were influenced by the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl.
For Heidegger and even more for Sartre, ontology is a description of Being
rather than a study of first principles.
The influence of Husserl on Sartre's phenomenological ontology is deci­
sive. Indeed, a turning point in Sartre's career occurred when Raymond
Aron introduced him to HusserPs philosophy in 1933. According to a well-
known story, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Aron were drinking either
apricot cocktails or beer (Beauvoir says it was the former, Aron the latter) at
the Bee de Gaz in the Rue Montparnasse when Sartre attempted to sketch
for Aron the outline of a novel he was writing. It would later become Nausea
(1938). Aron related the theme of Sartre's novel to his own recent studies in
German philosophy in Berlin, especially his study of Husserl's phenomenol­
ogy. "YDU see, mon petit comarade" he said to Sartre, "if you're a phenome-
nologist, you can talk about this drink and that's philosophy" (Cohen-
Solal, 1985, pp. 90-94; Hayman, 1987, pp. 97-IOI).
4 Chapter One

Sartre could not hide his enthusiasm for a philosophy which would by­
pass the familiar opposition between idealism and realism for a concrete re­
lationship between consciousness and the world. For the next several years,
he would make a thorough study first of Husserl and then of Heidegger-
taking Aron's place at the French Institute in Berlin for the following year.
Sartre would later say that "Husserl reinstituted the horror and the charm
of things. He has restored to us the world of artists and prophets" (quoted by
Collins, 1980, p. 12). The phenomenology which Sartre thereafter embraced
assumes a partnership between consciousness and the world—a partnership
in which consciousness is always "intentional" in the sense that it is always
consciousness of some real, remembered, or imagined event. Indeed, Sartre
would carry this idea further than Husserl, denying the existence even of a
transcendental ego or of the possibility of withdrawal from the world or
bracketing of one's intentionality (epoche) in order to study one's own sub­
jective processes. For Sartre, one's "fundamental project" or choice of a way
of being must be grasped in the midst of living and connecting with the
world and not in some state apart—though, as we shall see in a later chapter,
Sartre himself recommends a special state of mind (pure reflection) for a
more accurate comprehension of one's own motives and actions.
Thus Sartre acknowledges his connection with the tradition of Husserl
and Heidegger when, in the subtitle to Being and Nothingness, he refers to his
own philosophy as "phenomenological ontology." Sartre's ontology differs
from metaphysics in that it is an attempt not to describe the first principles
behind Being, but Being itself, including those aspects of Being which are
human being. As Joseph S. Catalano notes, Sartre, even more than Heideg­
ger, "distinguishes ontology from metaphysics." For Sartre, metaphysics "is
concerned with the question of why there is anything rather than nothing,"
whereas Sartre "claims that he is interested only in the fundamental descrip­
tions of being, and not in speculations about its origins—although . . . he
occasionally indulges in such speculations" (Catalano, 1974, p. 15).
Sartre's ontology would seem to be well suited to the demands of clinical
metatheory since it opts for what psychologists refer to as "experience-near"
descriptions rather than the "experience-distant" explanations of Freudian
metatheory, which are making even contemporary psychoanalysts uncom­
fortable. At the same time that Sartre's ontology is more human, however, it
is also a theory of Being and not mere empirical description—which means
that it allows for an understanding of the meaning and significance of
actions and symptoms rather than a simple cataloguing of events. It remains
 Introduction 5

to be seen whether it elucidates the clinical facts of depth therapy better

than Freudian metatheory, although I maintain that it does.
The question now arises as to why I chose Sartre as the basis for this study
rather than another existentialist philosopher or a combination of existen­
tialist philosophers, who might also be expected to produce experience-near
descriptions of human dilemmas. After all, have I not already said that
Sartre was heavily influenced by Husserl and Heidegger? And have Husserl
and Heidegger, along with other existentialist philosophers, not already
been richly mined for their psychological insights? Certainly, the Daseins-
analysts (named for Heidegger's description of human reality as Dasein, or
"being there"), especially Ludwig Binswanger (1963) and Medard Boss (1957,
1963), have already attempted a systematic rethinking of psychoanalysis
along Heideggerian lines—a rethinking which first became influential in the
English-speaking world through the wide dissemination of translations of
Binswanger's work and the work of other European existential/phenom-
enological analysts in Rollo May, Ernest Angel, and Henri E Ellenberger's
epochal edition, Existence (1958). Certainly, there has also been a rich min­
ing of Husserl for psychological insights, especially among the phenomeno-
logical psychologists at Duquesne University; a particularly ambitious work
is Joseph Kockelmans's Edmund HusserVs Phenomenological Psychology (1967).
Furthermore, many existentially oriented psychologists and psychothera­
pists have been satisfied with a more eclectic approach, preferring to glean
insights from a number of existentialist philosophers rather than to stay
with the ideas of only one thinker. For example, J. H. Van den Berg's excel­
lent (and somewhat neglected) book, The Phenomenological Approach to Psy-
chiatry (1955), blends the ideas of Husserl, Sartre, and others in a sensitive
application of existentialist ideas to clinical practice. Adrian Van Kaam's Ex-
istential Foundations of Psychology (1969) also blends sources in an existential­
ist reevaluation of psychological theory. J. H. Bugental's The Search for Au~
thenticity (1965) applies existentialist insights to the contingencies of human
existence as these relate to anxiety. Ernest Keen's Three Faces of Being (1970)
presents an extremely interesting application of existentialist insights drawn
from a number of sources to clinical issues centering around the Sartrean-
Heideggerian themes of Being-in-the-world, Being-for-myself, and Being-for-
others.
M. Guy Thompson's The Death of Desire (1985) presents a challenging dis­
cussion of the impact of phenomenology/existentialism on psychotherapy;
he takes a more optimistic view than I do of the reconcilability of Lacanian
structuralist psychoanalysis with phenomenological/existentialist ap-
6 Chapter One

proaches. Irvin D. Yalom's Existential Psychotherapy (1980) is likewise an excel­

lent treatment of the impact of existentialist themes such as death, freedom,
isolation, and the search for meaning on the conduct of psychotherapy,
while his most recent book, Love's Executioner (1989), is a moving personal
account of the existential dilemmas which face therapist and patient alike.
In addition, there is the "logotherapy" of Viktor Frankl (1955, 1959, 1967,
1969), who considers the center of psychic life—and the source of psy-
chopathology—to be the search for meaning (or its absence).
This array of theorists/practitioners would suggest that since Rollo May
(1950,1953; May, Angel, and Ellenberger, 1958) introduced existentialist psy­
chology to the English-speaking world in the 1950s, existentially oriented
psychotherapy has not lacked its adherents. May, who in his eclecticism
tends to be less favorable to Sartre than to other existentialist philosophers,
continues to have an enormous influence on the movement (see May, 1983).
And the Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, which recently pro­
duced volumes on Sartre and Heidegger, continues to provide a forum for
writers on existentialist psychology and psychotherapy. This book obviously
fits into that context. Indeed, I doubt that I would feel the need to justify it
if so many people, hearing about the plan for the book, had not asked me
the question, "Why Sartre?" Before addressing where I think these people's
doubts are really coming from, I would like to counter with another ques­
tion, "Why not Sartre?" For some time, I have considered a systematic appli­
cation of Sartre's ideas to clinical theory and practice to be long overdue.
Let me explain. Evidence suggests that Sartre, more than any other exis­
tentialist philosopher (with the possible exception of Karl Jaspers), has dem­
onstrated a deep and continuing interest both in psychological theory in
general and in psychoanalysis in particular. Indeed, Sartre's student, jour­
nalistic colleague, and friend, the eminent French psychoanalyst J.-B. Ponta-
lis, suggests that one day the "history of Sartre's thirty-year-long [forty-year
long by the time of Sartre's death in 1980] relationship with psychoanalysis,
an ambiguous mixture of equally deep attraction and repulsion, will have to
be written and perhaps his work reinterpreted in the light of it" (Pontalis in
BEM, p. 220). In this book, I propose instead to use Sartre as a basis for rein­
terpreting psychoanalysis. And although Sartre himself never underwent
psychoanalysis, he became interested enough in the process during the pe­
riod when he was writing his autobiography and trying to understand his
dreams to suggest that Pontalis analyze him. In light of their long friendship,
Pontalis very wisely refused (Pontalis in FS, p. xv; Hay man, 1987, pp. 393-
94; Cohen-Solal, 1985, p. 443).
 Introduction 7

Sartre's own writing on psychological themes began with his thesis at the
University of Paris in 1927, which was entitled Ulmage dans la vie psycholo-
gique, Role et nature; it was later published in revised form as the first part of
Imagination (1936). This was followed by two classical philosophical/psycho­
logical treatises, The Emotions: Outline of a Theory (1939) and The Psychology
of Imagination (1940). In addition, Sartre's first major philosophical work,
The Transcendence of the Ego (1937), is at least as significant psychologically as
it is philosophically. Sartre also devotes a section of his philosophical mas­
terpiece, Being and Nothingness (1943), to the development of major premises
for an "existential psychoanalysis" (BN, pp. 557—75)—and, indeed, the
whole work, as we shall see, has psychological as well as philosophical signif­
icance. Furthermore, Sartre was interested in applying his theoretical con­
structs to individual lives. In addition to the omnipresence of psychological
dilemmas in Sartre's fiction and plays, there are the psychobiographies—
subtle and increasingly penetrating studies of the lives of Baudelaire, Genet,
and Flaubert, together with other less-lengthy pieces. Sartre's autobiogra­
phy, The Words (1963), demonstrates the premises of existential psychoanaly­
sis as applied to Sartre's own life.
Actually, not even death has silenced Sartre's voice as a psychobiographer
who was deeply interested in psychoanalysis. In 1984, Pontalis brought out
an edition of two versions (originally over eight hundred pages) of a screen­
play on Freud's life which Sartre had written for John Huston in 1958 and
1959. Although the film starring Montgomery Clift contains little of Sartre's
original dialogue and little of his brilliance, and although Sartre eventually
had his name removed from the credits, The Freud Scenario may now be
judged to contain some of Sartre's finest writing. It is also amazingly sympa­
thetic to Freud. Despite Sartre's own assertion in an interview with Michel
Rybalka that Huston had picked the wrong man for the job "because one
shouldn't choose someone who doesn't believe in the unconscious to do a
film to the glory of Freud" (Sartre in Schilpp, 1981, p. 12), there is no ques­
tion that Sartre took the project seriously.
To prepare himself to write the screenplay, Sartre reread Studies on Hysteria
and The Interpretation of Dreams and read Freud's Autobiography, the Freud-
Fleiss correspondence (which had just been discovered two years earlier),
commentaries on and critical works about Freud, and the newly translated
first volume of Ernest Jones's biography of Freud. He also had Michelle
Vian laboriously translate aloud, line by line, the other Jones volumes
(Cohen-Solal, 1985, pp. 384-87; Hayman, 1987, pp. 351-61; Pontalis in pref­
ace to FS). This renewed interest in Freud, I believe, accounts in part for the
8 Chapter One

depth of Sartre's own analysis of Flaubert's hysterico-epilepsy and for the

strength of his insistence, in Search for a Method, that only psychoanalysis
can provide the entrance into the world of childhood which is a necessary
cornerstone for any viable social science theory.
I do not mean to imply, however, that Sartre was converted to orthodox
Freudianism through writing The Freud Scenario—as Hayman wrongly con­
tends in his biography (1987, pp. 352-53). As Hazel Barnes (1989) has
pointed out, much of the action of Sartre's film script can be interpreted in
two ways—according to Sartre's theory of bad faith and Freud's theory of
the unconscious. Furthermore, Sartre himself says in the interview with Ry-
balka that although he had through the years gone "deeper into the doc­
trine of Freud," he was nonetheless "always separated from him . . . because
of his idea of the unconscious" (Sartre in Schilpp, 1981, p. 12).
The truth is that Sartre's deep interest in psychological issues had led him
to produce a philosophy that had always been pro as well as contra Freud.
Those differences are perhaps encapsulated in the following passage:

I must add [to Sartre's statement that Cartesian rationalism had mis­
takenly dampened his earlier enthusiasm for Freud] that I remain
shocked by what was inevitable in Freud—the biological and physiolog­
ical language with which he underpinned thoughts. . . . Right up to the
time of Fleiss, as you know, he wrote physiological studies designed to
provide an equivalent of the cathexes and equilibria he had found in
psychoanalysis. The result is that the manner in which he describes the
psychoanalytic object suffers from a kind of mechanistic cramp. This is
not always true, for there are moments when he transcended this. But
in general this language produces a mythology of the unconscious which
I cannot accept. I am completely in agreement with the facts of disguise
and repression, as facts. But the words 'repression,' 'censorship,' or
'drive'—words which express at one moment a sort of finalism and the
next moment a sort of mechanism, these I reject. (BEM, p. 37)

Sartre, in other words, rejects Freudian metatheory.

Furthermore, Sartre believes that the mechanistic, authoritarian ap­
proach of psychoanalysis, in which the analyst is only subject and the anal­
ysand perpetual object, is mistaken. This idea of pushing for a more egalitar­
ian model for psychoanalysis on one occasion led Sartre to create trouble on
the editorial board of Les Temps Modernes. In 1969, an analysand presented
Sartre with a tape-recorded version of a session with his analyst in which
 Introduction 9

the presence of the tape recorder appeared to turn the tables in the subject-
object dichotomy. Sartre insisted on publishing the transcript of this ses­
sion, along with his own commentary and that of his dissenting board mem­
bers, Pontalis and B. Pingaud. Although Pontalis (BEM, p. 220) may have
been correct in thinking that Sartre's response indicates a failure to fully un­
derstand the clinical intricacies of psychoanalysis, I believe that it does
illustrate an important difference between existential and Freudian psycho­
analysis. Existential psychoanalysis finds that it must be alert to new inter­
personal issues in the therapeutic relationship, issues deriving from the
subject-object alternation which has been of key significance in Sartre's un­
derstanding of human relations—a point to which I return in later chapters.
Here, I suppose, it would be well to address directly the skepticism of the
people who have questioned me about my choice of Sartre's philosophy as a
basis for clinical metatheory. I believe these doubts spring from certain pop­
ular (and critical) misconceptions about Sartre's philosophy—miscon­
ceptions which are in some instances fueled by Sartre's own statements.
Aside from the extent to which Sartre's interest in psychoanalysis and psy­
chological issues in general is sometimes underrated, Sartre has often been
regarded as a rationalist voluntarist (see, for example, Murdoch, 1953) whose
rejection of the Freudian unconscious would make any depth therapy im­
possible. Perhaps it is for this reason that even a partially sympathetic critic
such as Rollo May regards Sartre's philosophy as not being "the most useful
introduction to the [existentialist] movement" because it represents "a sub-
jectivist extreme" (1983, p. 49).
Furthermore, Sartre's views on human relations and the human condition
in general have often been regarded as unduly pessimistic. The interpersonal
relations described in Being and Nothingness are all conflictual, no-win situa­
tions, leading to the impression that Garcin's pronouncement toward the
end of No Exit is indeed the view of the play's author. Garcin says, "Hell is
other people" (NE, p. 41). As for the human condition, Roquentin's realiza­
tions in Sartre's novel Nausea that his fundamental response to his own
bodily existence is one of nausea and that pure being without the addition
of human meaning and purpose is senseless and absurd have been taken as
indications that Sartre's brand of existentialism is unduly dark and nihilis­
tic.
Indeed, some critics have gone even further to suggest that Sartre's philos­
ophy itself is the production of a sick mind. Douglas Kirsner, for example, in
The Schizoid World of Jean-Paul Sartre and R. D. Laing (1977), argues that the
worldview shared by Sartre and Laing is best described as "schizoid," while
10 Chapter One

James Masterson, in his book The Real Self, labels Sartre a "narcissistic per­
sonality disorder" (1985, pp. 125-28). How, my critics want to know, can
such a dark or even pathological philosophy have anything positive to con­
tribute to the practice of psychotherapy? Furthermore, my more persistent
questioners ask, what about Sartre's later conversion to Marxism? Does not
the collective struggle advocated by Marxism invalidate an individualist dis­
cipline such as psychoanalysis? And what about the idea that existentialism
is passe? Would it not be more valuable or at least more fashionable to inves­
tigate the views of structuralist psychoanalysis, as presented by Jacques La-
can?
I am not overwhelmed by these objections. First of all, it seems to me that
the critics who label Sartre a rationalist voluntarist or a subjectivist demon­
strate an intrinsic misunderstanding of his ontology. Although Sartre him­
self has suggested in later interviews that his earlier philosophy is too indi­
vidualistic and too much under the domination of Cartesian rationalism, I
believe that he is really talking about emphasis and examples. Clearly, the
earlier Sartre did not understand as well as the later Sartre the significance
of sociomaterial constraints and class struggle for the simple reason that he
had yet to evolve the political awareness and intellectual tools for under­
standing these things. Nor, perhaps, did the earlier Sartre give enough credit
to the elusiveness of what he came to refer to as le vecu, or lived experience, a
concept which he later proposed as a substitute for the Freudian uncon­
scious. "fet even though lived experience represents a "host of complex in­
tentions" which are full of a richness they do not usually yield, Sartre con­
tinues to reject the idea that le vecu is either unconscious or on principle
unavailable to reflective understanding. He merely concedes that it is not
usually understood (Sartre in Schilpp, 1981, pp. 22-23).
This position is not a contradiction of Sartre's earlier philosophy, since
Sartre had always maintained that there is an unsurpassable gulf between
spontaneous lived experience and reflective understanding, between the
consciousness reflecting and the (past) consciousness reflected on. It is this
gulf, along with "bad faith" or lying to myself about the nature of reality,
which helps to explain the strange phenomenon of my "willing" to do one
thing on a reflective level while making another choice entirely on the non-
reflective level. Obviously, this is not simplistic voluntarism, and, indeed,
these two concepts of reflective/spontaneous consciousness and bad faith
(as we shall see in the next chapter) will go a long way toward explaining
many of the phenomena which Freud proposes as evidence of unconscious
processes.
 Introduction II

As for Sartre's own criticism of the overly rationalist strain in his earlier
philosophy, I think that Sartre means that he had not earlier appreciated
the extent to which an individual, in relating to the world, is impressed by
early familial interactions and sociomaterial constraints. On the purely phil­
osophical level, however, Sartre has never been a rationalist. Indeed, the
choice of a rational, emotional, or imaginative relationship with the world
has always been conceived by him to be prerational. Nor was Sartre ever the
extreme subjectivist that May characterizes him as being. Consciousness, for
Sartre, as I already said, is always consciousness of objects in the world.
The criticism that Sartre's earlier philosophy is unduly pessimistic, espe­
cially with respect to its description of human relationships, is perhaps more
justified by Sartre's own statements. After all, what could be more pessimis­
tic than Sartre's pronouncement, after describing the ontological purpose of
human beings as the creation of an (impossible) substantive freedom, that
"man is a useless passion" (BN, p. 615)? O n the other hand, I think we
should note that Sartre answers the charge that existentialism is nihilistic
and pessimistic in his popular essay (originally presented as a public lecture),
Existentialism (1946). There Sartre argues that although existentialism would
embrace such negative terms as "anguish," "forlornness," and "despair," it
would do so only to give them a new meaning in a philosophy which is not
in the least pessimistic. Indeed, Sartre declares that "there is no doctrine
more optimistic, since man's destiny is within himself (E, p. 42).
Anguish, Sartre says, refers to the recognition that one is free without
excuse—that one defines by one's own life what it means to be human. For­
lornness refers to the realization that one is alone in a universe without di­
vinely (or otherwise) ordained a priori values—a universe in which one is re­
sponsible for creating value and meaning. Despair refers to the realization
that although one must continue to act, one cannot always control the con­
sequences of one's actions, that the world will make of them what it will. All
of this amounts to "an optimistic toughness" (E, p. 40) which places squarely
on the shoulders of the individual the responsibility to make meaning and
value while insisting that the individual is free to do so. Seen in this light, Ro-
quentin's horrific ecstacy in Nausea loses its nihilistic implications. Roquen-
tin simply has learned through a gut-level experience that pure contingent
being (represented by his encounter with the chestnut tree) has no meaning
which has not been placed there by the projection of a human future.
As for the pessimistic implications of Sartre's account of human relations,
I must begin by saying that I think these descriptions are among Sartre's
greatest contributions to existentialist psychological theory, provided they
12 Chapter One

are not taken as the whole of what is possible in human relations. Indeed, it
is the application of his ontology to the description of conflicted human re­
lationships and his description of the nature and possibilities for such relat­
ing which, to my way of thinking, make Sartre's philosophy more immedi­
ately applicable to the consulting room than, say, the philosophy of
Heidegger.
I am aware, of course, that apologists for Heidegger have criticized Sartre
for this very thing—for the concreteness with which he spells out the impli­
cations of his ontology. The argument goes that whereas Heidegger is a true
ontologist, or philosopher of Being, Sartre operates only on the ontic level,
that of concrete beings. It seems to me that this criticism is unfair since, de­
spite Sartre's indebtedness to Heidegger, he has far greater talents for spell­
ing out the connections between ontological concepts and concrete applica­
tions than Heidegger. This difference is perhaps especially striking in
Sartre's description of human relationships. Dissatisfied with Heidegger's
vague designation of interpersonal relations as the Mitsein or "being with,"
Sartre sought to provide an ontological explanation of the perpetual pres­
ence of human conflicts—an explanation I present in detail in Chapter 3.
Yet although I believe that Sartre's description of human conflicts in the
section of Being and Nothingness entitled "Concrete Relations with Others"
(BN, pp. 361-430) is among his most brilliant contributions to psychology, I
will acknowledge that Sartre does give the impression there that human re­
lations are to be understood entirely in terms of a sadomasochistic power
struggle which arises from a conflict over who gets to be subject and who ob­
ject in a particular relationship. On the other hand, from an elusive foot­
note in which Sartre asserts the possibility of salvation from the sadomaso­
chistic circle through a "radical conversion which we cannot discuss here"
(BN, p. 412) and from the general implications of Sartre's ontology, one gets
the impression that this is not the whole story about human relationships.
But Sartre does not elaborate on this. Later, he would declare that all of the
relations described in "Concrete Relations with Others" were in bad faith.
And in his later work, he would strive more carefully to suggest that positive
reciprocity and authentic love are genuine possibilities, a point to which I re­
turn in Chapter 3. I also explore there the very great significance which
Sartre's ontological description of interpersonal relationships has for devel­
opmental theory—a significance which Sartre himself has begun to work
out in the psychobiographies, but which this book is the first to propose as
an answer to the metatheoretical dilemmas concerning the new "relational
needs" discovered by post-Freudian psychoanalytic theorists.
 Introduction 13

As for the idea that Sartre in his later philosophy has abandoned his ear­
lier belief in the free individual and converted to orthodox Marxism, a view
which Hayman expresses in his biography, this is simply absurd. Yet it is part
of a larger critical view (also expressed by Hayman) that Sartre constantly
changed his philosophical perspective. Sartre, says Hayman, "had so much
faith in his new theories that he forgot the old ones: rather than build
higher on an old foundation he would start all over with a new one" (1987,
p. 261). Sartre had already countered this line of thinking by asserting that
he "never said that I changed every five years: On the contrary, I think that
I underwent a continuous evolution beginning with La Nausee all the way
up to the Critique de la Raison Dialectique" (Sartre in Schilpp, 1981, p. 12).
This is not to say that new concepts fail to appear in Sartre's later philoso­
phy. Raymond Aron (1969), for instance, is equally at fault in attempting to
reduce Sartre's later ideas to his earlier ones. The truth is more complex
than either of these critical views suggests. What Sartre actually does is to
build on his earlier philosophy, sometimes changing his mind about details
and often deepening an earlier concept but never abandoning his basic on­
tology.
Hence while the later ("Marxist") Sartre adds a new sociomaterial dimen­
sion to existential psychoanalysis, he does not abandon psychoanalytic in­
dividualism for Marxist collectivism. Indeed, the later Sartre is if anything
more aware than the earlier Sartre of the significance of psychoanalysis for
social science theory in general. His intention, he says very explicitly in
Search for a Method (1960b), is to wed Marxism with psychoanalysis under
the auspices of existentialism. The result, of course, is a "sea change" for
Marxist determinism as well as psychoanalytic determinism since both will
be undermined. Indeed, Sartre believes that the problem shared by tradi­
tional social science theory and traditional Marxism is in part their failure
to recognize the insertion of the individual into the social scene in
childhood—a failure which psychoanalysis, deprived of its metatheoretical
"mythology" by existentialism, can be expected to correct. And at about the
same time that he was theoretically discussing these issues in Search for a
Method, Sartre was also attempting to apply the premises of (revised) existen­
tial psychoanalysis to his biography of Flaubert. In Chapter 5,1 present a de­
tailed investigation of the impact of these new ideas on existential psycho­
analysis.
The final criticism—that existentialism is passe and has been superseded
by new intellectual approaches such as structuralism and poststructur-
alism—is a topic I take up in Chapters 6 through 8 in my comparison/
14 Chapter One

contrast of Sartrean existential psychoanalysis with Lacanian structuralist

psychoanalysis. I argue that structuralism is really a new scientific positiv­
ism, a synchronic rather than diachronic positivism, but one which is none­
theless as reductionistic as traditional Freudian metatheory in its failure to
develop a fully human social science metatheory. Lacan does not solve the
problem of the new relational needs and the desire to develop a coherent
sense of self discovered by the post-Freudian theorists (whose work he
mostly dismisses); indeed, he rarely even addresses those difficulties. Instead,
he opts for a metapsychology based on structural linguistics which has some
points of convergence with Sartre (by whom Lacan may have been influ­
enced to some extent), but which is directly opposed to the ideas concerning
intentionality and meaning production which are the cornerstones of
Sartrean metatheory. As such, Lacanian structuralist metatheory is in real­
ity much more nihilistic in its implications than Sartrean existentialist meta­
theory could ever purport to be. I conclude that not only has Sartrean exis­
tentialism not been rendered obsolete, but also that its rich potential for
providing clinical precepts and insights has hardly been tapped.
By now, the reader probably has a sense of the structure of this book. In
Chapter 2, I initiate the dialogue with psychoanalysis by developing a
comparison/contrast between Freud and Sartre, suggesting some Sartrean
answers to difficult Freudian questions. The chief challenge to Sartre will be
to account in other ways for the phenomena which Freud uses to support
his hypothesis of the unconscious, while the chief challenge to Freud will be
to account for therapeutic change within a deterministic model. In Chap­
ters 3 and 4,1 develop the idea of a "crisis" in contemporary psychoanalytic
metatheory, arguing for a Sartrean solution to problems relating to the dis­
covery of new relational needs in earliest infancy (Chapter 3) and to the dis­
covery of the need for development of a firm and coherent sense of self
(Chapter 4)- I also note in these chapters the differences in clinical implica­
tions for a Sartrean view of developmental theory over a traditional Freud­
ian or post-Freudian perspective—differences which relate primarily to the
idea of traditional psychoanalysts that the psyche has substance and struc­
ture as contrasted with the Sartrean view that consciousness is translucid
and free.
Chapter 5 is a kind of transition piece in which I look back to the first four
chapters and suggest additions which Sartre's later philosophy can make to
existential psychoanalysis at the same time that I look ahead to the three
chapters on Lacan. Those three (somewhat shorter) chapters discuss in turn
Sartre's idea of the ego as contrasted with Lacan's; Sartre's idea of language
 Introduction 15

as sociomaterial reality as contrasted with Lacan's idea of unconscious lin­

guistic structure; and the impact of these ideas on existential as opposed to
Lacanian psychoanalysis. The concepts I discuss in Chapter 5 prove impor­
tant to developing a Sartrean answer to the challenge of structuralism, since
it is in his later philosophy that Sartre takes into account the power of so­
ciomaterial reality (including the part of sociomaterial reality which is lan­
guage) while still maintaining the structuring significance of the individual
project as that which creates and sustains everything. The final chapter
summarizes the book's major points, providing a Sartrean case illustration
and discussing possible paths for future inquiry.
Throughout this book, I attempt to relate Sartrean metatheory to clinical
practice. The point which will be emphasized again and again in drawing
those implications is that Sartrean metatheory differs from traditional
Freudian and post-Freudian metatheory in suggesting that the aim of exis­
tential psychoanalysis is neither the reduction of unconscious conflicts
(Freud) nor the repair of defective ego structure or the creation of a substan­
tialized sense of self (post-Freudian psychoanalytic theorists). Nor is it a rap­
prochement with the linguistic unconscious, as Lacanian structuralist psy­
choanalysis seems to suggest. Rather, the (general) aim of existentialist
therapy is to facilitate a clients letting go of the need to create a substantial­
ized self—thereby effecting a radical reorientation which can lead to a release
of spontaneity and a relinquishing of the need to use others to create a self
which lies behind much interpersonal misery. The truth is that although
Freudian and post-Freudian insights are in many respects useful to under­
standing the pain of a clients past, they are often less helpful than a
Sartrean perspective in understanding the significance of the future as value,
of interpersonal conflicts, and of those moments when a client—suspended
between a past in which he or she no longer believes and a future which can
only be known through living it—must make a new choice of a way of being
in the world. It is with respect to this latter situation that I believe that a
Sartrean perspective has most significantly aided me as a therapist in under­
standing and encouraging some of those important changes at which all
depth therapy aims. And it is those moments of change, moments which ad­
mittedly take a great deal of groundwork, which are the most exciting and
rewarding aspects of the practice of psychotherapy.
2 • Sartre versus Freud:
Two Approaches to Metapsychology

The Nature of the Dispute

A juxtaposition of Freud's and Sartre's psychological metatheories may

seem at first to be a matter only of contrasts, rather like comparing apples
and oranges. Since they are fruits of different trees—namely, phenomenolog-
ical ontology and positivistic science—they may seem to have nothing at all
in common. Yet despite a fundamental disagreement with Freud about the
nature of consciousness, or the psyche, Sartre acknowledges a great debt to
him. Obviously, existential psychoanalysis would have been inconceivable
without the prior invention of Freudian psychoanalysis. It could even be
said that Sartre's earlier philosophical work is both pro and contra Freud just
as his later work is pro and contra Marx.
Sartre objects to Freud and Marx for the same reason—their attempts to
apply the philosophical tenets of nineteenth-century scientific materialism
to the human sciences. In rejecting the mechanistic determinism of Freud
and Marx, Sartre advocates instead the establishment of a human science of
human beings. At the same time, however, he names his own metapsychol­
ogy "existential psychoanalysis" just as he calls his later philosophy "Marx­
ist." In this respect, it might be said that what Sartre accepts in both Freud
and Marx is their talent as phenomenologists, which is sometimes deeply
obscured by their attempts at establishing natural science credibility for
their theories.
Existential psychoanalysis begins from a different set of premises and is
the result of a different order of inquiry than Freudian psychoanalysis.
Sartre attempts to discover the ontological structures of existence, declaring
that "the final discoveries [of ontology are] the first principles of psychoanal-
16
 Sartre versus Freud YJ

ysis" (BN, p. 575). Freud seeks to establish through empirical observation a

natural science hypothesis about the workings of the human psyche. Even
though this observation is of a scientifically suspect variety—that is, it con­
cerns case studies and Freud's own self analysis—Freud nonetheless claims
objective status for it. He believes it has led him to the discovery of an un­
derlying psychobiological force, which, like gravity or electricity, explains
the phenomena of psychic life. Thus Freud's "discovery" of the libido as the
driving force in the psyche is a part of his general endeavor to establish the
scientific credibility of psychoanalysis. If the natural sciences deal in physi­
cal forces, then psychoanalysis must base itself on a comparable psycho-
biological force. The problem is that such a force is really a metaphysical
first principle based on scientistic metaphors rather than a scientific hypoth­
esis. It is too broad, either explaining everything or nothing, and is therefore
not subject to empirical validation.
Sartre, on the other hand, seeks to discover ontological structures. From
reflective self-analysis and empathic comprehension of the internal lives of
others, he wishes to discover within human experience the basic structures
of being human. He does not seek to discover the scientific laws or metaphys­
ical principles behind experience, nor does he wish to reduce psychology to
biological or physical laws. Rather, he accepts the idea that consciousness is
a different order of reality than the material world and that psychology
therefore requires a different approach to its subject matter. Comprehension
in the human sciences cannot be of the same order as comprehension in the
natural sciences. It must include intentionality and meaning. Thus for
Sartre the "force" in the human personality is not to be discovered behind
consciously lived experience but rather in that very experience. From the be­
ginning of his work to the end, Sartre objects to Freud's attempt to reduce
human behavior to environmental and biological determinism, psycho-
biological forces, and unconscious urges.
At this point, the traditional Freudian psychoanalyst is probably asking
why Sartre calls his revision of Freudian theory "psychoanalysis" at all. Ob­
viously, if one makes the acceptance of unconscious mental functioning,
psychic determinism, the psychosexual stages, mechanical defenses, and
drive-based interpretations of experience the criteria for deciding whether
or not an approach is psychoanalytic, then Sartre's approach is not psycho­
analysis. In this book, I often use the term "existentialist therapy" rather
than "existential psychoanalysis," for the reason just stated and because
some of my clinical data derive from other approaches. On the other hand,
Freud defines psychoanalysis as a technique or treatment which deals with
18 Chapter Two

transference and resistance (1914b, p. 16). If one defines "transference" as

the repetition within the therapy situation and elsewhere of the patterns of
childhood emotional attachments, and "resistance" as the refusal to face
certain unpleasant truths about oneself and one's existence, then there is no
reason why existential psychoanalysis would not be a possibility. In addi­
tion, Sartre has described some significant similarities between Freudian
psychoanalysis and his own version of existential psychoanalysis. These are,
of course, similarities in the midst of differences.

Similarities and Differences between Freudian

and Existential Psychoanalysis

As Sartre himself points out (BN, pp. 569-71), there are many points of com­
parison between existential and Freudian psychoanalysis. Similarities in­
clude the idea that the personality is unified, the idea that division can exist
within this unity, and the idea that analysis is needed because of this divi­
sion and because knowledge facilitates change. Both Freud and Sartre see
meaning in the symptoms of mental illness which prior to Freud had been
viewed as simply irrational or as indications of biological degeneration.
And, in conjunction with this, both theorists interpret surface psychic man­
ifestations (gestures, single actions, symptoms, tastes, the whole set of ele­
ments constituting concrete lived experience) in terms of a deeper aim.
Sartre says, "A gesture refers to a Weltanschauung and we sense it" (BN,
p. 457). Freud would agree—except that in Sartre's metapsychology the
deeper aim is manifested in the concrete choices, whereas in Freud's it is to
be discovered behind them in instinctual life and the unconscious.
Finally, neither Sartre nor Freud accepts the subject of the analysis as be­
ing in a privileged position with respect to his or her own subjective mate­
rial. However, the reasons are different, leading to different treatment of pa­
tients or clients: For Freud, the analyst must wrestle with the analysand's
resistance to making unconscious material conscious. For Sartre, there is a
gulf between spontaneous experience (prereflective consciousness) and re­
flective awareness (reflective consciousness), but since the same person expe­
riences both, the final intuition of the subject of an analysis can be taken as
definitive. Also, the patient or client can be taken into partnership with the
therapist in the mutual project of exploring and naming what Sartre refers
to as the client's "fundamental project of being."
Existential psychoanalysis, like Freudian psychoanalysis, recognizes that
 Sartre versus Freud 19

the individual is all of a piece. The "fundamental project" in existential psy­

choanalysis takes on the same importance as the "complex" in Freudian
psychoanalysis. It is also similarly subject to divisions within an overall
unity, thereby making it an appropriate subject for "analysis." Just as the
Freudian psychoanalyst attempts to discover the childhood events which
led to the organized group of ideas and memories constituting the complex,
so the existential psychoanalyst attempts to discover the "original choice of
being" whereby a client has adopted this or that particular worldview. Both
the fundamental project and the complex refer to the interpersonal world of
childhood. And both forms of psychoanalysis seek to discover, as Sartre
says, "the crucial event of infancy and the psychic crystallization around
that event" (BN, p. 569). Yet the original other as libidinal object in Freud­
ian psychoanalysis is quite different from the original Other as the first per­
son who sees and names me in existential psychoanalysis. Also, the funda­
mental project differs from the complex in that the latter is unconscious and
subject to the laws of nature, whereas the former is conscious and subject to
continuing revision or even to radical transformation. It is a project, or a
throwing of oneself forward from the past toward the future in a particular
way.
Similarly, the division within unity of existential psychoanalysis differs
from the division of Freudian psychoanalysis in that reflective consciousness
and prereflective consciousness refer to the same conscious subject. Freud,
on the other hand, depicts the psyche as a set of warring principalities—
consciousness and the unconscious in the "topographical" hypothesis and
the ego, superego, and id in the "structural" hypothesis. Finally, the knowl­
edge which facilitates change, as discussed above, involves subjecting prere­
flective experience to reflective awareness in Sartre's formulation, whereas it
involves making the unconscious conscious in Freud's. A therapeutic prac­
tice built on Sartre's metatheory, though it can include useful insights from
Freudian psychoanalysis, will differ significantly in its approach to clients as
being consciously aware of the experiences which they will reflectively need
to confront in order to revise their fundamental projects of being.
In discussing similarities between the two versions of psychoanalysis, we
keep encountering differences. There really are radical differences between
the two approaches, as Sartre observes in his critique of "empirical" (Freud­
ian) psychoanalysis in Being and Nothingness (pp. 557—75). Sartre objects to
Freud's insistence on an unconscious area of psychic life behind conscious­
ness, to Freudian determinism, to Freud's mechanical-biological explana­
tions, to the idea that nature and nurture rather than an original choice of a
20 Chapter Two

way of being in the world explain human behavior, to the idea of a psycho-
biological residue such as libido as an explanation of human motivation, to
the notion of universal symbols (for example, gold = feces or a pincushion
= the breast), and to the general nosology or diagnostic categories of Freud­
ian psychoanalysis. Sartre proposes instead that the objective of existential
psychoanalysis would be to reveal in all its concrete richness an individuals
original choice of being, which, though grounded in the concrete world, is
not reducible to it. Such a choice is constantly changing and capable of radi­
cal transformation. Hence existential psychoanalysis must maintain a flexi­
bility in interpreting symbols and symptoms not simply between individuals
but with a particular individual at different times in therapy.
Sartre says in Search for a Method that "a life develops in spirals; it passes
again and again by the same points but at different levels of integration and
complexity" (p. 106). Existential psychoanalysis is not reductionist in its at­
tempts to explain such developments as permutations of the drives. Al­
though psychosexuality is important in human development, it is not for
Sartre its motivating force. In place of pleasure as the goal of the human or­
ganism, Sartre proposes an attempt on the part of consciousness to establish
itself as value through concrete situations in the world. This is the "circuit of
selfhess" through which Sartre says an individual uses a relationship with
objects and other people to attempt to create a solid sense of self. Although
this attempt is ultimately doomed because free consciousness is always
ahead of its attempts at self-definition, existential psychoanalysis aims at
grasping the meaning of an individual's concrete choices as part of a project
to create value. In this system, general nosology will not do. Sartre insists
that existential psychoanalysis must endeavor to grasp the particular rather
than the general structure of delusions or other symptoms—for example,
why an individual chooses to believe that he is Jesus Christ and not Moses
or Genghis Khan.
All this leads to a difference in methodology between existential psycho­
analysis and Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud introduces only the first half of
the method—regressive analysis. He believes it is possible to discover the
sources of contemporary behavior in an analysand's childhood. Yet Freud
admits that his own method must always remain analytic rather than syn­
thetic. It can reconstruct the past, but it cannot predict the future:

So long as we trace the development [of a mental process] from its final
outcome backwards, the chain of events appears continuous, and we
feel we have gained an insight which is completely satisfactory or even
 Sartre versus Freud 21

exhaustive. But if we proceed the reverse way, if we start from the prem­
ises inferred from the analysis and try to follow these up to the final
result, then we no longer get the impression of an inevitable sequence
of events which could not have been otherwise determined. We notice
at once that there might have been another result, and that we might
have been just as well able to understand and explain the latter. The
synthesis is thus not so satisfactory as the analysis; in other words, from
a knowledge of the premises we could not have foretold the nature of
the result. (Freud, 1920b, p. 167)

Freud believes that this failure of synthesis occurs because certain factors
in mental life must always remain unknown. Even if the psychoanalyst, for
example, understands the complete etiology of a psychological illness, he or
she cannot know the quality or strength or possible combinations of all the
etiological factors. Freud goes on to say that it is only after the fact that we
know which determining factors are weaker or stronger: The stronger factor
was the one that succeeded. "Hence," Freud concludes, "the chain of causa­
tion can always be recognized with certainty if we follow the line of analysis,
whereas to predict it along the line of synthesis is impossible" (1920b, p. 168).
Presumably, if the psychoanalyst had access to all the data, he or she would
be able to predict the future. It did not occur to Freud that the impossibility
of prediction in human affairs might result from something entirely differ­
ent.
In Being and Nothingness (1943), Sartre first develops his idea that existen­
tial psychoanalysis must be based on synthesis as well as analysis. It must be
able to put together as well as to take apart. Sartre argues that the factor
which is missing in Freudian determinism is just the factor which would al­
low both synthesis and analysis,. This factor is freedom, intentionality,
choice. Since choices are always made in a situation, they seem caused in ret­
rospect. The truth is, however, that the material world cannot provide
causes for human behavior in the strictly scientific sense. It can only provide
motives. Or rather, to put the matter in Sartre's own terminology, I discover
causes in the nonscientific everyday sense as I approach the world as a
motivator for my actions; I discover motives when I reflectively look at my
own consciousness as grasping those causes (BN, pp. 445-50). "Thus,"
Sartre writes, "cause and motive are correlative—the one referring to the
world of things which consciousness grasps, the other to intentional con­
sciousness" (BN, p. 449).
A rock, to use an example of Sartre's, appears "not scalable" only against
22 Chapter Two

the background of my project of climbing, including the expertise I bring

and the daring I am willing to put forth. The truth is that "the environment
can act on the subject only to the exact extent that he comprehends it; that
is, transforms it into a situation" (BN, p. 572). For Sartre, the situation is "an
ambiguous phenomenon in which it is impossible for the for-itself [con­
sciousness] to distinguish the contribution of freedom from that of the brute
existent" (BN, p. 488). Looking at the past, it may therefore seem that I
could not have acted otherwise since, in fact, I chose to interpret the world
and live my situation in this way and not in another. This mistaking of mo­
tive for causality in the scientific sense is exactly what the deterministic
strain in Freudian psychoanalysis encourages.
In Search for a Method (1960b) and the Critique of Dialectical Reason
(1960a), Sartre elaborates a methodology for the social sciences in general
which is dialectical rather than analytical—which pays attention to analysis
as only one moment in a "progressive-regressive method" (SM, pp. 85-166).
This method, which Sartre adapted from Marxist sociologist Henri Lefeb-
vre,1 has three moments: (1) a moment of phenomenological description, or
observation informed by experience and general theory; (2) an analytico-
regressive moment—a regression back into the history of the individual or
group to earlier stages; and (3) a synthetico-progressive moment which
moves from past to present in an attempt to rediscover the present in all its
particular complexity.
Freudian psychoanalysis recognizes the first two moments, although
Freud's metatheory sometimes clouds the first. The third moment, the
synthetico-progressive moment, is one which is not accounted for within
the context of traditional Freudian analysis. In a cause-effect system, there is
no intentionality to discover in past actions—no (past) future-directedness.
Of course, Freudian analysts often do in practice recognize the intentional­
ity of past actions—but this is not accounted for in strictly Freudian meta­
theory. And it seems to me a very important clinical matter for a therapist
to have a theoretical basis for attempting to recapture past intentionality.
Otherwise, the recovery of the past might become an excuse for stasis rather
than an impetus to change. After all, to recognize the intentional nature of
the past is to allow for present intentionality. If I was free, I am free. The fu­
ture is liberated as well.
All this points to a primary difference between Sartre's and Freud's me-
tatheories. As Gerald N. Izenberg (1976) rightly observes, the major differ­
ence between Freudian and existentialist metatheory is their respective
characterization of meaning. For Freud, meaning is ultimately neurophysio-
 Sartre versus Freud 23

logical and evolutionary. In his early Project for a Scientific Psychology (not
published until after his death), Freud writes that the intention of the pro­
ject is to "furnish us with a psychology which shall be a natural science; its
aim, that is, is to represent psychological processes as quantitatively deter­
mined states of specifiable material particles and so make them plain and
void of contradictions" (1950, p. 355). As Frank J. Sulloway (1979) points
out, the Project was an early attempt at physical (neurophysiological) reduc-
tionism.
In his later work, Freud, as a "biologist of the mind," leans more toward
biological and evolutionary reductionism—though he never abandons the
neurophysiological principle of constancy upon which all of his later work
rests. As Sulloway's monumental intellectual biography convincingly ar­
gues, the Project is not, as some Freud scholars have insisted, merely an early
neurological document which was abandoned by its author shortly after be­
ing written in favor of a theory of the mind which was purely psychological.
Freud throughout his career remained influenced by the scientific ideas of
his day. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he writes, "The deficiencies in our
description [of the mind] would probably vanish if we were already in a posi­
tion to replace the psychological terms by physiological or chemical ones"
(1920a, p. 60). And as late as Analysis Terminable and Interminable, Freud in­
sists that "for the psychical field, the biological field does in fact play the
part of the underlying bedrock" (1937, p. 252).
Meaning, for Freud, is ultimately reducible to the play of physical forces
within the human organism combined with biological propensities and
laws. Behind conscious life lies unconscious fantasy, behind unconscious
fantasy primary process, and behind primary process those instinctual forces
which Freud conceives of as lying on the frontier "between the mental and
the somatic" (1915a, p. 122). The pleasure principle, for Freud, is a mechani­
cal principle involving the physical reduction of quantities of energy in the
organism. The past is causally significant in the formation of symptoms be­
cause the energy surrounding uncatharted memories or fantasies disturbs
the smooth working of the organism. Sexual pleasure has as its aim the pres­
ervation of the species, thereby serving the laws of evolution. Its opposite,
the death instinct, is an involutionary principle which accounts for aggres­
sion as a turning outward of the inner physiological tendency to pursue a re­
turn to inorganic matter.
In place of both the pleasure principle and the death instinct, Sartre sub­
stitutes the human aim of creating value, which is a priori neither pleasur­
able nor painful and which can be aggressive or unaggressive. In place of
24 Chapter Two

Freud's neurophysiological and evolutionary paradigms, Sartre substitutes

an investigation of consciousness as intentional and meaning creating. He
thus carries to its logical conclusion Freud's own idea that psychoanalysis
should cleanse itself of everything but "psychological auxiliary ideas"
(Freud, 1916-17, p. 21). Existential psychoanalysis, in its denial that the laws
of scientific materialism apply to the world of consciousness and in its sub­
stitution of motives for scientific causality, frees itself entirely from such
ideas. For the Freudian idea of the determining power of the past, existential
psychoanalysis substitutes an understanding of both the past and the future
as humanly meaningful in terms of choices and values. For the Freudian
idea of desire as a biological instinct, Sartre proposes the idea first of desire
(BN) and later of need (CDR) as a lack which is discovered not in the biolog­
ical recesses of the self but on the face of the world as it responds to em­
bodied consciousness. For the mechanistic universe of natural science,
Sartre substitutes the human universe of phenomenological investigation
and ontological categories as these are discovered within concrete lived expe­
rience.
Thus although Freud and Sartre would each say that a symptom is
"meaningful," they indicate quite different things by this assertion. Both
forms of psychoanalysis are a kind of hermeneutics—that is, the reading of
the text of a life in its historical context on the basis of a subtext which ex­
plains what is going on. And each form of hermeneutics is, as Paul Ricoeur
(1970) says of Freudian psychoanalysis, "a hermeneutics of suspicion." Nei­
ther accepts surface explanations or rationalizations. Here, however, the
similarities end. I do not believe that Ricoeur's attempt to reconcile phe­
nomenology and Freudian psychoanalysis really works because the kinds of
meanings discovered by the hermeneutical processes of each system differ
too greatly. The only reconciliation which seems really feasible to me is one
which disregards the metapsychology of Freud and keeps what is valuable in
his clinical analysis. As I will attempt to show throughout this book, I be­
lieve it is possible to reinterpret much of Freudian data along existentialist
lines. Thus it might be possible for an existentialist approach to retain the
highly valuable clinical insights of Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanaly­
tic theory while giving up the cumbersome experience-distant metapsychol­
ogy. Before deciding this, however, we must look in more detail at Freud's
and Sartre's metatheories—at the ways in which each writer interprets the
phenomenological data of human experience in terms of metaprinciples ex­
plaining what it means to be human.
 Sartre versus Freud 25

Freudian Metapsychology:
Psychobiological and Neurophysiological Forces

According to Freud, the meaning of life is the pursuit of pleasure, which can
be defined as an organismic return from excitation to equilibrium. All
strong forces of excitation, external or internal, are perceived by the orga­
nism as pain; the return to zero energy charge is perceived as pleasure. This
is the "principle of constancy" upon which all of Freud's psychological theo­
ries are based. Freud links it with the pleasure principle when he writes, in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, that the "pleasure principle follows from the
principle of constancy: actually the latter principle was inferred from the
facts which forced us to adopt the pleasure principle ,, (1920a, p. 9). Looked
at in this way, the pleasure principle and the death instinct, as conceived by
the later Freud, are really not so far apart after all since the ultimate absence
of charge is death. For Freud, everything is part of a unified system. The eco­
nomic hypothesis (energy flow, inhibition, and displacement in the psyche)
is the most experience-distant part of Freud's theory; yet it lies behind the
topographical hypothesis (conscious, unconscious, and preconscious areas
of the psyche), the dynamic hypothesis (psyche explained by opposing men­
tal forces), and the structural hypothesis (ego, superego, and id). The eco­
nomic hypothesis is, in a sense, the engine that makes the Freudian machine
go.
Although the economic hypothesis, with its charge and discharge meta­
phors borrowed from physics, is often disputed by contemporary psychoana­
lysts, there is no question that Freud takes it very seriously. An inheritance
from his teachers in neurophysiology, Brucke and Meynert (Izenberg, 1976;
Sulloway, 1979), it is never abandoned throughout the many permutations
of his psychological theories. It explains, among other things, the connec­
tion between the psyche and its objects (cathexis) and the formation of neu­
rotic symptoms (through displacement, condensation, and conversion).
With libidinal energy, or generalized sexual instinct, as the main internal
driving force of the organism, Freud can explain both normal development
and pathology in terms of energetic permutations and displacements, con­
scious and unconscious. They have a meaning, but the meaning is ulti­
mately to be found in the neurons and not in personal choice and creation.
Even when Freud later pronounces that psychology and biology are separate
sciences and must be treated as such, he never abandons the economic the­
ory which had its origins in neurophysiology. And he persists in believing,
as he states in the seventh chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900),
16 Chapter Two

that the most fundamental explanations of psychological disturbances will

one day be found to be neurophysiological. Part of the problem with the
core of Freud's metatheory is that the neurophysiological theory on which it
is based—the idea that the nervous system seeks to rid itself of all tension—is
now outdated. The hydraulic metaphors, through which the mind is visual­
ized as a machine driven by the flow of energy, also prove cumbersome.
Freud's theory of the connection between consciousness and its objects is
thus mechanical rather than humanly meaningful. "Cathexis" is a concept
implying the amount of psychical energy attached to an object, an idea or
ideas, or a body part. Freud believes that this energy is at least theoretically
measurable, that it can be condensed or displaced from its original objects to
others, and that it explains such things as mourning or self-preoccupation.
In mourning, the subject has withdrawn psychical energy from the outside
world, hypercathecting the fantasied lost love object instead (Freud, 1917). In
narcissism, the patient has hypercathected (a certain amount of ego cathexis
is considered normal by Freud) his own ego to the exclusion of external ob­
jects (Freud, 1914a). As for hysteria, Freud believes that it is a clear case of
the "conversion" of physical energy into "innervation" energy, thus produc­
ing such symptoms as hysterical blindness (Freud, 1896; 1905b). Even the
state of being in love, unless returned by the love object, is seen as impover­
ishing the subject in terms of draining libidinal energy from the ego to the
object (Freud, 1914a).
Obviously, for Freud, the most significant internal force is libido, or gener­
alized sexual energy. Its many permutations in the psyche account both for
neurotic symptoms and for growth and development. On the one hand,
lack of immediate gratification promotes the development of the ego as a
reality-oriented structure capable of assessing situations and postponing dis­
charge. On the other hand, neurotic symptoms result from permanently
binding or displacing energy which needs some route of discharge—that is,
from repression or displacement. What is repressed from the conscious is, ac­
cording to Freud's theory of equivalence, activated in the unconscious.
Hence it becomes the source of unconscious complexes. Similarly, the en­
ergy displaced from one activity to a substitute activity, as in obsessional
neuroses, retains its original intensity while being deprived of its original
content. One washes one's hands with the same compulsive intensity that
one wishes to engage in "dirty activities"—and the unconscious takes plea­
sure in the substitute activity as an equivalent for the repressed wish (Freud,
1909,1913). Or, as in the case of Freud's patient Dora, one develops a hyster­
ical cough as a substitute gratification for the unconscious wish for oral sex
 Sartre versus Freud 27

(Freud, 1905b). In the first instance, the unconscious wish is satisfied

through "reaction formation," in the second through "conversion."
This brings us to Freud's theory of the instincts, which forms a conjunc­
tion between his evolutionary theory and his neurophysiological theory.
Actually, Freud's dual instinct theory undergoes a major revision in his later
work. At first Freud conceives of sexual versus self-preservative or ego in­
stincts (Freud, 1905a; 1915a) and later of life versus death (Eros versus Than-
atos) instincts (Freud, 1920a; 1930; 1937). Although Freud sometimes refers
to his instinct theory as a "mythology" (Freud, 1933, p. 95), he treats it seri­
ously. For Freud, a drive or instinct has three components: a source, an aim,
and an object. According to this point of view, it is the aim of the instinct,
rather than the aim of the conscious subject, which is the real meaning of
symptoms and of human activity in general.
There is, however, a difference in specificity of aim and object between the
self-preservative instincts and the sexual instinct. Hunger and thirst can be
satisfied only by eating food or drinking liquids (or, as Freud tells us, halluci­
nations of such fulfillment, as in the case of the frustrated infant who hallu­
cinates the breast). The sexual instinct, on the other hand, chooses its ob­
jects and even its aims on the basis of personal history. There is no
guarantee that biological maturity will constitute genital sexuality, for in­
stance, or that the individual will choose intercourse with a member of the
opposite sex. The object may be a fetish or the aim may be the fulfillment of
some "component instinct" which is a throwback to polymorphous perver­
sity. At any rate, Freud believes that in both mature genital sexuality and
other more primitive forms, it is sexual arousal which leads the individual to
seek an object. Biology is responsible for behavior in the world.
As forces on the border between the psychic and the somatic, instincts are
made responsible for the variety of human responses to the world. The sex­
ual instinct gives rise to primary process thinking which seeks immediate
gratification through real or hallucinated objects. This mode, which is char­
acteristic of the unconscious, is under the sway of the id. It is the source of
unconscious fantasy and of dreams. Secondary process thinking, by con­
trast, is more under the influence of the self-preservative or ego instincts,
which adhere to the reality principle as a means to individual survival.
Freud later contends that the self-preservative instincts derive from libidinal
cathexis to the ego, thereby postulating that all instincts originate in the id.
According to Freud's first theory of the instincts, aggression is in the service
of the self-preservative instincts. Later, he sees it as a manifestation of the
death instinct.
28 Chapter Two

The return to equilibrium, or zero energy charge, is one aim of sexual dis­
charge; the other is the evolutionary aim of the preservation of the species.
In either case, the meaning of human activity in the world is ultimately re­
ducible to biological drives. Freud's fascination with evolutionary theory
goes back to an interest in Darwin during his last years in the Gymnasium.
He also took Carl Claus's "General Biology and Darwinism" as an elective
his first year as a medical student at the University of Vienna (Sulloway,
1979, pp. 13-14). Darwinian and Lamarckian evolution subsequently had a
tremendous influence on the development of psychoanalytic theory, provid­
ing a model for interpreting human activity in terms of the biological aims
of survival and preservation of the species.
Thus Freud views instinctual behavior in terms of its biological function,
which is not necessarily congruent with the conscious ideas of the individ­
ual. Using an ontogenetic model based on Darwinian principles, Freud ex­
plains psychopathology as a regression to earlier stages of sexual develop­
ment or to "component instincts" which ought to have developed into the
genital arrangement that best serves the continuation of the species. Normal
progression, by contrast, involves an ontogenetic development through the
psychosexual stages: oral, anal, phallic, and genital (Freud, 1905a).
The Oedipus complex and guilt are sometimes explained in terms of a La­
marckian inheritance of acquired characteristics. Freud (1912-13) thinks that
the incest taboo gains part of its power from a phylogenetic memory: He hy­
pothesizes that the primal brothers, jealous of the primal father's monopoly
of women, had murdered the primal father, after which a sense of guilt had
arisen on the human scene. Similarly, certain children's phobic fears of ani­
mals, Freud argues, are only in part a displacement of feelings toward their
fathers. These fears also reproduce primitive totemism. That Freud was
much influenced by this evolutionary paradigm is once again underscored
by a statement he jotted down the year before his death: "With neurotics it
is as though we were in a prehistoric landscape—for instance, in the Jurassic.
The great saurians are still running about; the horsetails grow as high as
palms" (quoted by Sulloway, 1979, p. 497). It was the categorization and
treatment of these "prehistoric" states of mind which proved to be Freud's
life work. He continued to view them in the light of the natural science para­
digms of his day.
Even the late theory of the death instinct, which has provoked much dis­
agreement among Freud's followers, derives from Freud's essentially biologi­
cal paradigm: The forces of evolution are matched by forces of involution.
Actually, as Sulloway (1979) points out, Freud's whole paradigm of mental
 Sartre versus Freud 29

illness requires a second force capable of reversing biogenetic achievements

through regressions to previously abandoned stages of development. It is
here, in fact, that Freud's neurophysiological paradigms and his evolution­
ary paradigms meet. The return to death is a cessation of all charge; it is also
an impulse to return to earlier forms preserved in the (psycho-Lamarckian)
phylogenetic memory of the race. Ultimately, this memory must include a
memory of the emergence of life from undisturbed inorganic matter. Al­
though Freud proposes the death instinct fairly tentatively in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle (1920a), he has become quite convinced of this theory by
the time of Civilization and Its Discontents (1930):

To begin with, it was only tentatively that I put forward the views I have
developed here [concerning the death instinct], but in the course of
time they have gained such a hold upon me that I can no longer think
in any other way. To my mind, they are far more serviceable from a the­
oretical standpoint than any other possible ones; they provide that sim­
plification, without either ignoring or doing violence to the facts, for
which we strive in scientific work. (Freud, 1930, p. 119)

As Sulloway so convincingly demonstrates, Freud's theory of the death in­

stinct was neither subjectively determined (resulting from his unhappy expe­
riences in Vienna during and after the First World War) nor a late and
peripheral addition to psychoanalytic thinking, as many psychoanalysts
would like to think. As Freud himself perceived, it was a concept in tune
with the very heart of Freud's metabiological thinking. It explained, among
other things, the presence of aggression throughout history, the pursuit of
pain rather than pleasure (primary masochism), the repetition of painful pat­
terns of experience (the repetition compulsion), and the existence of regres­
sive tendencies in the psyche (Freud, 1920a, 1930).
Drive theory, or the economic hypothesis, is obviously the cornerstone of
Freud's metatheory. The topographical, the dynamic, and the structural hy­
potheses are all inexplicable without it. Yet even Freud sees the difference in
levels of abstraction between the hypothesis. Although he might concede
on occasion that his drives or instincts are "mythical entities," he considers
the existence of the unconscious to be a proven fact. The phenomena on
which the topographical hypothesis (Freud, 1900, 1901, 1915c) is based (self-
deception, memory lapses, symptom formation, parapraxes, and dreams) are
as familiar to everyday life as to the consulting room—though they might, as
30 Chapter Two

we shall see, admit of other explanations than Freud's theory of the uncon­
scious. Freud himself does not hesitate to make his more dubious idea of in­
stinctual drives the force behind his "proven" concepts of unconscious men­
tal life and conflicts.
According to Freud, the unconscious consists of two parts: the deep un­
conscious, which is the source of instinctual impulses and phylogenetic
memories and which can never be brought into consciousness, and the dy­
namic unconscious, which is the habitat of wishes and memories which
have been repressed. In addition, there is the preconscious, which can be
brought into awareness without difficulty; it is simply not conscious at the
moment. But since the unconscious is the location both of the primary
drives and of repressed instinctual wishes, it is inexplicable except in terms
of the economic hypothesis. The dynamic hypothesis (Freud, 1910, 1912a),
which is closely related to the topographical hypothesis, explicitly formu­
lates the conflicts between the psychic systems in terms of the repression
and displacement of instinctual energy in the organism and the conflicts be­
tween opposing sets of instincts.
Drive theory is also made the cornerstone of the structural hypothesis
(1923)—sometimes referred to as the second topographical hypothesis—
which has been a main focus of interest among most modern psychoanalytic
theorists. Yet whereas many of these theorists either ignore or merely pay lip
service to Freudian drive theory, Freud himself postulates the formation of
psychic structures by and for the purpose of managing the drives. The id,
which is present at birth, is the dwelling place of the drives. It knows no
sense of time and does not develop historically. The ego is, at least in Freud's
early theory, conscious life adjusting to the demands of the outer world
(Freud, 1895). Freud later conceives of the ego as mediating between the de­
mands of the superego, the id, and the outer world and as having uncon­
scious as well as conscious segments (Freud, 1923). Its origin is the id, and
the ego develops out of the id because of frustration of immediate drive grat­
ification by the infant's environment. The superego, the critical and judg­
mental part of the psyche, results from the resolution of the Oedipus com­
plex due to the internalization of parental prohibitions against drive
satisfaction. Because renunciation is involved in giving up one's original li-
bidinal object (the mother), the young boy (girls, Freud [1930] says, do not
develop adequate superegos because they lack castration anxiety) becomes
capable of sublimation leading to cultural achievements.2
Interestingly, this theory of psychic structure leads to a conception of in­
terpersonal relationships that views them as thoroughly instinctually ori-
 Sartre versus Freud 31

ented. It is as though the drives in some sense create their objects. Indeed,
Freud himself says that, for the infant, "repeated situations of satisfaction
have created an object out of the mother" (1926, p. 170). The object, Freud
contends, is the "most variable part" of the instinctual apparatus. It "is not
originally connected with [the instinct] but becomes assigned to it only in
consequence of being peculiarly fitted to make satisfaction possible" (1915a,
p. 122). There is obviously no reason why the libidinal object, according to
Freud's conception, needs to be a person at all. In fact, a robot programmed
for complete satisfaction might do better than a human love object from the
viewpoint of the id. Love, according to such a view, "is nothing more than
object-cathexis on the part of the sexual instincts with a view to directly sex­
ual satisfaction" (Freud, 1921, p. III).
As for friendships and social relations in general, they are sublimated ho­
mosexual longings or efforts to control unconscious hostility, incestuous
strivings, and ambivalence in the interest of survival (Freud, 1912-13, 1921,
1930). Social relations are not fundamental and may be reduced to the trans­
mutations of individual instinctual tendencies. Like the structure ego, they
result from drive frustrations and permutations. Civilization itself, for
Freud, is an ambiguous good—in return for safety and survival, human be­
ings give up the most intense forms of primitive satisfaction (Freud, 1930).
Obviously, Freud is observing and describing phenomena in the human
world and translating these into drive-related metatheory. Certainly, we all
experience self-deception and the other phenomena which Freud uses in
support of his hypothesis of the unconscious. We all also experience passion
(id), reality orientation (ego), and pangs of conscience, guilt, and self-
criticism (superego). I suppose there is no objection to calling these by their
now familiar Freudian names if one does not mean to imply by this a meta-
biological explanation of their origins. The real question is whether Freud's
metatheory is the best conceptualization of the phenomena at hand. Al­
though modern Freudians have sometimes de-emphasized the origins of
Freud's metatheory in nineteenth-century natural science, especially its debt
to now-outdated Lamarckian evolutionary theory, I think that there can be
no doubt that Freud took his mechanical and biologistic metatheory seri­
ously. It is in many ways an elegantly consistent system—not in every detail,
as critics have often pointed out, but in overall design.
Freud's system is also appealing because of Freud's own obviously great
clinical insights. Take, for example, Freud's insights into the phenomena he
calls "transference" (Freud, 1912b, 1915b) and the "repetition compulsion"
(Freud, 1914c, 1920a). I do not believe any depth psychology, that is, any
32 Chapter Two

therapeutic approach which explores past influences and nonbehavioral ex­

planations of human functioning, can afford to do without these insights.
Freud discovered that his analysands invariably responded to him as if he
were a member of that person's family of origin—that he received first the
positive and then the negative feelings which the analysand had for father,
mother, sister, brother, or grandparents. If the analysand was a woman, she
also frequently fell violently in love with her analyst without regard to any
of his realistic personal qualities. The analyst's interpretation of this trans­
ference (the term refers to Freudian drive theory and indicates Freud's hy­
pothesis that libidinal energy can be rerouted as if it obeyed hydraulic prin­
ciples) of feelings from the original libidinal object to the analyst was made
the primary technical focus of psychoanalysis. It was the vehicle for discov­
ering the etiology of the analysand's neurosis.
Freud also notes that the analysand has usually spent years superimposing
the family of origin onto many contemporary situations and relationships.
Freud attributes this, together with the attempt at repetition within the
analysis, to a compulsion to repeat the emotional experiences of the past.
Here is an excellent descriptive piece linking the two concepts of transfer­
ence and the repetition compulsion to everyday observation:

What psycho-analysis reveals in the transference phenomena of neu­

rotics can also be observed in the lives of some normal people. The im­
pression they give is of being pursued by a malignant fate or possessed
by some 'daemonic' power; but psycho-analysis has always taken the
view that their fate is for the most part arranged by themselves and de­
termined by early infantile influences. . . . Thus we have come across
people all of whose human relationships have the same outcome: such
as the benefactor who is abandoned in anger after a time by each of his
proteges, however much they may otherwise differ from one another,
and who thus seems doomed to taste all the bitterness of ingratitude; or
the man whose friendships all end in betrayal by his friend, or the man
who time after time in the course of his life raises someone else into a
position of great public authority and then after a certain interval, him­
self upsets that authority and replaces him by a new one; or, again, the
lover each of whose love affairs with a woman passes through the same
phases and reaches the same conclusion. . . .
If we take into account observations such as these, based upon behav­
ior in the transference and upon the life-histories of men and women,
we shall find courage to assume that there really does exist in the mind
 Sartre versus Freud 33

a compulsion to repeat which overrides the pleasure principle. (Freud,

1920a, pp. 21-22)

So far, so good. But in the next section of Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
Freud introduces a further permutation of his metatheory—the death in­
stinct, or Thanatos. This late idea of Thanatos as an explanation of the
need to repeat has often proven problematic to post-Freudian psychoanaly­
tic theorists. Two notable exceptions to the general inclination to dismiss
this concept are Melanie Klein, whose ideas on the subject are discussed in
the next chapter, and Jacques Lacan, whose attempts to link the Freudian
death instinct with psycho-linguistic theory are discussed in Chapter 7.
Freud himself finds in the death instinct both a metabiological principle for
explaining regression and aggression and a way of understanding the repeti­
tion of experiences which were obviously not pleasurable.
Despite all this, in an earlier section of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud
actually gives an insight into the origin of this need to repeat which does
not accord with the hypothesis of the death instinct (Freud, 1920a, pp. 14-
17). The two theories of repetition are, in fact, a good illustration of how
Freud the talented observer can himself be at odds with Freud the meta-
biologist. Freud observed his eighteen-month-old grandson playing a game
which Freud very cleverly identified as an attempt to master his mother's
leaving him, which he permitted without crying. The child would fling away
his toys into the far corners of the room with the long drawn-out expression,
"0-0-0-oh," which Freud and the child's mother interpreted as meaning "go
away" (fort). Later, Freud noticed that the child would occasionally with his
significant "o-o-o-oh'' fling away a wooden reel with a piece of string wound
around it and then draw it back again with a joyful "da" (here), ^fet the child
much more frequently played at the fort part of the game than at the da
part.
Freud interpreted this game as the child's technique for mastering his in­
stinctive renunciation in allowing his mother to leave without making a
fuss. The pleasure came from turning the passive situation of being left into
an active one of controlling the leaving. Included in this mastery was the
venting of hostility and defiance toward the mother, as if the child were say­
ing, "All right, then, go away! I don't need you. I'm sending you away my­
self" (Freud, 1920a, p. 16). If one leaves aside the instinctual interpretation,
it becomes clear that what Freud had observed was a reversal in play so that
the child felt that he had the initiative in a painful situation. Freud observes
that adults enjoy tragic drama for similar reasons. He also notes that this
34 Chapter Two

need for self-assertion does not require a separate (Adlerian) instinct toward
mastery to explain it. Neither, I believe, does it need further interpretation
in terms of Freudian metatheory, either with respect to the pleasure princi­
ple or the death instinct. The need to turn passive into active fits Sartre's
ontology just as well as it fits Freud's metatheory.
Existentialist objections are not so much to Freud the clinical theorist as
to Freud the metapsychologist, insofar as the two can be separated. Such ob­
jections are based on the observation that the experience-distant part of
Freud's system is too mechanical and does not fit well with phenomenologi-
cal analysis. For example, does experience show that human beings always
seek reduction of tension, as the principle of constancy suggests, or is it
sometimes true that they seek increasing excitement? Also, do Oedipal re­
nunciation, sublimation, symptom formation based on unconscious dis­
placement of libidinal energy, or the death instinct really explain why many
human beings—both the psychologically healthy and the seriously ill—very
obviously do not make pleasure the goal of their existence? In other words,
it may be that Freudian metatheory does not account well for cultural
achievement, much as Freud tried to reduce culture to the permutations of
the drives.
Similarly, can the great repertoire of subtle emotional states discoverable
in the healthy adult really be epiphenomena of the drives, resulting from the
lack of immediate discharge? Perhaps human feeling is not ultimately reduc­
ible to the pursuit of pleasure or the avoidance of pain and human relation­
ships to sublimations of libidinal energy. Because of this reductive strain,
however, classical Freudian metatheory leaves many of the developments of
post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory—ego psychology, object relations the­
ory, interpersonal psychoanalysis, and self psychology—with a less than ad­
equate metatheoretical grounding. Such developments require some appre­
ciation of the Other as more than a libidinal object and as important in
ways other than those leading to drive satisfaction—a matter I take up in de­
tail in the next two chapters.
Finally and perhaps most importantly, existentialists object to Freud's the­
ory because it draws upon mechanical explanations borrowed from the nat­
ural sciences—explanations which do not fit well with reflective analysis of
one's own experience or empathic understanding of the experiences of oth­
ers. Even if we accept Freud's occasional statements that psychology must
establish itself as a separate discipline on the basis of purely psychical con­
cepts, we would still have to say that Freud's metaphors about how the
psyche works are drawn from nonpsychical sources—from physics and biol-
 Sartre versus Freud 35

ogy. As Sulloway (1979) so convincingly argues, Freud remains a "crypto-

biologist." Such sources leave little room for understanding the human side
of human relationships—oneself and the Other as subjects as opposed to
oneself and others as objects. Although Freud expresses a desire to carve a
separate realm for psychology as a specific science, he continues to describe
human reality as if it were a thing subject to the laws of cause and effect
which are discovered operating in the thing world. The chief objection to
this model is that it inhibits the investigation of meaning in the exclusively
human sense.

Sartrean Metapsychology: Consciousness

as the Pursuit of Value

The initially most striking thing about Sartre's theory of human reality is
his denial of the unconscious. The reader steeped in Freud will immediately
wonder how one is to proceed with any depth therapy, much less psycho­
analysis, without a theory of the unconscious. Without the unconscious, are
we not thrown back into the world of rationalist voluntarism? "fet it is
Sartre's denial of the unconscious which makes it possible for him to do
without the instinctual forces and psychobiological explanations of Freud.
A meaning which is unconscious is no meaning at all. Sartre's theory of
consciousness, however, is not a voluntarist theory. He does not equate con­
sciousness with the will. Nor does he deny the power of emotional, imagina­
tive, and sexual consciousness as well as rational consciousness. Sartre's the­
ory of consciousness also has a place for all those self-deceptions which are
presented as phenomenological evidence for the unconscious in Freud's sys­
tem. And perhaps most important, Sartre's theory of consciousness allows
for an investigation of the future as meaning or value as well as the past as
ground in human reality.
Sartre's own challenge in Being and Nothingness to Freud's theory of the
unconscious revolves around a philosophical contradiction in Freud's think­
ing. How, Sartre asks, does Freud's concept of the censor who stands be­
tween consciousness and the unconscious in the topographical hypothesis
make sense? There is also, though Sartre does not mention this, a second
censor between the unconscious and the preconscious (Freud, 1915c). This
proliferation of censors, however, only strengthens Sartre's argument. Sartre
questions whether the censor is a viable concept. In other words, the censor,
in order to perform the function of repression, would have to be knowledge-
36 Chapter Two

able of the unconscious material in order to repress it—that is, the censor
would need to know it in order not to know it. The censor thus reintroduces
the paradox of the dual unity of the deceiver and the deceived. We have re­
turned to the original problem of self-deception which Freud's concept of
the censor was intended to resolve: How can an individual (or a censor) lie
to himself or herself about the nature of his or her wishes and desires? We
might as well dispose of the censor and explain how a consciousness can be di­
vided in this way.
Though Sartre does not discuss the later permutations of Freud's theory,
this problem of the dual unity of the deceiver and the deceived is not solved
by Freud's later introduction of the structural hypothesis. In The Ego and the
Id (1923), Freud relegates the censorship function to the superego rather
than to a censor between consciousness and the unconscious. In a sense, as
we shall see, this conception is closer to Sartre's idea about how self-
deception works in that the superego might be taken as a critical reflective
voice which judges spontaneous experience. Yet to the extent that Freud
conceives of the superego as a discrete principality within the psyche, the
question still remains concerning how the superego as censor deceives itself
about unconscious material it recognizes. The same objection applies to
Freud's late (1940) attribution of the function of censorship to the ego as the
home of the defenses. A psychological structure (the ego) has simultane­
ously to know and not to know itself in order to repress certain ideas, feel­
ings, and impulses. One wonders if Freud's three revisions of the theory of
censorship and his attribution of it to three different psychological struc­
tures indicate his own dissatisfaction with his attempts to understand how
this function works.
In any case, Sartre further maintains that the "aha" experience of the
analysand in psychoanalysis calls into question Freud's theory of the uncon­
scious. All depth therapists are aware of this phenomenon in which the
analysand or client suddenly lights up at the felt truth of a particular inter­
pretation or insight: "Aha," the person says, "that is what has been happen­
ing all this time; I see it now." Freud would maintain that at this moment
unconscious material is becoming conscious. 'Yet if the analysand recognizes
a true picture of himself or herself in the analyst's interpretation, Sartre
maintains, then this material could never have been unconscious in the first
place. This sense of enlightenment is explicable 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" (BN, p. 574). Other­
wise, if the complex were truly unconscious, who would recognize it? The
 Sartre versus Freud yj

conscious subject could not, since it has always been out of reach of con­
sciousness. Nor could the complex recognize itself, since Freud tells us that it
lacks understanding. Only a subject who both knows and does not know
his or her own tendencies and desires could recognize what had previously
been hidden. In fact, only such a subject would be able to "resist" the ana­
lyst in bringing this material to light, since only such a subject would know
that there is anything to resist or defend against.
Finally, Sartre claims that much of what Freudian psychology labels
drives and instinctual forces of the deep unconscious is the result of a confu­
sion of the essential structure of reflective acts with the essential structure of
nonreflective acts—whether one is reflecting on oneself or on another per­
son. Reification of consciousness occurs when "each time the observed con­
sciousnesses are given as unreflected, one superimposes on them a structure,
belonging to reflection, which one doggedly alleges to be unconscious" (TE,
pp. 55-56). Thus one observes a young man falling in love with a young
woman. Sartre would say that this particular young man discovers his de­
sires for this particular young woman out there in the world rather than
that the young man's libido drives him to find the young woman. Only a re­
flective act makes the Freudian psychoanalyst say that the young man
found an outlet for his libido in courting the young woman or a substitute
for it in writing a romantic novel or other activity. The young man's desire,
Sartre would say, does not exist prior to living it but in living it. Reflection
conceives of libido as an unconscious a priori when it is, in fact, a superim-
position.
Thus Sartre believes that the analysand in psychoanalysis gains not con­
sciousness of unconscious tendencies but knowledge of spontaneous experi­
ence. The problem is not that these tendencies are too dark, that they are
hidden away in the unconscious, but rather that they are too light. Sartre
writes,

[Spontaneous consciousness] is penetrated by a great light without be­

ing able to express what this light is illuminating. We are not dealing
with an unsolved riddle as the Freudians believe; all is there,
luminous. . . . But this "mystery in broad daylight" is due to the fact
that this possession is deprived of the means which would ordinarily
permit analysis and conceptualization. It grasps everything, all at once,
without shading, without relief, without connections of grandeur—not
that these shades, these values, these reliefs exist somewhere and are
hidden from it, but rather because they must be established by another
38 Chapter Two

human attitude and because they can exist only by means of and for
knowledge. (BN, pp. 570-71)

What Sartre is describing here is the simple awareness of prereflective con­

sciousness without the addition of reflective conceptualization. We must be
careful, however, not to conceive of "prereflective consciousness" and "re­
flective consciousness" as subdivisions of consciousness. Unlike Freud,
Sartre views consciousness as all of a piece, without compartments or
spheres. Reflective consciousness is simply prereflective consciousness turn­
ing and making an object of its own (past) actions, feelings, and gestures—
instead of being directed toward the world, consciousness is now directed to­
ward the self, ^fet it is in this very turning that self-deception becomes a
possibility, since a gap appears between the consciousness reflecting and the
consciousness reflected on. Before we can fully understand this, however, we
must first examine more carefully what Sartre means by "consciousness."
Consciousness for Sartre is not a thing with substance and structure, as
the psyche is for Freud. Nor is human reality motivated by underlying drives
pushing for instinctual gratification. Consciousness is translucid rather than
opaque. It is an openness toward Being, a desire or lack of a future fullness
rather than a self-contained, intrapsychic system. Because consciousness
brings into being a nothingness or gap between itself and its objects, it can
be aware of objects in the world. Otherwise, as a fullness, it could not be a
presence to other objects. Hence Sartre does not accept Freud's idea that the
infant is wrapped in a blanket of primary narcissism from which it is lured by
the discovery that objects in the world (particularly human beings) can pro­
vide gratification. Instead, Sartre's infant would be world-conscious from
the beginning. In fact, we might presume from Sartre's description of prere­
flective consciousness that the infant would be more world-conscious than
self-conscious—a view which might help to explain the finding of many
post-Freudian theorists that a young infant has difficulty distinguishing
himself or herself from the world.3 The human being is not a bundle of
drives but rather the assumption of a position on Being. Consciousness im­
plies its partner, the world. It is intentional in Husserl's sense of always being
consciousness of this or that object.
Sartrean consciousness is also always consciousness for. In other words, con­
sciousness is temporalizing. It is aware of movement out of a past that has
been its only reality toward a future that is not yet. In this respect, Sartre
says that consciousness is doubly "nihilating," or doubly aware of itself as
not being its objects. Consciousness is aware that it is not its objects, and it is
 Sartre versus Freud 39

aware that consciousness and its objects are not what they are going to be.
This movement is perceived both in terms of objects in the world and of
one's own project of being—or way of projecting, or throwing oneself for­
ward toward the future through those objects. Sartre gives the example of
the crescent moon which is going to be a full moon (BN, pp. 86-87). The cres­
cent moon is perceived by consciousness as the lack of a full moon. In itself,
the moon does not recognize this future possibility; it is therefore brought
into being as possibility by the presence of a human witness. Consciousness
also actively attempts to bring into being its own possibilities. The Emperor
Constantine, to use another of Sartre's examples, conceives of his empire in
terms of a present lack of a Christian city in the east—a lack which leads
him to found Constantinople (BN, pp. 433-34).
It is because consciousness inserts lack into the heart of Being that it can
conceive of a future which is different from the present. For all of us, Sartre
says, "being is revealed on the ground of the world as an instrumental thing,
and the world rises as the undifferentiated ground of indicative complexes of
instrumentality" (BN, p. 201). In other words, we perceive objects in the
world in terms of our projects of being—not that we create the world, but
that, for example, a mountain climber and a geologist might view a moun­
tain as object quite differently. As Sartre puts the matter, using a concept
borrowed from Gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin, the world is "hodologi-
cally" organized (BN, p. 279, EOT, p. 57). In other words, it is organized in
terms of the paths which I perceive toward and away from a variety of ob­
jects in the direction of a future which I intend to bring into being. This in­
cludes spatial as well as temporal relationships—my nearness or distance
from objects and my way of conceiving them as furthering or obstructing
my fundamental project in this way or that.
My fundamental project also includes all those tastes and habits by which
I define myself in the world. On the level of prereflective consciousness, a
person must be sought for in the concrete choices which clarify his or her
fundamental project of being. This project is not to be found behind this
concrete richness but in it. Sartre says,

The value of things, their instrumental role, their proximity and real
distance (which have no relation to their spatial proximity and dis­
tance) do nothing more than to outline my image—that is, my choice.
My clothing (a uniform or a lounge suit, a soft or a starched shirt,
whether neglected or cared for, carefully chosen or ordinary), my furni­
ture, the street on which I live, the city in which I reside, the books with
40 Chapter Two

which I surround myself, the recreation which I enjoy, everything

which is mine, that is, finally, the world of which I am perpetually con­
scious, at least by way of a meaning implied by the object which I look
at or use: all this informs me of my choice—that is, my being. (BN,
p. 463)

These prereflective choices, which include such things as my taste in food

and clothing as well as my way of relating to other people, may never have
been reflectively conceived. I may not be able to say, for instance, why it is
that I prefer my meat done medium-well rather than rare, or why I am more
comfortable being too hot than too cold, ^ t according to Sartre, all of my
concrete choices, all of my various ways of being, doing, and having are
clues to my fundamental project of being—the meaning of my being in the
world.
Furthermore, these "cardinal categories" (BN, p. 431) of human reality-
being, doing, and having—by which I define myself in the world are not on-
tologically unrelated to each other. Doing, for example, is a mode of having,
and having is part of the attempt to be—to achieve a substantive sense of
self. The uniquely individual character of a person's fundamental project is
revealed through an examination of these cardinal categories. Indeed, Sartre
asserts, one might invent a "psychoanalysis of things" based on the qualities
of things and the relation of these qualities to an individual's choice of self
in the world. For example, as Sartre notes in a famous example, "slime" is a
quality which can be applied both to the human world (to a handshake, a
smile, a thought, a feeling) and to the physical world. The reason slime
strikes us as so horrible, Sartre maintains, is that it suggests a kind of "re­
venge of the In-itself" on the for-itself (BN, p. 609). Like a "liquid seen in a
nightmare" (BN, p. 609), slime possesses a leechlike softness which threatens
to possess me as I attempt to possess it.
The ontological significance of slime is therefore the discovery of the slimy
as "antivalue" (BN, p. 6ll). Slime suggests not substantive freedom (Being-in-
itself-for-itself) but a freedom sucked up and absorbed by matter (Being-for-
itself-in-itself). And it is for this reason that we tend to recoil from the slimy
substance or the slimy handshake. Unlike water, which provides a natural
symbol for the fluidity of consciousness, slime appears to be a kind of "ag­
ony of water" (BN, p. 607) which suggests just the opposite—a consciousness
not fluid and free, but sucked up by a material world within which it loses it­
self. Of course, Being-for-itself-in-itself is no more of a real possibility than
Being-in-itself-for-itself, but the "great ontological region of sliminess" (BN,
 Sartre versus Freud 41

p. 611) gives testimony to the horror which conceiving of such a state can
evoke in the majority of people. Ontological investigations such as this one,
Sartre proposes, might create a psychoanalysis of things to replace the uni­
versal symbology of Freudian psychoanalysis. Certainly a preference for
slime (if one should have such a preference) would have a particular mean-
ing in an individual's fundamental project of being. But because it would be
discovered out there in the world rather than in the recesses of the psyche, it
would represent a point of conjunction between consciousness and the
world.
Such prereflective choices, on the other hand, would not necessarily be
any better known in the reflective sense in existential psychoanalysis than
they are in Freudian psychoanalysis. Indeed, the meaning of my various
ways of doing, being, and having may be easily reflectively misconceived—
especially if they are part of a project to deceive myself in this way or that. I
may, for instance, conceive of myself as being a warm and generous person,
when in actuality my warmth is hypocritical and my generosity a means to
control others by ingratiating myself with them. Yet Sartre would maintain
that my underlying aggressive motives are not unconscious. Rather, they are
to be found in the way I perform my so-called warm and generous acts and
probably also in my complaints when I do not receive the responses I desire.
Yet Sartre says that to be is to act and to act is to intend to act. In fact, there
is no difference between acting and intending to act, for "our acts will in­
form us of our intentions" (BN, p. 484). If I could attend to myself while per­
forming these acts which I have reflectively designated as "warm and gener­
ous," I would discover their true nature. The problem is that I do not want
to see this about myself. I want, instead, to perpetuate the myth that I am
warm and generous. In fact, if others suspect my motives, I will probably re­
monstrate with a great deal of feeling—though my defensiveness will itself be
a sign that I somehow recognize the truth of their statements. How, then,
according to Sartre's concepts, is this self-deception possible?
Self-deception is possible because of the gap between prereflective and re­
flective consciousness. Although the same person spontaneously acts and
reflectively conceives of those actions, these two acts of consciousness are
separated by the same nothingness which separates consciousness from ob­
jects in the world. In other words, it is only by not being my past spontane­
ous self that I can reflectively conceive that self. Of course, I am not being it
in the mode of reflectively designating it. Bad faith, or reflectively lying to
oneself about the nature of reality, is possible largely because the "reflective
attitude . . . involves a thousand possibilities of error . . . in so far as it aims
42 Chapter Two

at constituting across the reflected-on veritable psychic objects which are

only probable objects . . . and which can even be false objects [depending
on what I am trying to prove about myself in so reflecting]" (BN, p. 471).
Thus the mother who calls her harshness love ("I'm only doing this because
I love you") has reflectively created a false psychic object which may confuse
her offspring for the rest of their lives. Her adult children may, for example,
call their own harshness or that of others toward them "love." Fortunately,
as Sartre points out, basic intentionality, unlike reflective awareness, "can
never be deceived about itself" (BN, p. 471). It is therefore always possible to
liberate oneself by returning to the prereflective level and renaming those
objects.
This discussion brings up another question: What is consciousness trying
to do in reflectively conceiving or misconceiving itself? That is, what is the
meaning of all this naming and misnaming? In order to answer this ques­
tion, we must first look at Sartre's idea of the aim of consciousness in both
its reflective and prereflective modes. In contrast to Freud's reduction of
meaning to psychophysiological drives, Sartre maintains that the creation
of value is the primary human focus and aim. Sartre would not, of course,
deny the existence of organismic needs or the grounding of consciousness in
the body. In fact, Sartre believes that consciousness lives the world through
its body. But this is the body for-itself, one's bodily experience of the world,
rather than the body as an object of scientific and medical investigations or
reflective analysis. He gives as an example the pain that I, upon reflection,
say I feel in my eyes from reading. On the nonreflective level, this pain-
consciousness is simply my way of reading. The lived body is not an object
but a subject.
The body of scientific investigation, on the other hand, is an object.
Sartre believes that it cannot be made to express meaning. "The nerve," he
says, "is not meaningful^ it is a colloidal substance which can be described in
itself and which does not have the quality of transcendence; that is, it does
not transcend itself in order to make known to itself by means of other reali­
ties what it is [as consciousness does]" (BN, p. 560). To read human meaning
into physiological excitation is to switch levels of discourse. For Sartre, it is
not psychobiological aims but the attempt at self/world transcendence,
one's sense of becoming, which is basic human reality.
What interests Sartre is the fact that conscious experience, including
bodily experience, is lived as a connection with the world through which we
attempt to create value or meaning. One attempts to use the world to get a
sense of self. Sartre refers to this attempt to create a self through objects in
 Sartre versus Freud 43

the world as the "circuit of selfhess.,, This is the perception by consciousness

of its "possibles" on the face of this particular world, as, for example, con­
sciousness perceives its thirst concretely as this-glass-of-water-to-be-drunk or
a project of writing as this-book-to-be-written. Instead of the Freudian re­
duction of human meaning to neurophysiological forces and evolutionary
aims, Sartre would substitute a meaning which is inherent in each concrete
human action and gesture. This meaning is teleological—it refers to future
ends rather than to past causes, although the past may figure in its designa­
tion of future ends. O n the nonreflective level, the world is revealed as the
"plurality of tasks which are my image" (BN, p. 201). And as I find myself
"sculpturing my figure in the world" (BN, pp. 463-64), it becomes impos­
sible to distinguish what I bring from what the world discloses. My choice of
myself in the world and my discovery of the world are identical. Sartre says,
"Without the world there is no selfhess, no person; without selfness, with­
out the person, there is no world [in the sense of differentiated objects]"
(BN, p. 104).
Thus, without denying the physiological givens of the human condition,
it could never be said that there is first an instinct which then pushes for sat­
isfaction through an object. Consciousness is desire or lack of a (future) full­
ness, but this desire discovers itself outside in the world rather than in the
recesses of the self. Also, this desire is not primarily sexual in nature, though
it can include sexuality as one of its modes of expression. It is a desire of Be­
ing rather than a desire for pleasure or cessation of tension. As an ontologi-
cal desire, it is not a desire which consciousness has but a desire or lack
which consciousness is. Since self/object discovery includes but goes beyond
the satisfaction of elementary physical needs, Sartre does not require a re­
ductionist system in which the higher activities of human beings must be ex­
plained as transmutations of elementary drives. If consciousness discovers it­
self in the world, it can do so in art or philosophy as well as in sexual
fulfillment. Nor do the former need to be explained as a sublimation of the
latter, as Freud believes.
But what is this desire or lack which consciousness is? In its concrete
mode, the answer is as varied as the number of human beings in the world.
Each fundamental project is different. But ontologically speaking, this desire
is a desire for a future fullness, a desire to be a substantial self and yet to re­
main a free consciousness. This is the origin of Sartre's well-known state­
ment that "man is the being whose project is to be God" (BN, p. 566). God,
as the ens causa sui of Aristotelian and Thomist philosophy, is precisely this
combination of a substantial being with a transcending consciousness.
44 Chapter Two

Sartre calls this desire on the part of human beings to become the missing
God "Being-in-itself-for-itself' because it would be a combination of the
substantiality of an object (Being-in-itself, the material world) with human
freedom (Being-for-itself). Unfortunately, this is an impossible goal. "Man,"
as Sartre puts it, "is a useless passion" (BN, p. 615). The goal is impossible be­
cause consciousness is always projecting itself toward the future—because it
can never stop and be a static given.
Let us take Sartre's example of consciousness discovering its thirst in the
glass of water which is to be drunk (BN, p. IOI-2). Consciousness, Sartre
says, conceives of a fulfillment of thirst, satisfied thirst, as a substantial
thing. Such a fulfillment would be the in-itself-for-itself of thirst—that is, it
would combine the two sides of reality, free consciousness with material be­
ing. The problem with this is that the moment the glass of water is drunk, it
becomes the background for a new enterprise—say, continuing to write this
chapter. This is the familiar movement between figure and ground of the
Gestalt perceptual psychologists, whom Sartre admired. According to this
view, consciousness can never coincide with itself. I can never be this kind of
person as a table is a table. I must always face the anguish of my freedom,
which means that I must face the truth that I can never establish myself in
the world once and for all as this kind of person.
Actually, this philosophical perception receives implicit validation from
everyday life. Take those endless personality quizzes or psychological tests
which purport to help me discover "who I am" in the substantive sense. The
truth is that the very existence of these tests indicates that the entity they
claim to discover is in doubt. If consciousness were opaque, like the color of
my hair, this fascination would make no sense. I do not need to discover that
my hair is blond because I already know it. The facts about me as a person
are of a different order from the facts about the physical world, including the
physical contingencies of my own body. Or take the "serious man" (BN,
p. 580) who identifies with his role in a way that Sartre would call "inau-
thentic." This man attempts to be a doctor or lawyer or clergyman or corpo­
rate executive (or cafe waiter, to include a well-known example of Sartre's) as
a table is a table. We may say colloquially that he is "full of himself" in a de­
rogatory sense because of the inflated nature of this stance. What is inflated
about it is our recognition that there is a free consciousness behind this cari­
cature of a profession. For this reason, we know—and suspect that he
knows—that his pomposity is not justified.
O n the other hand, all of us are trying to create a self by our every action
and gesture in the world. As Sartre puts the matter, our fundamental project
 Sartre versus Freud 45

is always "the outline of a solution to the problem of being [the problem of

creating a self in a world where one can never coincide with the self that one
has created]" (BN, p. 463)—a solution which is not first conceived and then
realized, but rather a solution that we continually live in all its concrete real­
ity. So long as this aim is future-oriented, so long as we do not believe we
have arrived at this destination, there is no lack of integrity in the pursuit.
In fact, it is this pursuit, this plan, this stance toward Being, which Sartre re­
gards as the "veritable irreducible" (BN, p. 560), which is the object of inves­
tigation in existential psychoanalysis. It is indistinguishable from one's way
of living one's life in the world.
Part of this project will inevitably be reflective. The serious man who at­
tempts to be a doctor in the substantive sense or the abusive mother who
conceives of herself as loving are examples of the reflective side of this pro­
ject. Probably all social roles are examples of it. So too, Sartre tells us, is the
ego (which, for Sartre, is the "I" or "me" of ordinary experience and not the
Freudian ego of the tripartite structure). In the inauthentic mode (possibili­
ties for an authentic attitude toward one's ego are discussed in a later chap­
ter), the ego is simply my reflective view of myself as having a particular
character or nature. The difficulty with reflectivity, however, is that except
as an attempt at simple presence to one's spontaneous self (a form which
Sartre calls "pure reflection" and which I discuss in detail in a later chapter),
reflectivity is likely to distort. While the distortions of reflective conscious­
ness can take a variety of forms, their basic ontological aim is to create the il­
lusion of substantive freedom, Being-in-itself-for-itself. As such, these distor­
tions are an escape from freedom and responsibility.
"Bad faith" is Sartre's name for this evasion of reality. Although bad faith
is strictly speaking an ontological rather than an ethical category, it often
has ethical connotations as well—as, for example, when Sartre accuses the
anti-Semite or the colonialist or the self-righteous person of bad faith. The
notable exception is the bad faith which is manifested in mental illness. As
Sartre says in a letter to R. D. Laing printed as the foreword to Laing and
Cooper's book on Sartre's later philosophy, Reason and Violence*

Like you, I believe that one cannot understand psychological illnesses

from the outside, on the basis of a positivistic determinism, or recon­
struct them with a combination of concepts that remain outside the ill­
ness as lived and experienced. I also believe that one cannot study, let
alone cure, a neurosis without a fundamental respect for the person of
the patient, without a constant effort to grasp the situation and relive
46 Chapter Two

it, without an attempt to rediscover the response of the patient to that

situation and—like you, I think—I regard mental illness as the "way
out" that the free organism, in its total unity, invents in order to live
through an intolerable situation. (Laing and Cooper, 1964, p. 6)

I think this point is very important to a Sartrean perspective on psychother­

apy since it implies that discovering the structures of bad faith in a client's
fundamental project has nothing at all to do with judging one's client,
which would obviously be inappropriate. In other words, whereas it is al­
ways possible to choose how one lives a particular situation, it is not always
possible to have a viable choice.
The bad faith into which we all fall at one time or another may take two
forms, based on the two sides of human reality. O n the one hand, there is
facticity—the contingent world which I did not create but which I must
choose to live in some fashion or other. Facticity includes my own past as
well as external circumstances. On the other hand, there is freedom—my
choice of objects in the world as a way of realizing my own fundamental pro­
ject of being. A full recognition of my freedom includes the recognition that
nothing—neither myself nor traditional values nor God—has a priori status
as value. Instead, I create value through valuing. I fall into bad faith if I take
one or both of two dishonest positions about reality: If I pretend either to be
free in a world without facts or to be a fact in a world without freedom.
If, for whatever reasons, I desire to escape my facticity, I may fall into the
dishonest position of claiming that I am absolutely free in the sense of being
able to do or be anything whatever or in the sense of having no connections
with my past self. The dreamer who constantly expects a "new tomorrow"
and the schizophrenic who completely ignores reality are examples of this
form of bad faith. So too, Sartre tells us, is the man who denies his own past
by claiming that, despite his preference for same-sex partners, he is not a ho­
mosexual just as a tree is not a rock. Certainly, he is not a homosexual as a
tree is a tree since he has on some level chosen this route, but he cannot
claim absolute disconnection with his past.5 Similarly, the client in therapy
who refuses to see past actions as past choices or who refuses to accept real
present circumstances is attempting to deny facticity. We could, in fact, say
that the "defense" of denial is exactly such an attempt at escape from factic­
ity.
The other form of bad faith noted by Sartre—escape from freedom-
involves a desire to make the world and my past or character determinative
factors in my life. This is the form adopted by the serious man who wishes to
 Sartre versus Freud 47

believe that the world has more reality than himself. Sartre says that "all se­
rious thought is thickened by the world; it coagulates; it is a dismissal of hu­
man reality in favor of the world." It claims "the priority of the object over
the subject," and the serious man "takes himself for an object" (BN, p. 580).
Sartre contrasts the "spirit of seriousness" with the "spirit of play," which
involves a lightness and an acceptance of freedom. He comments that it
would "appear that when a man is playing, bent on discovering himself as
free in his very action, he could not be concerned with possessing a being in
the world" (BN, p. 581).
The playful person is not engaged in the serious but mistaken pursuit of
substantiality. Unlike the serious person, he or she does not attribute his or
her actions to nature, circumstances, or the past. "Play," Sartre says, "re­
leases subjectivity" (BN, p. 580). Thus the position of "seriousness," which is
essentially the position of Freud, is false because it denies one's presence to
the world as conscious choice. The client who in therapy dwells on the past
as caused rather than as chosen would be engaging in this form of bad faith.
So would the person who is afraid to change because change would imply a
betrayal of the past. From this discussion, we can see that Sartre's "reality
principle" is in diametric opposition to Freud's account of reality-
orientation as "serious" attention to the constraints of life. There are, of
course, constraints in life—but one chooses how to live them.
This idea that human beings are basically free within a situation does not,
however, imply a return to rationalist voluntarism. First of all, one may
choose oneself in an emotional, imaginative, or sexual mode, as well as a ra­
tional or irrational mode. Second, Sartre does not equate choice with
"will." Prereflective consciousness is basic intentionality. According to
Sartre, such intentionality is definitely not to be equated with the will,
which is reflective. In fact, even language can be deceptive since it comes
into existence (and may continue even in one's inner dialogue) "for others"
and is often reflective rather than prereflective. Sartre says that "a voluntary
deliberation is always a deception" (BN, p. 450). When I get to the point of
deliberating, the "chips are down" in the sense that I have already chosen
the values on which I will base my deliberations.
Thus Sartre agrees with Freud in dismissing much of what passes for
decision-making as the surface manifestation of a deeper motivation. The
difference is that Freud would see this deeper motivation as unconscious,
whereas Sartre would insist that basic intentionality is conscious even where
it has never been articulated—indeed, even where the articulation (which is
reflective) seems to contradict the basic choice. Hence Sartre maintains that
48 Chapter Two

while I can seem to make "voluntary decisions which are opposed to the fun­
damental ends" I have chosen, I can really "attack these ends in appearance
only" (BN, p. 475). In the end, I will have done what I intended to do. Sartre
gives as an example the stutterer whose fundamental project is one of realiz­
ing his inferiority. The stutterer may make a concerted effort to overcome
his stuttering and may even succeed, only to discover himself finding other
means for realizing his fundamental project of proving that he is inferior.
This contradiction between prereflective intentionality and reflective
statement is an everyday occurrence in psychotherapy. Over and over again,
we meet people who say they want to do one thing but find themselves do­
ing another or who give up one symptom only to replace it with another.
Freud believes that these people are not in touch with their unconscious de­
sires. Sartre would say instead that they are not able to reflect accurately on
their basic intentions. I believe that Sartre is right since, if one asks these
people to attend carefully to the prereflective act and to feel deeply what
they are doing, they can usually come up with an accurate account of their
motivation. In this sense, they are reflectively conceiving correctly what had
previously been misconceived.
Take, for example, the alcoholic who says that he or she wishes to stop
drinking but simply cannot do so. On a reflective level, this person believes
that alcohol is ruining his or her life. O n a prereflective level, the glass of
whisky beckons in the form of a future state of intoxication which one de­
sires. If we put aside the physical symptoms of withdrawal for the moment
(the addiction could just as well be to a new lover for the Don Juan charac­
ter or to a work project for the workaholic), we may find that on the prere­
flective level the state of intoxication represents an escape from an apprehen­
sion of ordinary life as an intolerable state of deprivation. Thus we come to
understand that for this client to cease to reach for the glass of whisky (or
the addictive relationship or the work project) will mean a willingness to
face an intolerable longing. It will mean exchanging a known good (intoxi­
cation) for an unknown possibility of working through those feelings of dep­
rivation which are revealed in, not behind, the reach for the glass of whisky.
All of this is conscious, but it is not under the control of the reflective will.
There is one very significant way in which reflectivity can be contami­
nated. So far we have seen that Sartre has presented two ontological struc­
tures, which are to be contrasted with the purely psychological structures
(ego, superego, and id) of Freud. The first of these is "Being-for-itself" (Vetre-
pour-soi), or human consciousness, which can be divided into reflective and
prereflective modes depending on whether consciousness takes an object in
 Sartre versus Freud 49

the world or whether it takes its (past) self as an object. The second is Being-
in-itselfiVetre-en-soi), or the material world which is indifferent to conscious­
ness, but which consciousness needs in order to make known to itself what
it is. The third is Being-for-others (Vetre-pour-autrui), or my awareness of my­
self as an object for another consciousness.
This third structure, which is extremely important to existential psycho­
analysis, is not necessarily implied by consciousness in the same way that
consciousness by its very condition as consciousness implies a world.
Whereas a consciousness without objects is impossible according to a phe-
nomenological definition, it is possible to imagine a consciousness in a
world where there are no other consciousnesses—as sometimes happens in
stories of human beings raised by animals. On the other hand, this would
not be the human world as we know it. Sartre says that it is through an ex­
perience which he calls the "Look" that I come to be aware of the Other not
simply as an object like other objects in the world but as a consciousness like
my own. The Other's Look reveals another subject because it reveals to me
my own object status beneath the gaze of that subject.
We shall explore the implications of the Other's presence in greater detail
in the next chapter. What needs to be noted here is that my awareness of my
Being-for-others—though it gives me the opportunity for conceiving of my­
self as a concrete being—leads to a contamination of reflective conscious­
ness. Briefly speaking, the realization that I am an object for the Other gives
me new hope of recovering substantive freedom. If I can incorporate the
Other's view of me into my free project, then I imagine that I will become
that impossible combination, Being-in-itself-for-itself. The problem is that
in attempting to do so, I abandon the position of good faith, in which I ac­
cept the ontological failure implied in the value-making process, for a posi­
tion of bad faith in which I attempt to make substantive freedom itself a
thetic ideal.
Of course, I cannot really subvert the Other's freedom to this end, al­
though my attempt to do so will lead me to engage in those interpersonal
battles which Sartre describes as the "conflict of consciousnesses (BN, pp.
361-423). This is basically a conflict over my attempt to manipulate and use
the Other to create substantive freedom. The attempt is doomed because
the Other almost always wants to use me for the same ends and because the
Other is a separate freedom—I cannot incorporate him or her into my con­
sciousness. Sartre names this desire to incorporate the other person into
oneself without in any way impairing his or her character as an external wit­
ness the "Jonah complex" (BN, p. 579)—thereby indicating the ultimately
50 Chapter Two

pathological implications of the attempt to use the Other to create a sub­

stantive self.
O n the other hand, even though I cannot in reality incorporate the Other
into my consciousness, I can mimic the Other's view of me in my own reflec­
tive consciousness—further alienating reflective awareness from prereflective
experience. If I am a child and the Other is one of my parents, I will inevita­
bly engage in this reflective mimicry. To the extent that my parents refuse to
see and name me accurately, I will carry this reflective distortion forward as a
part of my project. In this sense, Freud's intuition about the censoring func­
tion of the superego was correct. But reflective awareness is not really a sepa­
rate structure, and the motivations for incorporating the voices of the origi­
nal others into reflective consciousness are different for Freud and for
Sartre. For Freud, the superego is an outcome of the successful resolution of
the Oedipus complex instead of a part of a project to achieve a substantive
sense of self. Through meta-reflection and a willingness to give up an inau-
thentic project, one can begin to purge reflective consciousness of these dis­
tortions. This too is a topic I take up in more detail in a later chapter.
It should be pointed out here that Sartre does not consider fundamental
change to be easy—any more than Freud does. Yet Sartre would not con­
sider the reason for this to be the stubbornness of libidinal attachments or
the presence of unconscious conflicts. Rather, for Sartre, a change even in
the smallest significant detail of an individual's life means a challenge to
that person's fundamental project. Sartre gives the example of a man on a
hike with friends whose fatigue becomes very painful after several hours of
walking. He initially resists his fatigue but finally lets go, throwing his knap­
sack down beside the road and falling next to it. Sartre goes on,

Someone will reproach me for my act [giving in to the tiredness] and

will mean thereby that I was free—that is, not only was my act not de­
termined by any thing or person, but also I could have succeeded in re­
sisting my fatigue longer, I could have done as my companions did and
reached the resting place before relaxing. I shall defend myself by saying
that I was too tired. Who is right? Or rather is the debate not based on
incorrect premises? There is no doubt that I could have done otherwise,
but that is not the problem. It ought to be formulated like this: could I
have done otherwise without perceptibly modifying the organic totality
of the projects which I am; or is the fact of resisting my fatigue such that
instead of remaining a purely local and accidental modification of my
 Sartre versus Freud 51

behavior, it could be effected only by means of a radical transformation

of my being-in-the-world—a transformation, moreover, which is possi­
ble? In other words: I could have done otherwise. Agreed. But at what
price! (BN, pp. 453-54)

Obviously, the price would be a modification of my whole project of being—

my way of living my body as fatigue to be succumbed to at such and such a
point.
There are many other ways of living my body, including (Sartre tells us in
his biography of Flaubert) psychosomatic illnesses which are intentional but
not deliberate. The point is that changes even in what might seem like the
insignificant details of living may involve a whole new way of "Being-in-the-
world." To change the way I walk, for instance, is to change my orientation
toward life. Thus when Sartre says that we are radically free, he does not
mean that we are capriciously or willfully free. Fundamental change means
facing one of those fearful psychological instants where self and world shift
together. (This is also a point I discuss in greater detail in a later chapter.)

The Implications for Psychotherapy

Clearly, consciousness has a radically different relationship to its objects and

to other people in Sartre's system than does the human psyche in Freud's
system. The Freudian psyche is opaque, whereas Sartrean consciousness is
translucid. Freud imagines a third substance, or psychic glue, which binds
the psyche to its objects: the libido, or generalized sexual energy, which ema­
nates from an unconscious realm of instinctual life beyond the reach of con-
sciousness. Other people in Freud's system are important not as subjects but
as need-gratifying objects. Motivation in interpersonal relations, as in every­
thing else, emanates from the dark regions of the unconscious—from the
drives and from unconscious wishes, conflicts, and complexes. The individ­
ual, according to Freud, emerges from the stages of psychosexual develop­
ment as a fairly self-contained intrapsychic system. Without the interven­
tion of psychoanalysis, the structural interplay between one's ego, superego,
and id is likely to remain essentially the same, as are those repetitions of in­
fantile experience which Freud refers to as "transference."
Sartre, on the other hand, describes the ontological structures of Being in
such a way that consciousness is an openness to its objects. Although con­
sciousness may divide itself into reflective and prereflective modes, it is really
52 Chapter Two

all of a piece since the same consciousness spontaneously acts and reflec­
tively conceives those actions. Thus it is possible through close attentiveness
to decipher one's own project of being and to change. Consciousness is both
consciousness of and consciousness toward a particular future which one is
attempting to bring into being. Sartrean consciousness is not circumscribed
and determined by the past, as is the Freudian psyche. It therefore becomes
as important in existential psychoanalysis to understand an individual's
project in terms of the future which is its meaning as in terms of the past
which is its ground. Furthermore, relations with others are not simply exter­
nal and accidental. The Other affects me in my being, and I have with him
"a reciprocal internal relationship of being to being." While this may be a
source of much conflict, especially if I attempt to use the Other in the inau-
thentic project of achieving substantive freedom, it may also be a source of
genuine positive reciprocity and intimacy (a topic I pursue in the following
chapter).
In conclusion, we might say that the chief difference between Freud's psy-
chobiological metatheory and Sartre's ontological metatheory is that al­
though both initially rely on phenomenological analysis and description,
Sartre attempts to discover the ontological structures of human existence
which manifest themselves in experience, whereas Freud attempts to dis­
cover the metabiological (or metaphysical) forces which lie behind human ex­
perience. As an experience-near theory, Sartre's analysis is more in line even
with many recent psychoanalytic approaches. Unlike most of these theo­
rists, however, Sartre offers a metatheory—a philosophical inquiry that goes
beyond phenomenological analysis to elucidate the general structures of hu­
man reality. This allows comprehension of psychological disturbances as
variations on the human dilemma itself—that is, as manifestations of the
various ways in which consciousness encounters the material world, other
people, and the self of reflective analysis and either deals with or attempts to
escape the anguish of responsible freedom.
The differences a Sartrean perspective might make to the practice of psy­
chotherapy, based on insights discussed in this chapter, could be briefly de­
scribed as follows:
1. A therapist working from a Sartrean orientation would substitute the
idea of prereflective choice for Freudian determinism. Using the progressive-
regressive method, he or she would not get stuck in regressive analysis; the
future as meaning would become as significant as the past as ground for con­
temporary choices. Indeed, the past itself would be approached in a different
way—as a past future-directedness with a significance that changes as one's
 Sartre versus Freud 53

fundamental project changes. Past actions would be grasped as intentional

and meaningful within the particular situations in which particular life
choices were made and the directions of the fundamental project estab­
lished. Such vivid reconstruction of the past can liberate the future as well,
since the past now makes sense as emotional choice rather than as mere in­
tellectual reconstruction. For example, if a client can recapture a past choice
of shrinking from an overpowering parent and really feel what it was like as
a child living that fearful situation, then he or she may begin to reflectively
understand his or her choice of the future as one in which submission or de­
fiance toward authority figures is prominent. And though this reconstruc­
tion might not be significantly different from similar reconstructions in
Freudian analysis, the emphasis on the past moment of choice (a choice
which is, of course, fully understandable within the situation) makes the
choice of a different future seem more probable.
As for the future, the existentialist therapist would attempt to interpret
present acts not only in terms of past choices but also in terms of future
meanings. What future, the existentialist therapist would want to ask, is the
client attempting to bring into being? Often the question, "What does [a
particular way] of [doing, being, having] do for you?" will elicit this informa­
tion. For example, suppressing a feeling may allow a client to believe that he
or she will remain in control of an interpersonal situation. And while this
supposition will undoubtedly have its antecedent in past experience, its
meaning is a fear or an intention with respect to the future.
Similarly, the client who is erecting emotional barriers between himself or
herself and others may understand quite well where this "wall" comes from
in terms of past interpersonal relationships. It is nonetheless necessary to
understand it as an intention toward the future as well. "This wall," as one
client put it, "feels like a fortress. I don't know what's outside it since I
haven't really let it down in years, but I suspect that what would happen to
me would be awful. I don't want to look." This not wanting to look is a vote
for future security over the awful anxiety that accompanies interpersonal
vulnerability—but, of course, it is a security for which this client is paying a
great price. Pointing this out leads to a dynamic conception of the wall as
more than a mere static "result" of past interpersonal hurts; it is also a way
of projecting oneself into the future, as a person walled in and unavailable
for genuine intimacy.
Throughout all this, the existentialist therapist would not, of course,
"blame" the client for such choices. He or she would instead try to under­
stand them in all their complex significance within a client's particular situ-
54 Chapter Two

ation. But this understanding would be an understanding of the motives

rather than of the causes (in the deterministic sense) of a client's present
actions. Such motives may well not be deliberate in the reflective sense; in­
deed, usually they are not or else they are reflectively distorted. But they are
gut-level choices—and these gut-level choices must be elucidated in terms
both of their origins in the past and of their meaning with respect to the fu­
ture.
Throughout the process of therapy the existentialist therapist would ap­
proach the client not as a mere product of past (hereditary and environmen­
tal) forces, but as a free subject who deserves the respect of a free subject ca­
pable of creating meaning and of either resisting or allowing fundamental
change to occur. Ultimately, the success or failure of therapy rests in the cli­
ent's hands, not in the therapist's—though this does not, of course, excuse
the therapist from helping the client to elucidate past and future-directed
choices with the aim of alleviating misery by facilitating fundamental
change.
2. The existentialist therapist would not only examine a client's project in
terms of its three temporal ekstases (standing apart) of past, present, and fu­
ture; he or she would also attempt to grasp that client's relationship to time
and space as such—an ontological concern which has no corollary in Freud­
ian analysis. Is a client stuck in the past, living in and ruminating on it while
refusing to be aware of the future to any significant extent? For example,
does this client go over and over a previous relationship, picking it apart to
discover the client's or the relationship's defects? Does this person dwell ex­
cessively on the recent or distant past, looking for excuses for present fail­
ures or even regarding the past as a kind of paradise which is forever fore­
closed? Or is a client at the opposite extreme—neglectful of all responsibility
for past actions, living in a fantasy future or adopting a capricious attitude
toward life? Or perhaps a client feels that he or she has no viable future at
all? Has this person as a consequence become sunk into depression or even
psychosis? How does a client's attitude toward the past change as his or her
future-directed project changes? For example, a client who began to reflec­
tively reassess the past harshness (which he had previously called love) of his
parents suddenly felt an opening of sadness and tenderness which affected
his approach to the future. He began to be less hard on himself and others
and to ask for and offer more intimacy in his relations with others.
The existentialist therapist would also want to be aware of a particular cli­
ent's way of living spatial relationships. Does a client feel closeness or dis­
tance from objects or other people? What is the quality of this closeness or
 Sartre versus Freud 55

distance and what does this say about the client's fundamental project?
How much space or lack of space does a client feel that his or her body occu­
pies? What is this person's hodological space like? What are the paths in the
world that lead toward or away from which objects? For example, a client
with whom I worked felt a sudden change in spatial perceptions resulting
from a shift in his fundamental project which occurred in therapy. He was
suddenly aware of feeling that he "had enough space to breathe" in a room
full of people where previously he had felt crowded and even threatened by
"teeming humanity." And he assured me that the room literally "looked dif­
ferent" as he experienced this crowd without the old (prereflective) intention
of assessing their degree of threat to his personal integrity—a theme which,
of course, had its roots in his childhood but which was also an intention to­
ward the future which affected his spatial perceptions.
3. A therapist adopting Sartre's view of consciousness in place of Freud's
view of the psyche would not regard therapy as a technique for making the
unconscious conscious, but rather as a way to focus a healing reflection on a
client's previously distorted or unidentified prereflective experience. As for
the phenomena of self-deception which Freud regards as indications of un­
conscious forces and processes, the existentialist therapist would reinterpret
these in the light of the gap between reflective and prereflective conscious­
ness and the structures of bad faith.
Especially important here would be an investigation of the way in which
prereflective choices have been reflectively distorted by attention to the
voices of the original powerful others. For example, perhaps a client who is
afraid to feel strongly identifies lack of feeling with "strength" and feeling
with "weakness"—views which correspond to the views of his or her parents
and which inhabit the client's project as a decision to be strong. Or perhaps
there has been a failure of conceptualization. For example, a client who feels
miserable over a lack of intimate contact with others may not have repressed
his or her awareness of intimacy needs into the unconscious; instead, this
person may simply have lived lack of intimacy as "the way things are" in a
family which offered little emotional contact.
As for the structures of bad faith—the lie to myself about being free in a
world without facts or a fact in a world without freedom—these may lead to
a misunderstanding about reality in which I resist awareness in certain areas.
From an existentialist perspective, such resistance does not amount to re­
pression into the unconscious. For example, a person afflicted by the first
form of bad faith might appear to have repressed a knowledge of past hurts,
whereas a person living the second might appear to have repressed the ca-
56 Chapter Two

pacity to act autonomously and effectively. The truth is that no repression

in the sense of relegating something to the unconscious is going on at all
here. Rather, there is a selective attention-inattention to the past or future
based on a particular fundamental choice of being. There is reflective distor­
tion, but no unconscious processes.
For example, I recall a client with a particularly painful and even abusive
childhood who had resolved, as part of his fundamental project, to "put all
that behind me." He remembered very little of his childhood by the time he
entered therapy. But he also reported remembering very little of what hap­
pened last week or last month. He had, in effect, learned to forget as a way
of surviving. Memories began to flood in as he changed his project of
forgetting—memories which I would submit were never unconscious but
which had been held at a distance in a project of forgetting.
Similarly, another client, afflicted with the second form of bad faith, came
in week after week to tell me of the overwhelming circumstances which kept
him from acting effectively in the world. He was not, as I discovered, af­
flicted with an unconscious motive to fail; however, he had made a funda­
mental choice of being in which he conceived of himself as exonerated from
guilt (which was abundantly handed out in his childhood home) only so
long as something outside made it impossible for him to act in any other
way. This project was fully conscious—but it had never been reflectively ex­
amined.
The existentialist therapist, then, would not look for an unconscious com­
plex to explain a client's "pathology." Instead, he or she would investigate
the ontological structures of that client's project of being. Such a project
would be assumed to be translucid and free. Its aim would not be pleasure
(though pleasure could be included as a subsidiary aim), but rather the crea­
tion of meaning—a self as value. And because such a fundamental project is
consciously, though not necessarily reflectively and certainly not accurately,
known, the existentialist therapist would simultaneously refuse to consider
the subject privileged in his or her knowledge of the fundamental project at
the beginning of therapy while still respecting "the final intuition of the sub­
ject as decisive" (BN, p. 574). Because the consciousness reflecting and the
consciousness reflected on are the same consciousness, there is no reason
not to assume that it is possible for the client to understand the strategies of
bad faith and reflective distortion which cloud the present reflective process
and to see what is really going on (a point to which I return in a later chap­
ter).
4. The existentialist therapist would regard relations with others as deriv-
 Sartre versus Freud $7

ing not from a person's discovery of others as libidinal objects capable of

gratifying/frustrating instinctual needs, but rather from a discovery of the
other person as a subject who sees and names me. As such, others, espe­
cially the original powerful others, figure in my fundamental project as
means to establishing a self as value. It is their reflected appraisals which
must be purged through meta-reflection on a reflective process in which I
have (badly) learned from them how to see myself. For example, many a
child has learned to see his or her own needs as "bad" because parents un-
suited to meet those needs have regarded the child as overly demanding or
wrong. On the other hand, my sudden awareness of the Other as another
subject through the experience of the Look also opens the way for a genuine
intimacy and authentic relationship that do not appear possible from the
Freudian perspective (a topic I discuss in a later chapter). The existentialist
therapist, of course, hopes the therapeutic relationship will be such an au­
thentic relationship.
5. The body in existentialist therapy would be regarded not as a source of
psychobiological drives but rather as a way of living one's life in the world.
The existentialist therapist would attempt to explore with the client all those
modes of living the body as a subject and as an object for other conscious­
nesses which form a part of his or her fundamental project. The existential­
ist therapist would interpret bodily lived experience, including emotions,
sexuality, and even psychosomatic symptoms, as choices. I do not, of course,
mean that one chooses one's body as such, but rather that one chooses
one's way of living one's body, including its limitations.
The existentialist therapist would be sensitive to these bodily ways of liv­
ing one's project, both the therapist's and the client's, in the context of ther­
apy. For example, he or she would be aware of closeness or distance, of eye
contact or its opposite, of breathing or holding the breath, of muscular
tightness, and so on as indications of the way a client is situating himself or
herself in the world. Unlike Freudian analysis, existentialist therapy would
not be regarded as a purely "talking cure." While bodily manifestations of
difficulties might well need to be talked about in order to be reflectively ap­
prehended, they would receive a focus in existentialist therapy that they do
not have in classical Freudian analysis. After all, since the subject is always a
body subject, the body itself may be regarded as signifying or indicating
meaning.
6. Unlike the classical analyst, the existentialist therapist would not be
satisfied either with general nosology or with general symptomatology or
symbology. Consequently, the client's world would be interpreted not in
58 Chapter Two

terms of abstract categories (either ontological or psychobiological), but

rather as a concrete and uniquely rich individual world. The ontological
categories are discovered in the client's experience, not behind it. For this rea­
son, symbolism can never be universal. Dreams must refer to a person's way
of living ontological structures and cultural experiences as part of his or her
unique project.
As a deciphering of an individual's project, a hermeneutics or an interpre­
tative enterprise, existentialist therapy must also be sensitive to the slightest
change in the meaning of symbols or the client's overall project. These shifts
signal the appearance of what Sartre calls a "psychological instant"—those
moments when major life changes occur. These major changes are rare if for
no other reason than that they remind us in the most direct way that the
self we seek to create can never be a fixed entity. Thus resistance, according
to this view, may be regarded as fear of facing the anguish of our freedom (a
topic discussed more fully in a later chapter).
The existentialist therapist must be aware of the possibility of radical
change and even cultivate it. Sartre describes the task of existential psycho­
analysis in the following way:

Thus existential psychoanalysis will have to be completely flexible and

adapt itself to the slightest observable changes in the subject. Our con­
cern here is to understand what is individual and often even instantane­
ous [in the sense of the emergence of radical change]. The method
which has served for one subject will not necessarily be suitable for an­
other subject or for the same subject at a later period. (BN, p. 573)

Existentialist therapy, at the same time that it seeks to understand the onto­
logical structures of a client's fundamental project, is aware that that project
is a project, or a throwing of oneself forward from the past to the future on
the part of an intentional consciousness. As such, it is unique, individual,
and ever changing—sometimes even radically.
7. Finally, the existentialist therapist would investigate with a client not
the structures of the client's psyche (since consciousness lacks substance and
structure) but the ways in which this person lives the three fundamental
structures of being—Being-in-itself, Being-for-itself, and Being-for-others. In
doing so, the existentialist therapist might want to ask himself or herself
questions concerning a particular client's way of living the structures of
Being—especially as these include attitudes of bad faith, or lying to oneself
about the nature of reality.
 Sartre versus Freud 59

Being4n4tself. What is this client's basic way of living his or her relation­
ship with objects in the world? Does a client overemphasize the power of the
environment or underemphasize it? In other words, which form of bad faith
(overemphasis on freedom or overemphasis on facticity) is this client more
inclined toward? Or is it a matter of some combination of the two? Or does
this client, influenced by some early trauma, have a very tenuous connec­
tion with real objects, for which he or she substitutes imaginary objects?
What are a client's concrete tastes, ways of regarding or disregarding objects,
or other relationships with objects? For example, does a client cherish them,
define himself or herself in terms of possessions, destroy objects, give objects
away in a flourish of generosity, find the material world oppositional or mal­
leable, and so on? And what does a particular attitude indicate about that
person's attempt to use the material world to create a self?
Being-for-others. What is a client's way of living his or her life with others?
Does a client constantly focus on himself or herself as an object for others,
attempting to please or antagonize or placate or persuade or humiliate him­
self or herself before the Other? Or does a client constantly focus on main­
taining power over others, on making himself or herself the subject and the
Other the object? Or does a client attempt to ignore the Other, losing him­
self or herself in the thing world? How much can a client really allow others
to know him or her or allow himself or herself to know others? In other
words, what is a client's capacity for reciprocity and intimacy?
What is the history of a client's way of relating to others? Where did the
client learn a particular pattern of relating to others, and why does he or she
continue it? Did the original others fail to adequately see or acknowledge
this client? Did they interfere, promising approval or threatening disap­
proval for particular kinds of behavior? Were they overwhelming or violent
in their insistence that their wishes and needs be met at the expense of the
client? And how did the client incorporate this into his or her reflective ap­
praisal of self? Also, how does the client presently hope to manipulate the
views of others, including the therapist, in the service of creating a particu­
lar sense of self? In other words, what are the particular structures of bad
faith in a client's relationships?
Being-for4tself in the reflective and prereflective modes. What is a client's rela­
tionship with himself or herself? Is he or she overly reflective, irresponsibly
nonreflective, or tormented by the (real or imagined) views of others which
are constantly incorporated into reflective consciousness? How accurate is a
client's reflective view of himself or herself? What is a client trying to prove
or what kind of self is a client trying to create through reflectively rewriting
60 Chapter Two

the past? What are the bad faith elements in a client's reflective view of self?
In other words, does a client attempt either to accept the idea of having a
fixed nature (good or bad) or to flee all responsibility by denying that past
actions have anything to do with their author? Does a client stifle all spon­
taneity by constant reflective self-observation? Or does a client refuse to take
a look at himself or herself out of fear of what might be discovered? How te­
naciously does a client cling to the view of himself or herself proposed by the
original powerful others? What are his or her motives for doing so—that is,
how does the client hope to use this reflective view to mold and have a self?

Obviously, there are significant differences between a Sartrean and a Freud­

ian approach to psychotherapy—differences which I discuss in more detail in
later chapters as they relate both to subsequent psychoanalytic theory and
to the practice of psychotherapy. If Sartre's metatheory is to prove clinically
viable, it must be able to account for the significance of other people other
than as objects for instinctual gratification/frustration. A Sartrean perspec­
tive must also be able to account for failures in development without resort­
ing to the structural hypothesis of Freud and for therapeutic change in some
other way than making unconscious ideas and wishes conscious. And it
must be able to accomplish its goal of achieving a more human approach to
psychotherapy while maintaining a rigor similar to that of Freudian psycho­
analysis at its best.
Actually, I believe that Sartre's metatheory accounts for the aim of psy­
chotherapy, which is a radical shift in a person's way of being in the world,
better than Freud's does. I also believe it is possible to gain a better under­
standing of many significant theoretical and clinical issues, including issues
brought forward by post-Freudian psychoanalytic theorists which are diffi­
cult to incorporate into a traditional Freudian framework, through an un­
derstanding of the philosophy of Sartre. Obviously, no metatheory, includ­
ing Freud's, can account for everything. It is enough if a metatheory proves
clinically viable in dealing with difficulties which stand in the way of allevi­
ating unnecessary human suffering and promoting authentic living and if it
accords well with the majority of clinical data.
3* Sartre and the Post-Freudian
Drive Theorists: A Crisis
in Psychoanalytic Metatheory

T/ie Nature of the Crisis

We have seen in the preceding chapter that Freud does not conceptualize an
internal and primary relationship between the psyche and its objects, either
inanimate or human. Other people are valued not first and primarily for
their human qualities, but rather for their capacities as objects for gratifying
instinctual desires. Only a combination of frustration and gratification can
lure the infant out of its blanket of primary narcissism. The ultimate origin
of interpersonal relations is therefore the discovery that other people can aid
in the reduction of tensions in the tissues of the organism, combined (Freud
sometimes indicates) with phylogenetic racial memories. Although this kind
of mechanistic view may be less than flattering to human relations, it fits
quite consistently into Freud's metatheoretical system.
The psychoanalytic theorists who followed Freud have no such consistent
system within which to place their versions of relations with others. For ex­
ample, they notice, but do not provide a metatheoretical explanation for,
the very significant role which the positive regard of the original others
plays in the development of a sense of self-esteem. Thus the whole question
of relations with others becomes critically important to psychoanalytic
metatheory. If the Other is no longer simply an object for libidinal cathexis
but has a more human role to play in the development of the psyche, then
Freudian metatheory is no longer sufficient. The question becomes this:
Can post-Freudian object (that is, human) relations theory accommodate it­
self to Freudian drive theory, or does the new wine burst the old bottles of
Freudian metatheory? I think that the latter is the case and that the require-
61
62 Chapter Three

ment is for the development of a new metatheory. Obviously, I believe that

Sartre's metatheory can help to solve the crisis in post-Freudian theory
which derives from the discovery of these new relational needs.
Psychoanalytic theory since Freud has made some enormous strides. It
has provided an extension of psychoanalytic principles to allow for work
with more disturbed personalities, including narcissistic, borderline, and
psychotic patients whom Freud considered unanalyzable. It has advanced
theories about human development, including the development of the ego
from the earliest stages of infancy, based both on reconstruction of such
stages from treatment of more severely disturbed adults and on direct obser­
vation of and work with children. Work with patients who seem to retain
certain archaic personality structures (borderline, schizoid, narcissistic, and
psychotic) has allowed a great deal of speculation on what the earliest stages
of infancy and childhood must have been like. And though such specula­
tions and even psychoanalytic infant studies have sometimes been accused
of "adultomorphization" (Peterfreund, 1978), or attribution of adult quali­
ties inappropriate to the infant, these theorists have nonetheless produced
some fascinating evidence that the quality of earliest relations with others is
of primary importance in developing a satisfying outlook on life.
At the same time, post-Freudian theorists have encountered a problem-
trie problem of accommodating Freudian drive theory, which states that
drives are primary and human relationships secondary, to the new emphasis
on relationships. In other words, post-Freudian theory has found itself with­
out adequate metatheoretical grounding. Its two most significant me-
tatheoretical issues are the problem of accounting for relational needs which
indicate a desire for something other than instinctual satisfaction and the
concomitant problem of accounting for the structuralization of the self or
ego which results from the satisfaction/frustration of these noninstinctual
needs.
Many writers on psychoanalytic theory have recognized these problems.
For example, Jay R. Greenberg and Stephen A. Mitchell, in their book Ob-
ject Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory, regard the problem of reconciling drive
theory with the discovery of new relational needs as the central problem in
post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory:

Despite their differences, all contemporary [psychoanalytic] theorists

are concerned with a common problem: how to account for the preemi­
nent importance in all clinical work of relations with other people.
Finding a role in theory for object relations has been the central con-
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Drive Theorists 63

ceptual problem throughout the history of psychoanalysis because

Freud's original drive theory takes the discharge of psychic energy as its
fundamental conceptual building-block, assigning to relations with
others a status which is neither central nor immediately apparent.
Every major psychoanalytic theorist has had to address himself to this
problem. (1983, p. 379)

The failure to solve this problem is the reason for the contemporary "crisis"
in post-Freudian psychoanalytic metatheory.
Post-Freudian theorists have often attempted to avoid this crisis by em­
phasizing the structural over the economic hypothesis of Freud. In doing so,
they propose to complete a task which is implicit in the later work of
Freud—the task of describing how the ego develops out of the id or, as it is
sometimes referred to in post-Freudian theory, the "undifferentiated matrix"
of earliest infancy. Psychoanalytic structural theory has its origins in Freud's
paper "On Narcissism: An Introduction" (1914a), which posited an ego ideal
that is used as a standard for measuring actual performance, a concept later
superseded by the superego. Structural theory is taken up again in "Mourn­
ing and Melancholia" (1917), where Freud explains depression as the result
of the introjection of a harsh critic. And, finally, in The Ego and the Id (1923),
the full theory of the division of the psyche into ego, id, and superego ap­
pears.
The notion of ego defenses, which has been so important to post-Freudian
theory, was introduced by Freud in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1926)
and elaborated by Anna Freud in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense
(1937). This latter work and Heinz Hartmann's Ego Psychology and the Prob­
lem of Adaptation (1939) firmly set the direction of post-Freudian psychoana­
lytic thought toward an investigation of the development of the ego through
the stages of infancy and childhood. Anna Freud's idea that ego defenses
can be externally directed toward the environment as well as internally di­
rected toward instinctual impulses inspired further investigation of the ef­
fects of the environment on ego development. Hartmann's idea that the ego
contains an amount of "neutralized libidinal energy" which can be used for
ego functions such as thinking and evaluation and his concept of the "aver­
age expectable environment" within which the infant can grow into a
healthy adult provided a starting point for those post-Freudian studies
which have attempted to look at the development of the ego in relations
with others. All of this has provided the impetus for a new direction in post-
Freudian psychoanalytic theory.
64. Chapter Three

Post-Freudian theorists are able to find much justification for this direc­
tion in Freud's later work. For example, the idea of ego splitting, which has
been so important to post-Freudian understanding of the more severe psy­
chological disorders, was first introduced by Freud. In "Splitting of the Ego
in the Process of Defense" (1940), Freud discusses ego splitting with respect
to both fetishism and defense mechanisms. For instance, he observes that
the concomitant recognition and disavowal of the perceptual fact that girls
do not have a penis can for fetishists persist side by side throughout their
lives without influencing each other (1940, pp. 75-78). Statements such as
this one paved the way for many discussions on ego splitting in pre-Oedipal
conditions—for example, those emphasized by Melanie Klein, Otto Kern-
berg, and others. Similarly, Freud's idea that "the ego is a precipitate of
abandoned object-cathexes and that it contains the history of those object-
choices" (1923, p. 29) is a cornerstone for the development of the concept in
object relations theory of "internal objects" and "partial objects" and their
influence on psychological development—an idea first emphasized by Mela­
nie Klein and later taken up by most object relations theorists.
O n the other hand, Freud himself definitely regards the pre-Oedipal con­
ditions which arouse so much interest among the post-Freudian theorists as
unanalyzable because they are "narcissistic" in character. By this, Freud is
referring not to Heinz Kohut's idea of "narcissism" as a natural line of devel­
opment relating to the impact of others on self-esteem, but to narcissism as
"self-love" or a pathological investment of the ego at the expense of an indi­
vidual's ability to relate to objects. Freud believes that neurosis in part in­
volves an opposite process—the pathological investment of objects leading
to the depletion of the ego. Certainly, he would not agree with Otto Kern-
berg that interfused self and object investments are primary from the begin­
ning of life and that the analysis of the "narcissistic" kernel of neurosis is a
proper facet of psychoanalysis even with neurotics. In fact, when post-
Freudian theorists reject Freud's concept of primary narcissism, they are do­
ing more than slightly revising Freudian theory. They are challenging the
very heart of Freudian drive theory—the idea that the desire for pleasure re­
sulting from the cessation of tension motivates all human activity. By dis­
carding primary narcissism, they make relations with others primary rather
than secondary. For Freud, however, relations with others are a by-product
of the principle of constancy.
Thus the economic hypothesis, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, remains
to demand a reckoning of these new theoretical developments. How, we ask,
is post-Freudian theory Freudian if it ignores or rejects the economic hy-
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Drive Theorists 65

pothesis? After all, the economic hypothesis is at the heart of Freud's

metatheory—explaining the very need for object relations. In fact, the term
"object relations" refers to the economic hypothesis. It means "libidinal ob­
ject," and Freud is quite clear in stating that such an object is human only
because the infant discovers that human beings are the most capable satisfi-
ers of instinctual needs. Post-Freudian theorists are very sensitive to this is­
sue, since it is the acid test of psychoanalytic orthodoxy. They have taken
essentially two paths, which Greenberg and Mitchell (1983) refer to as
"drive/structure" and "relational/structure" theories.
Although I think there is considerable overlap between the two groups, it
is probably essentially correct to divide post-Freudian theorists into those
who attempt to accommodate their ideas to Freudian drive theory and
those who reject, ignore, or radically revise it. Melanie Klein, Heinz Hart-
mann, Erik Erikson, Rene Spitz, Edith Jacobson, Margaret Mahler, and
Otto Kernberg fall within the first group. Harry Stack Sullivan, the British
object relations theorists (W. R. D. Fairbairn, D. W. Winnicott, Harry Gun-
trip), and the later Heinz Kohut fall within the second group. There is also,
as Greenberg and Mitchell point out, a third group—those who, like the
early Kohut, attempt to combine relational theory with drive theory by as­
signing drive theory an explanatory function for one group of (neurotic) dis­
orders and relational theory an explanatory function for another group of
(pre-Oedipal) disorders. All of the post-Freudian theorists discussed in the
next two chapters accept Freudian structural theory. A Sartrean position
would discard both drive theory and structural theory while retaining and
reconceptualizing some of the very useful insights of drive/structure and
relational/structure theorists.
Thus a major metatheoretical problem for post-Freudian theorists lies in
explaining the complexities of human relationships which even in the very
earliest stages seem to suggest that the infant needs something other than
cessation of the tensions associated with physiological needs. Particularly
difficult to explain are the affective relationships and the uses of significant
others to attain a sense of self discovered to be operating in earliest infancy.
Post-Freudian drive theorists have generally explained affective commit­
ments as developing out of initially vague and variable representations of
self and others, which are based on pleasurable and unpleasurable experi­
ences of instinctual gratification/frustration. Post-Freudian relational theo­
rists have often dwelt instead on the structural hypothesis of Freud and the
primarily object-seeking nature of the psyche, dismissing Freud's idea of pri­
mary narcissism and substituting for it an initial state of primary relatedness
66 Chapter Three

with the mother. Both groups of theorists run into difficulties when new re­
lational needs for self-esteem, mirroring, positive regard, affection, and so
on prove incompatible with orthodox Freudian metatheory. And neither
seems to have satisfactorily solved the metatheoretical issues associated with
the discovery of these new relational needs. After all, how can needs to use
the Other as a source of affection and self-definition derive from needs to
use the Other as a source of instinctual gratification? And if relational needs
do not derive from drives, how are they to be explained?
In this chapter, I consider the failed attempts of three avowed "drive" the­
orists to accommodate their discoveries of new relational needs to tradi­
tional Freudian metatheory. Although this failure is largely unacknow­
ledged or glossed over by drive theorists, I think it has grave implications for
Freudian metapsychology. If the most orthodox of post-Freudian theorists
cannot reconcile their own phenomenological data on relational needs with
Freudian drive theory, what is to become of traditional psychoanalytic
metatheory? I believe that Sartre's ontology answers the metatheoretical
questions which are implicit in the phenomenological data—questions con­
cerning who the Other is and how he or she can have such a profound im­
pact on psychological development in ways which are unrelated to drive
gratification/frustration. For Sartre, the Other is not a libidinal object at all,
but rather another subject whose view of me profoundly affects my develop­
ing sense of who I am. Even as an object, the Other is not important to me
primarily as a gratifier of libidinal needs. On the contrary, sexuality itself is a
response to the subject-object alternation—although, of course, a response
predicated on certain biological capacities. The post-Freudian drive theo­
rists also implicitly recognize the significance of the Other as subject—but
since they attempt to accommodate their insights to traditional Freudian
metatheory, the results are often confusing.

The Discovery of New Relational Needs

by Post-Freudian Drive Theorists

Psychoanalytic theorists identifying themselves as traditional in accepting

Freudian drive theory encounter difficulties when gratification/frustration
fails to explain all of the interpersonal facts which they encounter and de­
scribe. Indeed, these theorists often fail to acknowledge the novelty in their
discoveries of new relational needs. Instead they attempt to demonstrate
their loyalty to traditional Freudian metatheory by continually referring to
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Drive Theorists 6j

passages from Freud; by placing new concepts in the old bottles of Freudian
terminology; by assuming drive causality where none is demonstrated; and
by viewing their discoveries about earliest relations with others as exten­
sions rather than revisions of basic Freudian theory, that is, exploring pre-
Oedipal as opposed to Oedipal disorders. If Freud can be accused of mixing
levels of discourse by combining psychobiological and physicalist metaphors
with phenomenological description, post-Freudian drive theorists are even
guiltier of this. This becomes especially evident when the assumed me-
tatheoretical explanation is at odds with the phenomenological description,
as when drive language is used to describe relational needs that serve the de­
velopment of a firm and cohesive sense of self. Often, as soon as one gets be­
neath the obscurity of the drive language, the relational needs discovered by
drive theorists appear as radical challenges to Freudian metatheory.
Psychoanalytic infant studies and developmental schemata frequently ex­
emplify these challenges. Spitz's studies (1945; 1946; 1965) of institutional­
ized infants who were separated from their mothers are a case in point. Spitz
himself was an orthodox Freudian who explained the devastating effects of
maternal separation on infants as the loss of an object which allowed dis­
charge of libidinal and aggressive drives, "fet many post-Freudians have
viewed his work as an example of the devastating effects of lack of adequate
mothering in the emotional sense, even when physical needs are met. Simi­
larly, Erik Erikson's explorations (1959,1968) into the social and cultural fac­
tors influencing the formation of the ego were intended to supplement
Freud's theory, but have instead led to the possibility of substituting stages
of identity formation based on social and relational issues for Freud's psy-
chosexual stages.
Edith Jacobson's work (1964) also began as a traditional ego psychological
extension of Hartmann's concept of the "average expectable environment."
Yet when Jacobson actually gets down to discussing the negotiations be­
tween a phenomenologically conceived self and an object world composed
of real human beings, she begins to encounter the shaping significance of
"disappointment" as opposed to mere drive frustration in the derivation of
psychological disorders. Despite Jacobson's own insistence on maintaining
drive theory, her description of the evolution of the ego out of a shifting set
of images of self and others introduces the possibility of a purely relational
reading of psychological development.
Other post-Freudian drive theorists, whether their area of expertise is
child development/therapy or severe emotional disorders emanating from
disturbances in one's earliest relations with others, encounter similar diffi-
. 68 Chapter Three

culties with finding ways of accommodating relational needs for affective re­
sponsiveness and for the development of a secure sense of personal identity
to traditional Freudian metatheory. Because of their significant impact on
contemporary psychoanalytic theory, I shall discuss three of these theo­
rists— Melanie Klein, Margaret Mahler, and Otto Kernberg—in somewhat
greater detail. Although an overview cannot hope to do justice to the full
complexity of their insights, I believe that the theoretical difficulties we shall
discover in their work are shared by most seemingly orthodox contemporary
psychoanalytic theorists whose work is similarly based on psychotherapy
with children or severely disturbed adults. Klein's and Mahler's insights de­
rive from their work with children, whereas Kernberg is a specialist in treat­
ing the pre-Oedipal disturbances known as borderline and narcissistic per­
sonality disorders. All three theorists obscure the implications of their
discoveries of purely relational needs by using drive terms and pseudocausal
explanations.
Melanie Klein in many ways represents a crossroads between contempo­
rary drive theory and relational theory. Indeed, she has in one way or an­
other influenced most subsequent drive and relational theorists—despite
certain theoretical disagreements they may have with her. Although Klein
at first reading would appear to be a drive theorist par excellence, her work
clearly demonstrates the contradictions inherent in the attempt to reconcile
relational needs with drive theory. As a children's analyst interested in early
developmental issues, Klein seems to view the whole world first in terms of
the pleasure principle and later in terms of the death instinct as well. Ac­
cording to the early Klein (1923, 1928), a child's very curiosity and desire to
learn can be attributed to libidinal impulses. For example, letters and num­
bers entice because strokes and circles unconsciously recall the penis and the
vagina; geography fascinates because it promises a map of the interior of the
mother's body. Or, according to the later Klein (1930, 1948,1957, 1964), the
infant projects cataclysmic fantasies of destruction, born of the death in­
stinct, onto its earliest caretakers. The only real divergence from orthodox
Freudian theory would appear to be that Klein places the Oedipal struggle
and superego formation further back into infancy.
Yet despite this apparent allegiance to drive theory, Klein's thinking is de­
ceptively unorthodox on two counts: She rejects Freud's concept of primary
narcissism, and she proposes the existence of developed affects in infancy
which can hardly be attributable to transmutations of drives. In these re­
spects, Klein foreshadows many subsequent drive and relational theorists—
though their explanations about why these things are so may differ from
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Drive Theorists 69

hers. For Klein, the human infant is object-related from the very beginning
through a priori images of the gratifying breast, penis, babies, and so on,
While this concept of a priori images derives from an attempt to enlarge
Freud's idea of phylogenetic memories as explicated in such works as Totem
and Taboo (1912-13), Klein is actually calling into question not only Freud's
concept of primary narcissism but also his idea of the subordination of ob­
jects to the drives. In doing so, she makes room for the purely relational view
of the psyche espoused by the British object relations theorists (Fairbairn,
Winnicott, Balint, and Guntrip) who followed her. These theorists simply
discard the a priori images and retain the idea that relational needs are pri­
mary,
Similarly, Klein does not appear to recognize the antidrive implications of
her proposition that very young infants (second quarter of the first year of
life) experience the developed affects of "envy and gratitude" and that they
have an urge to "repair" the mother they had previously aggressively at­
tacked (at least in fantasy) as a "bad" partial object. Thus the infant entering
what Klein calls the "depressive position"—where the bad/frustrating,
good/gratifying images of the mother come together as one person—does
not simply seek gratification from the mother. The infant actually loves the
mother and mourns her fantasied destruction not merely as a libidinal ob­
ject but as a person. If this reparative effort fails, the world will forever seem
split into all-good and all-bad ego states and people, with no possibility for a
fully human appreciation of another whole person in all of his or her
complexity—a psychological state characteristic of many borderline and
narcissistic patients,
The problem with Klein's formulation is that the achievement of the de­
pressive position is not explicable on the basis of drive gratification. As
Harry Guntrip points out, "There could hardly be a more fully personal
object-relational concept than reparation made for hurt of the loved per­
son," Hence, despite Klein's "verbal play with ideas of instincts, she was
really concerned with good and bad object-relations, love and hate, and
guilt and reparation, not with ideas of quantitative gratifications of instinc­
tive drives" (Guntrip, 1971, p, 64), Klein's "paranoid-schizoid" and "depres­
sive" positions are not psychosexual but relational stages based on affects
rather than drives. As Greenberg and Mitchell put the matter, "Drives, for
Klein, are relationships" (1983, p, 146),
If Melanie Klein's discovery of relational needs and developed affects in
earliest infancy calls into question traditional psychoanalytic metatheory,
Margaret Mahler's extensive observation of normal children in various de-
JO Chapter Three

velopmental phases (together with her work with severely disturbed chil­
dren) provides even more convincing evidence that earliest relational needs
go beyond optimal drive gratification/frustration. Unlike Klein, who is of­
ten described as an id psychologist, Mahler has found a place within tradi­
tional American ego psychology.1 She is quite interested in the structural
formation of the ego in the earliest stages of infancy and childhood. And
though her work has generated much less controversy in orthodox psycho­
analytic circles than Kleiris, it seems to me that it is potentially even more
threatening to traditional Freudian metatheory. This is because Mahler doc­
uments complex relational needs and developmental stages only hinted at
in Klein's theory, describing in great detail the process through which a
child becomes "the child of this particular mother" (an oft-repeated phrase
in Mahler, Pine, and Bergman, 1975, and Mahler, 1979). Yet like Klein,
Mahler considers herself an orthodox drive theorist and reports her find­
ings using drive terminology. Unlike Klein, she accepts Freud's idea of a pri­
mary objectless state, which she designates as "normal autism." If we really
look closely at what Mahler is saying, however, she appears to have discov­
ered a whole set of relational needs which can hardly be accounted for by
Freudian drive theory. These are largely needs for responsiveness which al­
lows the flowering of a firm and unique individuality.
The primary issue of earliest childhood, according to Mahler, is the prob­
lem of negotiating a strong, separate sense of self in a context in which one
feels related, loved, and loving. Mahler contends that the "psychological
birth of the human infant" is not coincident with physiological birth. It in­
volves a "hatching" first from normal autism (at about three or four weeks)
and second from mother-infant symbiosis (at about five months). The
"separation-individuation" process, which Mahler describes in terms of four
subphases lasting from five months to two and a half or three years, is one of
achieving both an intrapsychic awareness of separateness (separation) and a
unique sense of individuality (individuation).
Mahler views the child as an active rather than a passive participant in
this process. Indeed, she continually marvels at "the extent to which the
normal infant-toddler is intent upon, and usually is also able to extract, con­
tact supplies and participation from the mother, sometimes against consid­
erable odds; how he tries to incorporate every bit of these supplies into libid-
inal channels for progressive personality organization" (Mahler, Pine, and
Bergman, 1975, p. 198). Although Mahler phrases this in drive language, her
observations strongly imply that what the child needs from mother is not so
much drive satisfaction as human relatedness. It is the success of "mutual
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Drive Theorists Jl

cuing," the duet between mother and baby, which determines the happy or
unhappy outcome of the child's development of a strong sense of personal
identity. Thus though Mahler attempts to relate the various subphases from
normal autism to consolidation of individuality and object constancy (end
of the second year onward) to the psychosexual stages of Freud, what is
really striking in her descriptions are the nondrive-oriented relational needs
and existential crises which characterize the process.
Mahler is most orthodox in her discussion of the stage about which she
has the least observational data. Since most mothers did not bring their
children to the laboratory nursery where Mahler and her co-workers ob­
served them until they were several months old, she has little direct data on
the "normal autistic" subphase. Many infant observers, including Mahler's
coauthor Fred Pine (1985), have questioned the existence of an objectless
stage of primary narcissism. And some (Eagle, 1984; Stern, 1985) have also
questioned whether there is actually a symbiotic stage in which the infant
experiences lack of differentiation from the mother. Furthermore, despite
Mahler's failure to acknowledge heterodoxy and despite the concept's wide­
spread acceptance in contemporary psychoanalytic circles, normal symbio­
sis actually diverges from traditional Freudian metatheory. Freud believes
that narcissistic libido and object libido are always clearly differentiated.
Thus Mahler is already not so orthodox as she would have us believe.
For our purposes, however, the significant heterodoxy lies in Mahler's
demonstration of the existence in infancy and earliest childhood of rela­
tional needs which have nothing at all to do with Freud's idea of libidinal
cathexis. These relational needs center around the development of self-
esteem and a firm sense of self through touching, mirroring, and other forms
of emotional and physical responsiveness from the first caregivers. Mahler
claims that such responsiveness leads to the neutralization of libidinal and
aggressive drive energy, thereby allowing the establishment of a "conflict-
free" ego sphere such as that described by Hartmann. Unfortunately, this
ego psychological explanation does not necessarily fit with the phenomeno-
logical data which Mahler presents. The causal link between instinctual
gratification and the need to be recognized as a person is missing.
While touch is important to a developing sense of self, one is struck by the
key importance of needs for visual "mirroring" (a term Mahler borrows from
British object relations theorist D. W. Winnicott), especially the need to be
seen and appreciated, as these manifest themselves throughout Mahler's
subphases. Whereas touch might be associated with drive gratification, it is
hard to see how the need to be seen can be related to anything other than
72 Chapter Three

ontological recognition of oneself as a person. Even touch, as Mahler and

others have observed, must be emotionally sensitive rather than mechanical
to promote optimal development. And Mahler notes that touch is also im­
portant to defining body boundaries, which would hardly seem to be a di­
rectly drive-related need.
It is still more difficult to see how the need to be visually mirrored can be
related to instinctual tension reduction. Mahler notes that this need for ac­
ceptance in the mother's eyes is of primary significance to identity forma­
tion in most of the stages of early infancy and childhood. It is present as
early as the symbiotic phase (four weeks to five months), where "all other
conditions being equal, symbiosis was optimal when the mother naturally
permitted the young infant to face her—that is, permitted and promoted eye
contact, especially while nursing (or bottle-feeding) the infant, or talking or
singing to him" (Mahler, Pine, and Bergman, 1975, p. 45). Among other
things, the early or late appearance of the smiling response is related to such
interactions.
Seeing and being seen, as well as expanded exploration of the world predi­
cated on developing locomotor functions, seem to be even more important
to infants at the differentiation stage (five to nine months). For example, a
baby of this age will spend much time exploring his or her mother's face, is
likely to experience anxiety beneath the gaze of a stranger, and is much de­
lighted by peekaboo games. Mahler explains the latter by commenting, "To
be found by mother, to be seen by her (that is to say, mirrored by her) seems
to build body-self awareness" (Mahler, Pine, and Bergman, 1975, pp. 221-
22). Mahler further notes that the infant's awareness of his or her own
bodily movements is intensified through the mirroring the infant receives
from an "admiring onlooking adult (especially the mother)" (Mahler, Pine,
and Bergman, 1975, p. 205). It is as though the mother's gaze is required to
build a bodily sense of self.
Nor do mirroring needs disappear at later stages. Mahler observes that the
"practicing" subphase child (nine to fourteen or fifteen months), despite
greater locomotor independence and the grandiloquent feeling (especially in
the later practicing subphase, when upright locomotion is possible) that the
"world is his oyster," still needs the mother's positive regard to successfully
negotiate this phase. Mahler notes that the mother's "admiration, when it is
forthcoming, augments the practicing toddler's sound narcissism, his love of
himself (Mahler, 1979, 2:159). Self-love, it appears, is not primary, but
rather is mediated through the love of others. Even the child's confidence in
his or her locomotor abilities is mediated through the mother's belief in the
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Drive Theorists 73

child's ability to "make it out there [in the world]" (Mahler, Pine, and
Bergman, 1975, p. 74). It is also true that "maternal unavailability" at this
time is likely to make the practicing subphase "rather brief and subdued"
(Mahler, Pine, and Bergman, 1975, p. 81) and to deprive the child of the ela­
tion over locomotor accomplishments and an upright view of the world
which is characteristic of this age.
For the child in the "rapprochement" subphase (fifteen to twenty-four
months), the mother, as a witness to the child's expanding sense of self, is
important in an even more complex way than she was in the preceding sub-
phase. Mahler notes that what is now required for the development of a
firm identity is not mere drive gratification or even the cuddling, physical/
emotional availability or applause of earlier ages, but rather higher level "di­
alogue" and developed "emotional understanding" of the child's mood
swings (Mahler, 1979, 2:68-69). The mother must encourage independence
while not rejecting the child's dependency needs. A child of this age has an
even hungrier need for mirroring than the practicing subphase child. The
toddler needs mother to "share with him every new acquisition on his part of
skill and experience" (Mahler, 1979, 2:128), and the toddler is continually
"filling her lap with objects that he found in his expanding world" (Mahler,
Pine, and Bergman, 1975, p. 90).
This is an ambivalent age, characterized by shadowing mother on the one
hand and darting or running away on the other. Mahler describes the exis­
tential crisis faced by the rapprochement child in this way:

O n the one hand is the toddler's feeling of helplessness in his realiza­

tion of separateness, and on the other hand is his valiant defense of
what he cherishes as the emerging autonomy of his body. . . . This is
the time of the rapprochement struggle, from which the toddler may
emerge through transmuting internalization . . . and other identifica-
tory mechanisms with a measure of integration of his self representa­
tion, or he may get caught up in uncertainty about his own identity as
a viable separate being. (Mahler, Pine, and Bergman, 1975, pp. 222-23)

A child in the rapprochement stage is very sensitive to verbal rebuke (as an

extension of nonverbal acceptance or rejection) and woos the mother's par­
ticipation in his or her world. At the same time, however, the toddler re­
sents any intrusions into his or her autonomy. He or she resents being "han­
dled" as a passive object and particularly resists "being kept or held in a
passive position while being dressed or diapered." Nor does the rapproche-
74 Chapter Three

ment child like "to be hugged and kissed, unless he is ready for it" (Mahler,
Pine, and Bergman, 1975, p. 91). The successful negotiation of the rapproche­
ment crisis leads to a firm internalization of loved objects (especially mother
but also father to some extent) together with a firm sense of self. The one is
mediated through the other, as the toddler emerges into a state of self and
object constancy simultaneously.
Mahler's discussions of child and adolescent psychoses illuminate the
drastic consequences of ignoring the relational needs of infancy and early
childhood. Interestingly, Mahler proposes that such psychoses refer to fail­
ure at the symbiotic stage, which she defines as a "dual unity" lacking differ­
entiation between subject and object. Yet what she actually describes is a
deprivation of mirroring (which implies a rudimentary subject-object differ­
entiation) leading to the lack of a sound sense of self. In fact, she comments
that the "primary method of identity formation consists of mutual reflec­
tion during the symbiotic phase" (Mahler, 1979, 2:87). One case history
demonstrating the effects of a lack of adequate mirroring involves an adoles­
cent suffering from a "symbiotic psychosis." As the son of an extremely nar­
cissistic and seductive mother who had no real interest in him as a person,
Mahler tells us that "Charlie" is left searching for "the 'good5 symbiotic
mother—whom he can reflect and whose eyes will reflect love for him"
(Mahler, 1979/ 2-97)- Hence, when dancing with a girl, this young man re­
ported maneuvering "around by the mirror-glass door where I can look at
my own face—see what I look like from the point of view of the others"
(Mahler, 1979, 2:96).
Similarly, a hospitalized fourteen-year-old patient, "Alma," spent much
time "looking into the mirror and said that the whole ward (world?) was a
mirror image of herself" (Mahler, 1979, 1:148). Alma believed that she was
her mother's mirror image or that the world was her own mirror image and
felt that her friends did not like her because something was wrong with her
face. Clearly, Alma's "symbiotic psychosis" related to a failure of self-
identity based on inadequate mirroring. Or take the plea of seven-year-old
"Betty," who expected her therapist's pronouncements to impart feelings to
her: "Do I look sad today? Please say I look happy" (Mahler, 1979, 1:189).
These instances of psychoses deriving from inadequate recognition as a per­
son are multiplied many times in Mahler's examples, suggesting that they re­
flect purely relational difficulties rather than difficulties in the structuraliza-
tion of drives. This would reinforce my contention that what Mahler has
actually described in her account of the separation-individuation process is
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Drive Theorists 75

not an orthodox addition to Freudian developmental theory but an alterna­

tive to the psychosexual stages.
Mahler does not acknowledge this, claiming that there is no clash be­
tween "anal stage oppositionalism,, and the delicate issues of the rapproche­
ment crisis as she describes it. Her drive language often obscures the prob­
lem, as when she writes, "The principal conditions for mental health, so far
as pre-Oedipal development is concerned, hinge on the attained and contin­
uing ability of the child to retain or restore his self-esteem in the context of
relative libidinal object constancy" (Mahler, Pine, and Bergman, 1975,
p. Il8).2 Yet we have seen that it is not as a libidinal object in the Freudian
sense but as a mirroring object that the mother helps the child to develop
self-esteem. Heinz Kohut, recognizing the contradiction, refers to these rela­
tional needs as "selfobject" needs to differentiate them from "libidinal ob­
ject" needs; but, as we shall see, there is some question as to whether the
mother as witness to the child's developing sense of self is an object at all.
Instead, it would seem that she is a subject and that the child perceives him­
self or herself as the object of her attention. Furthermore, considering the
prevalence of mirroring needs and needs for emotional relatedness in the
pre-Oedipal phases described by Mahler, one cannot help wondering how
the drives could become important at a later stage. If one finds emotional re­
latedness and human needs in earliest infancy, where is there room for drive
theory? This, indeed, is a primary problem for most psychoanalytic theorists
looking into the relational needs of infancy and early childhood: They find
not drives but affective attachments and needs for self-esteem based on fully
human interactions. This brings into question as well Freud's account of the
Oedipal struggle.
This dilemma is particularly evident in the work of contemporary Ameri­
can ego psychologist Otto Kernberg. Kernberg, whose theory derives from
work with severely disturbed borderline and narcissistic patients rather than
from work with children, strongly identifies himself as a traditional theorist.
Yet he in effect rejects three cardinal tenets of Freudian drive theory. Kern­
berg implicitly or explicitly takes issue with Freud's concept of primary nar­
cissism, with Freud's view that instinctual needs rather than affects are pri­
mary, and with Freud's theory that pathological narcissism results from
libidinal overinvestment of the ego rather than from thwarted needs for self-
esteem. Even though Kernberg insists on speaking the language of the
drives, one wonders what is left of the economic hypothesis once he is fin­
ished with it.
Kernberg, like Melanie Klein and unlike Margaret Mahler, categorically
j6 Chapter Three

rejects Freud's concept of primary narcissism. He believes that "the concept

of primary narcissism no longer seems warranted because, metapsychologi-
cally, primary narcissism' and primary object investment' are in effect coin­
cidental" (1975, p. 341). One's relationship with self is mediated through
one's relations with others from the very beginning of life. Freud, as we have
seen, would disagree. According to Freud (1914c), primary narcissism is an
objectless state in which the newborn infant is libidinally invested in himself
or herself and totally uninterested in the external world; secondary narcis­
sism is the narcissistic investment of the ego at the expense of withdrawal of
libidinal energy from the external world. Thus it is impossible to have coin­
cidental and mutually reinforcing self and object investment.
^fet Kernberg writes that in normal development there is "an optimal mix­
ture of 'object libidinal' and 'narcissistic' ties, in that the investment of ob­
jects and the investment of self go hand in hand" (1975, p. 323). Thus "when
there is an increase of narcissistic investment [self-love], there is a parallel in­
crease in the capacity to love and to give, to experience and express grati­
tude, to have concern for others, and for an increase in sexual love, sublima­
tion, and creativity" (Kernberg, 1975, p. 320)—or, conversely, in the case of
loss of love or other losses, there is a decrease in concern for others. In other
words, love by others, love of self, and love of others are mutually reinforc­
ing. What this means is that Kernberg has redefined the drives so that they
no longer maintain any vestiges of the quantitative energy permutations
which are crucial to Freud's metatheory. They clearly are no longer drives
but human emotions.
Kernberg, in fact, rejects Freud's idea of the primacy of drives over emo­
tions. Despite his devoted use of drive language, Kernberg claims that af­
fects, not drives, are the primary organizers of early infantile experience. He
argues that " 'cathexes' are, first of all, 'affective cathexes,' . . . which are ac­
tivated in the context of primitive units of internalized object relations; af­
fects are actually the organizers of such primitive units." Gradually, affects
become "linked with the organization of motivational systems, or drives,
into the 'libido' series and the 'aggression' series" (Kernberg, 1975, pp. 339-
40). Perhaps Kernberg's quotation marks should make us suspect that he is
not really talking about the economic hypothesis at all. In fact, Kernberg
has reversed Freud's postulate: For Kernberg, drives derive from feelings
rather than feelings from drives.
What then, one wonders, are "drives," and how can they be equated with
"motivational systems"? Is this not an example of the worst kind of mixing
of levels of discourse? Also, when Kernberg insists that the source of diffi-
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Drive Theorists JJ

culty for borderline and narcissistic patients is primitive, untamed drives, es­
pecially oral rage, envy, and paranoid fears, held rather precariously in check
by primitive defenses, what is he really saying? Is he talking about drives or
is he talking about human emotions? Kernberg himself says that for such pa­
tients it is the "loss of the world of loving and loved internal objects [which]
brings about the loss of meaning of the self and of the world" (1975, p. 313),
thereby leading to a sense of emptiness and meaninglessness accompanied
by states of primitive envy and rage. It would seem that Kernberg is talking
about emotions and about the human need for a meaningful life with others
rather than about drives.
Perhaps the heart of these metatheoretical difficulties lies in Kernberg's
view of severe psychological disorders. Kernberg's view is quite different
from Freud's and much closer to that of relational theorist Heinz Kohut. In
fact, despite much-publicized differences between the two theorists, Kern­
berg, like Kohut, uses his work with borderline and narcissistic patients as a
basis for discovering new relational needs which are important to normal as
well as pathological development. Kernberg's view is very different from that
of Freud, who considers "narcissistic neuroses" (psychoses) to be unanalyz-
able because there is not enough object-directed libidinal energy available to
form a transference. Kernberg disagrees, commenting that psychotic pa­
tients reveal not a lack of object relations but the presence of "primitive,
pathological object relations" which are activated in "psychotic, in contrast
to neurotic, transferences" (1975, p. 342).
Thus Kernberg, like Kohut, believes that at least some of the narcissistic
disturbances on the border between neurosis and psychosis are analyzable.
This is possible because, according to Kernberg, pathological narcissism is
caused not by an extreme withdrawal of libidinal energy from objects, but
rather by an attempt to defend against damaging internalized objects result­
ing in "an aggressive investment of the self" (1975, p. 321). Therefore, Kern­
berg believes that the basic function of narcissism in all pathology is "the
protection of self-esteem" (1975, p. 330). And although he makes certain
bows in the direction of innate aggression, what Kernberg actually seems to
be saying is that the deeply disturbed patient makes other people less real
because they have previously been all too real and threaten to become so
again.
Following Melanie Klein, Kernberg views the maintenance of conflicting
(split) ego states by borderline and narcissistic patients as resulting from the
failure of the very young child to integrate "good" and "bad" partial images
of the mother—a failure which is actually an attempt to protect the good im-
78 Chapter Three

ages from engulfrnent by the bad. The good images are needed to maintain
some vestiges of self-esteem and meaningfulness. The borderline personality
achieves this through contradictory ego states which, though consciously
known by the patient, are never integrated with each other. The narcissist
does it by activating a grandiose self-image which makes of others, except for
those who are taken into the circle of narcissism as extensions of the self,
mere shadows who can no longer attack and hurt; for the narcissist, others
are important as resources for self-aggrandizement. The narcissist's grandios­
ity serves to guard against reactivation of the "sadistically perceived mother
image" and with it the "sense of empty loneliness in a world devoid of per­
sonal meaning" against which the narcissist is protecting himself or herself
(Kernberg, 1975, p. 287).
Kernberg believes that this lack of ego integration in narcissistic and bor­
derline patients may derive from a failure to resolve the rapprochement cri­
sis, as described by Mahler. He does not, however, relegate narcissistic dis­
turbances solely to the arena of pre-Oedipal disorders. Again like Kohut,
Kernberg indicates that narcissistic injury is significant even in neurosis—
commenting that dealing with a "narcissistic lesion" is always a "part of ana­
lytic efforts to modify a neurotic character structure" (l975> P- 330)- In other
words, the need for self-esteem, as derived from positive (loving, not instinc-
tually gratifying) relations with others, is a primary human need. Thus one
cannot help questioning Kernberg's quarrel with Kohut's discovery of a sep­
arate line of narcissistic development which is nondrive motivated. Is this
not exactly what Kernberg himself has discovered? After all, what has the
need for self-esteem based on loving relations with others to do with drive
gratification? One simply cannot predicate the former on the latter. There is
an unbridgeable gap between the two.
With Kernberg, we see the implicit metathepretical difficulties in the work
of earlier theorists made quite explicit. Even more strikingly than in Mela-
nie Klein's work, the "drives" in Kernberg's work turn out to be human
emotions. Hence, as with Mahler, one must be constantly on the alert to
translate Kernberg's drive language into affective terms. Unlike Mahler,
however, Kernberg resembles Klein in his rejection of a state of primary ob­
jectless narcissism, though he is even more radical than Klein in that he
does not try to bolster this rejection with a priori images drawn from phylo-
genetic memories. Like Klein, Kernberg believes that the split ego states of
severely disturbed patients derive from punitive superego forerunners. Yet
unlike Klein, Kernberg is well aware that punitive real relations with the ear-
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Drive Theorists 79

liest caregivers, as opposed to mere projection of aggressive drive energy, may

have set the stage for these punitive superego forerunners.
In this respect, Kernberg may be linked with Edith Jacobson, who deeply
influenced his work, and with Margaret Mahler, whose idea of the rap­
prochement crisis he found useful. Like Jacobson, Kernberg does not accept
Klein's failure to recognize the impact of real parental failures on the devel­
opment of negative introjects. And like Jacobson, Kernberg contends that
the shaping of drives out of the undifferentiated matrix of primal energy de­
rives from real interactions with others—from the partnership of the self and
the object world. Like Mahler, Kernberg relates the narcissistic lesion at the
base of severe psychological disorders to early disturbances in the mother-
infant relationship as well as to constitutional proclivities. And like Mahler,
Kernberg is aware that self-esteem needs are at the base of narcissistic and
borderline disturbances. In fact, he is even more explicit than Mahler in
conceiving of a narcissistic element—in Kernberg's sense rather than
Freud's—in all psychological disturbances.
It is this breakdown of the distinction between the sources of Oedipal dis­
turbances (where Freud was correct) and pre-Oedipal disturbances (where
there is room for discovery of new needs in the formation of the ego) that
most severely challenges Freudian metatheory. If relational needs for self-
esteem rather than drive gratification are at the base of psychological devel­
opment, and the denial of relational needs at the base of psychopathology,
why retain Freud's drive model? Thus with Kernberg we reach the culmina­
tion of a trend in post-Freudian drive theory. This trend perhaps began with
Melanie Klein's recognition of complex affective interactions between
mother and infant, gained impetus with Margaret Mahler's description of
the mirroring needs critical to the separation-individuation process by
which an infant develops an identity, and culminated in the views of Kern­
berg, who, despite heavy use of traditional terminology, hardly retains any
vestiges of orthodox metatheory.
The questions which naturally arise out of this discussion of the develop­
mental significance of relations with others are these: Who is this Other
who is required for the acquisition of self-esteem in post-Freudian drive the­
ory, and is he or she a libidinal object in Freud's sense at all? It would seem
that we would have to answer the latter question in the negative, since, for
Freud, fear of the loss of the gratifying object precedes fear of the loss of love.
Nor is affective attachment primary for Freud, as it is for Kernberg; rather,
affective attachment derives from underlying instinctual energy and its per­
mutations and fluctuations. The new formulation, particularly as it is ex-
8o Chapter Three

pressed by Kernberg, makes recognition as a person at least as important as

gratification from earliest infancy On. Even when a theorist such as Mahler ac­
cepts Freud's idea of primary narcissism, she does not explain how the new re­
lational needs evolve out of it. The relational theorists I consider in the next
chapter insist even more strongly on regarding relatedness as primary from the
beginning of life. Since there appears to be no way to explain the new rela­
tional needs as transmutations of the drives, even among the more orthodox
post-Freudian theorists, it would seem that we need a new approach to ex­
plain them. I believe that Sartre's ontology can provide this new approach.

Sartre's View of the Other as Subject and Object

There is a philosophical problem embedded in the question of why the in­

fant needs empathic responsiveness and mirroring in order to develop self-
esteem. This is the ancient philosophical problem of the existence of others.
Sometimes referred to as the problem of solipsism, it involves the question
of how I know that there are other consciousnesses—that I am not alone in
the universe. This question requires an answer because the new relational
needs discovered by post-Freudian theorists imply the significance of the
Other as another consciousness, as a witness who can see and name the in­
fant. Although in earliest infancy this other consciousness may be only
dimly perceived through the touching and mutual gazing which Mahler and
others describe, there is no doubt that by the time of the rapprochement cri­
sis, the mother's attitude toward the toddler, both verbal and nonverbal, is
of primary importance. How then does the Other become important in this
way? We can begin to answer this question by contrasting Sartre's solution
to the problem of solipsism with that of Freud.
Freud's solution to the problem of solipsism is a curious wedding of scien­
tific empiricism and critical idealism. As a materialist, Freud argues that the
other person is important as another body—as a need-satisfying material ob­
ject. The stuff that binds us to others as material objects is libidinal energy,
and libidinal cathexis explains the investment of others with direct or subli­
mated value as gratifiers/frustrators of instinctual needs. Gratification is re­
quired to lure the infant out of his or her blanket of primary narcissism; frus­
tration is required to provoke ego development. More developed affects,
including those experienced in friendships and comradely relations as well
as in love relationships, are transmutations of primitive instinctual urges.
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Drive Theorists 8l

Aggression, for example, is sometimes characterized as a response to frustra­

tion and sometimes as a transmutation of primary masochism associated
with the death instinct.
According to this view, we have no direct intuitive awareness of the Other
as another consciousness. As Freud says, the notion that other people "pos­
sess a consciousness is an inference which we draw by analogy from their ut­
terances and actions in order to make this behavior of theirs intelligible to
us. . . . [Like the assumption of consciousness in animals,] the assumption of
a consciousness in them rests upon an inference and cannot share the imme­
diate certainty which we have of our own consciousness" (Freud, 1915c, p.
169). Our very interest in others as other consciousnesses has its origins in
their significance as "libidinal objects. ,, Presumably, as we have noted, a
cleverly programmed robot might be able to provide optimal drive gratifica­
tion as well or better than another human being.
The idealist side of Freud's theory follows Immanuel Kant's philosophical
distinction between appearance and reality—the thing as perceived and the
thing itself. As Ilham Dilman (1984) points out, Freud compares his own
idea that mental processes are not directly knowable to Kant's idea that the
outside world is never directly perceivable "by means of the sense-organs."
Freud goes on to say, "Just as Kant warned us not to overlook the fact that
our perceptions are subjectively conditioned and must not be regarded as
identical with what is perceived though unknowable, so psychoanalysis
warns us not to equate perceptions by means of consciousness with the un­
conscious mental processes which are their object. Like the physical, the
psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to be" (Freud, 1915c, p.
171). In fact, Freud seems to provide some relational categories through
which all experience is filtered, similar to Kant's regulative categories for ex­
periencing the external world. Instead of quantity, quality, relations, and
modality, Freud's a priori relational categories include the Oedipus complex,
castration anxiety (in boys) or penis envy (in girls), incest taboos, superego
development, transference of childhood experiences to adult relationships,
and so on. Everyone will experience relations with others as mediated by
these categories, and part of this experience will be governed by (unknowa­
ble) unconscious forces. According to this view, I "create" the other as a li­
bidinal object through the mediation of these categories.
What is striking about both of Freud's approaches to relations with others
is that they deny direct intuitive experience of the Other as another con­
sciousness whose value in relationships is based on this experience. Freud,
like behaviorist B. F. Skinner, regards the existence of other consciousnesses
82 Chapter Three

as an inference. Such a view fails to solve the problem of solipsism in its

more sophisticated form. Thus although Freud's combined materialist-
idealist solution works fairly well within the context of his own system, it
cannot account for the relational needs, operating since earliest infancy,
which have been reported by the majority of post-Freudian psychoanalytic
theorists.
Sartre attempts to solve the problem of solipsism by providing a descrip­
tion of an experience of "apodictic certainty" similar to the certainty about
one's own existence as a consciousness which Descartes attributes to the
thinking subject. Contrary to Freud, Sartre asserts that I know that the
Other exists as a consciousness not by mere inference but by direct experi­
ence. In order for the Other's existence to be certain rather than probable,
the Other "can not at first be an object" (BN, p. 252). Nor can I deduce the
Other's subjectivity from my own. Sartre says that we "encounter the Other:
we do not constitute him" (BN, p. 250). He calls the experience through
which this encounter occurs the Look (BN, pp. 252-302). The French term,
le regard, means notice or attention as well as a physical gaze.
According to Sartre, it is not my experience of the Other as an object, not
even as a mirroring object, which establishes my certainty about the Other's
existence as a consciousness. Rather, it is my experience of myself as an ob­
ject beneath the Other's gaze (or other form of presence since even a blind
person can be the source of the Look) which gives me this certainty. Such
certainty arrives not as a logical deduction but as a shudder in my being—a
shudder which points undeniably to the Other's existence as a subject.
Thus although Sartre takes the viewpoint of a number of psychoanalytic
theorists, including Freud, that there can never be a merging of conscious­
nesses or a way of directly experiencing the Other's subjectivity as the Other
experiences it, he at the same time denies that this means that I can have no
direct intuitive experience of the Other as another consciousness. In fact, it
is my experience of the Other's Look on my flesh which largely motivates all
those inferences by which I attempt to understand the Other's actions and
gestures as emanating from a subjectivity like my own.
Sartre's example of the experience of the Look is a man who, with his eye
glued to a keyhole out of curiosity or jealousy or vice, suddenly hears foot­
steps. Where before the keyhole was a simple instrument through which he
was attending to the scene inside, he suddenly becomes aware that he has an
outside. He becomes aware of his Being-for-others—that is, of his being a
man looking through a keyhole. He experiences shame. The other two basic
reactions to the discovery of my Being-for-others are pride, which is a deriv-
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Drive Theorists 83

ative of shame in that through pride I attempt to assume and bask in the ob­
ject status which I have for the Other, and fear, which arises from my knowl­
edge that I am in danger before the Other—that the Other may use me as an
object for ends which are not my own. In fact, the Other might even use his
or her own knowledge of my subjectivity against me—to manipulate me, de­
feat me, or use or abuse me in some other way. And though I might attempt
to assume an attitude of pride as an antidote to shame or fear, the truth is
that despite certain illusions to the contrary, pride, like the other two atti­
tudes, is a testimony to the Other's power over my status as an object in the
world. It is the Other, and not myself, who sees and names me as a real ob­
ject. For myself, I am forever only a "pseudo-object" created by a reflective
attitude which can never fully grasp that which it attempts to contemplate
since I cannot simultaneously see and be the object of contemplation.
Possibly Sartre's keyhole example, though emotionally convincing, is
somewhat misleading. Sartre is very clear that the feeling of shame does not
originate in any particular version of being made an object—from being
caught at a shameful act such as spying or voyeurism, for example. The rea­
son the threat of being shamed for a particular action is so effective a mode
of control is that it refers to an ontological experience of shame which oc­
curs not because I am this or that particular object before the Other, but be­
cause the Other makes me an object at all.
The Other's Look is a dethronement—an original fall which degrades me
as a sovereign subject and makes me a mere object in the Other's world.
This is why, in the Adam and Eve story of Genesis, the Other appears as
God looking on man's nakedness. Extreme shyness is a perpetual feeling of
shame beneath the real or imagined gaze of others. The ontological truth
behind my recoil from others, if I am shy, is that I feel the Other's Look as a
penetration of my being—the naming of an object which I cannot cease to
be but which I can never fully grasp or understand as it appears to the Other.
Everything happens as though the Other's reactions point mysteriously to­
ward an object I cannot see—and this object is me.
This experience of the Look gains ontological significance as it connects
with Sartre's larger philosophy. We have already seen in Chapter 2 that the
basic human aim is to create a self which is an object like other objects in
the world while still remaining free. This goal of achieving substantive free­
dom is the significance of all human enterprises. It does not involve bad
faith so long as it remains a simple value-making process on the nonthetic
level. But the inevitable human temptation seems to be to turn and try to
reflectively make the process of self-creation refer to a created self. This is the
84 Chapter Three

point where bad faith arises. The Sartrean paradox is that an approach in
good faith to the problem of living involves accepting the impossibility of
achieving substantive freedom while remaining committed to the process of
self-creation.
As we have seen, the Other provides a particular lure into bad faith, or ly­
ing to myself about the possibility of achieving the missing God, in that it is
the Other who provides me with the experience of knowing that I have an
outside. Without the Other, I might have a kind of rudimentary reflective
consciousness based on my perception of my own body and my awareness of
past events. But I can never actually have an outside, can never actually be
another for myself as I am another for the Other. I therefore imagine that if I
could only grasp this object which I am for the Other, I would be in posses­
sion of the secret of my being as an object in the world. The truth is that if
this were possible, I would indeed be in possession of such a secret: I would
know my being outside in the world as it is for this particular Other. If I
could then merge the Other's knowledge of me with my free living of my
project, I would be a free being with a substantive nature—Being-in-itself-
for-itself. That is, this would be so until I met a new Other, who would then
objectify me or the relationship between me and the first Other with whom
I had originally merged.3
Because of this fantasy that the Other can provide the key to my nature,
relationships pose a special temptation—the temptation either to try to sub­
merge myself in the Other's consciousness (love/masochism) or to lure, co­
erce, or manipulate the Other into submerging himself or herself in me
(desire/sadism). A third attitude, indifference, involves the pretense that the
Other does not exist as another subject, but rather as a mere object like
other objects in the world. Indifference results from the failure of other
forms of relating. If I do engage with the Other, I quickly discover that the
Other has his or her own plans for the relationship—and hence arises the
"conflict of consciousnesses" which Sartre describes in the section of Being
and Nothingness entitled "Concrete Relations with Others" (pp. 361-430).
The urge toward symbiosis, seen in the light of this attempt to use the
Other to achieve a self, is not retrospective but prospective. It is part of the
attempt to invent the missing God. Lovers, especially, tend to feel with par­
ticular poignancy this "urge to merge," and it is often the source of their
endless quarrels over whether each "loves" the other enough. The problem
is that the gulf between consciousnesses is impassable. However accurate
and sensitive my guesses, I can never experience the Other's experience, feel
his or her feelings, live his or her possibilities. I can directly experience the
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Drive Theorists 85

Other's Look, but I can never directly grasp the object which I am for the
Other as it (I) exists for the Other. In fact, as Sartre puts the matter, the mo­
ment I turn to look at the Other's Look, "I no longer see anything but eyes"
(BN, p. 380). The Other has ceased to be a subject and has become an ob­
ject. Although I may gain much information about how the Other sees me
from this object Other, I can never directly apprehend and possess the
Other as a perceiving subject.
It is my experience of the Other as a subject which provokes my interest in
the Other as an object, regardless of which I discover first.4 Even as the ob­
ject of my attention, the Other is a different kind of object than other ob­
jects in the world. It is not the Other's mere physical presence or gifts for
gratification/frustration of physical needs which absorb me, but rather his
or her intentions, aims, and attitudes toward me and the world at large as
these are perceived through actions, gestures, and words. Even as an object,
the Other interests me as a transcendence—as someone who, like myself, is
involved in the process of making a future for himself or herself, whose
actions have meanings as well as physical parameters and effects. In this re­
spect, Sartre says that the Other has "stolen the world from me" (BN,
p. 255). In discovering the Other, I suddenly find "that the world has a kind
of drain hole in the middle of its being and that it is perpetually flowing off
through this hole" (BN, p. 256). This hole is the Other as a center of refer­
ence for a set of meanings, perceptions, and actions which are not my mean­
ings, perceptions, and actions. The world is a different world for a different
consciousness than my own, and the Other is bringing into being a different
future than my own future.
Sartre says that the Other as an object is unlike the simple things I use as
instruments in fulfilling my project of being. The Other is instead "an explo­
sive instrument" which constantly has the possibility of making me "experi­
ence the flight of the world away from me and the alienation of my being"
(BN, p. 297). In other words, the Other as an object is constantly threaten­
ing to become a subject who will make me an object. For this reason, my re­
lations with the Other as an object may be made up of "ruses designed to
make him remain an object" (BN, p. 297). Thus the attempt on the part of
certain people to make others into mere objects like other objects in the
world, to deprive them of humanness, is a reaction to the discovery of the
Other as another consciousness—a reaction of denial.
This reification is possible precisely because people are not things, though
one may attempt to treat them as things in order to deprive them of their
objectifying power over oneself. Yet even the position of indifference is un-
86 Chapter Three

stable. Because I remain dimly aware of the Other's transcendence, it haunts

me as an unseen danger at the edges of my consciousness. And except for
this reaction of indifference, my interest in the Other is the opposite of that
described by Freud: I am not interested in the Other as a subject because the
Other has proved to be a sensually gratifying object; rather, I am interested
in the Other as a (transcendent) object because I know that he or she is a
subject.
"fet this realization that the Other is a subject who makes me an object, in
any attitude except the avoidant one of denial of the Other's subjecthood,
leads to a conflict which profoundly affects me. And, indeed, Sartre main­
tains that the two primitive attitudes which I may take toward the Other im­
ply such conflict. In the first of these, which Sartre associates with desire/
sadism, I attempt to transcend the Other's transcendence, thereby sub-
suming the Other's freedom in my own. In the second, which Sartre associ­
ates with love/masochism, I attempt to incorporate the Other's transcen­
dence within me without removing from it its character as transcendence
(BN, p. 363). In the first position, I concentrate on the power of my own sub­
jectivity to banish the Other's power as a subject by transforming the Other
into an object, whereas in the second I concentrate on myself as an object
beneath the Other's gaze.
Neither of the two positions is primary chronologically. Rather, they form
a circle in which, because each attitude is unstable and contains within it
the other as the seed of its destruction, the failure of one may easily lead to
the adoption of the other. The problem is that I can never be satisfied with
either position toward the Other because each position (Other-as-subject or
Other-as-object) refers to its opposite and this reference leads to its own col­
lapse. Our unstable relations with the Other forever include being tossed
between the two poles—being a Look and being looked at—with no hope
for a resolution.
There is no way out for the simple reason that we cannot simultaneously
apprehend the Other's freedom and the Other's facticity—or the Other
ours. We cannot place ourselves on a plane of equality "where the recogni­
tion of the Other's freedom would involve the Other's recognition of our
freedom" (BN, p. 408). Hence if I attempt to recover my sovereignty as a sub­
ject by making the Other an object, I soon find that without the Other I
have lost the means to founding my objective being. But if I then turn and
attempt to recover that objective being by identifying with the Other's free­
dom as its foundation, I discover that the inevitable separation of conscious­
nesses prevents me from accomplishing this feat. The Other remains an
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Drive Theorists
87

alien freedom which I cannot absorb into my objectness, and I remain a

freedom without substance for myself. If I then turn and attempt to absorb
the Other as a subject, I again discover that this is impossible because the
Other, even at the extreme limits of sadism, may recover subjecthood simply
by looking at me. Since neither of these two positions can be held without
contradiction, Sartre notes, the one will always remain present at the very
core of the other as the possibility of its death. At least on the plane of bad
faith, where our project is one of using the Other to achieve substantive free­
dom, there is no escape from this conflictual circle.
Since the circle of love/masochism-desire/sadism is so much at the heart
of most neurotic projects, I think it will be useful to describe these positions
in more detail. Although a person may easily get stuck at one or the other
side of the circle, it is often true that people alternate between the two in dif­
ferent relationships or in the same relationship at different times. An indi­
vidual, depending usually on life experience, may enter the circle at any
point. Sartre himself begins with love/masochism, though he points out
that this attitude is in no way prior to the other position.
According to Sartre, what usually passes for love in the world is at bottom
a desire to be loved—a point with which object relations theorist Michael Ba-
lint (1969) would agree. What the lover wants from the beloved is justification
for his or her existence. In order to achieve this, the lover wishes to assimi­
late the beloved's freedom as the lover's foundation. This does not mean,
however, that the lover wishes simply to be freely loved by a beloved who
does as he or she pleases. On the contrary, the lover wishes to be the "object
limit" of the beloved's freedom. The lover does not wish to be one object
among others in the world, but rather to be the beloved's "whole world" or
else to be that by which there is a world for the beloved. The lover wishes to
be an untranscendable object which cannot be used instrumentally for the
beloved's own ends. The lover wishes to be the beloved's whole "reason for
living," as popular songs are fond of saying.
Such "love" is, of course, a way of attempting to overcome the danger
which I am otherwise in with respect to the Other's freedom—the danger of
being for the Other an object over which I have no control and which
(though I am responsible for it) I did not found as an object. In the original
situation with the Other, as Sartre points out, my being remains over there
at a distance from me—"like the dinner of Tantalus" (BN, p. 364). In love, on
the contrary, I imagine that I can recover myself as an object by absorbing
the Other's freedom and thereby realizing the missing God, Being-in-itself-
for-itself. In pursuing this project, I am not interested in the Other's enter-
88 Chapter Three

prises as they relate solely to the Other; such pure transcendence threatens
me. Instead, I want to assimilate the Other as the "Other-looking-at-me"
(BN, p. 365).
One wonders if this desire to attain a secure being within the conscious­
ness of an Other who is always attending to me is the source of those seem­
ingly irrational feelings of jealousy which pervade some love relationships,
wherein the lover is threatened by anything (work, friends, leisure activities)
which seems to absorb any of the beloved's time or attention. Feeling pos­
sessed by the Other's freedom, I want to absorb that which possesses me. I
want to reduce the Other's freedom to a freedom which is subject to my free­
dom. In attempting to do so, I may make myself ever so seductive—holding
out to the Other the promise of a whole world which is supposedly con­
tained within me as an object.
At the same time, however, I will not be satisfied with my lover's attend­
ing to me out of duty. I do not want to possess the Other as an enslaved free­
dom; rather, I want to possess the Other's freedom as freedom. I am there­
fore not after power. Instead, I want the Other to want me. I want the Other
to voluntarily make me his or her ultimate value. That is, I want my beloved
to will his or her captivity. And this voluntary enslavement must not be
simply to an unchanging me-object. Instead, I want assurance that my be­
loved will love me no matter what I become, that his or her love is not based
on this or that characteristic for which my beloved loves me. Like the lover
in a poem by W. B. "Yeats, I want to know that my beloved will "love me for
myself alone and not my yellow hair" (1956, p. 240). I want to be for my be­
loved an "object-transcendence" which can never be devalued (BN, p. 369).
As absolute value, I also want to know that my beloved would do anything
for me—steal, kill, betray his or her friends. In other words, I want the Oth­
er's freedom to found my essence as its ultimate value.
This is an impossible goal, first because in reality I am one object among
others for my beloved and never simply the sole object of his or her atten­
tion. Even if my beloved seems to be totally absorbed in me for a time, his or
her awakening from the dream of love is always possible. And because my
beloved can at any moment make me appear as an object among other ob­
jects or as a different object than I had expected, I am perpetually insecure.
Second, the goal of using the Other to create substantive freedom is impos­
sible because my beloved, if he or she loves me, will want the same thing
from me. My beloved will want to be loved as a means to justifying his or her
right to be through my subjective absorption in him or her as an object.
This will create conflict since each of us wants from the other a love which is
 Sartre and the Post-Frevidian Drive Theorists 89

not reducible to the project of being loved. We each want a "pure engage­
ment without reciprocity,,, without demands—an "unselfish" love which is
impossible if for no other reason than that each of us wants it and in want­
ing it wants to make use of the Other to get it. The Other, we each find, can
never be a pure subjectivity founding my objectivity.
Finally, even if the two lovers manage to achieve a kind of folie a deux in
which each pretends to stand as justification for the other's existence, there
is always the possibility that a third person will look on the duo and destroy
their love as an absolute axis of reference. It is for this reason, Sartre points
out, that lovers seek solitude. They wish to escape this alienation as an us
object in the look of a third who can destroy the power of each to justify the
other's existence. Perhaps the loss of a love is often so poignant because one
feels that one has lost this justification for one's own existence. The terrible
thing has happened: The Other has turned and made of me something
other than the object limit of his or her freedom; indeed, he or she may even
have made of me a disagreeable object over which I now have no control.
That is why, I think, dispossessed lovers are prone to go over and over again
in their heads and with their friends the reasons why their former lovers are
"wrong" in their assessments of them.
The inevitable failure of the project of love may lead to the adoption of a
debasement of this project in the attitude of masochism. In masochism, I
give up the project of justifying myself by assimilating the Other as a witness
to my free project as object. Having been thrown back on my subjectivity
without justification, I adopt a position of despair which leads to a new ma­
nipulation. Instead of attempting to induce the Other to make me be as an
objective freedom, I attempt to rid myself of that subjectivity which I now
perceive as an obstacle to the Other's founding me in my being. I attempt to
make myself into a mere object, a pure in-itself, rather than a transcendent
object. In shame, I assume the position of instrumentality which I had previ­
ously rejected. In doing so, I desire to be used by an Other who is radically
free so that through identification with this freedom I can become fascinated
with my self-as-an-object.
Unhappily, masochism, too, is a failure since I cannot on principle appre­
hend for myself the object which I am for the Other. The obscene postures
which I assume, for example, are there in the world for the Other in a way
that they can never be there for me. Not only this, I have to recognize that it
is I as a subject who assume the stances which are intended to reduce me to a
mere object for the Other. Hence the more I try to taste my objectification,
the more I become aware of my subjectivity. The man who pays a prostitute
90 Chapter Three

to whip him, for instance, discovers that he is treating the woman as an in­
strument and is therefore taking the position of a transcendent subject in re­
lation to her. This discovery of her objectivity thus frees the masochisms sub­
jectivity, leading to a collapse of the whole project of masochism (BN, pp.
278-79).
With this failure of love/masochism, the person may move to the other
side of the circle, assuming the position of desire/sadism—though the as­
sumption of the attitude of desire/sadism may be taken on its own as an
original reaction to my Being-for-others without my having first assumed
the attitude of love/masochism. Nonetheless, the realization that I cannot
assimilate the Other's freedom either by becoming its object limit or by be­
coming a mere object may lead me to attempt to co-opt the Other's freedom
from another angle. After all, as we have seen, the failure of masochism
leaves me with an awareness of an unjustified subjectivity from which I can­
not escape. Thus freed from identifying with the Other's consciousness of
me as an object, I may turn toward the Other and look at him or her. But
since a Look cannot be looked at, the Other-as-subject disappears to be re­
placed by the Other-as-object. A new enterprise may be born of this experi­
ence. Since I cannot absorb the Other's pure freedom into myself as (tran­
scendent or mere) object, I may attempt to catch the Other's freedom (and
hence the Other's objectification of me) in the Other as object.
In order to do this, I must first induce the Other to incarnate himself or
herself—to subsume his or her consciousness in the body so that I may skim
it off as a person skims cream off milk (BN, p. 394). What I want thereby to
possess is not, of course, simply the Other's body as a body. Rather, I want
to possess the Other's body as it is possessed by that consciousness which in
turn possesses me as an object (BN, p. 394). I do not desire the Other as
body but the Other as flesh. But in order to desire the Other as flesh, I must
first make myself flesh. If, like a client with whom I once worked, I cannot
put myself into a state of sexual desire in the presence of the Other, if I can­
not make myself flesh, then the Other will also be unable to feel desire (at
least under normal circumstances). Indeed, this client, much to his dismay,
always achieved only friendships with the women who figured so strongly in
his solitary imagination as the objects of amorous adventures. He could not
understand why they did not desire him until he realized that, when they
were present at least, he did not allow himself to desire them.
What then does it mean to make oneself flesh and to enter the world of
desire? Sartre distinguishes the body-as-flesh from the body-in-action by
noting that in making myself flesh, I consent to being "absorbed by my
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Drive Theorists 91

body as ink is by a blotter" (BN, p. 395). In a state of desire, I give up my

body as an instrumental synthetic organization of my acts and replace it
with a body which aims at pure "being there" (BN, p. 395). The for-itself en­
snared in the body has as its ultimate project a "Being-in-the-midst-of-the-
world," an infection with facticity which helps explain why in world litera­
ture sensual pleasure is so often linked with death—which is also a
metamorphosis into Being-in-the-midst-of-the-world as opposed to Being-in-
the-world. Desire has therefore a heaviness which signals the "non-thetically
lived project of being swallowed up in the body" (BN, p. 389). It is a "clog­
ging" of consciousness with facticity, a "troubled" consciousness in the same
sense that we speak of "troubled water" as water which seems to be clogged
with itself. In reality, of course, the water is troubled by fine solid particles
suspended in the liquid, but we are talking here about a nonscientific im­
pression. Desiring consciousness presents a similar appearance because it
seems to be clogged with a "yeasty tumescence of fact" (BN, p. 388). Of
course, this inertia which appears to be characteristic of desiring conscious­
ness is itself an illusion in the sense that consciousness does not simply suc­
cumb to desire; rather, it "chooses itself as desire" (BN, p. 391).
The meaning of this choice is not pleasure (though it is often accompa­
nied by pleasure), but rather the attempt to realize the incarnation of the
Other through one's own incarnation. Thus desire experienced alone has a
suffocating quality, a vertigo which gives me the impression that I am going
to drown in my own facticity. This is because sexual desire, from a Sartrean
perspective, always has interpersonal implications. As such, desire also has a
language—the language of the "caress." The caress—which can be accom­
plished with the eyes as well as with the body—is, in fact, equivalent to de­
sire itself since I must first put myself into the attitude of being flesh in order
to caress. What is desired in the caress is, of course, not simple bodily con­
tact, the meeting of "two epidermises," but rather a shaping of the Other's
body by mine and mine by the Other's (BN, p. 390). In caressing the Other,
I cause the Other's flesh as embodied consciousness to be born beneath my
touch—a touch which has itself been metamorphosed by desire into a kind
of passivity.
In caressing the Other, I do not so much instrumentally take hold of a
part of the Other's body (which would undoubtedly cause the Other in a
state of desire to recoil) as place my own body against the Other in an al­
most studied fashion. As Sartre puts it, "It seems that I lift my arm as an in­
animate object and that I place it over against the flank of the desired
woman, that my fingers which I run over her arm are inert at the end of my
92 Chapter Three

hand" (BN, p. 391). Infected with inertia, I affect the Other with inertia-
causing the Other to be born as flesh. And, indeed, Sartre notes that the
"true caress" is not even a matter of caressing the Other with my hand. It is
instead a contact between the more fleshly parts of our bodies—those parts
(breasts, buttocks, thighs, and stomachs) which form more of an image of
pure facticity because they are incapable of spontaneous movement (BN,
p. 396).
Furthermore, it is not only my orientation to the Other which changes in
a state of desire but my whole world orientation. The world itself is meta­
morphosed into a world of desire, which reveals to me the "fleshy" side of
objects. Normally, in living my body instrumentally as a synthetic organiza­
tion of acts, I approach objects as means to my own ends. They are there to
be utilized or ignored. In a state of desire, however, objects reveal to me a
whole different side of themselves. They caress me or assault me, revealing to
me their depth and their texture. I feel, for instance, the caress of warm air,
sunshine, silk sheets, even the clothes against my body. Or I feel rudely as­
saulted by the harshness of a cold draft or a rough surface. This caress (or
anti-caress) of objects is similar to the caresses I exchange with my lover and,
indeed, is born of my placing myself in a state of desire with respect to him
or her.
Thus sexual desire for Sartre is not, as it is for Freud, a lonely enterprise of
instinctual stirring which requires an outlet. Rather, it is a "double reciprocal
incarnation" which can only happen reciprocally (BN, p. 391). Although de­
sire, as we shall see, also has its failure, it is in this sense perhaps more satisfy­
ing than (inauthentic) love, in which the only mutuality is the antagonistic
mutual desire of each partner to be loved. Although the Sartrean descrip­
tion of desire is very different from sexual desire as described by orthodox
psychoanalysis, there are nonetheless some points of convergence. For ex­
ample, Sartre agrees with Freud that sexuality is a preoccupation for the life
span. Sexual desire, Sartre tells us, "appears with birth and disappears only
with death" (BN, p. 384). Children, eunuchs, and old people feel desire, not
just adults who are capable of completing the sexual act. Sartre also agrees
with Freud that sexuality pervades all of our relations with others and not
simply those with the opposite sex; indeed, Sartre points out that even sex­
ual disgust (for example, the disgust often felt by heterosexuals at the
thought of taking a same-sex partner) testifies to a fleshly recognition of the
Other as flesh. As for other seemingly nonsexual attitudes—for example,
pity, admiration, envy, or gratitude—they also have their sexual compo-
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Drive Theorists 93

nents. Furthermore, Sartre agrees with Freud that sexuality is different in

kind from other bodily "appetites."
Here, however, the similarities end. Since Sartre rejects the economic hy­
pothesis in favor of an interpersonal hypothesis, he considers the signifi­
cance of sexuality to be its ontological meaning as related to my Being-for-
others rather than its instinctual aim. This meaning is not the pleasure of
instinctual release, the return to zero energy charge; rather, it is the use of
the Other to create a self by means of the mutual reciprocal incarnation.
Pleasure, where it happens, is a by-product and, as we shall see, often spells
the death of desire. This does not mean that Sartre would deny the biologi­
cal facts of sexuality, including orgasm and secondary sexual characteristics,
but he does not consider these contingent facts to be its primary signifi­
cance.
Indeed, Sartre suggests rather whimsically that the usual way of thinking
about these things may be backward: "Man, it is said, is a sexual being be­
cause he possesses a sex. And if the reverse were true? If sex were only the in­
strument and, so to speak, the image of a fundamental sexuality? If man pos­
sessed a sex only because he is originally and fundamentally a sexual being
as a being who exists in the world in relation with other men?" (BN, p. 383).
Obviously, this is a metaphysical speculation which Sartre cannot prove.
But this seemingly whimsical statement testifies to where he thinks the em­
phasis ought to be placed—on ontological rather than biological signifi­
cance. In a sense, post-Freudian psychoanalytic theorist George Klein agrees
with this assessment when he notes that the sexual aim represents "some
more encompassing need [than mere instinctual gratification] in which self-
conception and self-status are at issue" (1976, p. 97).5
This account is obviously different from sexual desire as described by
Freud, which, though it lacks specificity with respect to objects and even
with respect to aim in the sense of the kind of sexual practice desired, does
not lack specificity with respect to the energetic release which is its goal.
Hence when Sartre says that sexual desire differs from mere bodily appetites,
he has in mind something different from Freudian lability of aim and object
as these relate to a fundamentally polymorphously perverse sexual instinct.
What Sartre means is that in sexual desire, unlike simple hunger or thirst, I
must change my fundamental orientation toward the world. I must enter
the world of desire, which is an interpersonal world, and in doing so I must
clog my consciousness with facticity as I desire the Other to clog his or her
consciousness with facticity. Thus it is impossible, much as I might like
things to be this simple, to follow the old adage, "Make love to a pretty
94 Chapter Three

woman when you want her just as you drink a glass of cold water when you
are thirsty" (BN, p. 388). I cannot not be changed in the process, nor can I
fail to take note of the Other as transcendence.
Therefore, even though Sartre can see how psychoanalysts might view
sexuality as a kind of tabula rasa deriving all its determinations from indi­
vidual history, he nonetheless believes that, although one's individual his­
tory will certainly fix the particular type of relationship one seeks with the
Other, sexuality itself is determined not by biological instincts but by one's
original "upsurge . . . into a world where 'there are' Others" (BN, p. 407).
Sexuality, for Sartre but not for Freud, is originally and inescapably
interpersonal—even where one attempts to escape its interpersonal signifi­
cance in onanism (as Jean Genet did in Sartre's biography). For this reason
alone, we might say that Sartre's version of sexuality squares better with the
post-Freudian theorists' discovery of the primacy of interpersonal needs in
infancy than does a Freudian theory of an instinct which must thereafter at­
tach itself to objects. According to Sartre's view, the infant's interpersonal
needs are not at variance with its developing sexuality.
Sartrean sexual desire, however, is, like Sartrean love, an unstable posi­
tion, since the mutuality arrived at in the "double reciprocal incarnation"
cannot last. The discovery that I must incarnate myself to induce the Other
to incarnate himself of herself leads in two ways to the failure of desire to
achieve its goal of capturing the Other's freedom in his or her body. In the
first place, my own pleasure subverts this goal. Because pleasure motivates
the appearance of a reflective consciousness of corporeality which is "atten­
tion to pleasure" (BN, p. 397), I become forgetful of the Other's incarnation
and hence lose my object. The pleasure of caressing is replaced by the plea­
sure of being caressed as I become absorbed in my own incarnation.
This failure can lead to a passage to masochism if I then seek to become
absorbed as an object into the Other as consciousness, thereby becoming a
flesh swooning beneath the Other's Look. Or it can lead to a passage to sad­
ism if I break the reciprocity of incarnation by attempting to take hold of
and appropriate the Other's flesh—which to some extent I must do in the
active side of sexual intercourse. At this point, however, the Other as incar­
nated consciousness will disappear as the Other as object takes his or her
place. Although the Other may remain flesh for himself or herself and I may
understand this, this is no longer a flesh which I understand through my
flesh. Instead, I am a body, an instrumental organization, confronting a
flesh. The mutuality has been broken.
The "sado-masochistic strain" in normal sexuality which results from this
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Drive Theorists 95

inevitable instability of the positions of love and desire (BN, p. 404), how-
ever, must not be equated with masochism and sadism proper. We have al­
ready seen how the perversion of masochism leads me to try to make myself
into a mere object. Sadism is similarly an embellishment and a perversion of
this sadistic seed in normal sexuality. The sadist reacts to the rupture in re-
ciprocal incarnation by attempting an instrumental appropriation of the in­
carnated Other. As a transcendent subject, the sadist attempts a nonreci-
procity in which he or she "enjoys being a free appropriating power
confronting a freedom captured by flesh" (BN, p. 399). Desire, for the sadist,
is either a humiliating state or else one which simply is beyond the sadist's
power to achieve.
Hence the sadist's mode of attempting to capture the Other's conscious­
ness is to produce pain rather than to induce pleasure since pain can cause
facticity to invade consciousness in the same way that pleasure can—
producing a reflective consciousness which is attention to pain. What the
sadist wishes is to enslave the Other's freedom—to make the Other beg for
mercy, humiliate himself or herself, or betray his or her most cherished val­
ues. The sadist wishes to create in the heaving body of the Other "a broken
and enslaved freedom" which is subject to the sadist's will (BN, p. 404).
Sadism, however, is also an unstable position which bears within it the
seeds of its own destruction. O n the one hand, at the moment when the
sadist seems to have succeeded in reducing the Other as a pain-con­
sciousness to an enslaved freedom, the complex "flesh-as-instrument" which
the sadist had attempted to create disappears and the body of the Other re­
appears. The sadist, at this moment, does not know what to do with the
submissive body which appears before him or her. The only way to keep it
flesh would be for the sadist to enter a state of desire and become flesh him­
self or herself. But if the sadist at this moment incarnates himself or herself,
the project of sadism will have failed in the emergence of desire just as desire
had previously foundered in sadism.
Even if the sadist does not become sexually aroused, the project is likely to
fail from another direction. This is so because the project of the sadist—to
appropriate the transcendent freedom of the victim—is on principle out of
reach. One Look from the victim, at the extreme limits of torture, can ap­
prise the sadist of this fact. This Look, like the look of the dying black Joe
Christmas at his white castrators in Sartre's example from Faulkner's Light
in August, dethrones the sadist from the position of only subject and reestab­
lishes the victim in the position of a subject confronting the sadist as object.
96 Chapter Three

The passage Sartre quotes from the novel certainly does provide a graphic
illustration of this point:

"But the man on the floor had not moved. He just lay there, with his
eyes open and empty of everything save consciousness, and with some­
thing, a shadow, about his mouth. For a long moment he looked up at
them with peaceful and unfathomable and unbearable eyes. Then his
face, body, all, seemed to collapse, to fall in upon itself and from out of
the slashed garments about his hips and loins the pent black blood
seemed to rush like a released breath. It seemed to rush out of his pale
body like the rush of sparks from a rising rocket; upon that black blast
the man seemed to rise soaring into their memories for ever and ever.
They are not to lose it, in whatever peaceful valleys, beside whatever
placid and reassuring streams of old age, in the mirroring face of what-
ever children they will contemplate old disasters and newer hopes. It
will be there, musing, quiet, steadfast, not jading and not particularly threat-
fuly but of itself alone serene, of itself alone triumphant. Again from the
town deadened a little by the walls, the scream of a siren mounted to­
ward its unbelievable crescendo, passing out of hearing." (BN, p. 406)

Sartre goes on to remark that "this explosion of the Other's look in the
world of the sadist causes the meaning and goal of sadism to collapse" (BN,
p. 406). The sadist, at the point where his victim turns to look at him, "ex­
periences the absolute alienation of his being in the Other's freedom" (BN,
p. 405)—and his project of sadism, as we might have predicted, founders on
the reef of the Other's subjectivity.
These, then, are the unstable positions one may take with respect to the
Other in Sartre's description of "Concrete Relations with Others." Even the
position of hate, or desire for the Other's death, will not save me from this
sadomasochistic circle since I cannot, by annihilating the Other, reestablish
myself as pure transcendence. If out of despair over my inability to escape
the circle, I kill the Other, I will discover that the Other, "by slipping into
the past[,] becomes an irremediable dimension of myself in the form of
"having-been" (BN, p. 412). I will then, like the lynch gang in Light in Au-
gust, be contaminated by the Look of an Other which is unchangeable,
since the destroyed Other will carry the key to my being with him or her to
the grave. What I was for the Other is fixed by the Other's death, a fact
which may help to explain why dead parents are often more difficult to deal
with in therapy than live ones.
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Drive Theorists 97

Obviously, these are good descriptions of neurotic relationships, descrip­

tions which can be very useful to a therapist in understanding clients' dilem­
mas. But the question which now arises is this: Does Sartre provide any way
out of the sadomasochistic circle, or are all relationship possibilities as dis­
mal as the ones described here? Is it really true, as Garcin says at the end of
Sartre's No Exit, that "Hell is other people" (NE, p. 47) and that there is no
remedy for this situation? Although Sartre has often been accused of having
a pessimistic attitude toward human relations and although he himself in­
sists in "Concrete Relations with Others" that relating to Others necessarily
involves conflict, I do not think that Sartre's ontology requires us to take a
negative view of interpersonal relations. For one thing, Sartre later admitted
that all the interactions described in "Concrete Relations with Others" were
in bad faith. For another, as Hazel Barnes notes, there is at least a shade of
hope for mutuality in the "double reciprocal incarnation" of Sartrean desire.
And, finally, Sartre himself suggests in a provocative footnote that the pre­
ceding argument does not preclude "the possibility of an ethics of deliver­
ance and salvation" from the sadomasochistic circle—a possibility predi­
cated on a "radical conversion" to what we later learn is a valuing of
freedom itself (BN, p. 412 and 625-28). In Search for a Method, Sartre refers
to this as a "philosophy of freedom" (p. 34), but there he considers ethical/
psychological deliverance to be practically impossible in a world dominated
by scarcity.
Still, many passages in Being and Nothingness give us an idea of what this
radical conversion might be like—and the later Sartre insists, even more
than the earlier Sartre, that positive reciprocity is a genuine human possibil­
ity. The radical conversation would mean a renunciation, concomitant with
a renunciation of the belief that substantive freedom is possible, of all those
attempts to coerce, manipulate, plead with, or degrade the Other so that he
or she might provide me with a substantive sense of self. This renunciation
would not, however, lead to the position of hate based on despair which
Sartre describes as one possible outcome of the discovery that one cannot
get out of the sadomasochistic circle. Despair, as Sartre points out toward
the end of Being and Nothingness, is a position in which one is still commit­
ted to one's mission of effecting the in-itself-for-itself at the same time that
one realizes that this enterprise is doomed to failure. One is still caught up in
the "serious world." The radical conversion goes beyond this position by
valuing the value-making process itself while renouncing the aim of creating
a substantive self (BN, pp. 626-27).
Rather than leading to hate or despair, the radical conversion leads to a
98 Chapter Three

situation in which I freely respect the Other as another subject like myself,
whose desires, views, and life project may be different from and at times even
antagonistic to my own, but which I nonetheless do not attempt to subvert
to my own ends. This does not mean, however, that I delude myself into
thinking that I do not affect the Other or the Other me. Instead, I remain
open to the Other, and in doing so I realize that we cannot not affect each
other. As Sartre points out, even if I take a position of laissez-faire and toler­
ance toward the Other, I cannot thereby escape establishing myself as a "fac­
tual limit to the Other's freedom" (BN, p. 409). In this case, for example, I
throw the Other into a tolerant world and thereby "remove from him on
principle those free possibilities of courageous resistance, of perseverance, of
self-assertion which he would have had the opportunity to develop in a
world of intolerance" (BN, p. 409). The same, of course, is true of the Other
as a factual limit to my freedom. And the radical conversion would not erase
this truth. It would, however, go a long way toward releasing me from the
struggle that is a result of my believing I can use the Other to create substan­
tive freedom.
Perhaps we can recognize even more of the positive potential of the Look if
we understand that, as Hazel Barnes points out, there are two uther possible
Looks which Sartre does not emphasize in Being and Nothingness but which
are not contradicted by his observations there. The first is two people look­
ing at the world together, the "we" of the "common project" which Sartre
does mention in Being and Nothingness (pp. 423-30) but on which he does
not elaborate. It is the basis for comradeship, whether this occurs in the
work world or in an intimate relationship.
The second is the experience which Barnes designates as the "Look-as-
exchange." She regards such a Look not as "a union of subjects but a mu­
tual affirmation of respect for the Other as subject," resembling Sartre's en­
terprise of "love" as described in Being and Nothingness but lacking the
"attempt to assimilate the Other's freedom" (Barnes, 1974, p. 64). The Look-
as-exchange involves the usual subject-object alternation, but with the
added intention of positively understanding the Other's world and using
this understanding to enhance both self and Other (Barnes, 1967, pp. 333—
34). Perhaps the primordial prototype of the Look-as-exchange is the con­
tented mutual gazing of the normal mother-infant pair described by Mahler
and other infant observers. The Look-as-exchange is marked not by hostil­
ity or fear but by mutual receptiveness. We can easily see it as lying at the
heart of what Sartre in his later works referred to as positive reciprocity—
and authentic love.
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Drive Theorists 99

The fact remains, however, that the Sartre of Being and Nothingness does not
describe human relations in good faith. On the other hand, the later Sartre of
Search for a Method, the Critique of Dialectical Reason, the psychobiographies,
and other works repeatedly suggests that positive reciprocity is possible. It is
possible partially because even negative reciprocity (which arises in part because
the Other in a world dominated by scarcity poses both an economic and a psy­
chological danger to oneself) involves a comprehension of the Other as a sub­
ject like oneself (CDR, pp. 131-34). ^et positive regard, genuine love, and "care"
(a term Sartre uses in his posthumously published Ethics [Cahiers pour une mo-
rale; 1983]) can also arise from such comprehension. Nor are people in the later
works perceived so much as isolated individuals. Although Sartre hates the
"terror" which arises as groups on the way to institutional ossification attempt
to force their members to comply with group norms, he is much enamored of
the energy and sense of common aim and purpose which can arise in a "group-
in-fusion" (group-en-fusion) (CDR, pp. 345-404).
Thus we should not be totally surprised to find Sartre at seventy years old,
in an interview with Michel Contat, suggesting that absolute transparency
between people is desirable:

I think transparency should always be substituted for secrecy. I can

imagine the day when two men will no longer have secrets from each
other, because no one will have any more secrets from anyone, because
subjective life, as well as objective life, will be completely offered up,
given. It is impossible to accept the fact that we yield our bodies as we
do and yet keep our thoughts hidden, since for me there is no basic dif­
ference between the body and the consciousness. (L/S, p. Il)

What Sartre means, of course, is that the body is not simply a physical ob­
ject but an indicator of consciously lived life; as such, it can be seen,
touched, and interpreted by others.
Despite the dangers to oneself which self-revelation might pose, secrecy
provides another kind of danger. Consequently, Sartre points out that "this
dark region that we have within ourselves, which is at once dark for us and
dark for others, can only be illuminated for ourselves in trying to illuminate
it for others ,, (L/S, p. 12). This becomes clear when one understands that for
Sartre, the beginning of self-reflection lies to a great extent in the reflection
of others on the self to which one can now add disclosure to others who see
and (one hopes) comprehend oneself. One can probably do this only if one
has previously undergone a "radical conversion" to a philosophy of free-
IOO Chapter Three

dom—that is, if one can bear to have the Other see oneself differently from
the way one would have wished. Actually, Sartre had himself pursued a pact
of absolute transparency with Simone de Beauvoir since the early days of
their relationship—a pact which apparently gave to both a great advantage
in developing self-understanding. His later view is an extension of that early
commitment to transparency in his most significant relationship.6
The later Sartre even attempts to present a different view of "love" than
the inauthentic project of incorporating the self into the Other which he
had designated by that name in Being and Nothingness. He says in an inter­
view in 1975 that beginning with Saint Genet he had "changed my position a
bit, and I now see more positivity in love." He even goes so far as to give this
as his reason for writing the book: "I wrote Saint Genet to try to present a
love that goes beyond the sadism in which Genet is steeped and the maso­
chism that he suffered" (Sartre in Schilpp, 1981, p. 13). In other words, Sartre
wished to suggest the possibility of a love which transcends the sadomaso­
chistic circle of Being and Nothingness.
Contrasting Genet's solipsism with real love, Sartre says,

It is the appeal of the Other that makes the reality of love. We are
drawn, then held, by the promise of parted lips, by the expectation that
we read in the Other's eyes. In order to be able to love a voice, a face, we
must feel that they are calling out for love; hence, the beauty that we
ascribe to them is not likely to be a lie: it is a real gift, and the beloved,
who feeds on it, draws new confidence from it, is beautified by joy. In
order to be completely true, a love must be shared; it is a joint under­
taking in which the feeling of each is the substance of that of the Other.
Each of the two freedoms addresses the other, captivates it, tempts it, it
is the Other's love of me that is the truth of my love: if my passion is
solitary it becomes a cult or a phantasmagoria. (SG, pp. 327-28)

I quote this passage at length both because the mutuality described is so dif­
ferent from the conflictual inauthentic love described in Being and Nothing-
ness and because I think it is an equally logical outcome of Sartre's ontology.
Also, it seems to me that many of the cases of unrequited or nonreciprocal
love which clients present in therapy can be understood as solipsistic pro­
jects to make the Other love me so that I can feel that I have value. Not so ex­
treme as Genet, these clients are nonetheless unhappy because they have
similarly failed to develop a capacity for genuinely mutual caring.
The truth is that Sartre does believe that is possible to understand an-
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Drive Theorists 101

other person, both in a love relationship and in the professional relationship

of the social scientist to his or her subject or subjects. As early as Being and
Nothingness (1943), Sartre had suggested that an empathic human compre­
hension is the primary tool of existential psychoanalysis. In Search for a
Method (1960b) and the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960a), he went fur­
ther to elevate comprehension to an essential way in which dialectical rea­
son can grasp human truth in all of the social sciences (CDR, pp. 74-76).
There Sartre defines "comprehension'* as the ability to understand the
actions of another person or persons (in our own or another historical age)
in terms of human intentions or purposes. In order to achieve comprehen­
sion, the social scientist must be willing to give up his or her attempt at be­
ing the godlike objective observer and perceive other people as meaning-
engendering like himself or herself.
Comprehension is contrasted with "intellection," which Sartre does not
accept as an effective method in the social sciences so long as it is the purely
intellectual analysis of analytical reason. Only when intellection is wedded
to comprehension does it become useful. Comprehension without intellec­
tion might yield an understanding of people in a given situation while fail­
ing to grasp the intersection of historical processes that are initiated but not
understood by people in a sometimes unforgiving physical world. But intel­
lection without comprehension has produced an approach to the social sci­
ences which is a reified parody of the social world which it seeks to under­
stand in that it leaves out the one thing which makes social and historical
processes intelligible—human intentionality and meaning.
Sartre's demonstration of the dialectical process which he proposes for the
social sciences in Search for a Method and the Critique of Dialectical Reason
does not occur so much in the unfinished second volume of the Critique as
in the psychobiographies—especially the later biographies of Flaubert and
Genet.7 There Sartre's biographical method is identical to the empathic
method which he sets for the social scientist in the Critique: It involves com­
prehension in the sense of an empathic giving of oneself to the Other. What
had been a task for the existential psychoanalyst in Being and Nothingness
has become a task for Sartre the psychobiographer.

A Sartrean Perspective on Developmental Theory

It is in the biographies that Sartre spells out most concretely what the Look
can mean, positively or negatively, to human development. I believe his dis-
102 Chapter Three

cussions of the process of "valorization" in childhood and of three different

forms of the Look (which I have designated the look, the touch, and the
word) will aid us in understanding the developmental insights of the post-
Freudian theorists discussed earlier—especially their discovery of needs for
mirroring and positive regard from the original powerful others. At the same
time, I believe that a Sartrean perspective on developmental theory will
change our understanding of those insights and how they can be used in
therapy.
In the first volume of the Flaubert biography, Sartre discusses the child's
need for validation by the original powerful others and laments the devas­
tating effects of lack of such validation. Not only negative regard but lack of
regard can result in what R. D. Laing calls "ontological insecurity" about
one's right to be in the world (Laing, 1959a). Sartre attributes Flaubert's pas­
sivity to such early lack of positive regard, or "valorization":

[Flaubert's malaise] will be easier to discuss now that we know the fun­
damental reason for it: nonvalorization. This is not a matter of conjec­
ture: a child must have a mandate to live, the parents are the authorities
who issue the mandate. A grant of love enjoins him to cross the barrier
of the moment—the next moment is awaited, he is already adored
there, everything is prepared for his joyful reception; the future appears
to him as a vague and gilded cloud, as his mission. . . . If later on with a
little luck he can say: "My life has a purpose, I have found purpose in
my life," it is because the parent's love, their creation and expectation,
creation for future delight, has revealed his existence to him as a move­
ment toward an end; he is the conscious arrow that is awakened in mid-
flight and discovers, simultaneously, the distant archer, the target, and
the intoxication of flight. . . . [If this happens] living will be the
passion—in the religious sense—that will transform self-centeredness
into a gift; experience will be felt as the free exercise of generosity. (FI,
1:133-34)

The love of the parents guarantees the valorized child's value and mission—a
mission which "becomes a sovereign choice, permitted and evoked in the
subjective person by the presence of self-worth" (FI, 1:135). Without this
mandate to live, which Sartre acknowledges is more often than not missing
in children's interactions with their parents, a child will be left afloat in a
meaningless universe where physical laws perhaps point to a sense of a fu­
ture but where one's own existence appears senseless or wrong. Time, for
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Drive Theorists 103

such children, becomes "a slack succession of present moments that slip
back into past" (FI, 1:134), leaving them unable to cross the "barrier of the
moment" (FI, 1:133) t o create a meaningful existence. In this way, unvalor-
ized children, such as Flaubert, are discouraged from experiencing them­
selves as agents. Because the past holds no empathic nourishment, the fu­
ture holds no promise.
The reader familiar only with Sartre's early work may be wondering at
this juncture if this sense of a meaningless universe, upon which the individ-
ual must impose meaning, is not exactly what Sartre declares to be the case
in Being and Nothingness and elsewhere. In other words, is the valorized
child's sense of a mission not an expression of bad faith because it rests on
the a priori mandate of the parents? And is the "teleological urgency" (FI,
1:133) of the loved child not based on an illusion? Sartre's reply in The Family
Idiot is curious for anyone familiar with Sartre's early work, but it does not
contradict his earlier hypothesis. Sartre says that the mandate to live is, in
fact, a necessary deception which makes possible a later encounter with the
truth of existence. The senseless existence which the unloved child discovers
in himself or herself is therefore a lying truth, whereas the meaningfulness
which the loved child has conferred on him or her is a true lie. The unloved
child—though he or she can discover orderly connections, means and ends,
in the world—can discover no reason for his or her own being. In other
words, the unloved child is unable to form an authentic project of being—
though such a child may make a project of trying to get the love that was
missing in infancy and early childhood.
Sartre therefore believes that the "ethicalontological" truth that one
must create one's own value "must be revealed slowly" at the "end of a long
vagabond delusion" (FI, 1:136). To reveal it earlier through lack of valoriza­
tion is to subject the child to the delusion not simply of being unjustified
but of being "unjustifiable"—that is, unable to make a meaningful life—
which is "a hundred times farther from his real condition" than the lying
truth which convinces the loved child that he or she is justified in advance
(FI, 1:136). The lie of the parental mandate leads to the truth of discovering
one's existence as a temporal being who creates meaning. The truth of a too
early confrontation with the meaninglessness of contingent existence~in~
itself, based on the experience of parental neglect or hostility, leads to the lie
of disregarding one's temporalizing destiny. Thus the lack of a real future
combined with a sense of meaninglessness and emptiness is characteristic of
the borderline and narcissistic patients noted by Kernberg and others,
whereas neurotics (who have probably had some degree of valorization) are
104 Chapter Three

more likely to seek this experience again where it is inappropriate—in the

desire for "perfect understanding" and complete involvement from an adult
partner. The "conflict of consciousnesses," in this latter situation, most of­
ten becomes a quite accurate description of interpersonal relations within
the duo.
We can further conclude from the psychobiographies that the Look, as an
ontological category, includes all of the ways in which one directly experi­
ences oneself as an object for others—touching and verbal responses, as well
as actual looking. In fact, Sartre specifically tells us in Being and Nothingness
that it is not "eyes" but rather the feeling of the regard of another conscious­
ness which produces the Look. We might consider the three subcategories of
the Look—which Sartre discusses in various places without ever specifically
spelling them out—to be the (physical) look, the touch, and the word.
The touch is especially important in earliest infancy. In The Family Idiot,
Sartre comments on the importance of touch to the infant's developing ru­
dimentary awareness of self:

When a mother nurses or cleans an infant, she expresses, like everyone,

her integrity of self, which naturally sums up her entire life from birth;
at the same time, she achieves a relationship that is variable according
to circumstances and individuals—of which she is the subject and which
can be called maternal love. . . . [B]y this love and through it, through
the very person of the mother—skillful or clumsy, brutal or tender,
such as her history has made her—the child is made manifest to him­
self. That is, he does not discover himself only through his own self-
exploration and through his "double-sensations," but he learns his
flesh through the pressures, the foreign contacts, the grazings, the bruis-
ings that jostle him, or through a skillful gentleness. He will know his
bodily parts, violent, gentle, beaten, constrained or free through the vi­
olence or gentleness of the hands that awaken them. Through his flesh
he also knows another flesh, but a bit later. To begin with, he internal­
izes the maternal rhythms and labors as qualities lived with his own
body. (FI, 1:47)

The mother's touch, according to this passage, is that through which the in­
fant comes to know himself or herself as an object. One's sense of one's
body for-others is thus intimately connected with spontaneous awareness of
or pleasure in one's body as lived for-oneself. In fact, the two are only dimly
differentiated in earliest infancy. This fleshly knowing of self/mother is also
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Drive Theorists 105

the beginning of a relationship with mother which will later develop into a
full subject-object relationship—in which the infant will come to know "an­
other flesh" and still later another person in the fully human sense.
Without this experience, the growing child can hardly come to have a
bodily sense of self—as is perhaps evident in psychoanalytic descriptions of
severe personality disorders where differentiation of one's various bodily ap­
petites and functions, including a sense of inside and outside, are severely
disturbed. Peter Giovacchini, for example, describes a patient who had diffi­
culties distinguishing his appetites one from another (1984, pp. 155-56). Eat­
ing, for him, was a mechanical response to an indiscriminate feeling of hun­
ger. He had no appetite for any particular food—oatmeal and caviar were
the same to him. He also had no fantasies while masturbating, describing it
as relieving himself of some ill-defined tension. In fact, he found it difficult
to define his sensations—responding to a vague uneasiness by having to "de­
cide" whether he was hungry, needed to defecate, or was sexually aroused.
He also had difficulty distinguishing what was a part of him from what was
not. During the first week of analysis, for instance, he pounded on the wall
in order to determine where his body (fist) ended and the world (wall) be­
gan. Although Giovacchini attributes these difficulties to lack of adequate
ego development, I think we might well see them from a Sartrean perspec­
tive as deriving from the failure of the first others to present the child with a
viable future which would have allowed him to project the discernment and
fulfillment of his own needs and desires within it.
According to this view, the more severe disorders reflect not a lack of ego
development in the Freudian sense, but rather a lack of experience of oneself
as a particular kind of (valued) object for the earliest others. At the most
primitive level, this will of course relate to one's bodily sense of self. And
one suspects that even in less severely disturbed people, certain dimly recog­
nized though deep feelings about one's own body—as active, passive, dis­
gusting, appealing, and so on—derive from this period. One client graphi­
cally put such a feeling into words in the following manner, "Sometimes I
feel that my body is totally icky—that I have little bumps all over me, like al­
ligator skin or leprosy—and that although I can't see them other people can
and turn away from me because of it." Her mother, she remembered, was
squeamish about bodily functions and reluctant about touching.
As for the word, Sartre gives it particular attention in his biography of
Jean Genet (1952). Genet, Sartre says, first lives his childhood thefts as pre-
reflective acts devoid of judgment. Because the child Genet is a foundling in
the custody of an institution, he has no legitimate access to the property
106 Chapter Three

which, for the Morvan peasants into whose care he is given, defines one's
being a person. Genet acquires from them an absolute respect for property,
which becomes the genesis of his need to steal. Genet, unlike the legitimate
children with whom he associates, is deprived by birth of a right to the prop­
erty which otherwise might define him and give him a sense of self-respect at
the same time that he is subjected to the humiliation of being dependent on
the generosity of his caregivers—a "generosity" which Genet depicted with
vitriolic sarcasm in The Maids (1952 [1947]). His response is to "play at pos­
session" through theft (SG, p. 13). In the quiet of his solitary existence, this
playing acquires a trancelike quality in which a hand somehow reaches out
to take something from a drawer.
At some point, however, Genet will be "caught in the act"; someone will
enter the room and direct a Look at him. He feels the Look, but is still igno­
rant of its meaning. Soon he and the whole village will hear the "dizzying
word" (Sartre is quoting Genet here): "You're a thief." This word transforms
Genet's life. He now has an identity. He is a thief. This word might not have
become decisive for another child who stole, but who was by birthright a le­
gitimate member of the human community through inclusion in his or her
family. The young Sartre himself at one point became such a "legitimate"
thief when he stole money from his mother's purse in order to buy treats for
his friends (Hayman, 1987, pp. 43-44).
Genet, however, can only regain his agency by a rather spiteful decision:
He will decide to be the thief they said he was—"to be what crime made of
me," as he himself has said (SG, p. 49). In doing so, he will no longer be a
passive victim, but he will nonetheless be forever alienated from the sponta­
neous child he was. By enshrining the look and word of the Other forever in
his consciousness, Genet will discover that "I is another" (SG, p. 138). Sartre
is quite clear that the dizzying word which pillories Genet forever in the so-
called right-thinking man's conception is a rape—not a metaphorical rape
but an actual assault on his being which "took <a child and made a monster
of him for reasons of social utility" (SG, p. 23).
In reality, although Genet's case is extreme, it is not in its milder forms
that far removed from what many children from more "normal" situations
experience. Sartre is quite aware that families can impose identities on chil­
dren by verbally presenting them with prefabricated lives. These can, of
course, be positive destinies, in contrast to the negative destiny that had
been prepared for Genet. Sartre opposes the imposition of all such prefabri­
cated destinies on children. In his introduction to Andre Gorz's autobiogra­
phy, Sartre writes, "It seems that one can still find on earth savages stupid
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Drive Theorists 107

enough to discover reincarnated ancestors in their newborn children. . . .

What barbarism! They take a kid who is very much alive and sew him into
the skin of a dead man. He will suffocate in this senile childhood without
other hope than to poison future childhoods after his death" (quoted by
Collins, 1980, pp. III-12). Or, as Franz says in The Condemned of Altona,
"Nine months before my birth they had chosen my name, my career, my
character and my fate" (p. 75)-I cannot help thinking of clients, in the proc­
ess of becoming parents, who had already identified their unborn child with
a particular relative—mother, father, grandfather, dead brother, or even one
of the parents. They seemed fully prepared to react to this child as if he or
she were that person.
Even where naming does not involve the revelation of a prefabricated des­
tiny, the word can present itself as a rape when it condemns a child to look
at a particular spontaneous action—this can be anything from sexual explo­
ration to exuberance—as bad, shameful, wrong, without redemption. A
child's reaction can be everything from repressing the feeling or action in or­
der to be "good" in the parent's eyes to deciding, like Genet, to spitefully
take on the "bad" identity as one's own. In either case, the word which des­
ignates the child as this or that object becomes a form of violation—
thereafter alienating the child from his or her own spontaneous being.
Interestingly, this sense of violation occurs even if the inaccurate naming
is praise, where the praise involves a distortion of one's real feelings. For ex­
ample, "What a good little girl you are," can be an injunction to stifle one's
spontaneity. Sartre tells us in The Words that he had himself as a child expe­
rienced the applause of adults which transformed him into a "fake child"
whose playacting "robbed me of the world and of human beings" (p. 84).
The truth is that even in its mildest forms where accurate naming is in­
tended, the words of the original others have the power to distort experience
ever so slightly or, simply by naming, to make one aware of having an out­
side for others that is different from one's own spontaneous experience. Rec­
ognition, or accurate verbal reflection, therefore becomes a critical factor in
allowing the child to survive his or her earliest years and still be "very much
alive." Although the living death which Sartre describes as Genet's destiny
is perhaps relatively rare, very few if any of us make it through those years
with our spontaneity fully intact. As with Genet, the "melodious child" in
us is usually "dead" long before we reach adulthood (SG, p. i).8
As for the actual physical look, it is too pervasive and fundamental in
Sartre's writing to need much explication. From the agonizing look of the
third in No Exit to the blaming look of the general who married Baudelaire's
108 Chapter Three

mother and excluded him from her narcissistic admiration to the look of the
"righteous" man on the child-thief Genet to the humiliating and disap­
pointed look of Achille-Cleophas Flaubert on his superfluous son Gustave
to the judging look of the future represented by a jury of crabs in The Con-
demned of Altona, this has been a motif in Sartre's fiction and biographies
throughout his career. Although it is the prototype of my awareness of the
Other's presence as a subject who judges and names me, it is not its only
form.
Throughout his writing, through the three forms of the Look, Sartre ex­
plores the power which the Other as subject has, on the one hand, to alien­
ate me from myself and, on the other (though this is less often discussed), to
make me acquainted with myself. Where a person experiences his or her
parents' Look as a narcissistic wound, this is likely to lead to repression of
spontaneity—leaving that person, as Sartre says of Genet and Baudelaire,
with the predilection to "see himself as another." And as with Baudelaire,
his or her life is likely to be "but the story of this failure"—since, of course,
the failure of solipsism is that one can never actually be oneself and another
(B, p. 32). One must learn to accept and respect the otherness of the Other.
I think we are now in a position to find an ontological grounding for the
new relational needs discovered by many post-Freudian drive theorists. The
"mirroring" needs discovered by Mahler under the influence of Winnicott,
the "good internalized objects" and needs for "self-respect" discussed by
Kernberg, and the basically object-seeking libido of Melanie Klein all make
sense within a context in which the Other first appears to me not as an ob­
ject but as a subject. The child is not instinctually and accidentally related
to others. He or she is fundamentally related to the Other not as an instinc­
tually gratifying "object" but as another consciousness like his or her own. It
is not the Other as an object, not even as a mirroring object, who figures so
significantly in one's developing sense of self. Rather, this importance is ac­
corded to the Other as a subject for whom one is oneself an object. We may,
from a Sartrean perspective, discover stages in the child's dawning recogni­
tion of the full implications of the presence of the Other. But some kind of
dim recognition of the Other as another consciousness must have been
present almost from the beginning. Relational needs can therefore be under­
stood as a part of the attempt to create a reflective view of self out of the re­
actions one gets from the earliest significant others.
Of course, such a view is different from Mahler's account of the
separation-individuation process as a movement from symbiosis to object
constancy. In fact, both Mahler's beginning and ending stages would be dis-
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Drive Theorists 109

counted for two reasons: First, there can never be an actual merging or sym­
biosis with the mother—though, according to Sartre's account, the infant's
purely prereflective consciousness, which is only dimly aware of its differen­
tiation from the world, might seem much more "merged" than the later re­
flective view of self and world. Sartre's account of the impact of touching in
infancy indicates how earliest relations with others prepare the way for a ru­
dimentary reflective sense of body-self. Second, there can never be a stage of
internalized object constancy because representations of objects are not ac­
tually incorporated into the psyche—as Mahler, Klein, and Kernberg seem
to believe. What appear to be introjects or internalized objects are really fan­
tasies in which one attempts to take the reflective view of the Other on one­
self as a means to achieving the impossible goal of substantive freedom (a
topic I take up in greater detail in the next chapter when I discuss post-
Freudian views of the formation of a self).
If, however, Mahler's metatheoretical explanations are at variance with
Sartre's, her phenomenological observations of the various stages of infancy
and early childhood fit very well with Sartre's concept of the Look. When
Mahler talks about the "libidinization of the body," for instance, she is
really talking about the bodily sense of self which is gained from the moth­
er's touches and looks. Or when she discusses the way in which the exuber­
ance of the practicing subphase child can be muted by nonvalidating par­
ents, she might almost be quoting Sartre on the nonvalorized infant:
Flaubert, Sartre tells us, "has never felt his needs as sovereign demands, the
external world has never been his oyster, his larder; the environment is re­
vealed to him little by little in the dreary and cold consistency which
Heidegger has named nur-Vorbeilagen" (FI, 1:130). Sartre, of course, implies
that the "healthy" condition would be for an infant, as Mahler says of the
practicing subphase infant, to feel that the world is his or her oyster.
The truth is that Sartre's metatheory can, more easily than Freud's, help
us to understand the infantile needs which Mahler discovered. Sartre's idea
of the significance of the Look allows us to appreciate, for example, why
feeding or holding an infant in the "symbiotic" stage in a face to face posi­
tion that promotes eye contact facilitates psychological growth; why lack of
adequate "mirroring" promotes a "symbiotic child psychosis"; why peeka­
boo games involving seeing and being seen are so important to infants in
the differentiation stage; why being looked at increases the differentiating
infant's awareness of his or her own body and promotes pleasurable move­
ment; why differentiating infants are less anxious and more curious about a
stranger when the stranger averts his or her gaze; why the child in the prac-
HO Chapter Three

ticing subphase needs admiration and applause; and why the child in the
rapprochement phase woos the mother to participate in his or her every new
discovery and experience at the same time that he or she is excessively sensi­
tive to censure or rebuke. Since the Other's Look helps to fix the child's
identity from the outside, the Look can be a source of anxiety, as when the
child shrinks from the stranger's gaze or the mother's reproof; or it can be a
source of security, which happens when the child is valued, enjoyed, and ap­
plauded.
If we regard the ontological issues as primary, we might view the child's
dawning reflective sense of self as it develops in the presence of others as
leading to an existential crisis. In doing so, we would reinterpret Mahler's ac­
count of the rapprochement crisis. Mahler explains this crisis as emanating
from a realization on the part of the child in the practicing subphase that he
or she is, in fact, not all powerful—that the child is still small and dependent
after all, and that he or she cannot partake of an omnipotent dual unity
with the parent. Thus the elation of the practicing subphase gives way to the
somberness of the rapprochement subphase. Yet Mahler also notes that
even the child in the practicing subphase is likely to be subdued if the par­
ents' admiration is not forthcoming. I can believe that Mahler is correct in
assuming that the child in the practicing subphase is elated over achieving
upright locomotion and that this is accompanied by a wonderful elevation
in self-esteem—especially if the parents are there to applaud the new achieve­
ment. But I think there is something more in the toddler's somberness and
moodiness than Mahler suggests.
The rapprochement subphase is not simply a crisis in dependence-
independence issues, though it is partially that. Since this is the time of the
acquisition of language, it is also, as Daniel Stern suggests, a time which in­
volves a crisis in self-comprehension. According ]to Stern, "The crisis in self-
comprehension occurs because for the first time the infant experiences the
self as divided, and rightly senses that no one else can rebind the division.
The infant has not lost omnipotence but rather has lost experiential whole­
ness" (Stern, 1985, pp. 272-73). Verbal representation always causes a divi­
sion in experience because it is from a reflective rather than a nonreflective
position. Of course, reflective awareness had been developing in a rudimen­
tary form before this as a result of the child's awareness of others' looks and
touches. Stranger anxiety in the differentiation and rapprochement stages
probably emanates from the feeling that the child has an outside beneath
the stranger's gaze. And the elation of the child in the practicing subphase is
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Drive Theorists III

obviously at least in part an elation over having a positively perceived self

who can stand and act in the world.
At the same time, the child in the rapprochement stage encounters the re­
flective power of the word, which makes it more difficult to see the Other
simply as an audience. The Other is becoming another person with percep­
tions of oneself which are foreign to one's actual experience. These empathic
failures occur even for the most sensitive parents because words are necessar­
ily a reflective designation of experience rather than spontaneous experience
itself. In fact, these failures are probably necessary to draw the child out of
his or her sense of being the "object limit" of the parents' freedom—out of
the positive narcissism experienced by the normal child in the practicing
subphase. However, if the empathic failures are grave—if the parent is indif­
ferent, harshly critical, or verbally or physically abusive—then the move­
ment away from narcissistic needs for total acceptance and appreciation will
probably not occur. Having never had the necessary acceptance, the child
will not feel that he or she can live without it.
Thus we might view the rapprochement crisis as the beginning of a long
process through which an individual, if he or she is to experience genuine
reciprocity in relationships, must turn away from simply using the Other to
give a sense of self and begin to appreciate the Other as a person in his or
her own right. I am not saying that the successful resolution of the rap­
prochement crisis represents a final solution to this problem, that it is the
radical conversion to the philosophy of freedom which Sartre mentions in
Being and Nothingness. In fact, it may be that the achievement of genuine
reciprocity is a problem for the life span. Certainly, the child throughout his
or her early years, and even through adolescence in a different way, needs to
continue to feel that the parents are basically capable of positive mirroring.
But the resolution of the rapprochement crisis may represent the beginning
of a renunciation of the demand of the child in the practicing subphase that
the Other be all audience, all attention to self. If this is so, the resolution of
the rapprochement crisis might, like Klein's depressive position, mark the
beginning of a comprehension of the Other as another subject in the fully
human sense—not another self, but a separate Other with whom one is able
to empathize as well as to disagree.9 But first comes the crisis, in which one
protests not the loss of an omnipotent union which never existed, but the
loss of the hope of the union of one's free self with the Other's perfectly har­
monious view—that is, the loss of the hope for substantive freedom, or
Being-in-itself-for-itself. The delicate "egos" of many borderline, narcissistic,
or even neurotic clients may emanate from this inability to renounce the
112 Chapter Three

hope of getting a total absorption, understanding, and regard from others

which is only appropriately available in early infancy and childhood. They
want what they never had or had and lost too soon, the delighted applause
of the parents of the child in the practicing subphase: "Look what the baby
can do!"

The Implications for Psychotherapy

What difference, then, does a Sartrean perspective make to the practice of

psychotherapy? Although I believe that the very discovery and formal recog­
nition of new relational needs make contemporary psychoanalysis more sen­
sitive to important interpersonal and developmental issues, I also think that
there are certain significant differences which a Sartrean reinterpretation of
clinical data could make to the way therapists work with their patients or
clients.
1. The therapist using a Sartrean perspective can once and for all lay to
rest the tendency to think about relational issues in drive language—that is,
libidinal and aggressive drives, anal stage oppositionalism, oral rage and
envy—and thus avoid the tendency to cloud therapeutic interpretations
with such thinking. Although an existentialist perspective would not deny
the existence and importance of spontaneous desires and feelings, the ques­
tion becomes one of determining how these are filtered through and affected
by one's earliest relations with others. In other words, it is not the Oedipal
struggle which is so much at issue as my way of defining myself as a sensual/
sexual person on the basis of my earliest relations with others. In fact, the
child's struggle could just as easily refer to acceptance or rejection of himself
or herself as a joyful person or a sad or angry person—in other words, to any
relationship between spontaneous feelings and actions and reflective percep­
tions as these are influenced by the original others.
For example, I think of a client who, the minute he starts to feel happy, be­
gins to look for problems within or outside himself. His mother's reaction to
his feeling good was something like this: "You can't be happy when X is
wrong with you/me/the world." He now truncates his joy with a reflective
view that anticipates difficulties. From a Sartrean perspective, one need not
necessarily look beneath this scenario for sexual implications and meanings.
The reflective suppression of joy is just as much a possibility as the reflective
suppression of sexual urges.
2. The existentialist therapist can zero in on particular categories of expe-
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Drive Theorists 113

riences of the Look which might not otherwise be available without Sartre's
concepts. Does the negative self-representation which a client has adopted
or against which he or she is guarding emanate from a particular kind of
look, touch, or word? In this regard, I have had clients become aware of the
origins of whole sets of negative self-appraisals and/or interpersonal fears by
asking, at appropriate junctures, questions such as these: What was your
mother/father's touch like? How would you imagine the look in your
mother/father's eye when you did/said that? What, in particular, did your
mother/father say when you acted exuberant/expressed anger/refused to
obey, and so on?
Obviously, the relevant memories are sometimes less accessible to direct
questioning or accessible only through contemporary transference situa­
tions. For example, the woman mentioned earlier who felt as if she had lep­
rosy or alligator skin had no memory of her mother's feelings about touch­
ing her as an infant. But she did have a "skin" feeling about how
contemporary others might respond to her. In this instance, her block to
positive reciprocity lay in a negative anticipation of bodily rejection—not in
critical words or looks. On the other hand, people who are pathologically
shy are almost always supersensitive to the negative looks of others—as
though judging eyes follow their every movement or gesture. Or sometimes
the problem is with critical words, in which case the client finds himself or
herself hyper-reacting to the slightest hint of negative evaluation or else dis­
counting others in advance as a defense against such evaluations. There is
also the person who was neglected and who hungers for any look, touch, or
word of acknowledgment—and feels empty and lost when this is not forth­
coming. Perhaps one category of response was missing and not others: For
example, a parent may have offered words of encouragement but withheld
touching or eye contact. It is, in fact, important to discover which category
of the Look wounded the child or which kind of response was denied to him
or her. When such experiences are uncovered in all their concrete reality,
therapy becomes less intellectual and more affecting on a "gut level."
3. The therapist with a Sartrean orientation can more accurately under­
stand and interpret motives for the continuation of painful relations with
others and/or self. He or she can attempt to locate the point on the sado­
masochistic circle from which the client is currently conducting his or her
unhappy relationships. Obviously, this may be different with different
people or at different times in a client's history, making a historical perspec­
tive on relationship issues important. The objective is to uncover the onto-
logical motives, past or present, for a client's taking various positions in his
114 Chapter Three

or her attempts to create a substantive self and to expose the impossible na­
ture of this quixotic quest.
Of course, in working with these issues, existentialist therapists would sel­
dom use theoretical terms such as "Being-in-itself-for-itself" in talking with
clients, any more than classical analysts would use the technical terms of
Freudian metatheory. But these philosophical concepts would nonetheless
inform their clinical interpretations and questions. For example, I might, re­
membering Sartre's reconstruction of the life of Genet, guess that a particu­
lar client's insistence on failing occurs because he or she is determined to "be
the failure they said I was." In fact, I frequently discover this kind of motive
in people: It is often both a means to revenge and an active assumption of a
previously passive destiny.
Perhaps I might come to understand that a particular women client, who
is going over the details of her very painful divorce for the thousandth time
two years later, is still working with the loss of the impossible goal of being
the "object limit" of her ex-husband's freedom. She wishes to nullify his
judgments in her own mind. Or I might guess that another client's need to
dominate in his relationships—and his dropping the women as soon as dom­
inance is achieved—is an attempt to incorporate the Other's freedom from
the position of desire/sadism. This latter situation may further indicate an
avoidance of an earlier failure, thereby representing a mode of escape from
the masochistic merging demanded by a mother (or father) who wished to
use the child either as a mirror or as a narcissistic extension of self.
Furthermore, with respect to using other people to gain an identity, I may
find myself working with a client who attempts to force a warm relationship
with a cold and distant partner. I may ask, "What would it do for you to
have this person respond in the way you want?" The answer is likely to be,
"It would make me feel more alive/loved/lovable/valuable and so on."
Mind you, not just any relationship will perform this miracle—only one
which resembles the negative relationship with an original other. An exis­
tentialist interpretation of this situation is different from Freud's idea of
"transference" and the "repetition compulsion" in that it does not use the
mechanical nature of the libido and death instinct as explanatory princi­
ples. Instead, one understands that this client is actively seeking to use the
Other to become a certain kind of self by gaining a certain kind of response
from a certain kind of Other—as though someone resembling the magician
who cast the original spell over one's capacity to be this or that must remove
it.
Once the illusory nature of this quest is revealed (both the fact that the
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Drive Theorists 115

questing person is not so much desiring to love> as he or she thinks, but to be

loved in a particular way and the fact that it is no longer possible to gain in
this way the sense of confident being one might have had as a child from
one's parents), it becomes possible to give up a quest which is contradictory
in terms. In other words, I will by definition not be able to have warmth and
love from a person who prefers to remain cold and distant—unless, of
course, that person changes, in which case he or she will no longer resemble
the cold and distant parent.
Giving up the impossible quest is not, however, an easy task, since it
amounts to a conversion to a philosophy of freedom on the part of a person
who has never had his or her fill of secure contingency. Also, the ways in
which a client uses others to fulfill his or her original project of being are
never simple. The mystifying connections between reflective views of self, re­
lations with contemporary and original others, and the conundrums formed
out of the attempt to achieve the in-itself-for-itself are often as intricate as
Sartre's psychobiographies indicate.
4. The existentialist therapist can gain a clear view of the kinds of rela­
tionships which might be the goal of therapy—relationships involving genu­
ine positive reciprocity—and hence of the false expectations and actions
which can block the development of such relationships. For example, atten­
tion can be drawn to the way in which a client, in his or her heart of hearts,
cannot brook the slightest disagreement on the part of a lover, demands per­
fect understanding and constant attention, and gets (secretly or openly) en­
raged and accusatory if these are not forthcoming. Obviously, the client will
not present the situation in this light, but will instead, sometimes simultane­
ously or in succession, either blame the other person for resisting his or her
legitimate requests or blame himself or herself for not being more indepen­
dent. These reactions must be explored without judgment, and therapist
and client should try to understand their aim—which is usually some ver­
sion of the attempt to attain substantive freedom.
In the end, the trick is to feel the emotions (rather than to repress them),
to trace them to their origins in the distant past, and to refuse to act them
out in current relationships—a refusal which tends to intensify them and
therefore to make their origins more apparent. Ultimately, the demand that
the Other should make oneself whole must be renounced in favor of a more
genuinely reciprocal acceptance of the other person as different from oneself
and as having needs which have nothing to do with one's own needs to be
constantly adored and accepted. But this is a difficult and tricky process,
Il6 Chapter Three

one which is, needless to say, not under the control of reflective resolution
or will.
This scenario is not, of course, the only possible one in which genuine rec­
iprocity is lacking. With a different kind of client, the therapist might work
to discover the feelings of powerlessness at the hands of original others
which have led to a passion for manipulating and controlling others. Or one
might explore the fear of the Look which lies behind submission, indiffer­
ence, or avoidance of genuine intimacy.
5. Finally, adopting a Sartrean perspective can make a great difference in
the client-therapist relationship. Even traditional transference issues in
which a client projects onto a therapist childhood conflicts with mother, fa­
ther, sister, brother, and so on might be understood differently. For example,
the existentialist therapist might ask what particular kind of subject/object
conflict the projected relationship points to? Also, what permutations have
there been in a client's original way of relating to others? Do a client's at­
tempts to relate to the therapist indicate a desire to submerge the self in the
Other (masochism), to submerge the Other in the self (sadism), or to manip­
ulate the Other as an object which can never become a subject or can only
become a subject under the control and domination of oneself (narcissism,
psychopathy, and sociopathy)? Or has the client withdrawn into an attitude
of indifference (schizoid withdrawal) as a result of previous hurts and/or ir­
resolvable conflicts?
Interpretations of these various positions might stress the wound which
the client received in terms of the Looks—or indifference—of the original
others and the ways in which the client expects this situation to be repeated
with the therapist. The therapist can also be aware that approval, therapeu­
tic or parental, can be damaging when it encourages inauthenticity. The ex­
istentialist therapist can be attentive to possible ways in which the therapeu­
tic relationship can heal through accurate reflection and genuine
relatedness. And he or she can attempt to avoid situations in which the
therapeutic relationship leads to further distortions—as might happen, for
example, if a therapist is unwilling to abandon the position of witness (tech­
nical neutrality) when what the client needs is not neutrality but rather an
experience of positive reciprocity.

From the preceding discussion, we can see that a Sartrean perspective both
answers some intrinsic difficulties in post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory,
as represented by the discovery of nondrive-related relational needs, and
suggests new therapeutic insights that are unavailable from a traditional
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Drive Theorists IIJ

Freudian viewpoint. In the next chapter, we shall see how a Sartrean per­
spective on the self can clear the way to a fuller understanding of the impact
of relational issues on human development and psychopathology.
4 * Sartre and the Post-Freudian
Relational Theorists: Toward a
Psychoanalytic Theory of the Self

What Is the Self?

One of the interesting developments in recent psychoanalytic theory is the

introduction of the phenomenological term "self" in place of the structural
term "ego." The popularity of concepts of the "self" in psychoanalytic cir­
cles is evident from the number of recent books that contain the term in
their titles—even if one excludes from the list books dealing with the so-
called self psychology of Heinz Kohut. I believe that this reintroduction of a
subject at the heart of experience is a concomitant of the discovery by post-
Freudian relational theorists of others as people rather than as mere gratifi-
ers of instinctual needs. Despite certain theoretical confusions in the work
of these theorists, I agree with Roy Schafer that "the popularity of concepts
of self and identity is symptomatic of a fundamental shift toward a modern
conception of theory making and a modern psychological concern with spe­
cifically human phenomenology. . . . Freudian analysis can only benefit
from such a shift" (1976, p. 192).
On the other hand, I believe that the lack of grounding in metatheory of
psychoanalytic concepts of the self leads to many different and confused in­
terpretations of the term, as well as to a kind of reification of the self, similar
to Freud's reification of the ego, which is not helpful to therapeutic insights.
I believe that Sartre's ontology can help to create a metatheoretical under­
standing of the self1 which can clarify both the need to create a substantial
self which is discovered by these theorists and the need to transcend the idea
that one can have a substantial self—a topic not addressed by most relational
theorists.
The discovery of the significance of the need to create a self by post-
118
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Relational Theorists 119

Freudian relational theorists is, as I have noted, a concomitant of their dis­

covery that purely relational needs—rather than drives—lie at the heart of
human development. If post-Freudian drive theorists cannot avoid the dis­
covery of new relational needs which call into question the economic hy­
pothesis of Freud, relational theorists are even more emphatic in their insis­
tence on the primacy of relational needs from the beginning of life. No
relational theorist, for instance, accepts Freud's concept of primary narcis­
sism, as Margaret Mahler does. Instead, relational theorists concentrate on
the significance of relations with others from earliest infancy. Nor does any
relational theorist accept Freud's view of the death instinct or the primacy
of aggression, as Melanie Klein does.
As for the economic hypothesis, most relational theorists are more
straightforward than the drive theorists in facing the implications of the new
relational discoveries for traditional metatheory. Thus they are more likely
than drive theorists to disregard or to ignore drive theory completely. As
Harry Guntrip, who is perhaps the most radical of the British object rela­
tions theorists, puts the matter, it is time to discard outmoded Freudian
drive theory altogether in favor of a "consistently psychodynamic theory of
the unique individual in his personal relations" (Guntrip, 1969, p. 382).
Other relational theorists, such as D. W. Winnicott, are more circumspect in
their departures from Freudian orthodoxy, although most pay little heed to
the drives. Perhaps that is why relational theorists are less likely than drive
theorists to obscure new discoveries by using traditional economic terms
and concepts.
Instead, these theorists characteristically either change the meaning of
traditional Freudian terms or invent new terms for new discoveries. Thus
W. R. D. Fairbairn states unequivocally that "libido is not primarily
pleasure-seeking but object-seeking" (1952, p. 137)—thereby radically chang­
ing the meaning of "libido" to indicate the pursuit of relationships rather
than the pursuit of pleasure. Or Michael Balint (1969) replaces primary nar­
cissism with "primary object love"—which he defines as the desire to be
loved. Or D. W. Winnicott (1965a, 1965b, 1971) rejects primary narcissism and
autoeroticism in favor of a concept of the "nursing couple" (mother and
baby) for whom purely relational needs are primary. Similarly, Harry Stack
Sullivan's "tenderness theorem" (1940, 1953) indicates relational needs for
giving and receiving love on the part of the mother and baby from birth.
And John Bowlby (1969,1980) proposes a new relational drive which is evo-
lutionarily based. As for the meaning of these relational needs, their aim is
clearly something other than the tension reduction of Freudian drive the-
120 Chapter Four

ory. In fact, their aim is the creation of a self rather than the pursuit of plea­
sure. Thus it is that Heinz Kohut (1977, 1984) renames them "selfobject"
needs to distinguish them from the "libidinal object" needs of Freud. Actu­
ally, as we shall see, these needs have nothing to do with the Other as ob­
ject, but rather refer to the child's experience of himself or herself as an ob­
ject for another subject.
The significance of earliest relations with others to the formation of a self
is not, of course, an exclusive concern of post-Freudian relational theorists.
As we saw in the preceding chapter, the development of a self or identity is
also an important issue in the work of drive theorists such as Erikson,
Mahler, Jacobson, and Kernberg. Yet though these theorists sometimes slip
into a more active use of the term "self" (Mahler, Jacobson, and Kernberg)
or "identity" (Erikson), they basically accept Hartmann's traditional defini­
tion of the self, or rather the "self-representation,"2 as a phenomenological
concept referring to a set of images similar to the set of images of objects
formed by the ego. As we have seen in the work of Mahler, drive theorists
are often unaware that the pursuit of a self or sense of identity as a superor-
dinate aim is incompatible with Freudian drive theory—with which they try
to reconcile it. The self of relational theorists, on the other hand, is clearly
not simply the set of passive images of Hartmann; it is also an active, orga­
nizing center of behavior. The self of relational theorists is a subject rather
than an object—or it is a combination of subject and object.
Theoretical confusion concerning the term "self" arises in part because of
a philosophical confusion about the nature of consciousness or the psyche
which is inherited from Freud. Although relational theorists have often felt
a need to speak of a personal self rather than an impersonal ego, they have
not altogether left behind Freud's idea that the psyche is a thing which has
substance and structure. Thus in the work of relational theorists such as
Heinz Kohut, discussions of the "structuralization of the self" replace discus­
sions of the "structuralization of the ego." Or, in a formulation which seems
to me much closer to the truth, Harry Stack Sullivan extends the economic
hypothesis of Freud to develop a view of the self not as a thing per se but as
a set of energy transformations. Or, in the work of D. W. Winnicott, Harry
Guntrip, and James Masterson (1985), the discovery of a "true self" becomes
not a matter of simple authentic living but of uncovering such a self beneath
the conformist shell of a "false self," both of which are regarded as entities.
In post-Freudian theory, there is often a great deal of confusion about the
nature of the self as subject and as object—a confusion inherited from
Freud's own discussions of the ego. This is perhaps nowhere better illus-
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Relational Theorists 121

trated than in Masterson's book The Real Self, which provides a kind of sum­
mary of contemporary psychoanalytic perspectives on the self. This is par­
ticularly evident when Masterson mixes drive terms with relational terms, as
in the following statement: "Simultaneously and in parallel with the matu­
ration of ego functions, and with self and object representations becoming
whole, the now whole, separate real self becomes autonomous and takes on
its capacities" (1985, p. 26). How, we ask, does this self differ from the ego
with which it matures "in parallel"? How does it differ from the false self
with which it is compared? And how do whole self-representations, which
imply the self as an object of reflection, lead to an autonomous self with the
"capacities" of a subject? The list of capacities of the self which Masterson
provides to support the preceding assertion does not at all clarify matters. In
a discussion that summarizes a good deal of post-Freudian literature on the
self, heTumps together under the rubric of "self" a number of functions
which Sartre would label as either "reflective" or "prereflective." The result­
ing confusion is one that often pervades ordinary discourse—but psycholog­
ical description should be more precise.3
I believe that Sartre's view of the self can help to resolve some of this theo­
retical confusion. As Hazel Barnes (1983) notes, Sartre uses the term "self"
in three different, sharply defined ways. There is the spontaneous self of pre­
reflective consciousness, which is the center of action and conscious life. We
might also, if we do not introduce implications of substance, refer to this self
as the agent or doer. There is the self of reflective awareness, designated by
Sartre as the "ego," which is an object rather than a subject. And there is
the self as aim or value—the self which is the future goal and meaning of hu­
man activity, of one's "project of being." This is the self as a pursuit rather
than as an actual entity. Although it can be reflected on, it is not necessarily
an object of reflection; in fact, it is frequently reflectively misconceived. The
ultimate aim of the self as value is the pursuit of Being-in-itself-for-itself, sub­
stantive freedom.
Such a pursuit of self or meaning is never isolated or autonomous. It is al­
ways made on the face of a particular world and it is bodily oriented. Sartre
asserts, "Without the world there is no selfness, no person; without selfness,
without the person, there is no world" (BN, p. 104). According to this view,
the enclosed psyche of traditional Freudian theory is not a possibility. Inter­
estingly, it is only the reflective glance backward or the prospective glance
forward which gives one a sense of having a (pseudo) self in the substantive
sense. In the present, one is all translucidity, all movement toward or away
from the objects which compose one's experience—including the reflective
122 Chapter Four

experience of self as an object which so concerns and occupies each of us.

Although Sartre never spells out these three usages of self, they are quite
clear in context.
The post-Freudian relational theorists, on the other hand, run into many
theoretical difficulties when they confuse the self as agent with the self as ob­
ject. I believe this happens partly because they fail to recognize the full sig­
nificance of the self as value. Obviously, post-Freudian relational theorists
could hardly be expected to clarify these issues without first shifting me­
tatheoretical premises—without, for example, substituting the ontology of
Sartre for Freudian metatheory. Without some such ontological perspective,
they have no way of understanding why the creation of an adequate self be­
comes so important to human development. Because of this, these theorists,
like their patients, may fall into the inauthentic position of reifying the
psyche and thereby conceive the aim of therapy to be the provision of the
missing "substance" and "structure" which the patient thinks he or she
needs.
Although the terrible "identity diffusion" syndrome described by Erikson
(1959, 1968) and the "disintegration anxiety" described by Kohut (1984) are
certainly very real experiences for some clients, they do not point to the
need for psychological structure in the substantive sense but rather to a
need on the part of the client to learn to structure experience in the existen­
tial sense. If this is so, then a recognition and acceptance of the radical free­
dom of the individual may have much more to do with psychological "heal­
ing," especially in the later stages of therapy, than has hitherto been
recognized.
In pointing out these difficulties, I do not mean to ignore the very real the­
oretical advances that post-Freudian relational theorists have made. These
theorists generally recognize the organizing nature of the human psyche
("consciousness" in Sartre's terminology), and they realize that the attempt
to create a particular kind of self in the world is a primary human motiva­
tion. They also emphasize the significance of relations with others in the for­
mation of such a self. If we look at the work of the American interpersonal
psychoanalysts, the British object relations theorists, and the American self
psychologists who follow Heinz Kohut, we cannot help being struck by the
emphasis on the significance of human relations rather than drive gratifica­
tion to personality formation. While I believe such a shift is salutary, I think
it needs a metatheoretical grounding which will allow both a clarification of
confusions and an understanding of the superordinate desire to create a self
or to experience oneself as being this or that.
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Relational Theorists 123

In this chapter, I provide a Sartrean critique of theories of the self as they

are presented in the work of three influential post-Freudian relational theo­
rists from three different "schools": Harry Stack Sullivan, D. W. Winnicott,
and Heinz Kohut. Like the drive theorists discussed in the preceding chap­
ter, these theorists derive their ideas about relational needs from work with
more severely disturbed adults or from work with children. Sullivan was one
of the first psychiatrists to successfully treat schizophrenics with a form of
psychoanalysis. Along with fellow interpersonal theorists Clara Thompson,
Karen Horney, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, and Erich Fromm, he empha­
sizes the sociocultural as well as the individual origins of psychological disor­
ders. Of the three relational theorists I discuss, Sullivan is probably the most
forward-looking in his awareness of nondrive-oriented relational needs and
his refusal to reify the self.
D. W. Winnicott, who derives his theory from work with children rather
than psychotic adults, is similar to Sullivan in noting the effects of ear­
liest family relations—especially that of the mother and infant—on per­
sonality development and pathology, ^ t like fellow British object relations
theorists W. R. D. Fairbairn, Michael Balint, and Harry Guntrip, Winnicott
is less interested in sociocultural influences than Sullivan and more inclined
to reify the self. This tendency toward reification is perhaps an inheritance
from Melanie Klein, whose view of internal "objects" and "partial objects"
heavily influenced the British theorists. Heinz Kohut, who is a specialist in
treating narcissistic personality disorders, presents a still more reified view of
the self as an entity in need of structure and organization. O n the other
hand, he is the most precise of all the relational theorists in characterizing
the various relational needs that facilitate the formation of a firm and flexi­
ble self.
Hence while the post-Freudian relational theorists provide some sig­
nificant insights into the formation of a personal sense of self, they do not
for the most part avoid the tendencies toward reification in psychoanaly­
tic theory in general. Nor do they clarify the metatheoretical premises on
which their own discoveries would have to be based. I believe that Sartre's
ontology does answer the question of why a firm sense of self as object
seems so important at the same time that it allows us to understand that
the establishment of such a substantive self is not the final aim of psy­
chotherapy. That aim is instead a full and responsible acceptance of the
spontaneity and freedom of the prereflective self as agent—an aim which
is understandable from a Sartrean but not from a traditional Freudian per­
spective.
124 Chapter Four

Relations with Others and the Creation of a "Self":

Three Post-Freudian Views

In the preceding chapter, we discovered that the drives of post-Freudian

drive theorists usually turned out to be emotions and that the discovery of
new relational needs for mirroring, self-esteem, attachment, and so on
tended to undermine orthodox Freudian metatheory. Furthermore, drive
theorists such as Erik Erikson, Edith Jacobson, Margaret Mahler, and Otto
Kernberg found themselves interested in the way in which the meeting of re­
lational needs leads to the development of a sense of identity or self, "fet
these theorists were also reluctant to stray too far from traditional Freudian
terminology and explanatory principles. Thus they continued to speak of
drives, mechanisms, psychosexual stages, libido, and aggression, seemingly
without noticing that their orthodox language was undermined by their dis­
coveries of new relational needs.
The relational theorists I have selected for discussion here are generally
less constrained by traditional Freudian concepts and terminology (though
D. W. Winnicott does make bows in the direction of accommodation) and
more open to new terminology and new ways of conceptualizing psychologi­
cal development. They seem to take for granted, for instance, that relational
needs are primary, and they move from there to a discussion of how the
meeting or frustration of relational needs leads to the formation of a "self "—
a term they generally prefer to the traditional Freudian term ego. Yet in do­
ing so, they carry with them some of the traditional Freudian baggage, par­
ticularly the tendency to view the psyche as an entity with substance and
structure.
The degree of reification, however, varies with the theorist. Harry Stack
Sullivan is the least guilty of reifying the self. Heinz Kohut, whose views in
this respect have greatly influenced contemporary American relational the­
ory, is the most guilty. And D. W. Winnicott is somewhere in between. All
three contribute valuable insights into the way in which earliest relations
with others influence the development of a self. Yet none fully understands
the self in its three Sartrean forms—as prereflective consciousness or agent,
as object or ego, and as aim or value. I believe that a Sartrean perspective on
post-Freudian relational theory can clarify theoretical confusions, thereby
making the contribution of these theorists even more clinically useful.
Let us begin with Sullivan, who, although one of the first, is at the same
time perhaps the most radical of relational theorists. Sullivan is seldom given
credit as the originator of ideas which many subsequent relational theorists
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Relational Theorists 125

have developed, perhaps independently of Sullivan. Yet, as Greenberg and

Mitchell note, the fact that Sullivan's concerns and formulations were often
derided by classical Freudians during his lifetime has not precluded his hav­
ing had an enormous influence on contemporary psychoanalytic thinking:
"It has been suggested that Sullivan 'secretly dominates' much of modern
clinical psychiatry in the United States . . . and that he has been 'America's
most important and unique contributor to dynamic psychiatry' " (1983, pp.
80-81). In contrast to many post-Freudian theorists, Sullivan appears not to
have agonized over departures from traditional Freudian theory. Instead, he
simply offered substitute concepts where these seemed correct.
Hence Sullivan's view of the psyche differs radically from Freud's. Reject­
ing the idea of primary narcissism, Sullivan believes that the infant is rela-
tionally oriented from the beginning of life and that this relational orienta­
tion continues throughout a person's development. Sullivan's tenderness
theorem states that need in the infant is inclined to evoke tender responsive­
ness in the "mothering one."4 Where this does not occur, difficulties arise in
the formation of what Sullivan calls the "self," or "self-system," of the child.
While these relational needs vary according to the age of the child (a view
with which Mahler and Winnicott would agree), reciprocity is viewed as a
natural occurrence rather than as a graft onto the root of primary narcissism
or secondary experiences of gratification/frustration.
Sullivan's self-system is a complex concept, incorporating both the more
conservative view of the self of ego psychology (the self as a set of representa­
tions) and the more radical view of many relational theorists (the self as a
center of personality organization) within an overview which (unlike many
more recent formulations) refuses to see the self as a static entity at all. Sul­
livan's self, or self-system, is not a structure but a "dynamism"—which he
defines as "a relatively enduring pattern of energy transformations" (1953,
p. 103). As a system of representations, the self is organized around the "re­
flected appraisals" of the original caregivers (Sullivan, 1940, p. 22) in a man­
ner similar to the mirroring experiences noted by Winnicott and Mahler.
These reflected appraisals lead to "good-me," "bad-me," and "not-me" defi­
nitions of areas of experience which are predicated on parental approval or
disapproval. Anxiety arises not as the result of a superfluity of undischarged
libidinal energy, as Freud believes, but as a response to the threat posed by
disowned experiences to one's conception of self.
Sullivan is quite adamant in rejecting Freud's physicalist view of anxiety,
commenting that anxiety has "nothing whatever to do with the physico-
chemical needs of the living young" but rather is related to the "personal
126 Chapter Four

[and interpersonal] environment" (1953, p. 42). Mother's anxiety about cer­

tain behavior induces a similar anxiety in the child through "empathic reso­
nance"; the child subsequently defines the anxiety-provoking behavior as
"bad me" or, if the anxiety is more extreme, as "not me," thereby achieving
security at the sacrifice of diminished possibilities for satisfaction. The aim
of the self-system is to secure "necessary satisfaction without incurring much
anxiety" (Sullivan, 1953, p. 169). Conflicts arise when security and satisfac­
tion are at odds—when reflected appraisals necessary for security demand
the sacrifice of spontaneous satisfactions. The self-system is therefore not
the whole personality, since the disowned experiences may resurface in
other forms. Indeed, it is not a real entity at all but rather a "quasi-entity" or
set of "security operations." This is the active side of Sullivan's self-system—
the organization of experience so that it will not contradict one's self-
definition (whether this is based primarily on "good-me" or "bad-me" expe­
riences) and hence threaten the security which is necessary to ward off
unbearable anxiety.
Sullivan's concept of the conflict between security and satisfaction is not
simply a new version of Freud's idea of the structural conflict between ego,
superego, and id or between unconscious wishes and conscious restrictions.
First of all, the security operations of Sullivan's self-system are not based on
fear of punishment; instead, they derive from ontological anxiety about the
kind of person one is in the eyes of others. Second, in Sullivan's system,
there are no internalized others, or "internal objects." There are merely the
various operations designed to avoid anxiety-arousing threats to one's sense
of self. Although Sullivan recognizes that this anxiety is predicated on mem­
ories of earlier interpersonal situations which cause unpleasant anticipation
of similar situations, he is suspicious of the usual structural conceptualiza­
tion of this process. Thus he comments that "if you wish, you can talk about
the significant person having been introjected and becoming the superego,
but I think you are apt to have mental indigestion" (Sullivan, 1956, p. 232).
As for unconscious motivations, Sullivan does not usually speak of the ex­
clusion of conflicting tendencies as unconscious, though he provisionally ac­
cepts Freud's notion of unconscious mental life. Still, Sullivan's concept of
the unconscious, in passages such as the following one, appears to be quite
different from Freud's:

The unconscious, from the way I have actually presented the thing, is
quite clearly that which cannot be experienced directly, which fills all
the gaps in the mental life. In that rather broad sense, the postulate of
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Relational Theorists I2J

the unconscious has, as far as I know, nothing in the world the matter
with it. As soon as you begin to arrange the furniture in something that
cannot be directly experienced, you are engaged in a work that requires
more than parlor magic and you are apt to be embarrassed by some
skeptic. (1964, p. 204)

Sullivan himself prefers terms such as "covert operations, ,, "selective inat­

tention," and "parataxic [mapping childhood interpersonal situations onto
the present] distortions"5 to describe lack of awareness. He comments,
"Much of that which is ordinarily said to be repressed is merely unformu-
lated" (1940, p. 185). It is lived but not reflectively understood. Certainly, for
Sullivan, the exclusion of experience from awareness is an operation rather
than a mechanism.
Such exclusion points to the paradoxical nature of the self-system as a
means to stability on the one hand and a source of stagnation on the other.
Sullivan concludes that the self-system is simultaneously "the principal
stumbling block to favorable changes in the personality" and the "principal
influence that stands in the way of unfavorable changes in the personality
[that is, disintegration resulting from intolerable anxiety]" (1953, p. 169). The
self-system aims to create the illusion of substance. Change, on the other
hand, requires the willingness to face the anxiety which arises in the face of
shifts even in negative self-appraisals. Such shifts are always interpersonal
and not merely intrapsychic, and the unbearable anxiety associated with
them arises precisely because psyches are not things, as we might like to be­
lieve.
Sullivan writes of the fear of change on the part even of schizophrenic pa­
tients, who might on the surface seem of all psychiatric patients to have the
most motivation to want to change:

YDU may be wondering why the schizophrenic person goes on suffering

the terrifying experiences when everything would be resolved by ac­
cepting the dissociated tendencies into the self. This is a rather natural
question, if one has lost hold of the interpersonal principle, and instead
is thinking of the self as a thing and the dissociated as another thing,
the two being the units which make up a personality, To "accept a dis­
sociated tendency system into the self" is tantamount to undergoing an
extensive change in personality, implying a marked change in the sorts
of interpersonal situations in which one will have one's being. Not only
is there this element of great change, but also there is no possibility of
128 Chapter Four

foresight as to the direction and extent of the change. (1940, pp.

142-43)

Sullivan is one of a very small number of post-Freudian theorists to recog­

nize that the fear of change as such is an inhibiting factor in therapy, a mo­
tive for what is usually referred to as "resistance." In fact, he occasionally
suggests that in a culture which is not repressive an individual might find no
need to develop a self-system at all because there would be no forbidden ar­
eas against which to defend oneself.
Sullivan is able to so clearly see the paradoxically useful and inhibiting as­
pects of the self-system partially because he avoids thinking of psychological
reality in terms of stagnant structures; he prefers instead a "dynamic" (in
Sullivan's, not Freud's, sense of the term) orientation which is future as well
as past oriented. Sullivan insists that "experience functions in both recall
and foresight" (1953, p. 170). The therapist's task is to "determine what the
patient is trying to do" (Sullivan, quoting William Alanson White, 1940,
p. 177) in terms of what might have been done to him or her. Thus thera­
pists must center their endeavors around discovering how patients are
avoiding the anticipated reliving of past anxiety-provoking interpersonal sit­
uations in the present relational context. It is the duty of the therapist to call
attention to this repetition based on "unpleasant anticipation" and to work
with the patient in a healing process which is necessarily interpersonal.
Unlike traditional ego psychology, interpersonal psychoanalysis concen­
trates not on building structure in the personality, but rather on the way in
which a particular patient structures reality (including that important part of
reality in which one defines and maintains a sense of self). Sullivan calls the
final view of the patient's experience at which patient and therapist arrive
together "consensual validation." It signals the arrival of the patient at a
"syntaxic," or interpersonally verifiable, view of reality, as opposed to the
private meanings and defended (good or bad) fantasies about the self with
which the patient entered therapy. In other words, the patient does not
strive to make the unconscious conscious in the usual Freudian sense, but
rather to give up "parataxic" distortions of reality—that is, distortions based
on purely personal connections, associations, and anticipations of interac­
tions and their impact on self-esteem deriving from childhood experiences
which are no longer interpersonally valid.
The relational theorists who succeeded Sullivan repeat his insights in
many ways but with certain additions; most of them do not credit him as a
source. Where these theorists do not follow Sullivan, it is often in what I
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Relational Theorists 129

consider to be an adverse direction—that of reifying the self as Freud reifies

the tripartite psyche and as the ego psychologists reify the ego. D. W. Winni­
cott is the British object relations theorist whose insights most closely re­
semble those of Sullivan. Winnicott, as a pediatrician turned child psychia­
trist, is as aware as Sullivan that mere gratification of physical needs does
not promote optimal development. In fact, Winnicott notes that "it is possi­
ble to gratify an oral drive and by doing so to violate the infant's ego-
function, or that which will later on be jealously guarded as the self, the
core of the personality" if the feeding becomes a seduction away from more
significant interpersonal satisfactions (1965b, p. 57). It is definitely not "in­
stinctual satisfaction that makes a baby begin to be, to feel that life is real, to
find life worth living" (Winnicott, I97I» P- n6); rather, it is the development
of a sense of meaning and purpose, a sense of an authentic self derived from
accurate mirroring and holding by the original caregivers.
Like Sullivan, Winnicott therefore discards Freud's concept of primary
narcissism, though he occasionally retains the term while giving it a new
meaning. According to Winnicott, there is no such thing as a baby—there is
only the "nursing couple." And like Sullivan, Winnicott views the mother's
need to respond as the natural complement to the child's need for respon­
siveness. Winnicott names his version of Sullivan's tenderness theorem "pri­
mary maternal preoccupation," and, like Sullivan, he observes that it nor­
mally lessens as the child's needs for separation-individuation come to the
forefront.
Even Winnicott's notation of the "mirroring" needs of the infant and
young child has its antecedent in Sullivan's "reflected appraisals." As is the
case with negative and damaging reflected appraisals, negative mirroring can
lead to the suppression of spontaneous needs and desires. The ontological
basis of mirroring needs is even more strongly indicated by Winnicott than
by Sullivan, since for Winnicott it is not only negative appraisals that can
cause difficulties but also neglect, or lack of mirroring. The child needs a
witness in order to develop, to gain a sense of being. Neglect, or absence of
adequate mirroring, leads to the feelings of disintegration, emptiness, and
lack of a core personality which characterize schizoid personality disorders.
Such emptiness may be covered over by the development of a false self,
which goes through the motions of living but can never be touched in its
core. Negative mirroring also leads to the development of a false self on a
compliance basis, as contrasted with the development of a true self—which
occurs when the parents mostly accept, encourage, and positively channel
the expression of spontaneous needs.
130 Chapter Four

Thus the self-system of Sullivan is divided in two by Winnicott and pro-

vided with a kind of reificatory hue. If Winnicott means by a true self only
authentic, spontaneous living and by a false self only compliant, overly ad-
aptational living, then the terms need not imply reification. They are simply
designations for two different modes of living, with the self for Winnicott
implying a center of personality organization. While Winnicott often uses
the terms in this way, he moves in the direction of reification when, for ex­
ample, he maintains that one purpose of the false self is to safeguard the true
self—as though the true self were a homunculus in the personality to be un­
covered and triumphantly brought forward by therapy.
I do not dispute the fact that Winnicott's description of the situation is a
persistent fantasy on the part of patients or clients. But I have to agree with
Sullivan that there is, in fact, no hidden true self to be discovered in the
course of therapy; there is merely a different orientation toward reality
which must be achieved by dispelling the "negative anticipations" which
characterize distortions of interpersonal reality. In some ways, Winnicott's
conceptualization may be more comforting to patients than Sullivan's—
since they could use it to minimize the unspeakable anxiety associated with
fundamental change in the direction of the unknown interpersonal future
of which Sullivan writes so well. But that does not make Winnicott's ideas
more true or more useful to therapists, who need to recognize and deal hon­
estly with the ontologically based anxiety associated with such moments of
change.
Part of the difficulty with Winnicott seems to be his allegiance to Freudian
terminology. This difficulty with accommodating traditional Freudian terms
to his own new relational concepts is perhaps nowhere better exemplified
than in the many passages in which Winnicott appears to give lip service to
orthodox concepts while in reality either ignoring or reinterpreting them. A
familiar pattern of Winnicott's is to begin a talk or a chapter with a nod to­
ward a traditional Freudian concept, followed by much discordant material,
or to conclude with a bow toward Freudian orthodoxy which does not fol­
low from the preceding argument. For example, Winnicott begins one such
talk with a summary of Freud's concept of the psychosexual stages, express­
ing his hope that the audience will agree that anything he says about growth
from dependence to independence "does not in any way invalidate the state­
ment I might have [just] made of growth in terms of erotogenic zones, or of
object relating" (1965b, p. 83). The truth, however, is that Winnicott's con­
cept of primary dependency or relatedness, which he proceeds to describe, is
antithetical to Freud's concept of primary objectless narcissism.
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Relational Theorists 131

Similarly, in another piece, Winnicott takes great pains to distinguish the

happy normal play of children from play which is complicated by bodily ex­
citement, pointing out that this not simply a difference in degree but in
kind. He then concludes the chapter with the perplexing statement, "We
may pay tribute to the importance of ego-relatedness per se without giving
up the ideas that underlie the concept of sublimation" (1965b, p. 35). One
wonders how this is possible, since Winnicott has just proceeded to divest
normal play of its libidinal roots. Again, Winnicott, following a chapter on
the true self and the false self which has hardly any connection with ortho­
dox Freudian concepts, concludes by saying, "As far as I can see it [Winni-
cott's own approach] involves no important change in basic [Freudian] the­
ory" (1965b, p. 152). How, one is left wondering, is authenticity connected
with drive gratification/frustration?
The matter becomes even more confusing when Winnicott uses tradi­
tional Freudian terms with altered (relational) meanings. For instance, Win­
nicott attempts to equate his own idea of infantile dependence with Freud's
idea of primary narcissism (Winnicott, 1965b, p. 44). The truth is that Win-
nicott's mother-child couple and Freud's objectless libidinal state are funda­
mentally incompatible. Or Winnicott claims an affinity between his own
notion of a true self and a false self and Freud's "division of the self into a
part that is central and powered by the instincts (or by what Freud called
sexuality, pregenital and genital) and a part that is turned outward and is re­
lated to the world" (1965b, p. 140). Freud clearly does not intend to equate
id impulses with a true self and ego development with a false self. Nor is this
what Winnicott means by the true self and the false self, since Winnicott
makes it clear that the true self is capable of "concern" for others and value
development as well as spontaneous desire.
The characteristics of Winnicott's true self are spontaneity, integrity, and
creativity, including the capacity to "play" and to participate in cultural ac­
tivities. The true self develops adequately not because it has been allowed
channels for direct and sublimated instinctual satisfaction, as is the case
with the Freudian id, but because the child has received adequate holding
and mirroring and because he or she has found an object (mother) who reli­
ably and empathically meets needs, remains constant despite aggressive ex­
citement, and encourages continuity of being by her quiet, nonintrusive
presence. In other words, the concerns of the true self are ontological con­
cerns rather than drive concerns. The only uses Winnicott sees for the false
self, unlike the enormous usefulness Freud accords to the ego as the center
of mature psychic life, are the management of social situations where inti-
132 Chapter Four

macy is not appropriate (in normal individuals) and the protection of the
true self (in those disturbed individuals where intrusion and/or indifference
have threatened the core of the personality and encouraged a retreat). All
this is quite un-Freudian.
Another way in which Winnicott attempts to achieve continuity with or­
thodox psychoanalytic principles is by restricting his own contributions to
pre-self disorders (psychosis, schizoid and borderline cases, and false self dis­
orders) while maintaining that Freud was right concerning the neuroses and
Oedipal disorders. Yet Winnicott's account of the Oedipus complex is itself
unorthodox. He sees it through Kleinian glasses as a conflict between a
boy's love and hate for his father in a context in which the boy's "in-love re­
lationship" with his mother has been activated. This conceptualization de­
viates from Freud's account of the Oedipus complex as a conflict between
incestuous and murderous instincts on the one hand and the fear of retalia­
tion combined with constitutional bisexuality and phylogenetic memories
of primordial father murder on the other. Winnicott's Oedipus complex, by
contrast, is a purely relational affair—a "three-body" conflict versus the
"two-body" conflicts of early infancy, as Winnicott likes to put the matter.
Moreover, after redefining areas of concern—Freud's as neuroses defined
by castration anxiety and his own as self disorders defined by "annihilation
anxiety" (Winnicott, 1965b, p. 130)—Winnicott goes on to redefine regres­
sion. Whereas for Freud, regression to earlier psychosexual stages was to be
discouraged in analysis, Winnicott maintains that regression to the point
where the true self was abandoned is necessary for cure. In this, he agrees
with Ferenzi, Balint, and Laing. Furthermore, Winnicott's division of the
territory between himself and Freud does not remain constant. Early on, he
maintained that the majority of cases were amenable to orthodox psycho­
analysis. Later, like many other post-Freudian theorists, he came to see self
disorders as the rule rather than the exception and to view neuroses as de­
riving from "the strain of ambivalence in relationships between relatively
normal ' whole' persons" (Winnicott, 1965b, p. Il6). Surely, as Greenberg and
Mitchell point out, Freud would not agree to equate the "common unhappi-
ness" of normal persons with neurosis; nor would he agree that most psy­
chological distress consists of disorders of the self. At this point, as Green­
berg and Mitchell note, Winnicott is proposing "not an extension, but an
alternative to Freud's approach" (1983, p. 209).
Yet despite these bows toward orthodoxy, Winnicott presents a very sensi­
tive characterization of the interactions between mother and child. Of all
the post-Freudian theorists, Winnicott alone insists on the importance not
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Relational Theorists 133

only of high points, traumas, and overt responses, but also of the quiet mo­
ments of "going on being" that one hopes the young child will experience in
the mother's presence. In fact, Winnicott names the mother of these mo-
ments the "environment mother" to distinguish her from the "object
mother" who is the target of the child's imperious desires. The environment
mother is optimally a quiet presence, neither intrusive nor neglectful, who
allows the child to develop a sense of self-continuity. This experience is also
the basis for the adult's later ability to enjoy being alone. It is as though the
mother's presence imposes on the child's ongoing experience a meaning
which fends off disintegration into discrete unintegrated instants. If this
quiet experience of "being with" is ruptured by a mother who ignores or in­
trudes upon her infant, the infant experiences an "annihilation" of the
self—a feeling of fragmentation which is covered over by the development of
a false self. Actually, despite his own claims to the contrary, Winnicott's de­
scriptions both of mirroring needs and of the environment mother are se­
verely at odds with traditional Freudian theory, which views relational
needs as deriving from repeated experiences of drive gratification/frustration
and not from a basic need for a witness to one's development of an ongoing
sense of self.
Winnicott's ideas are also at odds with those of his teacher Melanie Klein.
Although his account of the child's attempt to "repair" the object mother
who is the goal of striving for drive gratification appears to be derived from
Klein's ideas about innate aggression and the achievement of the "depressive
position," Winnicott actually translates Klein's ideas into more strictly rela­
tional concepts. He says that in moments of excitement the object mother
becomes the target of the infant's aggressive exploitation. But in order to de­
velop properly, the infant needs to see the environment mother survive
these hungry attacks. This is because there will come a time when the grow­
ing child will realize in an emotional sense that the object mother and the
environment mother are the same person. The result, in Kleinian terms, is a
sense of guilt—though Winnicott prefers the term "concern" to characterize
the depressive position. The truth, however, is that Klein's good-gratifying
versus bad-frustrating breast dichotomy is not equivalent to Winnicott's
juxtaposition of the object mother and the environment mother. In Klein's
system, both experiences relate to the satisfaction of drives. In Winnicott's
the environment mother is a provider for relational not instinctual needs.
Furthermore, in Klein's system, the reparation which the baby attempts is
a fantasy activity; Winnicott, by contrast, believes the young child needs to
feel that he or she can actually make a difference to the mother, that the
134 Chapter Four

amends are real. Hence the chronically depressed mother, as Harold Searles
(1979) also notes, deprives her child of this experience of reparation, of mak­
ing a difference by expressing concern. Similarly, the unreliable or blaming
mother fails to assure her child that she has successfully survived the child's
aggressive attacks. Winnicott's emphasis is on the initial actual relationship
rather than on the initial fantasy relationship as described by Klein; how­
ever, for Winnicott, these actual relationships become the basis for later fan­
tasies.
Although Winnicott seems to believe otherwise, his idea of the impor­
tance of the transitional object and of the concomitant development of a ca­
pacity to play to the development of a true self also find no grounding in tra­
ditional psychoanalytic metatheory—which regards play as an attempt at
mastery or as a kind of sublimatory activity. According to Winnicott, the
transitional object provides a bridge between the world of earliest infancy,
where the infant experiences the mother as a "subjective object" whom the
infant has "created," and that of later childhood, where the mother has be­
come an "objective object" with her own center of subjectivity and control.
The manipulation of transitional objects (blanket, teddy bear, favorite toy,
and so on) provides an avenue of connection between the inner and the
outer worlds through the presence of an object which is experienced neither
as truly subjective nor as truly objective. It exists, as Winnicott says, in "the
potential space between the baby and the mother" (1971, p. 107). Such an ob­
ject is neither completely under the control of the self (as is the case with
mere fantasies) nor completely under the control of the external world.
The manipulation of transitional objects leads to an ability to play. Only
the ability to play can give an individual a sense of possibilities as opposed
to mere facts. Thus Winnicott defines psychotherapy as "two people playing
together" (1971, p. 38). In fact, the recovery of the ability to play is the es­
sence of cure, since "it is only in being creative that the individual discovers
the [true] self" (Winnicott, 1971, p. 54). What Winnicott seems to be saying
is that the transitional object.provides an invitation to imaginative activity,
to departing from the world of is to the world of may or might be, which is
the basis for artistic and cultural activity/participation, creative scientific
discovery, and creative living. Such a world, which is future as well as past
oriented, escapes the causal mechanism of traditional Freudian metatheory.
Kohut, like Winnicott, values not only the development of a self, but the
development of a firm, flexible, and creative self. Like Winnicott, Kohut
uses the term "self" as an active organizing center of experience rather than
as a set of reflected appraisals—although Kohut's self is quite clearly a per-
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Relational Theorists 135

sonality "structure," whereas Winnicott's is more ambiguously so. The term

"self psychology" indicates the primary importance which this active, orga­
nizing self is accorded in Kohut's theory. And just as Winnicott's environ­
ment mother is distinguished from Freud's object mother, so Kohut's
"selfobject,, needs are distinguished from Freud's "libidinal object" needs. In
fact, in Kohut we have finally arrived at a theorist who clearly recognizes
and names the new category of relational needs discussed by so many of the
post-Freudian theorists. According to Kohut's final formulation (1984),
there are three categories of selfobject needs which are critical to the devel­
opment of an adequately structured self. To develop such a self, the child
needs to experience adequate "mirroring," a sense of "twinship" with an­
other who is like himself or herself, and the calm presence of an "idealiza-
ble" other.
It is only by internalizing experiences of reflective support, as opposed to
mere drive gratification, that the self can acquire firmness, cohesion, and
flexibility. Although a certain amount of empathic failure is inevitable and
even necessary to growth, the child who has largely and persistently had his
or her selfobject needs denied will fail to develop a "nuclear self" (borderline
and psychotic patients) or will develop a severely disturbed self (narcissistic
patients). Even the castration anxiety experienced by the Oedipal child and
reexperienced by the analysand usually masks a deeper anxiety—"dis­
integration anxiety," the fear not of physical death but of "loss of human-
ness: psychological death" (Kohut, 1984, p. 16). Thus for Kohut, unlike
Freud, lust and destructiveness are not primary reactions and affection and
assertiveness secondary. Rather, lust and destructiveness are reactions to
empathic failure—a sentiment with which Sullivan and Winnicott would
agree.
Kohut's account of the disintegration anxiety which accompanies such
failures echoes Erikson's description of the "identity diffusion syndrome";
Sullivan's account of the disintegrative effects of anxiety caused by repeated
attacks on the self-system; and Winnicott's description of the "annihilation"
of the self experienced by the young child who is usurped or ignored. Kohut
believes that not only the more severely disturbed patients who provided
the sources for his theory but also neurotics need to investigate narcissistic
(in Kohut's sense of attacks on one's sense of self-esteem rather than in
Freud's sense of the investment of libido in the ego at the expense of objects)
disturbances of the self.
Analysis in self psychology therefore takes the form of uncovering and fill­
ing in (through a process which Kohut calls "transmuting internalization")
136 Chapter Four

the selfobject needs that were not met in earliest childhood. It is important
to the therapeutic process to recognize which of the three forms of selfobject
needs a particular patient has had the most difficulty getting met. Mirroring
needs refer to the child's requirements for an other who is able to accept and
accurately mirror his or her basic vitality and assertiveness. Lack of ade­
quate mirroring leads to a feeling of unreality similar to Winnicott's (1965a,
1965b, 1971) and Guntrip's (1969) accounts of the feeling of unreality re­
ported by schizoid patients or to R. D. Laing's (1959) account of "ontological
insecurity." Idealizing needs refer to the child's craving for a calm, uplifting
adult who is able to present goals and projects and with whom the child can
identify. The lack of an idealizable other may lead to a sense of aimlessness,
or lack of direction, or to a feeling of anxiety similar to the anxiety which
Sullivan describes in his patients. Twinship needs refer to the child's desire
for an alter ego—a sense of the presence of others who are like oneself and
who can confirm one's essential humanness. The absence of a "twinning"
other can lead to a failure to learn tasks or to feel at home in the human
community. The meeting of mirroring needs leads to the confirmation of
ambitions; the meeting of idealizing needs to the acquisition of goals; and
the meeting of twinship needs to the acquisition of skills and talents.
Throughout all of this, the other person is the mediator of the development
of a firm, flexible, and creative self.
Therapeutically, such distinctions are very useful. For example, I think of
a client who at the beginning of therapy dreamed of monsters from outer
space who pathetically expired beneath the gaze of an uncomprehending
crowd (an old theme in his dreams). Our investigation of this dream showed
the presence of a hunger to be accurately mirrored rather than ignored by an
unempathic mother and a frequently absent father. As therapy progressed,
this client began to have dreams of funerals, in which someone shared his
grief. These dreams proved more satisfying than the earlier ones because
they reflected the fulfillment of a wish for a "twin" (the therapist?) who
would share his grief over childhood losses—including the loss of the origi­
nal self who failed to be mirrored. This client repeatedly expressed the wish
that people close to him should not only understand but "feel what I feel." It
was a prerequisite, he seemed to say, to his being able to stop feeling alien­
ated from others. At other times, he expressed the desire for a calm parent
who might have lifted him out of the endless anxieties and night terrors he
had experienced as a child. His chief complaint was that he frequently felt,
even with the people he loved most, "all alone." The origin of this feeling
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Relational Theorists 137

was not the frustration of instinctual needs; rather, it was the lack of reso­
nant empathy and commonality with his aloof parents.
Thus it seemed particularly important to this client that I accurately re­
flect the nuances of his feelings, that I let him know that his feelings were
not "alien" (that I myself might have felt the same under similar circum­
stances), and that I empathize with his loneliness. He wished to know most
of all, in the language of his dreams, that he was not a "creature from outer
space." Part of this client's solution to these dilemmas lay in his increasing
ability to use my presence to fill in the gaps in his experience of self as an ob­
ject for an interested, calm, and caring other who was also like himself in
many ways—in other words, in the provision of mirroring, twinship, and
idealizing needs within the context of therapy. No doubt, Kohut would refer
to this as "transmuting internalization."
Despite their clinical usefulness, however, there are several problems with
Kohut's formulations. First, Kohut's selfobject needs do not seem to refer to
objects at all, but rather to the child's experiences as an object for others
who as subjects see and affirm (or, conversely, negatively judge and/or ig­
nore) the child. Yet what is the metatheoretical basis for the child's under­
standing that others can be subjects? Second, Kohut's ideas concerning the
structuralization of the self are somewhat contradictory because they seem
to confuse the self as subject with the self as object or aim. If the self is a sub­
jective center of reference, how can it have structure or content, firm or
otherwise? And if it is an object, how can it be resilient and creative?
Finally, what is the metatheoretical basis for Kohut's concept of the
"transmuting internalization" of the therapist and the therapeutic milieu?
Does the analysand metaphorically "eat" the therapist as the child meta­
phorically "eats" the selfobjects? Following this gastronomical metaphor,
Kohut asserts that if therapy has proceeded properly the analysand, like the
properly parented child, will thoroughly assimilate the analytic experience.
No bits and pieces of the analyst will be left to cause intrapsychic indiges­
tion. Could we not, then, get along without this idea of transmuting
internalization—replacing it with Sullivan's idea that, having had a different
interpersonal experience with the therapist, the patient will be able to let go
of his or her "negative anticipations" that future interpersonal relations will
pose the same threat as past ones to the self-system?
The implications of these two views for treatment of more severely dis­
turbed patients make these seemingly minor distinctions between Sullivan
and Kohut appear significant. Thus it is that Sullivan, who believes that the
psyche is a fluid and changeable energy configuration rather than a thing,
138 Chapter Four

approaches the treatment of schizophrenia with optimism. Schizophrenics

simply have more anxiety than other patients about threats to an already
shaky self-system, but they are not bereft of the psychological structure that
other patients have. All of us, Sullivan seems to imply, are dealing with illu­
sory notions of the self as a stable entity.
Kohut, on the other hand, although he believes that narcissistic personal­
ity disorders are treatable because the core of a "nuclear self" begins to form
in infancy and early childhood, does not hold the same hope for more
deeply disturbed borderline and psychotic patients. While Kohut thinks
that it is theoretically possible to confront the persisting sense of hollowness
at the center of the borderline patient's personality, he believes that, practi­
cally speaking, the therapeutic relationship with such patients should aim at
allowing them to manage their defensive structures to their best advantage
rather than try for a genuine cure. For the narcissistic patient, by contrast,
psychoanalysis attempts to provide "a matrix in which the defects in the
structure of the self—even more severe defects that lead to the temporary ap­
pearance of serious, quasi-psychotic symptoms—are filled in via reactivation
of the needs for narcissistic sustenance (i.e., the need for mirroring and the
need to merge with an ideal) that had not been provided in childhood" (Ko­
hut, 1984, pp. 8-9). As for the borderline or psychotic patient, since the
foundation has not been laid, the house cannot be built. The more radical
post-Freudian theorists who have worked successfully with borderline, schiz­
ophrenic, and schizoid patients—including Sullivan, Fromm-Reichmann,
Guntrip, Laing, and Searles—would certainly disagree.
Although all of the theorists discussed in this section have some grasp of
the significance of relational needs to the formation of a self, none seems to
fully understand the significance of the self as a goal of being as well as a
source of action and an object of reflection. Why, we ask, does the individ­
ual need the security of a clearly defined self-system (Sullivan), the mirroring
of a true self (Winnicott), or the cohesiveness of a self that has had narcissis­
tic needs for mirroring, idealization and twinship met (Kohut)? Nothing in
Freud's metatheory can explain the overpowering need for the sense of self-
continuity which these theorists recognize. It is especially difficult to see
how the pursuit of pleasure could provide this motivation.
If, on the other hand, as I suggested earlier, the defensive operations de­
signed to preserve the status quo are in the service of a desire to bring into
being substantive freedom, then post-Freudian relational theorists would be
acting in bad faith to the extent that they endorse structure building as a
therapeutic goal. And if such structure is illusory, the "cures" effected by self
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Relational Theorists 139

psychologists and others ascribing to this goal must be explained in some

other way. I believe that Sartre's ontology provides this explanation at the
same time that it promotes a positive going beyond the pursuit of stability in
the direction of a pursuit of meaning as freely constituted by the individual.

Sartre's Concept of the Self

In discussing Sartre's concept of the self, we must be careful to distinguish it

from more common psychological usages. We must also be clear about what
Sartre means by the term "self" when he uses it in three different ways—as
prereflective consciousness, as ego or personality, or as the aim or value
which consciousness is attempting to bring into being. Although these three
usages are clear in context, Sartre never formally differentiates among
them—perhaps because they are inextricably interlinked anyway. Although
the French word for self (soi) translates into English with the same connota­
tions, Sartre's three usages point to a quite different view of human reality
than that of most psychoanalytic theorists. The shift from what is basically
an essentialist to an existentialist view of human reality has, I believe, impli­
cations for the practice of psychotherapy which are both subtle and signifi­
cant.
Contemporary psychoanalytic theorists are working within a philosophi­
cal tradition which ultimately derives from Aristotle. According to Aristo­
tle, every being is composed of matter and form or structure. Each entity
also contains within itself a potentiality (not yet actual) which it is its nature
to realize. Sometimes referred to as the "acorn theory" (an oak tree is the re­
alization of the potentiality of an acorn), this view of human development
secretly permeates much psychological discourse from psychoanalysis to hu­
manistic psychology. Now outdated as a philosophy of nature with respect
to physics if not to biology, Aristotle's solution to the problem of change has
been much embraced as a solution to the problem of human change. When
I change, say the humanistic therapist and client, I "realize my potential."
Many psychoanalytic theorists similarly believe that I find and free my true
self while dissolving the false self which adverse environmental influences
have caused me to form.
Sartre disagrees. The self as prereflective agent has neither structure nor
substance. Prereflective choice, not the realization of an a priori potentiality,
lies at the heart of human reality: "Existence precedes essence." As for the
self as ego or character, it is given form and substance by the self as agent—
140 Chapter Four

but as this happens, it becomes a pseudo-object similar to other objects in

the world. It is no longer a living consciousness but an image or impression
of that consciousness. Much of the confusion among psychologists, Sartre
contends, derives from their treating the self as object as though it were a
real experiencing self rather than a construct of reflective consciousness. As
for the self as value, it is this self which haunts the self as agent in the form
of that substantial freedom, that self-correspondence, which is to be
achieved down there in the future. But Being-in-itself-for-itself is an illusion.
The self as value can never actually exist. It can only exist as the future-
directed meaning of my present actions, feelings, thoughts, and gestures—a
point which should become increasingly clear as we investigate the three
forms of the self in Sartre.
Let us begin with the self as prereflective consciousness. This self is the
source of the other two selves. As an agent, I am concerned with the project
of bringing into being the self as value, whereas as a person with a past who
lives among other people, I always do end up creating some kind of version
of myself as an object or personality. Despite these interconnections, I think
we can isolate some of the ontological characteristics of the self as prereflec­
tive consciousness. What defines the self as prereflective consciousness is not
potentiality as an inner essence to be realized, but possibility as discovered on
the face of a particular world.
Possibility may have to do with the world, as when I look out at gray
clouds and remark, "It is possible that it may rain this afternoon" (Aristotle
would say instead that the potentiality of the clouds is fulfilled in rain). Or it
may have to do with my activities in the world, as when I say, "It is possible
that I may finish this book this summer" (the humanistic psychologist
would say that I am "fulfilling my potential" as a writer). In both instances,
however, the possible is neither an inner potency waiting to be realized nor a
mere indifferent might; it is that which I view myself or the world as going to
be. In the first instance, possibility has to do with my awareness of the future
of the world, and in the second, with my awareness of my own future within
it. According to Sartre, both kinds of possibility are wholly and fundamen­
tally human. Material objects have no awareness of a future. The self of pre­
reflective consciousness, on the other hand, has no substance in the sense of
fullness of being.
This brings us to Sartre's famous definition of human reality as a desire or
lack. As desire or lack of Being, consciousness is aware of a gap between itself
and its objects. Sartre calls this awareness of distance between self and
(present and future) world "nothingness," and he considers the act of being
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Relational Theorists 141

aware a "nihilating act" in the sense that it by definition involves an aware­

ness of distances. Although this idea is often viewed pessimistically—even
Sartre has much to say about the "anguish of our freedom" or the "un­
happy" state of human consciousness—it is really the only possible outlook
which allows for human freedom and responsibility. The philosophical term
"nihilation" is therefore not to be equated with negativity in the usual sense;
instead, it must be understood as the distantiation which allows the world
to come into existence for me. It is through a dim awareness of my distinct­
ness from the objects of my consciousness, both as they are and as I expect
them to become, that I maintain the character of an intentional being—that
I become consciousness of. According to Sartre, a consciousness stuffed with
itself could not encounter the world. Perhaps, one is tempted to think, this
is why the Freudian psyche so often appears to be a closed intrapsychic sys­
tem: Its substantiality leaves no room for the world.
In any case, Sartre maintains just the opposite position. Since prereflective
consciousness is translucid, it contains none of the psychological content or
structural properties which psychological investigations like to attribute to
the human subject. Although Sartre says that such a consciousness is "per­
sonal" in the sense of being aware that it is aware (conscience [de] soi de Vob-
jet), it has none of the character traits and qualities usually associated with
the personality. It is personal only in the sense of existing "for itself as a pres­
ence to itself" (BN, p. 103). The self (soi) of prereflective consciousness comes
into being simultaneously with my awareness of the world (de Vobjet); this
prereflective self is, in fact, purely and simply my awareness of the gap be­
tween self and world with the parentheses indicating that such self-
awareness is not a real awareness of self as object. Rather, it is more like the
taste of self which goes along with each of my acts of world formulation.
Dimly aware of myself as not being the material world or even as not coin­
ciding with a particular view or attitude toward the world, I am "all light­
ness, all translucence" (TE, p. 42). I am all openness to being. In fact, to use
the term "I" is a misnomer, though I have retained it for linguistic conven­
ience. The truth is that when I am deeply immersed in an activity, I am not
even aware of an "I"—though if you stopped to ask me who is doing a partic­
ular action, I would reply that "I" am doing it. Prereflective consciousness is,
in other words, aware of individual continuity as a temporal being.
Actually, it is only when I reflectively turn and make an object of my
(past) self that the "I" and "me" of ordinary discourse appear. Sartre main­
tains in The Transcendence of the Ego that the "I" and the "me" are objects
rather than subjects. The consciousness which characterizes them is beyond
142 Chapter Four

the object being characterized in the very act of linguistic formulation. In

the formula for reflective consciousness, the self of prereflective conscious­
ness is never equivalent to the self of reflective consciousness: There is an
impassable gulf between the first and the second soi in conscience (de) soi de
sot Even in a simple statement such as, "I like this," the "I" who speaks the
sentence is reflectively beyond the "I" who does the liking. This becomes
even clearer with statements such as, "I am a good/bad/exciting/depressed/
angry person," which involve reflective characterizations extending far be­
yond the immediate past into the distant past and by implication into the
future as well.
Such reflective judgments coalesce into what Sartre refers to as the "ego,"
by which he means not the Freudian ego as part of a tripartite structure but
the whole psyche, ^ t the Sartrean ego or psyche, as an object both appre­
hended and created by consciousness, is opaque, whereas prereflective con­
sciousness is translucid. The ego, according to Sartre, "is neither formally
nor materially in consciousness: it is outside, in the world" (TE, p. 31). The
act of regarding one's own past as an object is similar to the act of appre­
hending other objects in the world—and equally (in some ways more so)
open to error. It is for this reason that Sartre agrees with Freud that the sub­
ject of a psychoanalysis does not have "a privileged position to proceed in
these inquiries concerning himself" (BN, p. 570)—and not because Sartre
accepts the Freudian unconscious.
This shift: in the usual perspective reverses many of the accepted ideas
both of psychology and of everyday life. Psychologists most often view per­
sonality traits as lying behind actions, which are said to emanate from them.
Sartre reverses this: Personality traits are not a source but a product of one's
reflective view of self. The center of the ego is not a living consciousness but
a "nucleus of opacity" (BN, p. 103). As an object of reflective consciousness
(which is the name Sartre gives to prereflective consciousness when it turns
and attempts to take a position on itself), the ego fis "the transcendent unity
of states and of actions" (TE, p. 70). What Sartre means is that conscious­
ness, as a transcendence or going beyond its objects, creates an ideal (not a
real) whole out of its past actions and states (which it may further unify into
personality qualities or traits).
Actions include not only physical actions but "psychical actions like
doubting, reasoning, meditating, making a hypothesis" (TE, p. 69). In posit­
ing the "I" pole of the ego, consciousness sees itself as the transcendent unity
of these past actions. I am the person who acts/acted in such and such a
fashion. Similarly, I may make my past feelings (which are also actions) into
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Relational Theorists 143

a "me*' pole of the ego. For example, my hatreds and loves come to define
me. "Yet hatred and love are states which can only appear to reflective con-
sciousness. Prereflectively, I may feel repugnance, anger, or joy in someone's
presence. But hatred and love imply a permanence which simple momen­
tary emotions do not have. Thus when I say that I have a hatred for some­
one or that I have done a particular act out of hatred, I have gone beyond
merely descriptive reflection to state more than I can know. I have made of
my hatred an object in consciousness, which it can never really be, or a mo­
tive for behavior, which it is not.
In fact, I may even be mistaken about a state: I may believe that I hate
when I love or that I love when I hate. If I go one step further, having ob­
served several or many such "hatreds** or "loves," I may decide that I have a
disposition toward hatred or love or some other state. When I do this, I at­
tribute to myself the quality or personality trait of being spiteful, loving, or
something else. As Sartre points out, the "faults, virtues, tastes, talents, ten­
dencies, instincts, etc.** which we attribute to ourselves and others are such
hypothetical qualities (TE, p. 71). We view them as "potentialities" or forces
within ourselves when they are really reifications of repeated feelings or
actions. They do not exist a priori but a posteriori; so, in fact, does the ego,
although it is popularly thought to be the source of the qualities, actions,
and states which define it.
The ego as conceived by popular imagination appears to have claims on
the future as well as the past. If I am this kind of person, then I will be this
kind of person. It is here that the self as ego connects with the self as aim or
value—at least to the extent that such a self is conceived in bad faith. In fact,
the point of constructing an ego may be exactly this: It gives a sense of sub­
stantiality or security concerning the future. Sartre says that consciousness
"is frightened by its own spontaneity because it senses this spontaneity as
beyond freedom'* in the sense that the prereflective self I am down there in
the future could make a different choice than I might wish to make right
now. My future self could betray my present self. For this reason, Sartre con­
siders that "perhaps the essential role of the ego is to mask from conscious­
ness its very spontaneity" (TE, p. IOO).
Many irrational fears spring from exactly this source. Sartre gives the ex­
ample of a young bride described by Pierre Janet who lived in terror of sit­
ting at a window and summoning passers-by as if she were a prostitute.
Nothing in her past served as an explanation for this fear, yet she could not
shake it. Sartre tells us that this young woman was experiencing "a vertigo
of possibility"—that her feeling "monstrously free" took the form of fear of
144 Chapter Four

this shameful action (TE, p. IOO). Fears about doing shameful things in a
crowd or of getting too near the edge of a cliff may have a similar source.
The person I will be down there in the future might stand up in a crowded
restaurant and shout or undress or my future self might choose to jump off a
cliff. Such things, in fact, often happen in dreams. Indeed, if consciousness
is pure spontaneity, what is to prevent me from making a future choice
which will go against all that I have ever considered important? The ego of­
fers itself as a comfort against this recognition that I am and will be pure
freedom.
To the extent that consciousness constitutes the ego as a substantial self
which provides an escape from its freedom, the ego provides a "a false repre­
sentation of itself" (TE, p. IOl). As a product of "accessory reflection,"
which differs from "pure reflection" in this very attempt to reify living con­
sciousness as a potentiality for certain actions and states, the ego can be al­
lied with bad faith. I will discuss pure reflection—or the simple presence of
the consciousness reflecting to the consciousness reflected on—in greater de­
tail below. Here it should be noted that the ego is inclined toward bad faith
because in creating an ego I usually engage in the inauthentic attempt to
substantialize consciousness. As a part of an effort to realize a self that is
substantively free (Being-in-itself-for-itself), the ego represents at least a
slightly skewed vision of myself. This vision is a lie because it denies my free­
dom or imbues it with an impossible substantiality, regardless of how accu­
rate a picture of myself I may draw in other respects.
Sartre does not suggest that it is possible to live without an ego. In fact, in
The Transcendence of the Ego, he states that even though the ego is not the
"owner" but the "object" of consciousness, it nonetheless "appears on the
horizon of a spontaneity" in the sense that one has a sense of the ego as a re­
flective unification of one's project (TE, p. 97). In The Family Idiot, Sartre de­
plores the fact that as a child Flaubert's "ego," or sense of himself as an ob­
ject, is so alienated from prereflective experience that "he knows it only by
hearsay" rather than as an "immediate structure [which is] . . . the sponta­
neous affirmation at the heart of concrete intuition." For the young Gus-
tave, his ego is not simply elusive, confused, or blurred; rather, like the false
self of Winnicott, it exists only in the significations of others. It is part of
Gustave's acquiescence to the "magical power of grown-ups"—which he
himself is unable to understand by making it his own (FI, 1:154-155). In
other words, Sartre understands as well as the relational theorists discussed
in this chapter the tragedy of a child's failure, through lack of adequate mir­
roring and positive regard, to develop a sound sense of self (ego) as object.
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Relational Theorists 145

Although Flaubert's case is extreme, it is understandable from a Sartrean

perspective why a person might substitute the distortions of others for his or
her own direct reflections on self. For one thing, one's own view of oneself as
an object is vulnerable to error in a way that is not true of one's view of
other objects in the world. This vulnerability is inescapable because the ob­
ject of reflective consciousness is always a pseudo-object for the simple rea­
son that prereflective consciousness cannot be present to my view as are
other objects in the world. I cannot simultaneously see and be the conscious­
ness reflected on, though in pure reflection I may approach some approxi­
mation of this. I can, however, be truly present as a real object beneath the
Other's gaze. For this and other reasons discussed in the preceding chapter, I
may be tempted to adopt the Other's view of me in place of my own. Much
human misery, as we have seen, begins exactly here—in the many variations
of this attempt to use the Other to bring into existence substantive freedom.
This leads us to a discussion of the self as value. This is the future self
which I am attempting to bring into being. Sartre calls it a value because it is
that which consciousness desires or lacks down there in the future. Ulti­
mately, this lack is a lack of self, and the ultimate pursuit is the impossible
pursuit of Being-in-itself-for-itself, or substantive freedom. The nothingness
which separates prereflective consciousness from its objects is not just a sim­
ple awareness that I am not this table; it is also an awareness of a present lack
which imagines itself as a future fullness. Sartre says that the "for-itself is it­
self down there, beyond its grasp, in the far reaches of its possibilities" (BN,
pp. 103-4). The "circuit of selfness," as we saw in Chapter 2, is intimately
connected with the world. Sartre uses "circuit of selfness (Circuit de ipseite)
for the relation of the for-itself with the possible which it is, and 'world' for
the totality of being in so far as it is traversed by the circuit of selfness" (BN,
p. 102). One is always in the process of creating a future self in terms of the
"possibles" one encounters on the face of this particular world. In this re­
spect, the self as value is a pursuit, a self-making process, rather than an ac­
tual entity.
Interestingly enough, reflection is not a necessary component of this pur­
suit of a self as value, though in reality the self as value always contains re­
flective elements. A mundane example of how this operates on a nonreflec-
tive level was given in Chapter 2: One experiences thirst out there in the
world in one's apprehension of this glass of water as desirable. What one de­
sires is a satisfied thirst, which Sartre calls the in-itself-for-itself-of-thirst.
What one gets is the disappearance of thirst and the appearance of a new de­
sire or lack. All this could happen on a purely nonreflective level, though it
146 Chapter Four

is always possible to turn and grasp the situation reflectively: I am thirsty. It

is conceivable that much of one's life project could be lived on a totally non-
reflective level, though in actuality this would probably only be possible for
a person deprived of human society and language. Nonetheless, there is
much that goes on for each of us that is never reflectively scrutinized. In-
deed, much of what Freudian analysis regards as "unconscious" may fall
within this category. It is lived as a future-directed project, but this project is
never named or else it is misnamed. In fact, it may be a part of one's project
to refuse to name it or to name it incorrectly.
Reflection, and with it the voices of others which one has reflectively
adopted, enter into the value-making process when one attempts to charac­
terize the self as value as a this or a that. To the extent that one realizes that
the self one is making, the value one is projecting oneself toward, will never
be made (except at the moment of death, when one's life becomes a value for
others), the self-making process can be undertaken in relatively good faith.
But the temptation toward bad faith—toward believing either that one is not
the self one has been because one has no connection with those past choices
or that one is or will become the self one is pursuing—is definitely strong. We
have seen that belief in the substantive ego is one manifestation of bad faith
which is well nigh universal. One reflectively creates an ego, which is a pure
in-itself or "nucleus of opacity" (BN, p. 103), and then imagines it as the
source of one's states and actions. The only possible release from this pro­
pensity toward self-deception is facing the reality that human consciousness
is an "unhappy consciousness" (BN, p. 90) to the extent that its fundamen­
tal project—bringing into being substantive freedom or a substantial self as
value—is impossible.
I believe, however, that this unhappiness looms larger to a consciousness
that has not yet performed on itself the radical "katharsis" of recognizing
and validating its freedom. Sartre himself says much about the anguish of
freedom and very little about its joys—though his descriptions of the "light­
ness" of the person who recognizes his or her freedom or the playfulness of
the person who has been converted to such a position presage a recognition
of the pleasures which such a shift can bring. Certainly, his description of
the "conflict of consciousnesses" vividly displays the miseries of human rela­
tions lived in bad faith—or in holding fast to a project which involves using
others to create the illusion of substance.
On the other hand, Sartre concludes Being and Nothingness with a set of
questions which were to be the basis for a book on ethics that he never fin-
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Relational Theorists 147

ished. These questions concern the possibility of transcending the trap of

believing that one can achieve substantive freedom:

What will become of freedom if it turns its back upon this value [of
bringing into being the in-itself-for-itself as a real possibility]? Will free­
dom carry this value along with it whatever it does and even in its very
turning back upon the in-itself-for-itself? Will freedom be reappre-
hended from behind by the value which it wishes to contemplate? Or
will freedom by the very fact that it apprehends itself as a freedom in re­
lation to itself, be able to put an end to the reign of this value? In partic­
ular is it possible for freedom to take itself for a value as the source of all
value, or must it necessarily be defined in relation to a transcendent
value which haunts it? And in case it could will itself as its own possible
and its determining value, what would this mean? A freedom which
wills itself freedom is in fact a being-which-is-not-what-it-is and which-
is-what-it-is-not, and which chooses as the ideal of being, being-what-
it-is-not and not-being-what-it-is. (BN, p. 627)

Sartre, toward the beginning of Being and Nothingness, defines human reality
as that being "which is what it is not and which is not what it is" (BN, p.
63). In the passage above, he suggests that it may be possible to choose this
same paradoxical human reality as value—and thereby to escape the trap of
bad faith.
Sartre allies the goals of existential psychoanalysis to this ethical enter­
prise of recognizing that one creates value rather than finds it. The aim of ex­
istential psychoanalysis, he says, is to repudiate the "spirit of seriousness"—
by which he means the propensity to look at oneself as a product of
environmental demands, past and present. In its place, existential psycho­
analysis would presumably place the "spirit of play" (BN, p. 580), of recog­
nizing the lightness of one's freedom. One is reminded of Winnicott's defini­
tion of psychoanalysis as "two people playing together." In any case,
existential psychoanalysis "is going to reveal to man the real goal of his pur­
suit, which is being as a synthetic fusion of the in-itself with the for-itself; ex­
istential psychoanalysis is going to acquaint man with his passion" (BN,
p. 626). Sartre, of course, means neither the sexual passion of Freud nor pas­
sion defined as self-interest (which, Sartre says, is "only one way freely cho­
sen among others to realize this passion" [BN, p. 626]); he means instead the
passion for creating a self down there in the future.
In order to be a "means of deliverance and salvation" rather than an invi-
148 Chapter Four

tation to despair, however, existential psychoanalysis must reveal to the

"moral agent that he is the being by whom values exist" (BN, p. 627). In other
words, it must release the analysand from the illusion of substance into a
feeling of responsibility for a life which one is always making, but which is
never made. From such a viewpoint alone, surprises about who one has
been and who one might become would be welcome. I believe that this en­
terprise of validating one's freedom involves a kind of therapeutic "transcen­
dence of the ego" in that one recognizes that the ego one identifies with is
an illusion of substance. And this insight that the ego or the self as object
must in some respect be repudiated is, I believe, a major contribution which
existential psychoanalysis can make to contemporary psychoanalytic discus­
sions of the self.

"Pure Reflection": A Sartrean Approach

to the Self in Psychotherapy

As we have seen, many contemporary psychoanalytic relational theorists

recognize that it is the pursuit of a self, rather than the pursuit of pleasure,
which is the chief human concern. Most follow Sullivan, Winnicott, and
Kohut in recognizing the significance of relations with others, especially
with respect to allowing the development of an adequate sense of self. Some,
such as Kohut and (to a lesser extent) Winnicott, regard this self as having
actual substance and structure. A few, such as Sullivan, view the self as ac­
tivity or energy rather than substance. The truth is that much theoretical
confusion surrounds contemporary psychoanalytic discussions of the self.
Certainly, there is no metatheoretical principle which would account for the
need to create or establish a firm sense of self.
I believe that Sartre's ontological insight that the pursuit of Being-in-itself-
for-itself is a description of being human provides such a metatheoretical
grounding for the significance of the development of a self. Yet Sartre's ideas
take us beyond contemporary psychoanalytic insights to an understanding
that only the paradoxical acceptance of human reality as a plan without a
blueprint can release us from the many forms of distress which are the prov­
ince of psychopathology. It is not the development of a substantial self
which is the final aim of existential psychoanalysis, but rather the transcen­
dence of the need to develop such a self.
For the most part, the establishment of a firm identity, self, or ego has
been the goal of psychoanalytic theory from the ego psychologists to the self
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Relational Theorists 149

psychologists (as Kohut's theory is styled). Even Sullivan, who recognizes

that the pursuit of a substantive self can in some instances lead to stultifica­
tion, fails to follow the full implications of his discovery of the fluidity of
consciousness. Although Sullivan does not regard the experiencing subject
as a thing, he does consider the ultimate human aim to be the attainment of
a maximum of satisfaction within a context which allows for a maximum of
security or lack of dissonance. Sartre, by contrast, would consider this
search for a secure self to be a sign that one is living in bad faith. As for the
more mainstream theorists, they are similar to Kohut in that they view the
self the same way they view the ego—as an entity with substance and struc­
ture (or lack thereof). Or they see the self as a potentiality to be realized, as
Winnicott does.
Sartrean consciousness, on the other hand, is anything but a substantial
entity or an identity or potentiality to be realized. Consciousness desires so­
lidity, it aims at substantiality, and it would like to see itself as having char­
acter or potential. But in this regard consciousness is always frustrated. As
for identity, the very word in its philosophical meaning of coincidence with
what one is is anathema to existential psychoanalysis as a description of
consciousness. The theorem "x = x" never works with respect to conscious­
ness. As applied to prereflective consciousness, one can never coincide with
oneself because one is always at a distance from oneself. A human being is,
after all, that being who "is what he is not and is not what he is." For exam­
ple, if one believes, one is dimly aware that one believes by making oneself
believe—that this belief is a prereflective choice of a way of relating to the
world. Or one is aware that one defines oneself in terms of objects which
one is not. O n the reflective level, the consciousness reflecting can never be
equated with the consciousness reflected on. The moment I turn to look at
my spontaneous actions, I am no longer the spontaneous choice of myself
which I previously was—as, for example, when I reflectively look at myself as
a person who is writing. Pursuit of a substantial true self, as discussed by
Winnicott and others, is another variation on this attempt to establish one's
identity as a this. The existentialist therapist does not attempt to provoke
the emergence of a true self or substantial ego identity, but rather tries to en­
courage the development of an authentic way of living.
How does one achieve this goal? Probably, it will not be achieved com­
pletely,6 but it will not even become a focus if client and therapist continue
to expect the emergence of a substantive structured self. It may be necessary,
especially with more severely disturbed people, to work for a long time at
providing an approximation of the reflection which was missing or severely
150 Chapter Four

distorting in early childhood. Here the therapeutic approach suggested by

Kohut can be quite useful, though existentialist therapy will provide a differ­
ent theoretical understanding of why accurate mirroring in therapy is so im­
portant. This is not because mirroring provides missing structure in the
psyche, but rather because it facilitates a different reflective orientation to­
ward one's prereflective experience. It is the relationship between the self as
agent and the self as object which is at issue.
Eventually, even in working with very disturbed clients and perhaps even
more so in working with people who are usually considered neurotic, it will
be necessary to confront the fact that one can never become a fixed, always
reliable self. This, too, involves developing a particular relationship between
reflective consciousness and prereflective consciousness. If Sartre is correct
in saying that the aim of existential psychoanalysis is "to acquaint man with
his passion" (BN, p. 626), then there must be a reflective confrontation with
the self of prereflective consciousness—which is at bottom no thing, sheer
translucidity and temporalizing movement. Such a confrontation changes
one's basic way of conceiving of self/world. It is also the only possible ave­
nue for mitigating the human misery which Sartre describes as the "conflict
of consciousnesses" by exposing the illusory nature of the attempt to use the
Other to create a self. Interestingly, what the client must do is first use an­
other (the therapist) to counteract the original distortions and neglect and
then realize that this very enterprise of using others to create a self is part of
a mistaken effort to bring into being the missing God.
What, then, is the approach by which existentialist theory attempts to fa­
cilitate a confrontation with oneself as responsible freedom? I believe it is
something close to Sartre's somewhat problematic concept of "pure reflec­
tion." Sartre later admitted that he had never really given a full account of
pure reflection, but had instead shown "only the facts of accessory reflec­
tion" (quoted by Barnes, 1983, p. 46). Hazel Barnes points out that as an ac­
tual mode of reflection, pure reflection is an impossibility. The operation,
conscience (de) soi de conscience (de) soi, is not possible if the second conscious­
ness is to be equated with the first (Barnes, 1983, p. 44-45). The conscious­
ness reflecting is always separated from the consciousness reflected on.
Barnes wonders if Sartre had in mind "some technique which he lacked the
capacity, ability, or will to spell out" (1983, p. 46).
Since Sartre was not a psychotherapist, I think this might well be the case.
But since pure reflection, which Sartre defines as the simple presence of the
consciousness reflecting to the consciousness reflected on, has great impor­
tance in Sartre's theory of psychoanalysis, I think he must have conceived
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Relational Theorists 151

that something like pure reflection—if not actual pure reflection—was a possi­
bility. He himself says that pure reflection "keeps to the given without setting
up claims for the future" (TE, p. 64). Such reflection lacks the usual motiva­
tion of manipulating events in the direction of achieving Being-in-itself-for-
itself. Because Sartre maintains that "reflective apprehension of spontaneous
consciousness as non-personal spontaneity would have to be accomplished
without any antecedent motivation" (TE, p. 92), pure reflection would have to
be the cornerstone of discovering oneself as prereflective spontaneity which
is the goal of existential psychoanalysis. Only such a reflection could accom­
plish this goal, since any impure reflection would already be contaminated
with the goal of creating an ego or self as object. Although Sartre admits that
such reflection is extremely rare, he maintains that it "is always possible in
principle" (TE, p. 92). I think we might more realistically say that the move­
ment toward pure reflection is a human possibility.
Actually, pure reflection, though not always identified by name, is a criti­
cal concept for both The Transcendence of the Ego and Being and Nothingness.
In the first place, without something approximating pure reflection, it would
have been impossible to arrive at the philosophical truths of either work. It
must be possible for Sartre as reflective consciousness to apprehend his own
free spontaneity as prereflective consciousness in order to write about this.
Once he has done this, Sartre finds himself, at the end of Being and Nothing-
ness, on the verge of an ethics or an existential psychoanalysis which takes as
its first premise the possibility of embracing a "philosophy of freedom"
which might make it possible to live one's life, including one's relations with
others, in relatively good faith. Such a conversion, which is the aim of exis­
tential psychoanalysis, is based on the possibility of pure reflection.
The radical conversion is also a likely outcome of adequate parental love
in childhood, as we have seen from the passage quoted from Sartre's biogra­
phy of Flaubert in the preceding chapter. In that passage, Sartre discusses
the importance of accurate positive reflection, noting that the child who has
experienced the "true lie" of parental love will escape the despair over future
possibilities which is the lot of the unloved child. This will make it easier
later to face the truth that one is oneself the source of all value—that this is
guaranteed neither by parental love nor by any character or personal poten­
tial given beforehand. But such a coming of age is predicated on pure reflec­
tion, since only pure reflection can reveal one to oneself as responsible free­
dom. Where parental love was lacking in making such reflection likely,
existential psychoanalysis can take up the task.
Pure reflection is important to the process of existential psychoanalysis
152 Chapter Four

partially because only pure reflection will reveal the immediate past as a
spontaneous choice rather than an emanation of the ego. As Sartre puts the
matter, "We see here two reflections: the one, impure and conniving, which
effects then and there a passage to the infinite [in terms of conceiving of the
self as a static object which one was, is, and will be] . . . ; the other, pure,
merely descriptive, which disarms the unreflected consciousness by granting
its instantaneousness ,, (TE, pp. 64-65). Sartre gives as an example of the dif­
ference between the two an everyday occurrence where someone says in an­
ger, "I detest you," and then catches himself and says, "It is not true, I do
not detest you, I said that in anger" (TE, p. 64). Hatred or detestation is a
state attributed to the ego. Anger is an immediate prereflective response. An
interesting phenomenon which one often meets in therapy is the client who
resists feeling something (anger, sadness, fear) out of concern that this feel­
ing will last forever or that it will define him or her as a person. Often a re­
sponse on the part of the therapist such as "That's what you're feeling right
now—it's not who you are," will disarm this fear.
Pure reflection is, in fact, the source of those moments of radical change
which Sartre designates as "psychological instants" to distinguish them from
temporal instants (which do not exist because time is a continuous flow).
These instants—in which an individual, suspended over an abyss, grasps in
order to let go and lets go in order to grasp a new way of being in the
world—are extremely critical to psychotherapy. They occur when prereflec­
tive consciousness takes its own immediate past as an object, evaluates it,
and makes a new choice of being based on this evaluation. Sartre says that
the "act of objectivizing the immediate past is the same as the new choice of
other ends; it contributes to causing the instant to spring forth as the nihi-
lating rupture of the temporalization" (BN, p. 467). Obviously, it is not al­
ways necessary to make a new choice of being at those moments, but Sartre
conceives that it is possible to do so.
Part of the process of allowing such instants to arise also involves focusing
pure reflection on situations in the distant past which have never been re­
flectively conceived or, one might assume, have been reflectively miscon­
ceived. Here the possibility of error is greater than with closer situations—as
Sartre shows in making his character Hugo choose the meaning of the past
in terms of his present project in Dirty Hands. O n the other hand, Sartre
points out that "every unreflective consciousness, being non-thetic [non-
thinglike] consciousness of itself, leaves a non-thetic memory that one can
consult" (TE, p. 46). The process of psychoanalysis, in fact, rests on attempt­
ing a more or less accurate reconstruction of the past in terms of a present
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Relational Theorists 153

project which one is attempting to change. Reevaluating the distant past—

especially those emotional situations in the past which have been contami­
nated by the demands and evaluations of others and which continue to in­
fluence the present—is a central part of the task of depth psychotherapy.
When one attempts this reevaluation process, I believe it is important, in­
sofar as this is possible, to approach the past through pure reflection, since
accessory reflection will reveal states and qualities rather than choices. If one
then makes a radically new choice of being, the past, including one's child­
hood, will take on a different meaning. This is not to say that the "facts" of
the past will change per se—these, Sartre tells us, are "irremediable"—only
that their significance may be radically altered. In beginning to project a dif­
ferent future, I come to "have" a different past. My past, according to Sartre,
comes to meet me out of the future. It is for this reason that the past can
take on such different colorings at various phases in a life or at various stages
in the course of psychotherapy.
It is also important to understand that while the psychological instant
may be hoped for, it is also feared. Sartre says that consciousness is "perpet­
ually threatened by the instant" (BN, p. 466). This is so because the exist­
ence of the psychological instant demonstrates that a "radical modification
of our fundamental project" is always possible—a radical modification
which, however much we may imagine that we want it, is the surest possible
demonstration that substantive freedom, Being-in-itself-for-itself, is an illu­
sion. As a moment of "double nothingness" (BN, p. 466), the psychological
instant shows me beyond a shadow of a doubt that I can never be somebody
in the substantive sense.
It is for this reason that we often prefer familiar pain to the chance for an
alien happiness. Radical change involves abandoning the whole weight of a
past project, including the knowledge of all the various paths in the world
for realizing that project, for an unknown future—an act which certainly re­
quires considerable courage. In fact, as we have seen in a passage quoted ear­
lier from Sullivan, it is this venture into the unknown which keeps even the
schizophrenic embedded in his or her familiar delusions. Joanne Greenberg,
in her autobiographical novel, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, similarly
validates this idea that part of the problem is that the schizophrenic patient
must exchange a known miserable world for an unknown possibility of liv­
ing differently. As Dr. Fried (who is modeled on Frieda Fromm-Reichmann)
says to the young patient's mother in the novel: "Believe it or not, her sick­
ness is the only solid ground she has. She and I are hacking away at that
ground, on which she stands. That there will be another, firmer ground for
154 Chapter Four

her after this is destroyed she can only take on faith" (1964, p. 109). Of
course, such fundamental shifts in a client's project usually take place over
time and not all at once. Still, in therapy there is usually a point at which a
client realizes exactly what is happening. The question, "Who will I be if I
[make this or that fundamental change]?" can only be answered with,
"YDU'II only really know by making it." And, forever after, such a client will
understand something else as well—that the self is not the substantial thing
which he or she once took it to be.
Since the self is not a thing or a set of qualities, the goal of inquiry in exis­
tential psychoanalysis "must be to discover a choice and not a state" (BN,
P- 573)- Sartre says that the existential psychoanalyst "must recall on every
occasion that his object is not a datum buried in the darkness of the uncon­
scious but a free, conscious determination—which is not even resident in
consciousness, but which is one with this consciousness itself" (BN, p. 573).
At the same time, he or she must recognize that even where the subject and
object of existential psychoanalysis are the same person, the project revealed
will be "from the point of view of the Other"—that is, it will be reflective rather
than prereflective (BN, p. 571). This second statement would seem to invali­
date the claims of some critics that Sartre had abandoned the translucidity
of consciousness in his later work when he claimed that "lived experience"
(le vecu) was not completely accessible to reflective awareness. Actually, al­
though the later Sartre may have become more humble in his conception of
the degree of self-knowledge which is actually possible, the early Sartre had
never believed that prereflective consciousness can be reflectively conceived
exactly as it is. The very act of reflection provides a view of the object re­
flected on from the outside.
O n the other hand, unless something approximating pure reflection is
possible, the critical point of existential psychoanalysis in which "the resis­
tance of the subject collapses suddenly and he recognizes the image of himself
which is presented to him as if he were seeing himself in a mirror" will never
be reached (BN, p. 573). Yet Sartre insists that this "enlightenment of the
subject is a fact. . . . The subject guided by the psychoanalyst does more and
better than give his agreement to an hypothesis; he touches it, he sees what
it is" (BN, p. 574). It is for this reason that "the final intuition of the subject"
must be recognized as "decisive" in existential psychoanalysis (BN, p. 574-)-
We appear to have reached a theoretical impasse here. Sartre seems to take
as the basis both of his philosophy and of the existentialist approach to psy­
chotherapy an action which is impossible. The consciousness reflecting can
never be exactly present to the consciousness reflected on. The nonparen-
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Relational Theorists 155

thetic de in conscience (de) soi de conscience (de) soi forever divides them. Nor,
one presumes, can the consciousness reflecting ever leave behind its own
project since it is this very project. In other words, it can never be the purely
descriptive consciousness which Sartre defines as pure reflection. Is this not
at least as problematic as the theoretical difficulty which Sartre himself
notes in the Freudian project of making the unconscious conscious? To at­
tempt to make the prereflective reflective, to move from consciousness to
knowledge, would seem to be as flawed an enterprise as the attempt to make
the unconscious conscious. The self as agent and the self as object would
seem to be unalterably alienated.
Actually, I think this difficulty is more apparent than real. Strictly speak­
ing, it is probably true that knowledge can never reveal everything about
consciousness, as Sartre seems to say in an interview late in his career (Sartre
in Schilpp, 1981, pp. 22-23). O n t n e other hand, because consciousness is
translucid, because it has no content, it is possible to grasp one's past
translucidity. For example, I can reflectively understand that as a conscious­
ness totally absorbed in the process of writing, the ego-I did not exist—that
nonreflective self-consciousness was simply this absorption in the work. Par­
tially, I can do this because prereflective consciousness itself is a kind of re­
flexive (not reflective) self-awareness. This, indeed, is the meaning of the par­
enthetic de in conscience (de) sou Hence it is only one slight step from this
reflexive self-awareness to a (pure) reflective looking over my shoulder as I
write.
Similarly, I can overtake myself in the process of accessory reflection: I can
catch myself in the lie of trying to create a substantive self. Thus it is that
the radical katharsis of deciding to give up the process of self-reification,
which leads me in the direction of pure reflection even if I can never exactly
achieve it, becomes a possibility. For this reason, I (as reflective conscious­
ness) become more and more able to give up some of the maneuvers of acces­
sory reflection and to attempt a simple understanding (pure reflection) of my
prereflective self. It is this which leads to the "aha" experience of the mirror
recognition, which Sartre describes as the end of the analysis and the begin­
ning of "cure."
I believe that most so-called depth therapy relies on this process, even
where it has no theoretical explanation for doing so. The concept of the
"observing ego" and the therapeutic alliance in traditional Freudian analysis
is a recognition along this line. As Sartre points out, "Empirical [Freudian]
psychoanalysis, to the extent that its method is better than its principles, is
often in sight of an existential discovery, but it always stops part way" (BN,
156 Chapter Four

P- 573)- I believe that this stopping part way is something which post-
Freudian relational theorists for the most part share in common with tradi­
tional Freudian analysts. They go further than Freud in understanding that
it is not the pursuit of pleasure but the pursuit of a self which is the primary
human motivation. But most stop short of recognizing that one can never
create a substantial self or identity—and that the process of therapy should
eventually involve giving up this enterprise.
Perhaps this failure is understandable, considering the fact that much
post-Freudian relational theory, like most post-Freudian drive theory, de­
rives from work with severely disturbed adults (who seem to lack the "struc­
ture" which could have been provided by accurate reflection) and from work
with children (who need accurate positive mirroring if they are to develop
into lively adults). On the other hand, to fail to see that structure never ex­
ists in consciousness or that such a substantive self can never be achieved as
an aim of therapy is to invite the continuation of human misery, including
that portion of it which Sartre describes as the "conflict of consciousnesses."
Only a reflective consciousness released from the struggle to create such a
substantive self can respect either its own freedom or that of others.

The Implications for Psychotherapy

The implications for psychotherapy of Sartre's conception of the self as

agent, object, and aim are both subtle and profound. As a therapist, one
can work effectively to a certain point using the insights of the post-
Freudian relational theorists, especially as these concern the impact of oth­
ers on the development of a self. One can discover with Sullivan, Winni-
cott, and Kohut, for example, the origin of psychological disturbances in
lack of adequate mirroring or reflection in childhood. Following the advice
of Kohut, one can begin to work with clients to supply the missing needs for
accurate reflection and other forms of human responsiveness—though one
will probably not want to follow Kohut's idea that this involves actually
building psychological structure.
One can then use the insights of Winnicott to consider questions of
authenticity—the ways in which clients have substituted images which they
believe will get the respect and approval of others for the truth of their spon­
taneous needs and desires. Again with Winnicott, one can explore the fail­
ure to develop an authentic self as this relates to a too intrusive or too ne-
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Relational Theorists 157

glectful parent who failed to allow a quiet sense of "going on being." Or one
can experiment with Winnicott's idea that therapy is a situation involving
"two people playing together"— that is, dissolving the serious world in favor
of recognizing new possibilities.
One can even, following the ideas of Sullivan, approach one's client not as
a fixed self but as a fluid self-system—though in doing so, one may wish to
avoid Sullivan's physicalist metaphor of energy transformations. With all
three theorists, one can respect the interpersonal nature of human reality,
including the relationship between client and therapist. One can under-
stand the extent to which other people have had and continue to have an
impact on a client's developing sense of self. Yet despite all these useful in­
sights, what will be found missing in post-Freudian relational theory is a
clear and therapeutically useful conception of the self.
I believe that Sartre's description of the self as agent, object, and aim can
clarify as well as take us beyond the insights of post-Freudian relational the­
ory. Without some such understanding of the self, the aim of firming up the
self as object (which is then confused with the self as agent) may become the
goal of therapy. And though it is certainly true that the most important
thing one can do at certain points in therapy is to provide accurate reflec­
tion, the attempt to provide missing structure may promote the very rigidity
and misery which therapy ought to alleviate. Only a therapy which values
the spontaneity of prereflective consciousness can emphasize self-acceptance
in the sense of encouraging the client to reflectively validate his or her free­
dom. In this respect, even the attempt to hold on to joy, in terms of becom­
ing a "happy person," is pathological. In fact, any other position than the
reflective recognition and acceptance of oneself as responsible freedom will
wrench away, constrict, and deny this very spontaneity. A therapy which
does not understand this ontological truth, despite many very useful in­
sights, is inclined to become a therapy in bad faith.
We can summarize the impact which a Sartrean view of the self might
have on psychotherapy as follows:
1. If prereflective consciousness, or the self as agent, is translucid rather
than opaque, then all therapeutic attempts to build structure in conscious­
ness must be abandoned. In their place, the existentialist therapist would
understand that a client's original difficulty lay in a faulty relationship be­
tween reflective consciousness and spontaneous consciousness, between the
self as agent and the self as object, predicated on faulty mirroring or lack of
adequate mirroring by the original others. The therapist would understand
that the process of therapy is in part a matter of learning a new way of self-
158 Chapter Four

reflection, partially through meta-reflection on one's reflective process. The

"transmutation" that occurs is not, as Kohut believes, a matter of psychic in-
corporation of the therapist, but rather a matter of acquiring a new (reflec­
tive) way of being with one's (prereflective) self To view or interpret this as
the acquisition of structure may impede this process.
2. If the self as object—the ego—is no longer confused with the self of pre­
reflective consciousness, then the therapist will be able to attend to the exis­
tential anxiety that accompanies profound change. This will lead the exis­
tentialist therapist to a new understanding of some forms of resistance as
resistance not to unacceptable unconscious ideas but to the implications of
change itself—that is, as resistance to the idea that one does not have a fixed
nature. I believe it is extremely important for the therapist to recognize and
deal with this "ontological" resistance. The question, "Who will I be if I
change in [this or that significant way]?" is one which clients frequently ask,
either implicitly or explicitly, as they consider the possibility of a fundamen­
tal shift: in their way of being in the world. In a sense, the aim of existential­
ist therapy is just the opposite of contemporary psychoanalysis: Ultimately,
it is not the establishment of a firm self or ego, but rather a "transcendence
of the ego" (in the Sartrean as well as the Freudian sense of the term), which
is the goal of existentialist therapy. The idea of becoming a substantive self
or ego must be given up because such a self only reveals itself as an object of
accessory reflection rather than as a subject.
3. In recognizing that the aim of consciousness is to create a self as value,
the existentialist therapist would be able to understand in a different way de­
fensive maneuvers, resistance, interpersonal conflict, and repetition of the
past. In the attempt to create a substantive self, a client may avoid recogniz­
ing the implications of spontaneous behavior; resist therapeutic attempts to
point out the impossibility of creating a substantive self; use others to at­
tempt to create such a self; and repeat the past in order to ward off the ap­
pearance of the radically new experience which threatens his or her idea of
being a substantive self. The existentialist therapist, in investigating all of
this, would look not for unconscious ideas and affects, but for reflective dis­
tortions of spontaneous experience. Such distortions would not be regarded
as deriving from a motive of pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain; rather,
they would be viewed as deriving from attempts to preserve a self as meaning
to which a client has great allegiance. Such a view does not require inter­
preting psychological distress as disguised pursuit of pleasure, since the pur­
suit of a self as meaning rather than the pursuit of pleasure as such is con­
ceived to be the ultimate human "passion."
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Relational Theorists 159

4. The existentialist therapist would be attuned to meanings in the client-

therapist interaction beyond those usually conceived by traditional psycho­
analysis. These would transcend the traditional understanding that therapy
will be a forum for replaying old relationships, or the more recent under­
standing that accurate mirroring plays a crucial role in psychoanalysis, to al­
low an understanding of how clients (and therapists) may attempt to use the
therapeutic process inauthentically in an attempt to create substantive free­
dom. For example, a client may (and probably will) want to use even the
mirroring process to aid in the creation of a substantive self. This "tell me
who I really am" process must be averted by pointing out that the client is
capable of reflecting on his or her spontaneous experience and that the ther­
apist is capable of misconceiving this. The question is, "Do you really want
to give me that much power [to decide who you are]?"
Similarly, the discovery of other feelings and aims than those reflectively
conveyed by parents may lead to an attempt to reify these new feelings and
aims. I think, for example, of a client who repeatedly returned to therapy
with the announcement, phrased in various ways, that last week he had fi­
nally discovered "who I really am." The therapist must in such cases resist
the temptation to play God and assign a nature to the client—no matter
how much the client seeks and desires this. Also, extreme caution must be
used with respect to the tendency of therapy to develop a one-sided relation­
ship at the expense of genuine reciprocity. The client must not emerge with
the feeling that he or she is even more an object—the object of analysis—
than when therapy began. Rather, the existentialist therapist should under­
stand that it is the self as agent who must be encouraged and reflectively ac­
cepted in the course of therapy.
5. Finally and most importantly, the existentialist therapist would view
the aim of therapy to be a radical conversion to a philosophy of freedom
which would allow a reflective validation of the self of prereflective con­
sciousness. Although accurate reflection, empathic resonance, and interpre­
tation of the repetitions of past experience in present experience are all a
part of existential psychoanalysis, as they are a part of Freudian psychoanal­
ysis, they are not its final goal. That goal, as I have said, is recognition of
one's prereflective self as responsible freedom. But this goal also affects the
process and the interpretations made along the way. For example, one at­
tempts to pursue the past, insofar as this is possible, in the mode of pure re­
flection rather than accessory reflection. This is very important, since in ap­
proaching the past it is quite easy to regard past events as determined from
the outside rather than as chosen. Because prereflective consciousness is con-
160 Chapter Four

sciousness of some external object, one remembers the past events and cir­
cumstances rather than oneself as an organizing consciousness of those events
and circumstances. At the same time, one supplies a substantial "I" which
was never there in the first place and attributes to it the property of being af­
fected or caused by those events and circumstances, as rock rolling downhill
is determined by physical forces. The problem with this view is that it solidi­
fies consciousness and encourages bad faith. Too great a reliance on acces­
sory reflection may indeed be the source of complaints that certain analyses
encourage increasing knowledge about oneself while failing to provoke signif­
icant change.
The recognition that I was free, on the other hand, leads to the under­
standing that I am free. By emphasizing the therapeutic recovery of oneself
as a past free agent, however, I do not mean to imply that the existentialist
therapist should encourage clients to blame themselves for past events. In
fact, self-blame frequently goes with a failure to recognize past agency rather
than its opposite, since clients seem rather irrationally to assume that the
blame lies in who they were/are—that the origin of their psychological diffi­
culties is some kind of substantial flaw which exists in the self and environ­
ment at once. The radical conversion, on the other hand, offers the oppor­
tunity for a real assumption of responsibility in one's life—as opposed to
either neurotic guilt or denial of agency. If I can really empathize with my
past self at the choosing moment, then I can understand and appreciate my
past self as a value-making process much better than if I take the more dis­
tant viewpoint of accessory reflection.
I can also, through meta-reflection, begin to purge the voices of the origi­
nal others which I have incorporated into my reflective way of being—since
pure reflection will provide a different vantage point on prereflective con­
sciousness. For example, mother said anger was "bad," and I have been
thinking of myself as "bad" when I am tempted to be angry. But pure reflec­
tion reveals to me not "badness" but anger. Recognizing this, I can begin to
see what my past anger was about on a nonreflective level. I may similarly
begin to name and reflectively understand past feelings and actions which
were never named or reflectively understood. For example, I may give a
name to the loneliness I felt as a child and thereby come to understand it
and its motivating relevance to my present way of living.
Similarly, the attempt at pure reflection of immediately past events must
be encouraged in therapy, as, for example, when one is investigating the
client-therapist relationship in its contemporary dimensions. Therapeutic
change involves more than anything catching oneself in the act of self/
 Sartre and the Post-Freudian Relational Theorists 161

world-making and changing the direction of the world one is attempting to

make. For instance, one may catch oneself in the process of trying to impress
the therapist with one's accomplishments as a way of avoiding a sense of in­
ner emptiness and lack—which one can then explore. The fundamental di­
rection of that change is movement toward the paradoxical realization that,
though one must engage in the task of creating a self as value, one must
never strive to be the self one has created—or to convince others to be the
selves they have created or one would like them to create. Ultimately, the
aim of psychotherapy is not building personality structure, but dissolving
the illusion that consciousness or the psyche has structure and substance.
The self as agent is free to create value.

As we come to the end of this discussion of how the basic project of creating
a self affects existentialist therapy, one point needs to be reiterated. Al­
though an existentialist approach along the lines of Sartre's philosophy out­
lines the process of self/world-making in terms of ontological insights, it in
no respect dictates the particular character which an individual's world-
making project will take. The existentialist therapist, as I have said, must
never attempt to fix the meaning of symbols, in dreams or elsewhere, before­
hand. Symbolic and other meanings emerge within the context of particular
lives.Thus although the ontological outline is the same for all of us in that
we are all pursuing the self as value, the particulars of how that pursuit takes
place (and it can actually be discerned only in particulars) vary greatly from
person to person. And while we can say that the goal of existentialist ther­
apy is a radical conversion to a philosophy of freedom which involves giving
up the belief that one can ever actually have a fixed self, the particular di­
mensions which such a conversion will take on in individual lives will also
vary greatly. Furthermore, since lesser and greater modifications in an indi­
vidual's project are always possible and may in fact be constantly occurring,
the existentialist therapist must never approach clients as fixed psychologi­
cal structures or static psyches. Both the methodology and the aim of exis­
tentialist therapy involve respect for and continual attunement to self and
others as situated freedom.
5* Sartre's Later Philosophy and
the Sociomaterial World: A New
Dimension for Existential Psychoanalysis

The Sartrean Dialectic and Existentialist Therapy

Sartre's earlier philosophy has thus far served us well in revealing the need
for some major revisions in psychoanalytic metatheory which can help to
account for, among other things, the new relational needs and disorders of
the self discovered by many post-Freudian psychoanalytic theorists. Accord­
ing to the perspective developed in the preceding four chapters, this shift in
psychoanalytic Weltanschauung has significant implications for the practice
of psychotherapy, especially with respect to providing an understanding of
the future-directed dimension of a client's fundamental project and to appre­
hending and facilitating the moment of choice upon which significant
change is based. Also, Sartrean revision of Freudian metatheory suggests
that relations with others can be analyzed in terms of their significance to
the fundamental project in ways which cannot be reduced to the simple de­
sire to achieve pleasure or avoid pain.
"fet even though Sartre's earlier philosophy provides some crucial insights
into the significance of the Other to one's definition of self, the earlier
Sartre does not move beyond dyadic relations to develop a theory of groups
and other social ensembles. Aside from a brief mention of the third party
who objectifies the couple as an "us object" and the "we" of the common
project, the "concrete relations with others" Sartre describes in Being and
Nothingness are dyadic relations. Also, the specifically social implications of
an individual's developing his or her fundamental project through the
choice of various ways of being, doing, and having in a world held in common
with others is simply not addressed to any significant extent.
162
 Sartre's Later Philosophy and the Sociomaterial World 163

The situation is very different in Search for a Method and the Critique of
Dialectical Reason, where Sartre has taken on the task of describing and ac­
counting for individual, group, and serial relations in a material world
which is always sociomaterial. Although this shift does not, as some critics
have argued, signify an abandonment of his earlier ontology, it is definitely
an enrichment of his earlier position, which rests on the introduction of
concepts not present in Being and Nothingness. Sartre's ambition in the Cri-
tique of Dialectical Reason is nothing less than to provide "Prolegomena to
any future anthropology" in the European sense of the social sciences in
general (CDR, p. 66). Or, as the subtitle of the critique indicates, the book's
aim is to provide a "theory of practical ensembles." By practical ensembles,
Sartre means human series and groups as they are connected to the so-
ciomaterial world on the basis of survival-based need. Sartre also declares
his intent in the Critique to solve "the fundamental problem of anthropol­
ogy . . . the relations of practical organisms [human beings] to inorganic
matter" (CDR, p. 72).
Although Sartre in Being and Nothingness had established an ontological
basis for the relationship between human beings and the world, he had
not yet discovered the practical relationship between them. Ontologically,
this relationship does not change in Sartre's later philosophy: The free
future-directed project based on negating consciousness still lies at the
heart of all human enterprises. Indeed, the later Sartre still maintains that
"the human dimension (that is, the existential project)" is "the foundation
of anthropological Knowledge" (SM, p. 181). But this project is in the
first instance a need-based project of organismic survival. It is practical first
and ethical later.
This fundamental relationship between human beings and the sociomate­
rial world is also, Sartre now insists, a "dialectical" relationship. The word
"dialectic" in its contemporary usage refers to the interpenetration of oppo-
sites. According to this view, which is derived from Hegel and Marx,1 change
is the distinguishing feature of reality. The "law of the negation of the nega­
tion," by means of which each state or phase of development is a synthesis
which resolves the contradictions contained in the preceding synthesis at
the same time that it generates its own contradictions, obtains in the move­
ment of history. Yet although Sartre gains a basic understanding of the
workings of the dialectic from his predecessors, he is neither a Hegelian nor
a deterministic Marxist. Unlike Hegel and like Marx, Sartre grounds his un­
derstanding of the dialectic in the sociomaterial world. And like Hegel and
164 Chapter Five

unlike Marx, he locates the dialectic in its initial moment in the life of the
individual.
Yet unlike either Hegel or Marx, Sartre refuses to subsume the individual
in suprapersonal forces; he resorts neither to a Hegelian conception of the
"World Historical Spirit" nor to the economic determinism of Marx to ex­
plain the movement of individual lives or of human history. Sartre considers
both Hegelian "absolute knowledge" and Marxist "naturalistic" knowledge
of the ends of history to be impossibilities. The reason, of course, is that hu­
man beings are fundamentally free. Also, according to Sartre, it is impossible
for the philosopher or social scientist to take a position outside the move­
ment of history from which to judge and categorize human affairs. Hence
Sartre argues that by attempting to eliminate consciousness through objec­
tivism, dogmatic Marxism has no recourse but to delegate the dialectic to a
position outside of human history. As such, the dialectic becomes the
"truth of Being as it appears to a universal consciousness" and thereby falls
back into "complete dogmatic idealism" (CDR, p. 28).
Sartre describes his own position as one of "dialectical nominalism."2
What he means is that he rejects the claims of both Hegelianism and Marx­
ism to a dialectic which transcends individual praxis as its foundation and
sustenance. The original negation of the negation, according to Sartre, is
the needing individual negating the (projected) possibility of his or her ex­
tinction through work in the world. Thus Sartre believes that when we look
at the real world, we do not find ideas or forces of production and exchange
moving people; rather, we find people, through their impact on the world,
creating social forces which subsequently make demands on their own and
others' freedom—demands which can only be sustained by individual free­
dom. For Sartre, the dialectic "is not some powerful unitary force revealing
itself behind history, like the will of God" (CDR, p. 37). Dialectical nominal­
ism, unlike Hegelian idealism or Marxist economism, realizes that "there is
no such thing as man" or history as distinguished from individual human
beings (CDR, p. 36). It therefore insists on individual and group responsibil­
ity: If we are to have a more human future, we as human beings must create
it.
Sartre also contends that the social scientist should place himself or her­
self within the human world that he or she is studying. The social scientist,
according to Sartre, is not simply an observer who objectively notes the dia­
lectical character of the object under study. Dialectical reason is an episte-
mology as well as a description of human reality. And knowledge in the so­
cial sciences, according to this view, is the dialectical knowing of a dialectical
 Sartre's Later Philosophy and the Sociomaterial World 165

object which can only be known dialectically. Some of what Sartre means
by this we have explored in previous chapters—especially in the discussion
of the progressive-regressive method and of the fact that empathic compre­
hension supplemented by intellection is required for understanding in the
human sciences. In the next three chapters, I compare the dialectical ap­
proach of existentialist therapy with the analytical approach of Lacanian
structuralist psychoanalysis.
Here it should be noted that Sartre insists that in the human sciences, it is
not a disadvantage for the social scientist to be a part of the system he or she
studies. Although the Heisenberg principle of indeterminacy is making the
objective observer obsolete even in the physical sciences, this idea that the
experimenter is part of the experimental system is even more crucial to the
human sciences. As Sartre puts it, "the only theory of knowledge which can
be valid today is one which is founded on that truth of microphysics: the ex­
perimenter is part of the experimental system. This is the only position
which allows us to get rid of all idealist illusions, the only one which shows
the real man in the midst of the real world" (SM, p. 32).
Although today more social scientists are aware of the effects of the experi­
menter on the experimental system than was the case when Sartre first pub­
lished these sentiments in i960, objectivism in the social sciences is still far
from dead. The problem with objectivist social science is that it falls into the
error of expecting an active truth to reveal itself to a consciousness which
has made itself passive. And this, Sartre maintains, is impossible, since "the
scientist's passivity in relation to the system will reveal to him a passivity of
the system in relation to him." It is for this reason, Sartre tells us, that "the
dialectic as the living logic or action is invisible to contemplative reason"
(CDR, p. 38).
Sartre, on the other hand, argues that "no one can discover the dialectic
while keeping to the point of view of analytical Reason; which means,
among other things, that no one can discover the dialectic while remaining
external to the object under consideration" (CDR, p. 38). It is only as a
meaning-engendering being that I as a social scientist have any chance of
understanding the meanings engendered by others. For example, it is only
from my own experience as part of a human series (a concept to be ex­
plained in some detail later on) or as a group member that I have any
chance of understanding what serial alterity or being grouped means to oth­
ers. Hence Sartre believes that the social scientist must enter into a dialogue
with the object of study, a dialogue in which the investigator risks being per­
sonally touched and affected by the investigation. The social sciences, ac-
166 Chapter Five

cording to this view, require active involvement rather than passive analysis.
The position of the godlike objective observer is impossible, and all attempts
to mimic this position lead to distortions rather than to clarity in the hu­
man sciences.
Obviously, such a viewpoint is diametrically opposed to most traditional
social science theory or even to traditional Marxism. Yet Sartre believes that
traditional social scientists are deceiving themselves. Natural science pro-
vides a false model for the social sciences for the simple reason that human
beings are not rocks or planets and human groups are not beehives. Predict-
ability cannot be achieved in the human world because the free project,
though not unsituated, is unpredictable. Genuine novelty, in which change
cannot be reduced to identity, is a fundamental characteristic of the human
world.
Actually, as Sartre points out, the attempt on the part of traditional social
scientists to describe human affairs as if they were natural events involves a
giant conjuring act:

The procedure of discovering dialectical rationality in praxis, and then

projecting it, as an unconditional law, on to the inorganic world, and
then returning to the study of societies and claiming that this opaquely
irrational law of nature conditions them, seems to us to be a complete
aberration. A human relation, which can be recognised only because
we are ourselves human, is encountered, hypostasised, stripped of every
human characteristic and, finally, this irrational fabrication is substi­
tuted for the genuine relation which was encountered in the first place.
Thus in the name of monism the practical rationality of man making
history is replaced by the ancient notion of blind Necessity, the clear by
the obscure, Truth by Science Fiction. (CDR, p. 33)

Not that Sartre would deny that certain moments of the dialectic are ame­
nable to analytical classification of even that they can be expressed in math­
ematical formulas (CDR, pp. 177 and 561). But this is so because human be­
ings encounter a thing world in which they must to some extent attempt to
make themselves things in order to survive. A simple example is the human
arm which I use as an extension to a crow bar in order to form a lever. A
more complex example is the group which attempts to imitate a machine
that acts effectively in the world. The group can therefore, from a certain
perspective, be analyzed according to "a universal combinatory of func-
 Sartre's Later Philosophy and the Sociomaterial World l6j

tions" and thereby become the "object of an ordinal mathematics" (CDR,

p. 561).
The problem with viewing the whole human scene in terms of the ele­
ments of it which can be understood analytically or even mathematically,
however, is that this perspective ignores the fact that "the dialectic itself is
beyond any mathematics" (CDR, p. VJJVL). In other words, the human mo­
tives which give significance to my making my arm into a part of a lever or
supporting a group which attempts to work with machinelike precision lie
beyond the grasp of mathematical analysis. Such an analysis is simply incap­
able of comprehending the "teleological structure" of human action, a struc­
ture which is always defined by its future-directed goal rather than by the in­
ert structures which serve it in meeting that goal (CDR, p. 74).
Thus when analytical social scientists attempt to discover the "hidden real-
ity of men and societies" in inhuman processes or static structures, they have
reversed the truth of human affairs (CDR, 709). Processes and structures
certainly exist, but they have been created and continue to be sustained by
individual and group praxis.3 To ignore this truth is to remove from them
their intelligibility and to engage in perceptual and conceptual violence. Or
as Sartre puts the matter, "Any philosophy which subordinates the human
to what is Other than man . . . has hatred of man as its basis and its conse­
quence" (CDR, p. 181). And this is true whether the "philosophy" in ques­
tion is Marxist dogmatism, existentialist (Heideggerian) "idealism," or scien­
tific positivism (CDR, p. 181).
Existentialist therapy, according to this view, is a dialogue in which the
therapist as well as the client risks changing. Even more than other social
science disciplines, psychotherapy is a living exchange rather than an anti­
septic procedure. Traditional Freudian psychoanalysis has, of course, always
recognized that it is the relationship which heals in the sense that the distor­
tions of the transference are worked through within it. But the involvement
of the analyst, that is, his or her deviation from a position of "technical neu­
trality" or (worse yet) being caught up in a "countertransference" which is
often defined as any feeling toward the analysand, has been regarded as an
error.
Existentialist therapy would also expect the therapist to avoid imposing
his or her own issues on the client and to refuse to enter into the client's life
as a participant in the usual sense (points I take up again in Chapter 8). But
it would not therefore view absolute neutrality as an ideal position from
which to conduct therapy. Hence Sartre, in the man with the tape recorder
incident mentioned in Chapter 1, views as potentially pathological a situa-
168 Chapter Five

tion in which the analyst is always an observer—the subject of the Look—

while the analysand is always the object under observation. The client must
realize that the therapist is a human being like himself or herself, or, to put
this another way, the client must learn positive reciprocity within the con­
text of therapy.
The ideas of Search for a Method and the Critique of Dialectical Reason,
then, are relevant both for social science theory in general and for existen­
tial psychoanalysis in particular. Indeed, Sartre himself uses these ideas, to­
gether with many of his earlier concepts, in his biography of Flaubert. As
for the relevance of psychoanalysis to social science endeavors in general,
Sartre is even more adamant now about its value than he had been earlier.
Attempting to create a marriage between Marxism and psychoanalysis un­
der the auspices of existentialism, Sartre declares that psychoanalysis is "the
one privileged mediation which permits [Marxism] to pass from general and
abstract determinations to particular traits of a single individual" (SM,
p. 6l). This is important because, according to Sartre, the ultimate goal of
social science research is to elucidate that "concrete universal": the unique
historical individual. Unlike those lazy Marxists who overgeneralize because
"they have forgotten their own childhoods" (SM, p. 62), Sartre would not
engage in the "terrorist practice of 'liquidating the particularity'" (SM,
p. 28) which reduces real people to economic abstractions—and which has
at times corresponded to the physical killing of particular people. Existen­
tialism instead "believes that it can integrate [with Marxism] the psychoana­
lytic method which discovers the point of insertion of man and his class—
that is, the particular family, as a mediation between the universal class and
the individual" (SM, p. 62). In doing so, Sartre believes that existentialism
can correct the contemporary Marxist error of "reducing] change to iden­
tity" (SM, p. 29).
Thus Sartre would ignore neither individual freedom nor the socio-
material dimension of a person's life. Sartre defines existential psychoanaly­
sis as "a method which is primarily concerned with establishing the way in
which the child lives his family relations inside a given society" (SM, p. 61).
After all, without understanding a person's childhood, we have no hope of
understanding the path of his or her socialization or of his or her "personal­
ization," that is, of what the environment brings and what the person adds.
This is so because it is childhood which "sets up unsurpassable prejudices, it
is childhood which, in the violence of training and the frenzy of the tamed
beast, makes us experience the fact of our belonging to our environment as a
unique event" (SM, p. 60). It is this unique event which the Sartrean dialectic
 Sartre's Later Philosophy and the Sociomaterial World 169

attempts to discover. Whether a Marxist viewpoint is required to accomplish

this is, however, a matter open to question. Indeed, Sartre himself later
questioned whether the Critique was in fact a Marxist work.4 It is certainly a
work which allows us to add a sociomaterial dimension to the individualist
approach of Being and Nothingness.
The Sartrean "dialectic" contains three "moments" (CDR, pp. 318-19), all
of which have significance for (revised) existential psychoanalysis. The first
moment, the moment of "objectification," is the moment in which individ­
ual need-oriented praxis inscribes itself in the sociomaterial world as a
means to negating the possibility that it might fail to survive as an organism.
An issue for clinical metatheory which arises from discussion of this mo­
ment concerns the substitution of survival-oriented "need" in Sartre's later
philosophy for value-oriented "desire" in his earlier philosophy as a descrip­
tion of the basic relationship between the individual and the world. The
questions we must ask are these: Are the two positions in any way reconcil­
able, and, if so, what impact does the new position have on Sartrean devel­
opmental theory? I believe that they are, and that the impact on Sartrean
developmental theory is to deepen it in the direction of providing a link be­
tween organismically oriented needs and value-oriented desires.
The second moment of the Sartrean dialectic is the moment of "objectiv­
ity." This is the moment in which inorganic matter, infused with human
meaning, "demands" of human beings a compliance to a pre-established fu­
ture. It is the moment of the "practico-inert," or matter infused with human
meaning and purpose. This idea that we never encounter anything but hu­
manized matter is probably the most revolutionary concept of the Critique
in that it is the basis for Sartre's whole social theory. Its significance for exis­
tentialist therapy is that it can help to account for the way in which an indi­
vidual is inserted into a particular class or society at the same time that it ex­
plains how things too often come to dominate people—especially in the area
of "work." It can help to clarify an individual's relations with previous gen­
eration^) at the same time that it can define the serial impotence which lies
behind a client's "other-directedness" and the "negative reciprocity" which
may come to dominate a client's relationships in a situation dominated by
scarcity. From this perspective, two aims of existentialist therapy would be to
aid an individual, insofar as this is possible, in transforming other-
directedness into self-directedness and negative reciprocity into authentic re-
latedness.
The third moment is the moment of "unification," or group praxis. Sartre's
concept of group praxis as a negation of serial impotence introduces the new
170 Chapter Five

concept of the "ternary relation." And this idea of tertiary relations enables
us to move beyond the binary relations of Being and Nothingness, which have
proved so fruitful in elucidating the mother-child dyads of earliest infancy
and childhood, to consider the power of the family as a group over its individ­
ual members. It also allows us to understand the kinds of groups that families
may form and the significance of other groups, including the therapy group,
to an individual's reconsideration of family norms. The third moment of the
Sartrean dialectic, in fact, clearly moves existential psychoanalysis in the di­
rection of social, and not simply individual, psychology.
Obviously, a single chapter of a book cannot hope to do justice to the
complicated social philosophy of a dense volume such as the Critique of Dia-
lectical Reason, I have therefore relegated certain issues, such as Sartre's
Marxism, to the background. The sociopolitical implications of Sartre's
later philosophy have, in any case, been adequately and admirably dealt
with elsewhere.5 In this chapter I want instead to consider the ways in which
Sartre's later philosophy provides a social dimension for existential psycho­
analysis which, though building on the ontology of Being and Nothingness,
was not present in Sartre's earlier work.

Praxis, Need/Desire, and Sartrean Developmental Theory

The first moment of the Sartrean dialectic, the moment of objectification, is a

moment which is ignored by positivist and Marxist social scientists alike.
This is the moment of individual praxis which is all important to Sartre. It is
the moment in which the negating individual inscribes his or her meanings
in matter in the interest, first of organismic survival and later for other rea­
sons as well. It is the moment of the "constituent dialectic," since everything
is created and sustained by individual "totalizing" praxis—that is, by the in­
dividual comprehending and acting on the sociomaterial field. It is the mo­
ment with which the ontology of Being and Nothingness is concerned,
though in his earlier philosophy Sartre demonstrates less of an appreciation
of the sociomaterial world in which the individual objectifies himself or her­
self than he does in his later philosophy. In the Critique, such objectifying,
goal-directed activity is referred to as "praxis" to emphasize the active nature
of the for-itself as it lives its project in the sociomaterial world. Its opposite is
"hexis,"6 or simple re-creation of the status quo at the expense of genuine
transcendence.
I make more of this idea of hexis than Sartre does (though I think the way
 Sartre's Later Philosophy and the Sociomaterial World IJl

in which praxis is derailed by the sociomaterial world is a major theme in all

of Sartre's later work) for the simple reason that I believe that the transfor­
mation of hexis into praxis can be regarded as a major goal of (revised) exis­
tentialist therapy. Indeed, without authentic praxis, the moment of objectifi-
cation is deprived of meaning—or it has only one (degraded) meaning: a
restoration of the organism which rests on the submission of an enslaved
freedom to the exigencies of the sociomaterial world. Such subservience is
possible because restoration of the organism through the fulfillment of orga-
nismic needs is itself the first goal of praxis. And, of course, a certain
amount of hexis is necessary in any life; it is, among other things, the secu­
rity of the given.
By this time, the reader has probably already noted that Sartre, in his dis­
cussion of objectification in the Critique, substitutes the term "need" for
"desire" as a description of the basic relationship between human beings
and the world. Some have taken this substitution, along with Sartre's de­
scription of human reality as praxis rather than as consciousness or Being-
for-itself, to indicate an abandonment of his earlier ontology. Although it is
certainly true that the new terminology indicates a new emphasis on social
awareness and action in the sociomaterial world, the idea that Sartre the
Marxist has abandoned his earlier philosophy of freedom proves not to be
the case. O n the other hand, the shift in emphasis and the introduction of
new ideas in Sartre's later philosophy do have significant consequences for
the theory and practice of existentialist therapy.
Particularly significant for Sartrean developmental theory is his introduc­
tion, in the Critique, of a set of new terms to describe the relationship of
the human individual to the sociomaterial world. These include "need,"
"praxis" and "hexis," and "totalization." Let us begin with "praxis," a term
which is as old as Aristotle and which Sartre borrows from Marx.7 Praxis, as
we have said, is human goal-directed activity. More precisely, Sartre defines
praxis as "an organizing project which transcends material conditions to­
wards an end and inscribes itself, through labour, in inorganic matter as a
rearrangement of the practical field and a reunification of means in the light
of the end" (CDR, p. 734). Actually, despite this new sociomaterial orienta­
tion, praxis has much in common with nihilating consciousness as de­
scribed in Being and Nothingness. Praxis, like the nihilating movement of
Being-for-itself, is predicated on a relationship with the world as a perceived
lack of future fullness. Like the for-itself, praxis is self-explanatory and trans­
parent to itself, though Sartre adds that this intelligibility is "not necessarily
expressible in words" (CDR, p. 93). Sartre still insists, in a sentence which
172 Chapter Five

might have come straight out of Being and Nothingness, that "consciousness,
as apodictic certainty (of) itself and as consciousness of such and such an
object" is the starting point for dialectical reason (CDR, p. 51). Praxis is hu­
man freedom, though not in the idealist sense of freedom without limita­
tion. Even in Sartre's earlier philosophy, as we have seen, he had always
conceived of freedom as situated freedom.
The difference is that in Sartre's later formulation the situation inevitably
involves work on the sociomaterial world, which is designed, at the most ba­
sic level, to produce organismic survival; at the same time, praxis is inextrica­
bly interlinked with its sociomaterial milieu. Sartre therefore insists that "in
an individual life, each praxis uses the whole of culture and becomes both
synchronic (in the ensemble of the present) and diachronic (in its human
depth)" (CDR, p. 55). The later Sartre is concerned with dissociating himself
from some of his more radical earlier statements about one's being totally
free in any situation. Although this is ontologically true, one must distin­
guish between an ontological freedom that allows one to freely live out the
sentence which a society has passed on one and the kind of real freedom
which a more genuinely human society might provide for everyone.
Nonetheless, Sartre still insists in the Critique that dialectical reason, in
attempting to elucidate human praxis, must not reduce change to identity.
Because praxis is not reducible to the material objects and social relations
which it internalizes, it is capable of producing novelty. As Sartre notes, if
we do not "distinguish the project, as transcendence, from circumstances, as
conditions, we are left with nothing but inert objects, and History vanishes"
(CDR, p. 97). It is for this reason that Sartre insists that "if there is any such
thing as dialectical reason, it must be defined as the absolute intelligibility of
the irreducibly new, in so far as it is irreducibly new" (CDR, p. 58).
Transcendence remains the key to Sartre's later philosophy as well as to his
ethico-political position. In the Critique, however, Sartre wishes to locate
transcending praxis at a much more basic level than that allocated to con­
sciousness in Being and Nothingness. He therefore no longer terms the funda­
mental relationship between consciousness and its objects "desire"; instead,
he designates this relationship as one of "need." Lest the reader think that
the later Sartre has embraced some kind of instinctualism, however, we
must hasten to add that need according to Sartre's conception is a human
future-directed relationship with the world rather than an instinctual force.
It is, like desire, a nihilating movement involving awareness of a present lack
of a future fullness which is discovered in the world. Far from a "vis a tergo
pushing the human laborer," need is "the lived perception of a goal aimed
 Sartre's Later Philosophy and the Sociomaterial World 173

at, and this goal is, in the first instance, simply restoration of the organism"
(CDR, p. 90). It is this "first instance" which distinguishes need in the Cri-
tique from desire in Being and Nothingness. The original negation of the nega­
tion quite simply is involved with survival itself.
Sartre describes praxis in the service of need satisfaction as proceeding by
means of an activity which he terms "totalization." The totalization is an
extremely important concept in the Critique, replacing the totality of tradi­
tional analytical social science theory both as the object of study and as the
means by which the social scientist approaches this object. A totalization
differs from a totality in that a totalization is a living, moving relation be­
tween the individual, or the group as sustained by individual praxis, and the
world, whereas a totality is a static, inert whole. Sartre, however, claims that
stasis is not a real characteristic of the human world. Praxis is always totaliz­
ing, detotalizing, retotalizing. A totality is a "fictionalized inert whole";
within dialectical reason, it functions as "a regulative principle of the total­
ization" rather than as a real entity. Like Being-in-itself-for-itself, which it re­
sembles in some respects, it is that toward which human activity is heading
rather than the point of arrival. For this reason, totalities as imaginary
wholes come into the world through and are sustained by totalizing praxis
(CDR, pp. 45-47). Even where a person has succumbed to the status quo,
leading a life which is more hexis than praxis, there is still a moving retotali-
zation which sustains that stasis or impasse. If one were really a static total­
ity, one would not be able to feel bored or stuck.
If the totalization sounds like the world-making function of nihilating
consciousness in Being and Nothingness, then this is so because the two con­
cepts are, in fact, similar. The difference lies in the emphasis on the practical
aspects of the totalization in Sartre's later work. From this perspective, need
is lived as a "totalizing relation between the material being, man, and the
material ensemble of which he is part" (CDR, p. 80). As such, a totalization
is a "developing unification" of a practical field which is understanding and
action at once; Sartre also uses the term for the field thus totalized, much as
we use the word "work" in English to designate both the act of working and
its products. Although totalizing praxis, like nihilating consciousness, is fu­
ture directed grasping the present as the lack of a future fullness, that lack is
in the first instance simply the projected lack of organismic survival unless
one works on the world. At the most basic level, the totalization is the reve­
lation of "the material environment, to infinity, as the total field of possibili­
ties of satisfaction" (CDR, p. 80).
The problem for existentialist therapy with this description of the first mo-
174 Chapter Five

ment of the Sartrean dialectic in terms of praxis, need, and totalization is

that it fails to provide the link which will allow us to understand the con-
nection between need as it is concerned with the restoration of the organism
and desire as it is concerned with the creation of a self. In other words, the
link between Sartre's earlier and later philosophy is missing. Yet surely
Sartre has not abandoned his earlier ideas on desire, a conclusion which is
amply illustrated by the Flaubert biography. Actually, this missing link be­
tween need and desire, though not present in Search for a Method and the
Critique of Dialectical Reason, does show up in Sartre's unpublished writings
from the 1960s, after he had completed the Critique and as he was working
with the Flaubert material. In one of these manuscripts,8 Sartre spells out
the link we are looking for: Desire, he tells us, is socialized need, need which
has through interpersonal relations been transformed from mere organismic
longings into the desire for a certain kind of self.
Actually, as Sartre himself makes clear in the unpublished manuscript,
need never appears in the already socialized human world in its pure form—
except perhaps at birth. Otherwise, need is already socialized. And social­
ized need, as Sartre points out, is desire. It does not involve mere reproduc-
tion of the organism but production of a self at a more advanced level of the
dialectic. It is the self as value which is the object of desire rather than the
simple continued existence of the organism. And Sartre maintains that
whereas pure need is "practical" in the sense of being survival oriented, de­
sire is "ethical" in the sense of being value making. But just as the organic
individual founds and limits the socialization of the serial individual of col­
lectives and the common individual of groups while never appearing in a
pure unsocialized state, so need, though nowhere to be found in its pure
form, founds desire. Even in the Critique, Sartre is careful to point out that
need is always socialized. For example, he states that "the labourer's work,
his manner of producing himself, conditions not only the satisfaction of his
need, but also the need itself" (CDR, p. 95). Yet as Robert Stone and Eliza­
beth Bowman note, this founding of the Sartrean dialectic on organismic
need as the bedrock of desire is important because it "makes complete interi-
orization of impotence impossible" (1986, p. 208). There is a point in oppres­
sion at which the slave must revolt.
One can, however, go a long way toward distorting and denying needs be­
fore this revolt will occur. Throughout the Critique, Sartre points out that it
is possible to turn praxis into hexis, changing transcendence into mere re­
production of the past/support of the status quo. In a sense, this re-creation
of the past is an activity of free praxis, but it is an activity which undermines
 Sartre's Later Philosophy and the Sociomaterial World 175

that freedom because people find themselves caught in the "passive activity"
of obeying the exigencies inscribed in matter and the sociomaterial order.
And while this turning of praxis into hexis is an inescapable aspect of being
human, since it arises with the creation of the practico-inert, which is an in-
escapable outcome of the objectification process itself, Sartre objects to its
overabundance in a world dominated by scarcity.
In such a world, needs are often denied or distorted through this transfor­
mation, even though the creation of the practico-inert is in the first instance
intended to be need satisfying. Sartre cites the example of certain semi-
employed day laborers in the south of Italy who, chronically malnourished,
live their hunger as hexis. Since they expect only one meal a day or one
every other day, they degrade their vitality accordingly to live in a state of
semi-starvation (CDR, p. 95). Only the denial of that one meal, we might
surmise, would be likely to arouse revolt against a situation which is other­
wise deemed normal. Similarly, Sartre notes in the unpublished manuscript
and in his biography of Flaubert, ordinary children from middle-class house­
holds may learn to deny or distort their needs—turning praxis into hexis.
Before we can fully appreciate this insight, however, we must first under­
stand how need, through relations with others in the sociomaterial world, is
transformed into desire. This idea is especially significant for existential psy­
choanalysis, as it will allow us to add some new insights to a Sartrean con­
ception of developmental theory. In his unpublished manuscript, Sartre dis­
cusses how organismic disturbances which in their pure form are referred to
as needs get transformed through interpersonal encounters into desires.
From the beginning of life, the responses of others to an infant's organismic
needs unveil that infant's being to him or her. l b the infant's appeal, the
adult caretaker responds by giving or withholding satisfaction. Gradually,
through this interaction, appeal to the Other is transformed into demand or
right over the Other. The infant comes to expect its cries to bring satisfac­
tion in the form of mother's ministrations.
Sartre also explains that needs become intermixed—and symbolic of each
other—in the context of the family. Alimentation, for instance, becomes
sexual and sexual need becomes a way of eating. Artificial desires abstract
themselves from cultivated needs. For instance, smoking may refer to eating,
nursing, or sexuality. By the time a person reaches adulthood, no need ap­
pears in its pure form. All have been transformed into desires. Take eating,
for instance. Neither the gourmet nor the ascetic experiences hunger as sim­
ple need. The gourmet subsumes simple hunger in an elaborate social ritual
with an end which is not mere organismic survival but rather a particular
176 Chapter Five

kind of satisfaction which has aesthetic as well as nutritional goals. Nor can
the ascetic with simple bread and bowl escape living hunger as desire since
the ascetic's choice is ethical (value making) rather than merely nutritional.
As for sexuality, it is, as we saw in Chapter 3, always much more complex
than simple satisfaction of an organismic urge. Sexual desire involves a
transformation of such organismic disturbances through language and fan­
tasy into a demand to be (this or that kind of person) through (this or that
kind of) sexual possession of (this or that) object.
The responses of the first caregivers are extremely important to the way in
which an individual comes to live his or her needs/desires in the world. If
the mother or primary caregiver responds with joy, acceptance, and under­
standing, then need, as Sartre tells us in the Flaubert biography, will be
transformed into a desire that is felt as the perpetual possibility for action
validating (or "valorizing," to use Sartre's own term) oneself and one's
needs/desires in the world (FI, 1:133-34). But if, as Sartre points out in the
unpublished manuscript, the primary caregiver responds with irritation, dis­
dain, or hostility, then need will tend to posit itself as illegitimate or culpa­
ble. The infant's need will have been socialized as a kind of primal being
guilty—and this being guilty will come to be felt as an essential aspect of my
being since each time organismic need is reborn (as it is perpetually reborn),
my being guilty will be reborn. Not only my present, but my future (as need
which has to be fulfilled) is implicated in this reproduction of guilt. For ex­
ample, I am guilty for being hungry, sick, or "needy" in general—and I am
ashamed of my needs/desires. Such guilt is a response to my being there, my
very existence as a needing organism, which is reflected back to me as unde­
sirable in this way or that by the original others. In psychotherapy, we con­
stantly encounter such ontological guilt.
Sartre's example in the unpublished manuscript is anorexia.9 The
anorexic, Sartre hypothesizes, displays the desire for a guilt-free need that
must be relieved of culpability by the Other's demand and supplication to
eat. What the anorexic wants, Sartre tells us, is to experience a need that is
wanted by the Other—as the anorexic's original need was apparently un­
wanted by the original others. The problem is that only a universal supplica­
tion could erase the original guilt—and this is impossible. Thus the meaning
of anorexia lies in the movement of desire as a rejection-of-need-in-order-to-
be-supplicated. Similarly, forbidden desire may look for a satisfaction that si­
multaneously punishes it and thereby purifies it—as happens in masochism
and various other forms of self-destruction. Failure also is an example of
need transformed into desire, in this case the desire to prove, by the impossi-
 Sartre's Later Philosophy and the Sociomaterial World YJJ

bility of living, that there is an inverse to this impossibility—fulfillment in a

more human world.
Obviously, though Sartre's examples are mostly negative, the transforma­
tion of need into desire can involve positive as well as negative development.
Therapists, however, mostly encounter situations in which development has
been painful, and Sartre's descriptions are extremely helpful here. Nor is
Sartre, in his unpublished manuscript, unaware of the difficulties involved
in a person's attempting to change the fundamental attitude formed in earli­
est infancy. This is so partially because the very eyes with which one will see
new experiences have been clouded by this earliest experience, which must
be retotalized each time one encounters something new. The past is surpass-
able, but only as taken into the detotalization and retotalization as a signifi­
cant aspect of what is now practico-inert. As my original being there, this
first experience of need as shaped by others into desire is very difficult to sur­
pass in the sense of overcoming my guilt.
This is true because in objectifying myself I reproduce myself and this re­
production in the first instance means culpability (if I have experienced a
negative response from the original others; otherwise, it means myself as
gift, as possibility). My culpability gains the intimate force of need itself. The
violence of my hunger, for instance, is the violence of my guilt. What I de­
mand of the satisfaction of my desire is therefore a return to innocence—a
restoration of an innocence I in a sense never had, since in discovering my
need I discovered myself guilty before the original others. What I want is rec­
ognition of myself as innocent in the world of the Other; but this recogni­
tion is impossible—first, because even though the Other might change, it
would be for other reasons than to validate me, and, second, because I pres­
ently structure reality in such a way that I probably could not see the
change. Thus Sartre says that a long work on the part of the Other is re­
quired to free me of my guilt. Presumably, this is part of the work of psycho­
therapy. Its aim is not unsocialized need, but rather need/desire freed of the
original condemnation.
Sartre's own approach to the Flaubert biography includes a description of
the transformation of need into desire (or its failure) along the lines set forth
in the unpublished manuscript. In The Family Idiot, Sartre attempts to show
how an unvalorized child, Gustave Flaubert, through his interactions with
the original others in his life, came to live his need more as hexis than as
praxis and thereby to adopt the mode of "passive activity" as an integral part
of his fundamental project. According to Sartre, Flaubert, as an "under-
loved" child, experienced as an infant the dutiful but cold ministrations of
178 Chapter Five

his mother. Madame Flaubert, Sartre hypothesizes, provided only the best
physical care for her son, often anticipating in an overly protective fashion
his needs before they even had a chance to manifest themselves. But in do­
ing so, she treated her son as an object rather than as a subject, depriving
him of the opportunity to develop an active sense of himself as affecting the
world. At an "age when hunger cannot be distinguished from sexual desire"
and when "feeding and hygiene condition the first aggressive mode of be­
havior," Sartre believes that Flaubert was deprived of a sense that he could
aggressively satisfy his own needs/desires (FI, 1:48). Sartre describes the re­
sulting condition as a kind of "anorexia" in which Flaubert fails to develop
an active desire.
Flaubert's early passivity was not remedied by his encounter with a father
who acted the paterfamilias and expected obedience. Even the part of
Flaubert's interaction with his father which might have been expected to
support him as an agent—his father's insistence on an active furtherance of
the Flaubert family glory—escaped Gustave. He simply could not imagine
what it meant to act in any real sense; instead, he playacted, dutifully pro­
ducing the gestures expected of him by others. He also disappointed his fa­
ther by his failure to learn to read as easily as his older brother, a failure
Sartre attributes to the fact that reading requires an active participation of
which the young Flaubert was little capable. As an escape from the adult
world where he was Other to himself, Gustave sank into passive ecstasies in
which a pantheistic union with nature had the real meaning of obliterating
self and world together—a state in which, as Sartre says, "the soul wants
nothing, feels nothing, desires nothing" (FI, 1:32). Later on, as an adult,
Flaubert would complain of a "secret wound," which Sartre identifies as the
"passive constitution" which resulted from his earliest interpersonal rela­
tions and of an ennui which never left him.
Before going on, I should explain what Sartre means by ascribing to
Flaubert a "constitution," since it seems to imply a nature which would ap­
pear antithetical to the ontology of Being and Nothingness. Sartre, in The
Family Idiot, divides an individual's life into three segments. The first of
these is a person's "prehistory." This is the objective structure of the family
into which the child has been born, including such things as class, social mi­
lieu, the character of the parents, and birth order. It will later be internalized
by the child in this way or that. The second segment is the "protohistory,"
which refers to the earliest events in a child's life, including the "passional
structure" which is the outcome of the earliest mother-infant interactions.
The events of the protohistory lead to the development of what Sartre refers
 Sartre's Later Philosophy and the Sociomaterial World 179

to as the child's "constitution." And if this sounds deterministic, it should

be remembered that in developing a constitution, the infant still internalizes
the external. It is just that Sartre recognizes the limitations of real choice (as
distinguished from ontological freedom) which this involves.
Without a protohistory which includes the ability to affect the mother
with one's needs, a child (as Sartre posits was the case with Flaubert) could
hardly be expected to develop an "active" constitution. The constitution
the child does develop will be included in the spiral of his or her develop­
ment as a this which has to be transcended. Probably, we might add, the ba­
sic orientation toward life which is established in the protohistory is not
likely to be overcome except through the deepest of therapeutic work. It will,
however, be included in the next turn of the spiral of the child's life—his or
her history proper, or "personalization." Personalization marks the advent
of genuine praxis in the sense that the child begins to make something of
what he or she has been made of—to act on the prehistory and protohistory
which have been handed to him or her. But it is the constitution which will
provide the original point around which the "spiral" of one's life will pass
"again and again . . . but at different levels of integration and complexity"
(SM, p. 106).
Flaubert, then, developed a passive constitution in response to indifferent
handling by his mother. Hence he would later find himself complaining in a
letter to his mistress of feeling like "a mushroom swollen with boredom" (FI,
1:142). He would envy less-talented souls who were able simply to feel and to
act, and he would develop a sexuality which revolved around a fantasy of
passive ravishment and which found its fulfillment in sporadic adventures
with prostitutes and a long-distance relationship with the volatile Louise
Colet rather than in real mutuality or commitment. As a mature writer,
Flaubert would show a preoccupation with gestures, ceremonies, and objects
rather than with reciprocal relations and with actions. Though he trans­
formed his early project through an (imaginary) relationship with art which
Sartre also deemed inauthentic, Flaubert was never able to overcome the
passivity and isolation which derived from his original relations with others.
He was never able to turn hexis into praxis or to learn the lessons of an ac­
tive desire and real mutuality.
Actually, people similar to Sartre's Flaubert are not uncommon in ther­
apy. I think especially of a client whom I shall call "John," whose life might
be described as the epitome of hexis. John's mother, apparently an extremely
self-centered, narcissistic woman, had consistently responded to him in ways
that seemed designed to block the development of an active desire. In effect,
180 Chapter Five

she never heard anything which he asked of her. Instead, she substituted her
own suppositions about who he was and what he needed or wanted for any
communications he might have- given her on the subject. John describes
himself as being a very passive, "good" child as far back as memory goes. A
particularly poignant memory involved a Christmas at home at about age
eight. John had dutifully, but not very hopefully, made out a Christmas list.
As custom had it, he and his brother were allowed to select one gift for
opening on Christmas Eve. John selected a small package, which he imag­
ined to be a toy car he had requested. When he opened this gift, his dismay
at discovering "corn spears" (spears for holding corn on the cob) instead of
the desired vehicle was greeted by the uproarious laughter of his mother.
Not only could she not hear, but her not hearing appeared malicious.
"From that time on," John told me sadly, "I decided never to put anything
on my list which I really wanted—or probably even to want anything."
John's difficulties were very similar to those that Sartre describes for
Flaubert. Although John did not become a writer (he was interested in writ­
ing), it was evident that he used reading as an escape from the real world.
Asked about his hiding himself away in a world of books at a very young
age, he replied, "Oh, yes, I read in order not to be." In his relationships with
women, he was even more avoidant than Flaubert. After dissolving a mar­
riage which was largely sexless by his wife's desire, he attempted to establish
relations with other women. What he discovered was an extreme reluctance
to even feel sexual desire in a woman's presence. O n a rare occasion when he
established a short sexual relationship with a woman, he described himself
as lacking any feeling in his penis after penetration. "I was only aware of her
and not of myself at all." His lack of desire showed up in other areas of his
life as well. For example, he reported having to force himself to eat regular
meals despite having no idea what he might want to eat. Also, even though
he was a successful consultant in a technical field, he reported having no
earthly notion about what he might want to do with all the money he made.
A seemingly casual remark which John made one day in therapy provided
an opening into his dilemma. He commented that when people telephoned
him, they frequently waited a moment after he answered "because they
think I'm an answering machine." "Even you," he went on to say, "mistook
me for an answering machine when you called the other day." I realized that
what he said was true. And it occurred to me that the quality in his voice
that caused him to be mistaken for an answering machine was a quality I of­
ten noticed there—the quality of not expecting anything from the other per­
son. His childhood had foreclosed the possibility of learning to appeal to
 Sartre's Later Philosophy and the Sociomaterial World 181

others for an answer or to expect/demand that his needs be met. At this

point, John began to remember rather vividly what a "desert" (his word) his
childhood had been. He had learned so well how to transform praxis into
hexis that the whole world now appeared to be a similar desert in which he
embraced the anti-value of "never desiring anything." As praxis began to be
reawakened, he began to experience the pain, the humiliation, the anxiety,
and the extreme loneliness he had previously avoided by deadening himself
and curtailing his desires as completely as possible. Unlike Sartre's Flaubert,
he was no longer bored.
Obviously, then, Sartre's account of the interconnection between organis-
mic needs and relational needs or desires has implications for Sartrean de­
velopmental theory as well as for clinical practice. It should also be clear by
now that Sartre has not abandoned his earlier interpersonal orientation for
a new instinctualism. What he has done, however, is to give to organismic
needs a significance that was missing in his earlier work. At the same time, it
should be recognized that these needs gain significance and meaning only in
a world which is from the beginning an interpersonal world. Hence it is only
when organismic needs are met and shaped in a hospitable human environ­
ment that one's desire is shaped into a viable and real relationship with the
world of objects and other people. Of course, as we saw in an earlier chapter,
demand must be relinquished as a right over others if one is to develop rela­
tions in good faith. But unless the infant first experiences agency in being
able to bring about the fulfillment of needs by the original caregiver, that in­
fant will learn to live need as hexis rather than as praxis.
The young child in such a situation will learn to experience his or her
being in the world of others as a being passive. Such a child will be more
object than subject, and what will develop is something akin to the false self
described by Winnicott. The problem, however, is that there is no true self
to be uncovered; the release of spontaneity will require extensive work for a
person to experience in a new way those needs which are perpetually reborn
to be perpetually denied. The fact that they are perpetually reborn,
however, allows the existentialist therapist to claim that a radical reori­
entation of oneself as a needing/desiring praxis is possible. The client in
therapy must find a way within the therapeutic relationship to transform
hexis into praxis—thereby discovering a viable future that the person has
never before experienced. In this respect, on the individual if not on the
group level, existentialist therapy might be conceived of as a revolutionary
praxis.
182 Chapter Five

The Practico-inert: Serial Alterity and Negative

Reciprocity as Issues for Existentialist Therapy

The second moment of the Sartrean dialectic, the moment of <<objectivity,,,

is the moment in which worked matter, the practico-inert, returns with
claims on human freedom. The practico-inert is able to do this because
those claims have previously been written in matter by human beings. And
although Sartre, as a philosopher of freedom, tends to emphasize the nega­
tive characteristics of the practico-inert in a world dominated by scarcity,
the practico-inert has its positive side as well. It is both obstacle and oppor­
tunity. It is that through which I come to know myself as a part of my socio-
cultural heritage, that through which knowledge and opportunity are
passed (and in being passed are transformed) from generation to generation.
The practico-inert is also the thousands of exigencies written in matter
which enable me to live my life in an efficient manner without continually
"reinventing the wheel." It is not only the language which I speak and the
books which I read but also the streetlight at the corner which I obey and
the shop where I wait at the counter to buy my groceries.10 It is that around
which my insertion into a particular class or milieu takes place. It is even the
natural disasters I experience, such as the volcano which destroyed Hercula-
neum or the recent earthquake in Armenia—since these occur in a human­
ized world where they are given a human significance (CDR, p. 180).11 We
cannot escape the practico-inert. It is, Sartre contends, the very "motive
force of history" in that it is the practico-inert which provides the basis for
action in a common world (serial praxis) and which, through the creation of
serial impotence, motivates action in common (group praxis).
The practico-inert, however, is also the "anti-dialectic." As such, it re­
places the conflict of consciousness in Sartre's earlier philosophy as the
Sartrean "hell." Indeed, one might say that in both Being and Nothingness
and the Critique hell is objectification—since it is the Other's objectification
of me that creates my misery in the former work while it is my objectifica­
tion of myself (together with the objectifications of others) that creates the
practico-inert hell of the latter. What Sartre calls this "shifting hell of the
field of practical passivity" (CDR, p. 219) is a "place of violence, darkness,
and witchcraft" (CDR, p. 318) precisely because of its power to steal my
actions from me and to limit my freedom. It is because of this power of the
practico-inert to eat away at my own and others' freedom that Sartre, who
had noted in Being and Nothingness that I am constantly "sculpturing my fig-
 Sartre's Later Philosophy and the Sociomaterial World 183

ure in the world" (BN, pp. 463-64), now proclaims that all of us "spend our
lives engraving our maleficent image on things" (CDR, p. 227).
The practico-inert, then, is that which eats away at my freedom by requir­
ing that I obey its exigencies, thereby bending myself to those rigid and pre-
determined paths of action that are the "passive activity" of hexis rather
than genuine transcendence. A machine in a factory, for instance, "de­
mands" of the workers who service it that it be kept in working order, re­
quiring them to submit to a "prefabricated future" in which the exigencies
written in the machine take precedence over individualized action in which
work is self-actualization (CDR, p. 188). Or a "brace and a bit and a monkey
wrench" present a generalized future for anyone who uses them; they de­
mand a similar usage of me and my neighbor (CDR, p. 186).12 Even the lan­
guage I speak suggests certain paths for my experience, paths which have
been inscribed in the organized sounds and markings on paper which I have
inherited from previous generations. Hence Sartre suggests that the "scan-
dalous absurdity" associated with the exigencies written in tools is that they
set up a "conflict between interchangeability and existence (as unique lived
praxis)" (CDR, p. 26.0n).
Some people, of course, suffer more than others from the "hellish" side of
the practico-inert. The factory worker, for example, would be more de­
meaned by the machine which he or she merely services to ends other than
his or her own than would be a person who uses carpentry tools to build his
or her own house. Similarly, the person who merely parrots the ideas and
opinions of others without using them to help formulate that person's own
unique experience would be living language more as hexis than as praxis.
At the same time, the meanings inscribed in tools—and all practico-inert
objects are tools in the sense that they provide means to the satisfaction of
needs/desires—are not as fixed as we might imagine. Indeed, as tools are
made to "serve some other purpose" than was originally intended (actually,
the moment a tool is created, it may already have begun to serve such a pur­
pose), they lend themselves to the creation of new systems (CDR, p. 183).
Consider, for example, the invention of gunpowder with its original mean­
ing of greater power for destroying the enemy. What this invention helped to
bring about was the collapse of the feudal system, since the knight on horse­
back thereby lost his privileged position in battle as protector of the realm.
Similarly, we are only just beginning to suspect the possibilities for computer
technology to transform the face of the socio-industrial world today.
Of course, tools cannot accomplish such changes on their own; a praxis
(individual, serial, or group) must bend them to new ends. The point is that
184 Chapter Five

the tool is not a mere inert object. Sartre notes that the primitive tribesman
also recognizes this when he calls the tool "sacred." He means that it con-
tains "both a maleficent power [the power of solidified praxis as an indica­
tion of future behavior] and a threat [the threat of being used against oneself
for purposes other than one's own]"—which is the contradiction long recog­
nized as characteristic of the sacred (CDR, p. l83n).
Sartre, of course, understands that one must carve one's being in the prac-
tico-inert. An individual's life, from this perspective, is always some combi­
nation of hexis and praxis, freedom and necessity, exigency and value. In­
deed, Sartre insists that dialectical rationality itself "must be seen as the
permanent and dialectical unity of freedom and necessity" (CDR, p. 35). By
necessity he does not mean an external or mechanistic fatality. Rather, ne­
cessity "arises in experience only when we are robbed of our action by
worked matter, not in so far as it is pure materiality but in so far as it is mate­
rialized praxis" (CDR, p. 224). Necessity, though it erodes my freedom,
emerges from it—it is my work alienated from me in a world which makes
something different of it than I intended (CDR, pp. 226-27).
Just as freedom and necessity imply each other, so also are value and exi­
gency "two different structures within a single process":

The imperative character of exigency is due to the fact that materiality

is animated by the praxis of the other and to the fact that this praxis is
revealed to me as both human and alien: it signifies me and awaits me,
but it is not mine: it is myself as nothing. Value, on the other hand, is a
double movement: both the revealing of my praxis in its free develop­
ment in so far as it posits itself as other within immanence, and the re­
vealing of a future signification as an inertia which refers back to my
freedom. (CDR, p. 248n)

There is no way to avoid objectifying myself in the world and having my

praxis returned to me in an alien form. Furthermore, today's values become
tomorrow's exigencies as they develop into a "system of values" adopted by a
particular society.
The difference between value and exigency, praxis and hexis, therefore lies
in the fact that value and praxis refer to the power of freedom to create nov­
elty (even amid previously seemingly static structures) while exigency and
hexis refer to the acceptance of the future as closed—as that "which cannot
be transcended" (CDR, p. 247n). Obviously, all human projects are a part­
nership between the two. A completely open future would not be human.
 Sartre's Later Philosophy and the Sociomaterial World 185

Praxis must learn to define itself in the practico-inert world in such a way as
not to be completely absorbed by it.
The question, then, is not whether hexis exists in my life—since it obvi­
ously does—but the extent to which it dominates my life. This is at least in
part related to the extent to which I have fallen victim to "serial impotence"
in a situation of scarcity. Sartre's concept of the series is undoubtedly one of
the most significant and original contributions of the Critique to social the­
ory. The human series, according to Sartre, is composed of individuals form­
ing a social ensemble in which each reacts to a particular aspect of the
practico-inert field, the "collective object," in an identical manner. As a so­
cial concept, the series lies between the individual and the group and pro­
vides an understanding of the link between the two in that it is serial impo­
tence which motivates the formation of groups. Not all series, however,
become groups. Sartre's most famous example—people queueing up to a
bus—is unlikely to become a group unless something unforeseen happens,
such as a group forming around a child who has been hit by the bus.
Since the bus queue illustrates all the aspects of the series which I wish to
consider here, let us examine it more closely. The people in the bus queue
are, like people in series in general, solitary, separate, interchangeable, and
identical in their relationship to the collective object, the bus. The first indi­
vidual in the line enters the bus first, not the individual who most deserves
or needs to enter the bus (to use only two criteria for differentiation). The
individuals in the bus queue, like individuals in series in general, are aware
of each other: I wonder, for instance, if I will be able to get a seat on the bus.
But the bus, like collective objects in general, does not provide a means to
uniting me with these other people in any significant sense; rather, it be­
comes an index of separation cutting me off both from other people and
from an authentic sense of self. We each stand in solitude as we wait for the
bus and (usually) sit or stand in solitude once we have entered. In the bus
queue, everyone "is the same as the Other in so far as he is Other than him­
self" in the sense of engaging in a generalized rather than an individual
praxis (CDR, p. 260).
The locus of feeling, thought, and action in a series is always "elsewhere"
rather than "here." Seriality therefore has more to do with hexis than with
praxis. Its distinguishing characteristic is impotence rather than transcen­
dence. Sartre refers to the "passive activity" of serial behavior as "recur­
rence." Recurrence is my acting as I believe the Other will act because it ap­
pears to be in my interest to do so. A n outstanding example is the so-called
free market of capitalism, which is in effect governed by recurrence rather
186 Chapter Five

than by individualist action. Another example is price, which "imposes it-

self on me, as a buyer, because it imposes itself on my neighbor; it imposes it-
self on him because it imposes itself on his neighbor; and so on" (CDR,
p. 288). And though I am aware that I help to establish it, I am also aware
that I can do nothing about it. There are, as Sartre points out, serial
thoughts and serial feelings as well as serial actions. Scandal, as the judg­
ment which no one claims and which is referred to as an impersonal "they,"
is an example of serial thoughts (CDR, p. 277); many other forms of "public
opinion," including racism and anti-Semitism, fit here as well (CDR, pp.
652-54 and 716-34). Stereotypical love relations are an example of serial
feelings.
Obviously, there is no harm in serial praxis if we are simply talking about
a bus queue or a grocery line. In such situations, the formation of a series is
a matter of mere convenience. But what if the individual who waits in the
bus queue is not doing so as a means to further a project which includes gen-
uine self-creation and the establishment of positively reciprocal relations
with others? What if that person is heading for work in a factory where he
or she has sold his or her labor in a situation involving competitive recur­
rence with other workers for a job in which each will become the machine's
"thing"? And what if this person, on boarding the bus, simply opens up that
other collective object, the daily newspaper, and imbibes the paper's edito­
rial opinions as his or her own? What if that person, on returning home, sits
passively in front of another collective object, the television screen, absorb­
ing but not critiquing or evaluating what he or she sees and hears, and then
retires to bed? Will that person's dreams be serial, or will the crushed desire
for individual praxis emerge with an unaccustomed violence? Actually,
though one doubts that anyone is ever so completely immersed in seriality
as our hypothetical example here, all of us to some extent act, think, and
feel as other than ourselves. Sartre refers to the person who is fairly thor­
oughly immersed in serial alterity as "other-directed"—borrowing a term
from American sociologist David Riesman (1950) and giving it a philosophi­
cal foundation.
Other direction is, from the perspective of existential psychoanalysis, a
pathological condition. Often it involves a "manipulated series." Some "sov­
ereign" person or group (see the next section for precise definitions) uses its
influence or authority to induce fundamental relations of alterity in the
members of a series in order to profit in some way from this seriality. The
other-directed person has lost himself or herself in seriality. Other direction
is, in fact, a kind of "worked seriality" in which a person has directed "his
 Sartre's Later Philosophy and the Sociomaterial World iSj

free praxis onto himself so as to be like the Others" (CDR, p. 643). Sartre
takes two examples from a visit to the United States in 1946. One is the
training of American salesmen, who must learn to manipulate themselves in
order to manipulate their customers. The other is a radio phenomenon—the
"top ten" records—which is used by broadcasters and record producers to
promote sales.
The top ten records phenomenon provides an especially helpful insight
into other-direction as a sociocultural phenomenon. It may be particularly
relevant in an age where television advertising is much more pervasive and
convincing as a tool for manipulating seriality than the radio broadcasts of
the 1940s. After all, are we not continually asked to buy not only the record
collection of the Other but also the soap, hair spray, automobiles, clothes,
gum, toothpaste, and other products of the Other? And are we not asked to
do this with the particular aim, it seems, of becoming the ideally desirable
person (made visually manifest by the T V advertising model)—that is, no
one?
In any case, the phenomenon which Sartre describes is this: In response to
the announcement and playing of the top ten best-selling records of the
week on several radio stations, listeners go out and buy records, increasing
sales during the following week by thirty to fifty percent. According to
Sartre, these listeners are responding serially to the announcement that oth­
ers consider these the best records, and it is as Other that they buy either
the top record or several top records. The individual record buyer than "lis­
tens to the selected record through Others and through himself as Other" in
an "isolated ceremony" that "consecrates him as Other even in his own feel­
ings" (CDR, p. 649). The record broadcast is successful because it persuades
the listener "to buy what the Other is buying" (CDR, p. 669n). When the
listener turned buyer later talks with peers about the record, this person will
have the feeling of sharing something with others. Despite their being oth­
ers to themselves, all of these people are mistaking manipulated seriality for
genuine reciprocity. These buyers are not sharing their individuality, but are
instead giving testimony to the fact that they are "really just the instruments
of well-organized collectives" (CDR, p. 649). The truth is that this record
buying is an act of recurrence. Each record buyer has acted "the same as the
others in order to become the same as them" (CDR, p. 650), and the discus­
sion among them is a ritual confirmation that both have succeeded.
Sartre points out that such appeals to act or buy as the Other can only
succeed if "the serial individual has been produced from childhood as
other-directed" (CDR, p. 651). One task of existentialist therapy will there-
188 Chapter Five

fore be to discover to what extent seriality and other-directedness permeate

a client's fundamental project—and how childhood may have prepared this
person to engage in a project that includes the desire to become other than
oneself. In this connection, I think of a young woman, whom I shall call
Sherry, with whom I once worked in therapy. Sherry, who was in her early
thirties, entered therapy at the suggestion of a friend because she found it
extremely difficult to say no to people. She consequently found herself
working sixty-hour weeks and continuing in a relationship (only mildly sat­
isfying to her) in which her boyfriend made most of the decisions about
where to go, whom to see, and what to do. In the therapeutic relationship,
she seemed to expect advice and try to play the "good client"—an issue with
which we worked in some depth.
What struck me most about Sherry in her initial interview was a certain
"generic quality ,, to her dress, speech, and manner. She was pleasant and
polite enough, but there was something about her that made it difficult for
me to think of her as a "real" person in the sense of being a developed indi­
vidual. Although she did not appear to be manipulative in any deliberate
way, her manner had an inauthentic air that was hard to get hold of. I grad­
ually discovered that this resulted from an extreme other-directedness in her
fundamental project—an other-directedness which showed up, among other
things, in her speech mannerisms. Instead of saying "I think" or "I feel,"
Sherry would say "you think/feel/say." For example, she might say to me,
"When you're not happy, you just don't have any idea of why it's like that."
By asking her to substitute "I" for "you," I soon confirmed something I had
already begun to suspect: Sherry simply had no idea what she herself
wanted, needed, or thought. For instance, she once stopped in the middle of
moving to help a friend write a resume because "you're supposed to be there
for your friends." Most of her opinions were the generalized opinions of the
"they say" variety—and their origins were the practico-inert wisdom of the
popular culture of the day. When Sherry first began to look at this phenom­
enon, she was really frightened. She wondered aloud if "I [not you] even
have a self." In a sense, of course, she did not have much uniqueness—
though the fact that she was able as a free consciousness to grasp this meant
she could begin to change.
Sherry's background provides one glimpse into how other-directedness is,
as Sartre says, produced from childhood. Sherry's mother, who had come
from a poor farming community and joined the middle class through her
marriage, was extremely conscious of conventions. She was also somewhat
tyrannical: It seemed natural to her to dictate not only the rules of the
 Sartre's Later Philosophy and the Sociomaterial World 189

house, but her children's thoughts and feelings as well. The father, who was
concentrating on his business, did not interfere and apparently appreciated
the "orderliness" of his household. Sherry, on entering therapy, simply
could not imagine contradicting her mother since her mother became un­
reasonably irate at the least sign of anything that smacked of differences.
This woman's children, it seemed, required keeping in order like the furni­
ture. At the same time, what dictated the mother's opinions and wishes for
her children was public opinion—the "they" of middle-class respectability.
Sherry remembered joining a girl scout troop, rather than the dance class
she had wanted to join in grade school, because her mother insisted that
"lots of successful children have been scouts" and "all of my friends' kids are
in scouts."
Sherry was also aware that her mother hardly differentiated among the
children: They were the generic "kids" and must do what "kids" are sup­
posed to do. And though Sherry's younger sister had rebelled against this to
some degree, Sherry herself was the "good daughter" who tried to please her
mother. Indeed, this good-daughter motive was so strong that at a certain
critical moment near the beginning of therapy, Sherry unaccountably de­
cided to move back to her hometown because "my family misses me." Once
this crisis was over, it became apparent that she was extremely fearful of fac­
ing the angry feelings she had toward her mother over squelching her indi­
viduality.
In Sartrean terms, what had happened in this family was serialization
based on the existence of a "sovereign" at the center of the family group (a
situation I discuss further in the next section). I believe it was partially be­
cause I was aware of the concept of serial praxis and other-directedness at
the time I worked with Sherry that I was able to help her move toward devel­
oping a more authentic sense of self. Sherry began to look at the emptiness
at the heart of her project—at the placement of the Other where there might
have been a self. Although this was painful and difficult, she also began to
get excited at the prospect of choosing something (an activity, a dress, a
friend) "simply because I like it." This was obviously a totally new idea to
her. Gradually in the course of the year during which I worked with her,
Sherry began experimenting in her personal life—moving out of a roommate
situation which was made difficult by her growing unwillingness to be acqui­
escent and suggesting activities to her boyfriend or even doing things on her
own. Unfortunately, this relationship did not survive the changes since she
had apparently chosen a very narcissistic man. The breakup, however, trou-
190 Chapter Five

bled Sherry only briefly, as she began dating and doing things with new
friends.
In becoming aware of her own body rhythms and needs/desires, Sherry
had started to live her own life rather than the life of the Other. Even her
manner of dressing became more individualized. She told her boss "no" to
the amount of overtime he had been extracting from her. And she organized
and set up a training group for a program at work which landed her a pro­
motion. Her excitement at discovering that "the sky doesn't fall in when I
listen to myself" (she, of course, did not become narcissistic in doing so) was
refreshing. The last time I saw Sherry I could not help being struck by the
change in demeanor which had taken place since her first visit: In place of
the polite, overly flexible young woman who had first come to see me was a
real person with energy and enthusiasm.
While my work with Sherry demonstrates one of Sartre's points about se­
rial impotence, the fact that it can deprive a person of an authentic sense of
self, it does not illustrate the other—the fact that seriality, throughout his­
tory, has occurred in a field of scarcity. We must remember, however, in talk­
ing about scarcity that Sartre's theory of scarcity is a social theory, since for
Sartre there are no facts which are not social facts. Hence scarcity is experi­
enced differently by different people. For example, the fabulously rich heir
to a mine might experience scarcity as "dispersal, poverty of means, and the
resistance of matter" constituting impediments that threaten to slow down
production. "For the heir, scarcity is the possibility of not coming into his
inheritance unless he reorganises his field of actions as soon as possible"
rather than a threat to his physical existence as such (CDR, p. 739)- His
workers, on the other hand, might experience scarcity as the lack in this
particular field of decent work and wages. At certain times in the economic
cycles of capitalism, scarcity might even be experienced as a scarcity of con­
sumers rather than of products. Or it might be scarcity of time.
Ultimately, scarcity refers to basic needs. And even though the structures
of capitalistic society relate only indirectly to basic needs, need is nonethe­
less "always present as tension" even in situations where it does not appear
directly (CDR, p. 218). Most of us, after all, are at least dimly aware of the
fact that two-thirds of the world's population remains undernourished
(CDR, p. 123), and most of us have at least a peripheral fear of falling into
the superfluous group. Nonetheless, because scarcity for Sartre is "a human
fact, rather than the malignity of a cruel nature" (CDR, p. I40n), it is possi­
ble to think of overcoming it in a more just world.
In this world, however, the addition of scarcity to seriality "transforms
 Sartre's Later Philosophy and the Sociomaterial World 191

separation into antagonism" (CDR, p. 22l). And it is this transformation

rather than the simple existence of the Other (as Hegel thought) which is
the "scandal" of our common existence. In such a situation, violence, as "in-
teriorised scarcity," becomes the basic structure of human relations (CDR,
p. 815). This is not, however, necessarily an open violence; it is more often a
structured violence in which a society, by the way it structures human rela­
tions according to classes and other criteria, chooses "its dead and its under­
fed" (CDR, p. 147). Exploitation, Sartre remarks, takes place not by violence
but in violence (CDR, p. 153). And in a field of scarcity, violence (implicit or
explicit) permeates all human relationships.
Actually, what Sartre is saying here is very interesting in light of his de­
scription of the conflict of consciousnesses in Being and Nothingness. Al­
though his ontology has not changed, his ideas concerning the origins of
interpersonal misery have shifted. The Other as the source of my objectifica-
tion (as I am of the Other's) has not been superseded, as the following sum­
mary from the Critique illustrates: "It is impossible to exist amongst men with­
out their becoming objects both for me and for them through me, without
my being an object for them, and without my subjectivity getting its objec­
tive reality through them as the interiorisation of my human objectivity"
(CDR, p. 105). Nor, as we can see from the Flaubert biography, has the sig­
nificance of the objectifying Look been superseded as a means to under­
standing the origins of a person's neurotic distress: Sartre still claims that it
was the critical Look of Flaubert's father, added to his mother's dutiful indif­
ference, that helped to place Gustave in the untenable position leading to
his neurosis (and to his becoming a writer). 'Yet the hostile Look of the
Other now takes place in a sociomaterial context of (actual or possible) scar­
city. And it is this scarcity which is viewed as lying at the heart of violence
in human relationships—and not the mere existence of the Other as a wit­
ness and critic.
Since Sartre is usually regarded as a philosopher of human conflicts, I
would like to emphasize the importance of this shift in perspective for exis­
tential psychoanalysis. What Sartre now regards as "normal" in human rela­
tionships not malformed by scarcity is something akin to the attitude of em-
pathic understanding that he had already prescribed for the existential
psychoanalyst in Being and Nothingness. Reciprocity, rather than antago­
nism, is fundamental. The term "reciprocity," for Sartre, means simply "a
free exchange between two men who recognize each other in their freedom"
(CDR, p. IIO). Such recognition can be either positive or negative: I can use
the fact that the Other's project is comprehensible to me because I, too, am
192 Chapter Five

human either to aid him or her in realizing it or to foil the Other's plans. In
"pure reciprocity/' however, I regard the Other not as an antagonist but as
"another self," that is, as a person whom I recognize as being fundamentally
like myself in his or her basic humanness. In such a situation, "my partner's
praxis is, as it were, at root my praxis, which has broken in two by accident,
and whose two pieces, each of which is now a complete praxis on its own,
both retain from their original unity a profound affinity and an immediate
understanding" (CDR, p. 131).
When I violate this affinity and solidarity with the Other, as I must do ei­
ther implicitly or explicitly in a situation of scarcity, I myself suffer as well.
Sartre comments that in attempting to destroy my adversary, "I cannot help
destroying the humanity of man in him, and realising his nonhumanity in
myself. . . . [In attacking my enemy] what I attack is man as man, that is, as
the free praxis of an organic being. It is man, and nothing else, that I hate in
the enemy, that is, in myself as Other; and it is myself that I try to destroy in
him so as to prevent him from destroying me in my own body" (CDR,
P. 133).
Later on, Sartre gives as an example the nineteenth-century factory owner
whose own lifestyle (stiff collars and top hats for himself; corset' for his wife
and daughters; repression of sexual and other needs/desires for all) repre­
sents the "presence of the oppressed in the oppressor in person" (CDR, p.
771). The suppression of his own and his family's organismic spontaneity is
somehow intended to justify the factory owner's oppression of his workers at
the same time that it proves him to be a "superior being" who deserves the
favored position in which he finds himself. %t the bourgeois owner suffers
as well, as his own organismic needs are placed under strict surveillance,
even if they cannot be fully extinguished. One wonders if something similar
is at work in child abuse, where it is abundantly clear in the case of parents
who were themselves abused as children that the child represents the "pres­
ence of the oppressed [one's own child self] in the oppressor [one's self, one's
parent] in person." Often the thing which originally infuriates the abusive
parent is the child's simple organismic needs—which the parent's parent had
presumably failed to tolerate and which the parent now regards with suspi­
cion and loathing in himself or herself as well as in the child.
Why, then, if in doing so we damage ourselves as well, do we develop an­
tagonistic relationships in a situation of scarcity? Sartre suggests that this
antagonism initially develops out of a simple fear of being the "superfluous
man" in a world where there is "not enough for everybody" (CDR, p. 128).
That this fear exists at the edges of consciousnesses even in the most affluent
 Sartre's Later Philosophy and the Sociomaterial World 193

bourgeois homes is attested to by those ubiquitous parental maxims: "Eat

your [whatever loathsome dish the child is trying to avoid]—don't you know
that the children in [whatever impoverished country is currently in the spot­
light] are starving?" Or the parent may say, "Study hard—do you want to
grow up to be a garbage collector?" In fact, I once had a client who admitted
to getting his doctorate partially out of fear of becoming a garbage collector.
Sartre describes the negative reciprocity which results from the recogni­
tion of scarcity in the following way:

In pure reciprocity, that which is Other is also the same, but in reciproc­
ity as modified by scarcity, the same appears to us as antihuman in so far
as this same man appears as radically Other—that is to say, as threaten­
ing us with death. Or, to put it another way, we have a rough under­
standing of his ends [for they are the same as ours], and of his means
(we have the same ones) as well as of the dialectical structures of his
acts; but we understand them as if they belonged to another species, our
demonic double. Nothing—not even wild beasts or microbes—could be
more terrifying for man than a species which is intelligent, carnivorous
and cruel, and which can understand and outwit human intelligence,
and whose aim is precisely the destruction of man. This, however, is
our own species as perceived in others by each of its members in the
context of scarcity. (CDR, pp. 131-32)

In such a situation, violence will be perceived as counterviolence (CDR, p.

133) in which the Other is always the "one who started it" (CDR, p. 149).
Scarcity therefore provokes the development of Manichaeism—a situation
in which I and my group or subgroup are perceived as "good" and/or "hu­
man" while the others are perceived as "evil" and/or "subhuman." Mani­
chaeism is obvious in the conflicts between nations and between well-
defined groups and subgroups (races, classes, interest groups) within a
society. Prejudice of various sorts is an outstanding example. But Sartre ar­
gues that such antagonism also implicitly invades relationships between
friends and family members (CDR, pp. I52-53n). In the context of "diffused
violence" created by scarcity, it is always possible to view even one's best
friend as an "alien wild beast" whose intent is one's own destruction (CDR,
p. 150). Friendly and not so friendly "competition" is often a veiled form of
such antagonism.
Within families, it is possible that Sartre's idea of antagonism based on
scarcity of parental supplies better explains sibling rivalry than Freud's ex-
194 Chapter Five

planation of instinctual sexually based jealousy. Those supplies obviously

include not simply the means to fulfilling organismic needs but also the lack
of love or validation of those needs, which might well be in part the result of
shaping the child to live in a society where scarcity of resources requires a
dulling of active praxis in favor of hexis. After all, who could expect a still
"needy" parent to respond well to the needs of a child? In any case, I believe
that negative reciprocity is a viable concept for understanding certain kinds
of extremely negative and destructive interactions which develop between
family members.
Obviously, such negative reciprocity may be exacerbated in cases of real
economic deprivation or perhaps even homelessness—although it is also
possible that in such situations people might learn to support each other.
The example I will use involves the learning of negative reciprocity in an
"ordinary" middle-class household since this is the population with which I
usually work in private practice. My client, whom I shall call Polly, was a
young divorced woman in her mid-thirties with a ten-year-old son and a
live-in boyfriend. During the course of therapy, Polly broke up with her boy­
friend and entered a more compatible relationship. It was in the context of
this "good" relationship that she became suspicious of the continued pres­
ence of an old symptom which did not vanish because of her newfound con­
fidence in her partner.
This troubling symptom was unfounded jealousy. Polly was jealous of any­
one her lover spent time with—of his women friends most of all, but also of
his family and his men friends. She also admitted that she found it difficult
to be with him or with anyone else who was close to her in a group situa­
tion. Apparently she either felt jealous that her friend was giving others
more attention or that others were giving her friend more attention. She
also felt a compulsion to entertain or be the center of attention in groups.
O n her own, she kept up a hectic pace of achievement-oriented activities.
All of this made her miserable, as her adult mind told her that her compan­
ion was reliable and her responses were unreasonable and that her hectic
pace left her drained and uneasy. In fact, as it turned out, all this frantic ac­
tivity ("too many pots boiling on the stove," as Polly described it) kept at
bay certain deep feelings of inadequacy and sadness. Nonetheless, Polly
could not restrain herself from "punishing" her lover with angry withdrawal
for any time he spent with friends. And "slowing down" admittedly made
her very anxious.
Part of Polly's problem with jealousy seemed to derive from a desire to
have her lover provide her with constant positive mirroring. Polly simply felt
 Sartre's Later Philosophy and the Sociomaterial World 195

that she did not really exist when she was not being mirrored. But as Polly
worked on these issues in therapy, it became increasingly clear that there was
another source to her difficulties as well: She had grown up in a family
where negative reciprocity was the norm. Polly's father, a businessman to
whom "success" was extremely important and who failed to conceal his
opinion that the three children his wife had insisted on having were a finan­
cial burden and a bother, nonetheless paid attention to his children in one
way. He arranged competitions among them—for attention, grades, or what­
ever. Even at the family dinner table, he set up a ritual in which the child
with the best story received money as a reward. Polly usually won the prize,
resulting in a feeling that it was "not OK" just to be herself—that she had to
be interesting and entertaining. In fact, she complained bitterly of feeling
that if she did not entertain or perform, "I would just be invisible and
worthless." Apparently this was how her older sister, Mary Ann, felt,
whereas her younger brother, John, gained attention by self-destructive re­
bellion. Polly, however, in addition to winning the competitions, was re­
garded by her mother as "my best child." It would appear at first that she
had the best from both parents. In fact, her older sister now lived a life that
was continually in crisis, and her younger brother was an alcoholic still liv­
ing at home. The truth, however, is that Polly, the seemingly "normal one,"
did not escape unscathed.
The effects of negative reciprocity even on the "winner" became very clear
in a break-through session with Polly during the second year of therapy.
Polly came in vaguely annoyed with her sister, who had been "wasting my
time" regaling her with the latest details of the sister's "latest crisis." Polly
felt concerned, frustrated, and helpless to do anything about Mary Ann's
constant "problems." She also felt vaguely guilty. After all, even her parents
had called suggesting that Polly might be able to and in fact ought to find a
way to help "poor Mary Ann."
I suggested a Gestalt dialogue with Mary Ann, which revealed some very
interesting things not only about Polly's feelings concerning Mary Ann but
also about her feelings regarding her mother's favoritism and her father's
competition mongering. In the course of this role playing, Polly's anger and
guilt toward Mary Ann turned into anger with her father for setting up
competitions between them which Mary Ann always lost and which left
Polly feeling guilty and sad for Mary Ann, whom she now realized felt like
"another self." This made Polly more aware of her own terror over the possi­
bility of being in Mary Ann's position since it was obvious that "somebody in
196 Chapter Five

the family had to lose." There was in this family, in other words, a scarcity of
validation.
In this session, it also became clear that the competition mongering of Pol­
ly's father was reinforced by her mother's very obvious preference for Polly
over Mary Ann. And, indeed, it was in the dialogue with her mother that
an emotional "explosion" occurred for Polly. Polly became aware that she
felt very distant toward her mother and tried to keep her at arm's length. In
the dialogue, she physically held up her arms and hands to ward her mother
off. At first, she thought this was out of sympathy for her sister in not re­
ceiving the same "love," and it was certainly true that Polly as a child had
obviously felt deeply Mary Ann's wounds. But as it turned out, the "love"
for which Mary Ann so envied Polly turned out to be not genuine love at all
but a voracious narcissism on their mother's part. Polly's fear was of having
the "life sucked out of me" by a vampire mother who wished to use Polly to
fill up her own emptiness in a marriage where there was little emotional con­
tact. The mother had even agreed with the father to send Mary Ann away
to boarding school in high school, but had resisted sending "my Polly" be­
cause she needed her so badly. Mary Ann, of course, had felt this as a terri­
ble rejection, while Polly had pitied Mary Ann at the same time that she felt
the danger of engulfment by her mother grow stronger.
When Polly was finally able to get deeply angry with her mother in this di­
alogue (she had found it easier earlier in therapy to get angry with her fa­
ther, but she had continued to insist up until this point that she felt only
pity for her mother) and to demand her own release as a narcissistic exten­
sion of her mother, she felt much clearer about the relationship with her sis­
ter. At this point, Polly experienced a deep sadness about the seemingly im­
passable gulf which had been placed between the children in this family by
their father's competitive games and their mother's narcissistic favoritism. I
suggested that Polly talk with her sister not about her sister's problems, but
about her own unhappiness in a family where jealousy and rivalry were a
natural outcome of a situation of negative reciprocity in which nobody was
able to receive genuine love and validation. She followed my suggestion and
was surprised to find herself developing a closer relationship with her sister.
At the same time, she felt more involved in a deeply caring relationship
with her lover, one in which she felt less jealous and more "peaceful"—a
word which, she noted, she had never before applied to her own life. At this
point, Polly expressed a desire to terminate therapy and I agreed. Although
she knew that some of these issues would continue to come up, she felt that
she now had "the tools to understand and deal with them." I think she
 Sartre's Later Philosophy and the Sociomaterial World 197

meant that she had developed a meta-reflective process which served her
well in dealing with the remnants of her old project.

Obviously, the two families described in this chapter were permeated by se­
rial alterity and/or negative reciprocity. These issues, I am finding, come up
again and again within the context of individual psychotherapy. I am also
aware that such issues might prove even more poignant in working with
families or individuals experiencing genuine economic deprivation. Two
cases, of course, cannot hope to illustrate the whole spectrum of uses to
which Sartre's concept of the practico-inert can be put in the context of psy­
chotherapy. That usefulness is itself much larger than our discussion of
other-directedness and negative reciprocity. It encompasses as well such
things as the significance of an individual's insertion into a particular class
and/or milieu, the nature of relations between generations, the quality of an
individual's insertion into the world of work, and the way in which an indi­
vidual relates to what Sartre in the Flaubert biography refers to as the "Ob­
jective Mind" of his or her era. While there is not enough time or space in a
single section to mine the whole rich potential which the practico-inert
holds for the theory and practice of psychotherapy, these ideas deserve at
least a brief treatment.
Take, for instance, an individual's "class-being," which arises as a conse­
quence of the serial relationship of an ensemble of people to particular as­
pects of the practico-inert. Although groups develop within classes, a class is
not a group. Rather, it is "a shifting ensemble of groups and series" (CDR,
p. 638)—a "totalised series of series" (CDR, p. 315). Belonging to the anti-
dialectic (CDR, p. 806), class-being pervades every aspect of our lives and be­
comes part of the facticity upon which future freedom must play itself out.
In the following passage, Sartre describes how we are all continually con­
serving as we supersede our class-being as we learned to live it in our families
of origin:

What was once both a vague comprehension of our class, of our social
conditioning by way of the family group, and a blind going beyond, an
awkward effort to wrench ourselves away from all this, at last ends up
inscribed in us in the form of character. At this level are found the
learned gestures (bourgeois gestures, socialist gestures) and the contra­
dictory roles which compose us and which tear us apart. . . . At this
level also are the traces left by our first revolts, our desperate efforts to
198 Chapter Five

go beyond a stifling reality, and the resulting deviations and distor­

tions. l b surpass all that is also to preserve it. We shall think with these
original derivations, we shall act with these gestures which we have
learned and which we want to reject. By projecting ourselves toward
our possible so as to escape the contradictions of our existence, we un­
veil them, and they are revealed in our very acting although this action
is richer than they are and gives us access to a social world in which
new contradictions will involve us in new conduct. Thus we can say
both that we continually surpass our class and that class reality is made
manifest by means of this very surpassing. The realization of the possi­
ble necessarily results in the production of an object or an event in the
social world; this realization is our objectification, and the original con­
tradictions which are reflected there testify to our alienation. (SM, pp.
IOO-IOI)

One of the goals of existentialist therapy, from this perspective, will obvi­
ously be to understand the way in which a particular individual has been in­
serted into his or her class and/or social milieu—as Sartre has attempted to
do in his explication of Flaubert's relationship with the French bourgeoisie
of his day.
At the same time that Sartre insists that class-being must be taken into ac­
count in understanding an individual's project, however, he is also clear
that the approach he is recommending must not resort to Marxist reduc-
tionism. For example, he faults contemporary Marxists for attempting to
thoroughly reduce the French poet Paul Valery to his class affiliations. Such
approaches, according to Sartre, fail to yield an understanding of the indi­
vidual in all of his or her rich particularity as a "concrete universal" who in­
ternalizes but is not reducible to the sociomaterial world from which he or
she comes. "Valery," as Sartre points out, "is a petit bourgeois intellectual,
no doubt about it. But not every petit bourgeois intellectual is Valery" (SM,
P. 56).
Although the work of existential psychoanalysis has been enlarged to in­
clude socialization, it still involves elucidation of the individual project in
terms of individual choices. In approaching this individual project, however,
we must not forget that to deny one's class affiliations is to indulge in bad
faith since one is thereby refusing to face an aspect of one's facticity—a form
of inauthenticity of which Sartre accuses Flaubert and the writers of the
Second Empire. And just as Sartre believes that contemporary Marxists are
 Sartre's Later Philosophy and the Sociomaterial World 199

too often guilty of ignoring the concrete in favor of the universal, so we must
also admit that contemporary psychotherapists are too often guilty of ignor­
ing the universal in favor of the concrete or individual.
I believe that this sociomaterial "blind spot" on the part of psychothera­
pists can be particularly detrimental when they are working with people
from a different class than their own or when they are working with people
who have passed through the ever-permeable barriers between classes and
whose projects bear the imprints of that surpassing. Sartre, in the Flaubert
biography, makes much of the way in which Achille-Cleophas's movement
from the peasantry to the minor bourgeoisie affected his family relations and
particularly the self-perceptions of his sons. For one thing, those sons could
never, in their own eyes or in the eyes of their father, be quite so wonderful
as he because they could never aspire to the marvelous achievement of mov­
ing into a higher class.
Sartre's account reminds me of a client who, like Gustave Flaubert, had
developed a sense of personal deficiency based in part on his feeling that he
could never match the marvelous "rags to riches" trajectory of his father. His
task was to find a self in a world that seemed to be completely dominated by
his father's myth of rising. At the same time that the son's work in therapy
revealed the grandiosity of the father's project, it also seemed to point to a
social unsureness on the part of the father—an unsureness which appeared
to be covered over by a blustering contempt for the "softness" of his middle-
class wife and sons. Sherry's mother, in the case described above, also seems
to demonstrate the difficulties which the movement from one class to an­
other can impose on a family. Interestingly, in my own experience as a thera­
pist, it is usually the children rather than the parents who come into ther­
apy. Only a clinical depression of mammoth proportions, it seems to me, is
likely to bring the "self-made man" to the therapist's office.
The connection between the generations, however, is a complex one and
not a simple matter of cause and effect. As Sartre points out, the previous
generation passes along the culture, the material means, and even the lan­
guage which are the tools with which the new generation must work. But
the new generation does not simply accept the objectifications provided to
it. Regarding the materialized praxis which it has inherited from the pre­
vious generation as "an inert object which needs to be rearranged," the new
generation goes on to transcend in one way or another the legacy of its fa­
thers (CDR, p. 666). Even history, our collective past, is rewritten by each
generation according to changes in the future-directed projects of its mem-
200 Chapter Five

bers; thus social memories (like individual memories) change over time
(CDR, p. 56).
It must be emphasized, however, that the members of a new generation
cannot simply make anything whatever of their inheritance; even revolu­
tionary praxis must inscribe itself in a practico-inert world that is resistant
because of prior inscriptions. One lives, for good or ill, within a particular
culture and with certain sociomaterial constraints—which, to be overcome
in a realistic fashion, must first be taken into account. Consequently,
though the investigation of continuity and conflicts between generations
must not remain on an abstract general level in existentialist therapy, nei­
ther can the existentially oriented therapist afford to ignore what the partic­
ular members of a generation have in common.
What makes a certain amount of generalization possible is the common re­
lationship which the members of a particular class, society, or generation
have to the practico-inert. It is because of the claims of the practico-inert,
and not because of some mysterious suprapersonal unity or mechanistic de­
terminism, that membership in a particular class or generation leads us to
have certain common characteristics. In the Flaubert biography, Sartre re­
fers to the cultural heritage of a generation as the "Objective Mind" of that
generation. This idea of the Objective Mind, despite its Hegelian ring, does
not represent a return to idealism. The Objective Mind, according to Sartre,
is nothing other than the cultural practico-inert at a particular moment of
history. Sartre himself is especially interested in investigating the literary
works which influenced the generation of writers of the Second Empire, of
whom Flaubert was one of the leading lights.
The Objective Mind of Flaubert's generation, Sartre tells us, was flawed
because the writers of the Second Empire were presented with contradic­
tions which were realistically insuperable—contradictions passed on to them
by their literary "grandfathers," the eighteenth-century philosophes, and
their literary "elder brothers," the romantic writers. The grandfathers enjoin
those who follow them to create through their works a rational "universal"
art which serves all mankind, but which really invokes a bourgeois defini­
tion of "man." By contrast, the European romantics, who have aristocratic
rather than bourgeois leanings, enjoin their followers (who are unhappily
bourgeois rather than aristocratic) to take a stance of beauty for its own sake
and a hatred of the bourgeoisie.
The neurotic solution—and Sartre insists that the solution of the Second
Empire writers must be neurotic because the Objective Mind of the period is
filled with contradictions that admit of no "real" solutions—of the writers of
 Sartre's Later Philosophy and the Sociomaterial World 201

Flaubert's generation is to embrace the universal calling of the philosophes

without their idea of service and to embrace the love of beauty of the ro­
mantics combined with a generalized misanthropy. "Art for art's sake" and
the renunciation of the duty to communicate are the earmarks of these writ­
ers. Asked for an impossible solution, they embrace the imaginary as demo­
ralization because all avenues for a real solution have been foreclosed.
Flaubert, Sartre maintains, was eminent among these literary "Knights of
Nothingness" partially because his personal history predisposed him to take
the position required by the "Objective Neurosis" of the period.13
Obviously, then, in addition to exploring the individual dimensions of a
client's fundamental project, the existentialist therapist who is aware of
Sartre's later work must also be prepared to explore the cultural contradic­
tions which an individual is living and how these affect that client's life. An
obvious negative example is the Objective Mind of the generation in Ger­
many which chose Adolf Hitler as its leader; perhaps the cultural practico-
inert at this time was not simply neurotic, but psychotic in the grandiosity
combined with rage which are its earmarks. In any case, there is no doubt
that this situation is one which Germans—and the rest of the world—will
have to try to reconcile themselves to (or escape from) for some years to
come. An example which might be considered positive by many people is
the Objective Mind of the generation of the 1960s and 1970s in the United
States and Europe. During this time, new meanings concerning racial, colo­
nial, and sexual equality were inscribed into the Euro-American tradition of
freedom, equality, and individual opportunity as this had been handed
down in numerous documents and proclamations by previous generations.
As a therapist who is now beginning to encounter a new generation of
clients—those who are making something different of what the generation
of the 1960s and 1970s (my own generation) has made—I am finding this
idea of social continuity with a difference increasingly fascinating. Indeed, it
has occurred to me that a study of the lives of members of my own genera­
tion in terms of the impact on them of the civil rights movement, the Viet­
nam War, the sexual revolution, the women's movement, and so on might
be extremely interesting—particularly if it could be extended to include
what is now being made (positively and negatively) of those experiences
both by the people who lived them and by their children.
Such studies have, of course, occasionally been done. An example is the
studies of the impact of their parents' concentration camp experiences on
the "children of the holocaust." What has not been done to any great extent
is to look at the impact of everyone's sociomaterial depths on the creation of
202 Chapter Five

a number of individual projects. A task of existentialist therapy, from this

perspective, would be to take into account the common relationship to the
practico-inert of members of a particular generation in elucidating a project
which is nonetheless individual for all its connections with the sociomate-
rial world—a task Sartre himself undertook in his elaborate examination of
Flaubert's connections, reactions, and contributions to the Objective Mind
of his generation in the third volume of The Family Idiot.
One significant way in which an individual must connect with his or her
sociocultural milieu is, of course, through work in the world. Since Freud's
famous definition of the normal individual as one who is able "to love and
to work," psychoanalysis has been interested in an individual's relationship
with the world of work. But this interest has been largely a theoretical inter-
est in work as neutralization or sublimation of libidinal energy and a clinical
interest in work as manifesting aspects of the transference. Certainly, trans­
ference issues cannot be avoided, especially, for example, when one works
with a client who repeatedly relates to employers as if they were parents and
to co-workers as if they were siblings. On the other hand, transference is not
the whole story, and even the relationship of present work difficulties to past
experiences may require an understanding of principles which are not
present in Freudian metatheory. As therapists, we are often reluctant or un­
able to examine the effects which a client's work conditions have on the
quality of that person's life—or the way in which learning to live one's needs
as hexis in childhood may have prepared the way to accepting boring, repet­
itive, and overly restrictive work conditions as "normal."
There is, of course, from a Sartrean perspective an interplay between the
work conditions a society presents to its members and the way in which one
is prepared to live those conditions in childhood. Understanding this rela­
tionship is not a simple matter of deciding which factor (work conditions or
childhood experience) to place in the position of an independent variable.
Rather, from the perspective of existential psychoanalysis, it will be neces­
sary for the investigator to explore the past as ground for present distortions
of the self in the workplace while he or she must at the same time refuse to
reduce present difficulties to mere psychological phenomena. There is, after
all, a real sociomaterial world with which the individual must interact in
terms of work in order to survive and/or prosper.
Let us take, for example, Sartre's worst case scenario—the worker in a fac­
tory who is dominated by the hexis of a machine's demands. Obviously, this
worker has not ceased to have human needs; on the other hand, the use of
the machine to meet survival-based needs has to some extent relegated the
 Sartre's Later Philosophy and the Sociomaterial World 203

production of a self at a more advanced level of the dialectic to the worker's

less central leisure-time activities. His or her work involves not the creation
of a new individualized future, but the re-creation of the (past) static future
which is written into the machine. Not only this, the machine will invade
even the recesses of the worker's most intimate thoughts and feelings.
Sartre cites as an example certain studies which show that women factory
workers, as they work, engage in fantasies of sexual abandonment which
may or may not have any correspondence to their actual love life. In doing
so, Sartre maintains, they only find a way to better service the m a c h i n e -
since what is required by the machine is a kind of semi-automatism on the
part of the worker, "an explosive mixture of unconsciousness and vigilance."
In order to perform her job effectively, the worker must not really think in
an active way; for example, worries about her children are likely to distract
her from her work. Rather, she must induce in herself a state in which the
mind is "absorbed but not used" (CDR, p. 233).
The solution to this dilemma is the sexual fantasies. By engaging in them,
the woman worker attempts to modify the "desert of boredom" produced by
the machine through an escape into interiority. But because in doing so she
merely finds a way to better serve the machine, Sartre declares that "the
deepest interiority [thus] becomes a means of realising oneself as total exteri­
ority" (CDR, p. 234). Hence it is in a sense appropriate to say that "it was
the machine in [the woman worker] which was dreaming of love" (CDR,
p. 233). In another sense, of course, the compliance with the dictates of the
machine is founded on free praxis—which in this case is merely subjectivity
as "the verdict which compels us to carry out, freely and through ourselves,
the sentence which a 'developing' society has pronounced on us" (CDR, p.
71). The tragedy of degraded and reified freedom is that it is still freedom.
Since it is our childhoods which have prepared us to accept this verdict, it
is the task of existential psychoanalysis to find out how this is so. For exam­
ple, in Sherry's case, it was her obedience to her mother's tyrannical other-
directedness which prepared her to be exploited by her employer. Obviously,
as therapists, we must be aware not only of the real conditions (the demand
of the machine or other work situation for a certain kind of activity requir­
ing a certain kind of attentiveness) and the childhood situations but also of
the present life circumstances which dispose a person to accept a less than
human work situation. As for the larger sociopolitical issues, although they
are interconnected, they do not bear directly on our work with clients.
In all of these ways, Sartre's concept of the practico-inert enables us to en­
large the individualist perspective of existential psychoanalysis delineated in
204 Chapter Five

Being and Nothingness to include a sociomaterial perspective. Instead of view­

ing a client's project only in terms of individual choices of ways of doing, be­
ing, and having in a largely dyadic universe, Sartre's later philosophy also
mandates that existential psychoanalysis look at a person's work in a so­
ciomaterial world containing certain exigencies from the past which affect
and shape or misshape that project. It mandates a consideration of seriality
and negative reciprocity as they affect a person's life project. And it man­
dates a look at the connection between generations that is achieved in and
through the sociomaterial world.
Existential psychoanalysis, in other words, must consider the ways in
which a person's project is concurrently "centuries old" and completely new.
As Sartre puts the matter,

I totalise myself on the basis of centuries of history and, in accordance

with my culture, I totalise this experience. This means that my life is
centuries old, since the schemata which permit me to understand and
to totalise my practical undertakings (and the set of determinations
which go with them) have entered the present (present in their effects and
past in their completed history). In this sense, diachronic evolution is
present (as past—and, as we shall see later, as future) in synchronic tota­
lisation: their relations are bonds of interiority and to the extent that
critical investigation is possible, the temporal depth of the totalising
process becomes evident as soon as I reflexively interpret the operations
of my individual life. (CDR, p. 54)

Human reality, in the Critique as in Being and Nothingness, is still a temporal-

izing project linking past, present, and future—but that past-present-future
now has a social as well as an individual dimension.
Human reality is "synchronic," partaking of present sociomaterial rela­
tions, and "diachronic," living the past as present and as projected future
while detotalizing and retotalizing it. The aim of existentialist therapy, in
such a situation, is not to detach the individual from the sociomaterial
world, since this is impossible. Rather, it is to investigate with a client the so­
ciomaterial dimensions of his or her project with an end to increasing the
domain of praxis, or real freedom, and to decreasing the domain of hexis, or
resignation to the status quo, as an individual endeavors to make something
new and more satisfying and meaningful of what he or she has been made of
from a sociomaterial perspective. It is also, as we shall see in the next section,
 Sartre's Later Philosophy and the Sociomaterial World 205

to aid that person in investigating the opportunities and pitfalls of group

praxis as an antidote to serial impotence, negative reciprocity, and the im­
passes created by contradictory imperatives inscribed in the practico-inert.

The Regulatory Third Party, Fraternity-Terror,

and the Family as Group Praxis

The third moment of the Sartrean dialectic, the moment of "unification,"

arises as a negation of the serial impotence instituted by the second. Groups
attempt to nullify the "recurrence" or repetition in everyone of the same re­
lation to a collective object by transforming individual praxis into common
or collective praxis. For example, when the workers in a factory organize
themselves into a union, they are no longer each subjected to the same im­
potence with respect to that collective object, the factory. Together they are
able to demand better working conditions, shorter hours, and so on. Simi­
larly, people organizing themselves into a group can better deal with an
emergency like a natural disaster or a food shortage than can those same
people relating serially to the same event. Where a single individual experi­
ences impotence, the group has power.
All this, however, is ordinary and not particularly philosophically pro­
found. Sartre's originality with respect to explaining this third moment of
the dialectic arises from two new concepts which allow us to understand the
efficacy and power of groups without resorting to some theory of groups ei­
ther as hyperorganisms or as simple social contracts of the individual-to-
group variety. These concepts are the "regulatory third party" and
"fraternity-terror." They explain how group members come to share a com­
mon praxis at the same time that this common praxis ultimately rests on an
individual praxis which is always and everywhere being transformed by the
individual's inclusion in groups. Because the group is derived from and
maintained by individual praxis, however, Sartre refers to group praxis as
the "constituted dialectic" to distinguish it from the "constituent dialectic"
of individual action. This idea of the group as the constituted dialectic will
have, as we shall see, significant implications for our understanding of fam­
ily issues in the context of existentialist therapy and for our understanding
of the way in which the therapy group can be utilized to counteract destruc­
tive family norms.
The constituted dialectic rests on a new concept of the third party which
is both similar and dissimilar to Sartre's concept of the third in Being and
2o6 Chapter Five

Nothingness. Sartre in his earlier work describes human relations as primar­

ily dyadic, consisting of the eternal subject-object alternation which pro­
vokes the "conflict of consciousnesses." The third person there is simply an
addendum to the idea of objectification, with Sartre noting that two people
can be objectified by a third as an "us object" (BN, pp. 415-23). In the Cri-
tique, however, he seems to reverse himself by declaring that "the real rela­
tion between men is necessarily ternary" (CDR, p. 109). The truth is that
this is a contradiction in appearance only. Binary relations are still con­
ceived to be the "necessary ground of any ternary relationship" (CDR,
p. 109), its ontological foundation if you will, since it is still my experience of
the Other's Look that reveals to me the existence of other consciousnesses.
But in the "real" world—that is, in the inevitably social world—relations are
never simply dyadic. This is so because it is the third party who "makes reci­
procity visible to itself" (CDR, p. Il6). In other words, it is the third party
who provides the context and the perspective within which dyadic relations
come to know themselves reflectively. Within the context of the group, as we
shall see, everyone takes the position of this third party who makes the re­
ciprocal relations of the group visible to itself.
Let us take a look, for example, at the inevitably ternary nature of human
relations in that seemingly most intimate and exclusive of dyadic relation­
ships: the relationship between two people who have just fallen in love.
Sartre had already noted in Being and Nothingness that lovers will often at­
tempt to avoid for a time the objectifying Look of third parties because they
do not wish to be fixed from the outside as an us object, ^ t the truth is that
the lovers cannot escape the Look of the third, since this Look is the implied
presence in absence which allows them to constitute themselves as a couple
in the first place. Nor can this young couple, from the perspective of the Cri-
tique, simply "degroup" itself and start afresh as members of a self-sufficient
duo—as many a young couple has learned to its chagrin. Each will carry his
or her groupedness, especially membership in the family of origin, into the
new relationship. What is true for the young couple is also true for the rest
of us. The degrouped single individual, Robinson Crusoe, simply does not
exist. One is always and everywhere grouped, even before birth since loyalty
is expected in advance to the family and its groups. Of course, one may sub­
sequently defect from old groups and/or join new ones. The point is that
one does not first exist as a separate individual who later joins groups. One
is fundamentally grouped from the beginning of life.
At the same time that one is a "common" or grouped individual from the
beginning, however, it is also true that individual, organic praxis sustains
 Sartre's Later Philosophy and the Sociomaterial World 20J

groups. The secret of this apparent paradox lies in Sartre's idea that the
group is formed and maintained by a ternary relationship among its mem­
bers in which each acts to the others as a regulatory third party rather than
by some kind of union of consciousnesses in a hyperorganismic whole. First
cousin to the objectifying third who united the dyad as an us object in Being
and Nothingness, the regulatory third is no longer an instrument of aliena­
tion but an instrument of unification. This is so because the regulatory
third, standing together with others as a part of the group rather than ob­
serving others from a position apart, totalizes the others as a participant in a
common action on a particular sociomaterial field—acting, obeying, and
commanding for the group and demanding that others do likewise.
In such a situation, serial alterity has been overcome by common or group
praxis. Whereas in the series, the locus of action is always "elsewhere," in the
group it is always "here"; whereas in the series, I act as an "Other," in the
group I and the Other act as a "myself." This allows for a "we" which tran­
scends the "we" of the common project of Being and Nothingness—a "we"
which rests on a transformation of individual praxis into common praxis
and with it the transformation of the organic individual. As Sartre points
out, the individual in a group undergoes a metamorphosis. The grouped in­
dividual is "constituted as different from what he was on his own." He or
she experiences and internalizes the "adopted inertia, function, power,
rights and duties, structure, violence and fraternity" of the group and actu­
alizes these new reciprocal relations as "his new being, his sociality" (CDR,
p. 510).
At the same time that the organic individual is fashioned into a common
individual through such socialization, however, the fact that groups are
founded on individual praxis rather than on some kind of mystical union of
consciousnesses leaves them vulnerable to dissolution. Thus although group
praxis, as an antidote to serial alterity, may sound like an ideal solution to
recurrence, there is a worm in the apple. Unless the group has formed to
handle a single emergency (such as meeting a natural disaster or rescuing a
child from a well) after which it will naturally dissolve, individual praxis
poses a threat to the group and with it to the security and effectiveness
which the group affords its members. As Sartre puts the matter, one is never
simply in a group as the contained is in a container. As a group member, my
anguish consists precisely in the inextinguishability of individual praxis: "I
am inside but I am still afraid that I may be outside" (CDR, p. 586). From my
own viewpoint and from the viewpoint of the other members of the group,
there is always the possibility that I might detotalize and retotalize the group
2o8 Chapter Five

in such a way as to undermine its very foundation. Therefore, if groups are

to continue to exist, they must continually work on themselves as well as
work on the world. The group is always a double negation—of serial impo­
tence on the one hand and individualist action on the other.
The negation of individualist action takes a form which Sartre describes
as "fraternity-terror." Fraternity refers to the offer of inclusion in activity for
the common good, and terror to the threat of death or, what amounts to the
same thing, ostracism from the group if one does not live according to its re­
quirements or norms. In other words, the group demands that its members
abjure certain forms of freedom as a necessary condition for the preservation
of the group. It does so through the exaction of the "pledge," implicit or ex­
plicit, by means of which the organic individual promises to continue acting
as a common individual at the expense of his or her future freedom.
Such a pledge may be given beforehand by an individual born into a par­
ticular group—as in the pledge of military service on the part of all males
born into most tribes or nations. Sometimes the pledge is ritually renewed
at puberty, as in the puberty rites common to most tribal cultures; Chris­
tian confirmation and Jewish bar and bat mitzvahs are also examples of
such ritual renewals of the pledge. The pledge is necessary because the
group, much as it might like to be a hyperorganism or a machine, is unable
to accomplish this. This is why the traitor receives such severe treatment by
most groups: He or she is a living reminder to the group that the freedom of
each poses a constant (implicit) threat to the group's continued existence
(CDR, p. 5 89n).
The degree of fraternity versus the degree of terror in a particular group,
together with the degree of genuine community versus serial impotence, var­
ies with the kind of group and with its contexts. Sartre delineates four differ­
ent kinds of groups, classified according to increasing levels of organization:
the group-in-fusion,14 the pledged or statutory group, the organization, and
the institution. Each of these groups has more structure and more differenti­
ation of function than its predecessor. And since seriality increases as the
group becomes more and more permeated with inertia, each is more invaded
by serial impotence to the point where the institution, especially if it is also
bureaucratized, is permeated with seriality. The problem is that structure,
though it is an attempt at efficiency in dealing with the environment and
control in dealing with the danger of individualist revolt, signifies ossifica­
tion. Sartre's favorite kind of group, as the reader might guess, is the one
with the least structure—the group-in-fusion which arises as a response to a
particular situation. His least favorite is obviously the institution, which he
 Sartre's Later Philosophy and the Sociomaterial World 209

believes signifies the "systematic self-domestication of man by man" (CDR,

p. 606).
The group-in-fusion arises as a direct response to serial impotence. A
group is likely to form on the face of a collective when a gathering of people
suddenly begins to live serial impotence as something which might/must be
overcome. Ultimately, this movement from series to group is motivated by
need, with organismic survival providing a univocal link of interiority with
nature which points to a limit beyond which needs cannot be shaped or de­
nied. As I begin to read my own fate in the fate of the Other, including the
impotence of both of us before the collective object or sovereign group, I
come to see the Other not as an alien Other but as another self destined like
myself for extinction unless we engage in a common action. Obvious exam­
ples include people facing the possibility of death from a common natural
disaster, such as a fire or flood, or of starvation from a common lack of re­
sources. Sartre's own example is the storming of the Bastille at the moment
when the people of Paris came to read the presence of the king's troops as
the likelihood of their own deaths (CDR, pp. 351-63). Of course, less urgent
matters can also provoke group formation so long as people see their needs/
desires and their neighbors' as being equivalent and inextricably linked in
terms of the possibility of fulfillment.
The group-in-fusion, however, is not a prearranged covenant between
people, but rather the development of a spontaneous common action based
on a new totalization of the common field in which I and the Other act for
and through each other, becoming a group of "myselves" as a replacement
for the collection of "Others" which had locked us together in serial impo­
tence. This involves the development of group praxis, as each person fash­
ions himself or herself as a regulatory third party who totalizes the others as
a group as they totalize him or her. In the group-in-fusion, with its lack of
structure, anyone may perform any function—for example, the person near­
est the stump becomes the "myself" who urges the others on to the Bastille.
In the group-in-fusion, there is therefore the greatest amount of fraternity
and the least amount of terror since the energy of the group is focused al­
most entirely on the task at hand. The problem is that once the emergency
has passed, if the group is to continue to exist, it must work on itself as well
as work on the world. It is here that the group-in-fusion evokes the pledge
and with it the threat of death/ostracism which constitutes the bonds of
fraternity-terror in a pledged group. Terror increases and fraternity decreases
as groups become more structured, moving from pledged groups to organiza­
tions to institutions.
2IO Chapter Five

With the institution, the serial impotence which motivated group forma­
tion in the first place has been replaced by an institutional impotence. Seri-
ality has re-entered the picture in the form of everyone's loyalty to a sover­
eign individual or group. Actually, sovereignty has evolved because the
group has become a debased community, attempting to replace the energy of
spontaneous common activity with the efficiency of a machine. The group,
at the point where it becomes institutionalized, is endangered by individual
praxis. Thus each person attempts to save the group by expelling "freedom
from himself in order to realise the endangered unity of the declining group
as a thing" (CDR, p. 606). The model for the institution is the "forged tool."
Each person, in order to perpetuate the institution, must make himself or
herself into a "stereotyped praxis" supporting a rigid future that is in reality
a reproduction of the past (CDR, pp. 606-7). Obviously, in such a situation,
the danger of serial dispersal will be great since creative energy will be se­
verely limited. For this reason, as organizational ossification increases, terror
dominates and fraternity lessens. The wielding of this terror, however, is no
longer simply in the hands of each person as a regulatory third party.
Rather, it is focused in the hands of the sovereign individual or group and its
agents.
Sovereignty, according to Sartre, is only possible if a group has ossified to
the point where genuine community is no longer possible. Such a debased
community may then seek a false sense of oneness by substituting the or­
ganic unity of the sovereign individual for the missing real unification of
genuine community. If this happens, then secondary alienation re-enters the
group and reserialization occurs in a situation where the members of the
group are no longer the same and every elsewhere is no longer here. In the
sovereign, the group has produced an individual who is "other than all be­
cause he cannot become a regulated third party."
As an untranscendable third party, the sovereign comes to represent "vio­
lence without reciprocity" (CDR, p. 615). As a member of an institutional­
ized group with a sovereign leader, each individual finds himself or herself
supporting group praxis not as the action of a developing unification of my-
selves but as "an actualisation of the Other's [the sovereign's] freedom"
(CDR, p. 616). Only the sovereign is able to be himself or herself—and, of
course, even the sovereign cannot really do this because of the constraints of
the organization (CDR, p. 619). As for the group members, they subsume
their freedom in the freedom of the sovereign. Hence "the sovereign is
present in everyone as Other in the moment when he is obeyed" (CDR, p.
621). In fact, the sovereign is produced and maintained by terror; through
 Sartre's Later Philosophy and the Sociomaterial World 211

the sovereign's agents, the group is held together by (implicit or explicit) vio­
lence, which is necessary to counteract a return to seriality. Genuine com­
munity, which sovereignty is supposed to safeguard, would actually be a
threat to it and so disappears.
Thus the final step in the struggle against seriality is marked by a return to
seriality in the form of the impotence of everyone before the king (or other
sovereign individual or group), who now occupies the place vacated by the
collective object. What this whole situation masks is the fact that genuine
sovereignty—as distinguished from the quasisovereignty of the regulatory
third party or the pseudosovereignty of the king or other ruling group—
resides only in individual praxis or "man himself as action, as unifying la­
bour, in so far as he has a purchase on the world and is able to change it"
(CDR, p. 6l0). In a sense, the sovereign in the decaying group takes the posi­
tion of the missing God in the search for Being-in-itself-for-itself; in fact,
Sartre argues in the Critique that the institution of sovereignty is a false solu­
tion because "neither God nor the totalised group [as opposed to the totaliz­
ing group] actually exist" (CDR, p. 610). In other words, the resort to sover­
eignty is an evasion of freedom and responsibility, both individual and
group.
As we come to the end of this discussion of groups, it would be well to re­
member that the real social landscape is not as schematic as I have presented
it here. For one thing, groups do not necessarily develop in an orderly suc­
cession from group-in-fusion to institution with an eventual return to serial­
ity as the outmoded institution is abandoned like a dead leviathan by a new
generation which has simply lost interest. Instead, we find every order of
emergence and decay and, as we have previously seen, many varieties of in­
teractions between series and groups. As Sartre points out, there is no "for­
mal law" that compels groups to pass through the logical succession from
group-in-fusion to institution.15 Also, the presence of existing groups may ei­
ther provoke the emergence of new groups (as happened with the king's
army and the people storming the Bastille) or inhibit their formation (as is
the case with the manipulation of series by groups). Furthermore, there may
be a combination of forms. For example, why might we not explain the pres­
ence of groups with charismatic leaders as combinations of two opposite
forms, since they appear to have both the urgency and the vitality of the
group-in-fusion and the subsumption of individual freedom in a sovereign of
the institution?
Where a group does emerge, it is important, for social science in general
and for existential psychoanalysis in particular, to investigate its character
212 Chapter Five

and its degree of fraternity versus terror as a way of determining whether or

not this group provides a viable solution to the problem of serial impotence.
As an ontological negation and a practical realization, the group can either
empower or disempower an individual—depending on whether or not a per­
son as a common individual (or ontological negation of organic praxis) is
part of a group which is an energetic community promising the realization of
a goal (practical realization) which has genuine meaning for all, or whether
the group member is participating in a group which has ossified to the point
of demanding little more than obedience to the status quo, or passive activ­
ity. In the latter case, as with the series, the problem is that one's project has
become permeated with hexis rather than with praxis—that one views the
demands of the institution as "the way things are" rather than as a means to
transcendence. Although this debased community may still offer security, it
is in some ways worse than no community at all—especially since it may in­
hibit the formation of new, genuinely vital groups.
I think we can now begin to see the significance of Sartre's theory of
groups for existentialist therapy. If the existentialist therapist is to make full
use of the new social concepts presented in the Critique, he or she must add
to an understanding of those dyadic relations which have proved so useful
in deciphering the mirroring needs of earliest infancy and childhood an un­
derstanding of the way in which ternary relations govern all social relations,
including relations within the family. The family as series and as group must
be explored, together with its bonds of fraternity-terror and its claims on the
freedom of the individual.16 The kind of group represented by a particular
family—or the extent to which a family has been able to group itself at all as
opposed to remaining serial—must be considered. The family of origin is, of
course, crucial to this exploration. But membership in the present family
and other important groups must be explored as well. If a family has broken
apart at some point, the impact of this on the children's capacity for being
grouped must be explored. Similarly, the strength of the family in effectively
dealing with difficult circumstances, such as accidents, natural disasters, and
death, must be considered. And the efficacy of the therapy group as a means
to breaking the terror which keeps people bound to other dysfunctional
groups must be explored.
An appreciation of Sartre's theory of groups and of series will therefore al­
low existentially oriented therapists to go beyond the individualist analysis
which sometimes cripples our ability to help an individual. As with the exi­
gencies of the practico-inert and the traps of serial behavior and thought, it
is important to recognize the ways in which groups, especially institutional-
 Sartre's Later Philosophy and the Sociomaterial World 213

ized groups, may deform an individual by imposing a conformity to group

norms which is a matter of hexis rather than of praxis. At the same time, vi­
tal groups offer the most efficient (and many times the only) means for over­
coming hexis and serial impotence. Obviously, then, the existentialist thera­
pist will want to examine a client's group affiliations—and the impact that
being grouped or not being grouped in this way or that has on a client's fun­
damental project. In particular, the therapist will want to aid a client in
moving away from serial impotence into a sense of community, if this is a
problem, or else in escaping the demands of fraternity-terror imposed by a
group (frequently the family group) which is providing security at too great
an expense to individual happiness or genuine community.
Sartre himself was aware that the family provides fertile ground for illus­
trating his theory of groups. Having noted in the Critique that the paterfa­
milias of the traditional authoritarian family is an example of sovereignty, he
takes up in The Family Idiot the exploration of a particular family, that of
Gustave Flaubert, as an example of the effects of a semipatriarchal family on
one of its members. Achille-Cleophas Flaubert, according to Sartre, was a
mixture of bourgeois liberalism and traditionalism. The brilliant son of a
peasant family in which his father and two brothers were veterinarians,
Achille-Cleophas was sent to school in Paris where he won a scholarship to
medical school. As the chief surgeon of Rouen, he had clearly climbed out
of his humble beginnings. His marriage to Caroline Fleuriot gave him pre­
tensions even to nobility, as Caroline was connected on her mother's side to
the minor nobility. Like the father mentioned in the previous section who
had left: behind his humbler beginnings, Dr. Flaubert was something of a ty­
rant in his relations to his family. His wife, who was nine years younger than
he, bent her will to his—admiring, adoring, and obeying him. His sons,
whom he imagined would become doctors like himself, were valued primar­
ily as assets to the Flaubert family glory. In this respect, as we have seen,
Gustave was a disappointment; Achilles, on the other hand, succeeded in
his appointed task of following in his father's footsteps as the favored succes­
sor.
In such a family, what is required of the children is a "strict surrender of
the individual to the family group" (FI, 1:68). Hence because each of the
sons "was bursting with pride at being a Flaubert, neither of them knew the
dignity of being himself" (FI, 1:71). For Achilles, this lack of individualism is
rewarded by being allowed to fill his father's shoes. For Gustave, who was
the favorite of neither his father nor his mother, it adds to the earlier
wound. Although family life in such a situation resembles more of the atom-
214 Chapter Five

ization of a "common solitude" (FI, 1:70) than the solidarity of a genuine

community, Gustave suffered more than Achilles or Caroline. Intensely jeal­
ous of his older brother, he became generally envious and resentful. Later,
when he wished to escape from the alternative profession of law which his
father had chosen for him, Gustave could not risk direct confrontation. In­
stead, he allowed his body, through the passive activity of a psychosomatic
illness which has usually been identified as epilepsy but which Sartre regards
as hysteria,17 to accomplish this task for him. Direct disobedience to a father
whom he invested with the authority of a medieval lord if not with that of
God Almighty was unthinkable. According to Sartre, at a time when the
conjugal family with its greater freedom for wife and children and its greater
appreciation for the individuality of its children was becoming common, the
Flaubert family remained semipatriarchal and restrictive in a way that was
fifty years behind the times. Such families are still more common today than
most of us would like to admit.
In addition to the difficulties of the traditional patriarchal family, thera­
pists today often meet with a variation on the paterfamilias which is even
more destructive to the individuality and self-esteem of family members. Dr.
Flaubert, for all his tyrannizing over his family, at least represented the sta­
bility of a person who offers his family a recognized place in society. The
contemporary "family tyrant," who often brutalizes both wife and children
in an overtly violent way, offers no such security or stability. Similarly, ther­
apists often meet with families that either combine tyranny with extreme se­
rial alterity or that have failed to form cohesive groups at all. Sometimes sev­
eral divorces have compounded the difficulties of forming a new group out
of the remnants of an old one. Research into the effects of such degrouping
and regrouping, such as that of Judith Wallerstein (Wallerstein and Blakes-
lee, 1989), is just beginning to assess the damages.18
In any case, one cannot help thinking that the seemingly greater preva­
lence of what are referred to in therapeutic nosology as borderline and other
severe personality disorders may have at least something to do with the
greater degree of seriality in contemporary families. Indifference, as I noted
in earlier chapters, may be even more pathogenic than overt criticism; I
might add that lack of belonging to a coherent and reliable family may be
more damaging than participation in a group which is less than optimally
growth promoting. Perhaps bonds forged more in terror than in fraternity
are preferable to no bonds at all.
In working with individuals, therapists must not, however, mistake what
are actually phenomena relating to the bonds of fraternity-terror for individ-
 Sartre's Later Philosophy and the Sociomaterial World 215

ual aberrations or the effects of seriality. As Sartre points out, it is often true
that "what people call fanaticism, blindness, etc., is really fraternity-terror as
experienced in another group and in so far as we, as individuals, treat it as an
emotional occurrence in individuals" (CDR, p. 518). Since some of the stub-
bornest fixations in therapy derive precisely from these structures of
fraternity-terror in the family of origin, no amount of analysis of purely indi­
vidual motives will dissolve them. Instead, they must be looked at as phe­
nomena arising from the way in which an individual was originally
grouped—and as the terror which arises at the thought of giving up a way of
behaving/feeling/believing/thinking which appears to be critical for inclu­
sion in the family group at all. And since, as we know, one's experience in
one's family stands as a prototype for experience of the world in general,
since one's family was once one's whole world, giving up such prejudices
may appear to a client to be tantamount to giving up membership in the hu­
man race. Often the therapy group can help in overcoming this illusion.
As an example of the power of both the family bonds of fraternity-terror
and the efficacy of group therapy as contrasted with individual treatment in
helping to break the maleficent power of these bonds, I think of a client
whom I shall call Jan. Jan, who was a member of a women's therapy group
which met once a week for several years, was an attractive, divorced woman
in her mid-forties with a college-aged son and daughter. Jan's family of ori­
gin played a greater role in her adult life than contemporary families some­
times do. Jan and four of her five siblings still lived in the area where she
had grown up and all participated in managing the family business. The fa­
ther, though deceased, was a pervasive presence in the family, both because
he had been a powerful (often despotic) personality and because the busi­
ness which he had created and which still supported the family seemed
somehow to embody him. His "ghost" was constantly lurking around its
corridors. When Jan first came into therapy, she maintained that she simply
did not understand her own discontent and difficulties in sustaining a satis­
fying relationship with a man, considering the fact that she had come from
such a "good, close-knit family." As it turned out, this myth of the perfect
family—which was enforced by unusually strong bonds of fraternity-terror—
became the focal point for her therapy. If Jan wished to be a part of her fam­
ily, it appeared, she would simply have to support this idea of its "perfec­
tion."
The truth about Jan's family, as the reader might suspect, appeared to be
very different from this initial image of perfection. Jan's mother, though a
dutiful wife who stayed home to care for husband and children, was person-
2l6 Chapter Five

ally distant and inaccessible. She was a paragon of efficiency, not of warmth.
Family outings, Jan remembered, were more a matter of marching along to­
gether "like little soldiers" than of real fun and pleasure. Indeed, Jan herself
remembered getting sick to her stomach every Sunday when the family went
for its mandatory outing in the country. As for Jan's father, he apparently
had an irascible temper and a penchant for planning his children's lives. He
was also quite critical, especially of Jan's older sister, Joan, with whom he fre­
quently had loud arguments. "As for me," Jan was able to concede later in
her therapy, "he never really saw me. He only saw his blueprint for who he
thought I was or should be." O n those occasions when her father's temper
brought him close to violence with one family member or another, Jan re­
membered, her mother would pack the children into the car and drive
around for an hour. When they returned home, the point was to pretend
that nothing had happened. The "perfect family" was back in order.
Many of Jan's early therapy sessions centered around her feelings about
her older sister. Joan, though a rebellious child, had evolved into a staunch
defender of the family myth. When Jan began to question this myth, Joan
was adamant about how she saw her family: There were simply no problems
that Joan remembered; even the fights she had had with her father, which
had so disturbed her younger sister, Joan now viewed as having had the be­
neficent effect of strengthening her character. Mostly, however, Joan remem­
bered her childhood as happy and harmonious. As for her father, she
viewed him as heroic and was happy to see herself as being like him. Joan,
however, as Jan gradually revealed to the therapy group, had quite a few fam­
ily problems herself. Like her parents, she had had five children, but these
children were far from lacking in difficulties. Indeed, their problems ranged
from anorexia to suicidal depression. Although Joan blamed her ex-
husband and their divorce for her children's problems, it was Joan and not
their father to whom all of her children were at one point refusing to speak.
Joan nonetheless maintained that she was happy, that she had had a perfect
upbringing, and that her family of origin was still a close, wonderful group—
with the single exception of Jan, whom Joan viewed as full of unjustifiable
complaints about the past. And, of course, Joan viewed her own second
marriage as achieving the "perfection" she had missed on the first try.
Although Jan also did some individual therapy, it is to the women's ther­
apy group that I attribute much of the credit for Jan's gaining the strength to
eventually break with her family myth. Jan, as the group came to realize, not
only came from a family which regarded itself as close and problem-free; she
also tended to develop relationships with men and even friendships with
 Sartre's Later Philosophy and the Sociomaterial World 2IJ

people who similarly used idealization as a defense. Each time Jan encoun­
tered one of these "perfect" people, she gave herself a hard time for her own
"imperfection" and "inability to be satisfied." Soon the perfection theme—
and its source in Jan's family of origin—became quite familiar to the group.
Rather like a Greek chorus, they began to express in unison their disbelief in
the perfection of whatever friend or lover Jan was currently enhancing with
the family myth. Sometimes this took the form of laughter, sometimes of ex­
pressions of concern—but Jan could no longer deny that the group saw
through her family myth and its current embodiments. At the same time,
the group also provided the experience of belonging to a different kind of
group—one in which all kinds of feelings, and not just positive ones, could
be honestly expressed.
As Jan began to work with this material and to contemplate dissociating
herself from the family myth, she alternately experienced extreme distress
and a growing sense of authenticity. Her terror at the thought of defection
was great, as she imagined herself standing alone with no family or friends.
And as she lamented her lack of feeling of belonging and her terror over be­
ing "completely alone," ostracism became a major theme in her therapy. She
expressed a wish to bring her sisters, her mother, and a current lover into
therapy. Indeed, she convinced a woman friend to join the group for a short
time, and later she brought a lover for several couple's sessions. Apparently I
and/or the group were supposed to convert these people so that Jan would
not feel so alone in defecting from the family myth.
At the same time, Jan realized that her own relations with her children
were quite different from the family relations in her family of origin and that
she had a real closeness with them which her family criticized as "overindul­
gence." She could also see from her experience in the group that not all
groups are so massively attached to denial of negative feelings/thoughts as a
condition for membership as her family had been and continued to be. As
Jan began to be more centered in herself, she found the strength to end her
latest, highly unsatisfying love relationship over her lover's protests that the
two of them were—or could easily be—the "perfect couple." As Jan faced the
anguish, loneliness, and pervasive sense of unrealness she had experienced
with her original "perfect family," her loyalty to this mode of existence be­
gan to crumble. In its place was the gradual development of a new sense of
"space" and centeredness in herself—and with this a freedom from the terror
of not belonging which she had never before experienced.
Therapy groups, of course, have many other functions than the choral
one which I have described here—functions which have been adequately de-
2l8 Chapter Five

scribed by other group therapists.19 For example, the therapy group is likely,
especially in the beginning, to feel like a duplicate of the family group and
the client is likely to inadvertently go about trying to confirm this impres­
sion. Group leaders make excellent proxy parents and group members excel­
lent proxy siblings. In this way, the therapy group, like all other groups, can
be made to serve the interests of preserving the norms of fraternity-terror es­
tablished by the original family group.
For example, when Jan first joined the therapy group, she felt that she had
to smile continually and show her good-spiritedness in order to gain the
group's approval. She also felt a great uneasiness, like being "put on the spot
by my Dad," whenever her turn to speak came; and she tried to recede into
the background, a strategy which had worked in her family to keep her out
of the battles she saw her sister get into with their father. Obviously, these
"projections" of the family group onto the therapy group must be challenged
and investigated. Jan's group, for instance, soon challenged her assump­
tions: They let her know that they responded to her when she was real, not
when she was pretending to be cheerful. She reacted to this with disbelief
and later with gratitude. But for Jan the group was more than a vehicle for
working on transference; it was also an experience of a different way of being
grouped—a way which allowed her to break the old bonds of fraternity-
terror which had kept her trapped for so long in a painful and unfulfilling
life project.
Furthermore, whereas the therapy group is useful for a person such as Jan,
who is attempting to free herself from destructive family norms, it is perhaps
even more significant for the client who has never been adequately grouped
at all than for the client who has been unhappily grouped. For the person
who grew up in a situation of serial alterity, the therapy group, if such a per­
son can be included within it, can be critical to overcoming the loneliness
and alienation which tend to pervade this person's life. I think, for instance,
of a client whom I shall call "Craig." Unlike Jan's family, which fits the au­
thoritarian group style where serialization is a by-product of centering on
the father as sovereign, Craig's family was the closest in my experience to a
disconnected series living under a single roof. He, his father, his mother, and
his younger brother each, as he described them, "sat silent in our isolated
little worlds." Outsiders or even extended family members rarely entered the
tomblike atmosphere of this household. Eating together was rare and was
done largely in silence; family activities were unheard of.
When Craig spoke in the therapy group (he was often silent), his lack of
reaching out to other group members produced little response at first. He
 Sartre's Later Philosophy and the Sociomaterial World 219

was as isolated as before. When he complained about this, group members

pointed out that he seemed to be monologuing—that he seemed not to want
a response. This was painful for Craig since he could see that other group
members "feel more like they belong here than I do." Isolation, as he saw it,
was his "fate." Then one night, when Craig was talking about the pain of his
isolated life, he seemed to be actually sharing this pain rather than intellec-
tualizing about it.
When I realized that the other group members were involved with his
story, I called his attention to the fact that "everyone seems to be right here
with you." For the first time, Craig started to cry as he replied, "My whole
life has been so lonely, I just don't know what to do with this." I believe this
experience with the group was less a "corrective emotional experience" than
a challenge to the status quo—a glimpse of the possibility of turning hexis
into praxis and with it an awakening to the pain of his previously deprived
existence. Obviously, Craig had a long path to travel before he could allow
himself the experience of belonging to an outside group, but he had at least
begun to internalize the pledge which is implicit in the therapy group—the
pledge to support the norm of honest sharing and emotional presence.
Sartre's theory of groups, then, provides both a new way of looking at per­
sonal history and a new way of utilizing the therapy group to counter the de­
structive elements in family history. It might also provide some new insights
for doing family therapy as well. In addition to the family of origin and the
contemporary family, the existentialist therapist will probably also want to
investigate with a client his or her experiences with early and later peer
groups, with contemporary groups at work and in the community, and with
intergroup relations (family, work, or other). The therapist will want to see
what kinds of expectations a person has about being grouped (or not being
grouped)—and to use this both as a way of understanding contemporary life
and as an inroad into earliest experience. Moreover, perhaps looking at the
family group as a development within classes and within particular social
milieus will provide further keys to understanding an individual's dilemma.
Obviously, from this perspective, the ultimate aim of existentialist therapy
would be to see the individual involved in a group that provides genuine
community—a goal which Sartre believes is extremely difficult to attain in a
situation of scarcity, but one at which we must nonetheless aim. And as
therapists we must remember that even though we rarely see them in the
course of our professional work, relatively happy families do exist.
Sartre envisions something much larger. Although he questions whether
this will ever be completely possible, he would like to see the emergence in
220 Chapter Five

some future socialist society of "a true inter-subjective community in which

the only real relations will be those between men" (CDR, p. 307n)—that is,
of a community in which the practico-inert is made to serve human rela­
tions rather than the reverse and in which human beings will be able to risk
a transparency with each other that has as its concomitant a greater self-
knowledge and self-acceptance than is usual at the present time.
Sartre does not describe the specifics of this genuine future society since
he believes they will have to be discovered in the process of creating it. Nev­
ertheless, he does give some hints as to what it will be like. Obviously, it will
avoid as much as possible the reification of people which exists in all existing
technological societies. In doing so, it will place a value on the creation of
what Sartre refers to as "immaterial matter" (CDR, p. 183)—the divesting of
things of their power over people. It will be a society in which scarcity and
class divisions will have been overcome and in which positive reciprocity
predominates in human relations. It will be a society whose social structures
are closer to the group-in-fusion than to the institution or the bureaucracy.
And it will be a society which encourages not only freedom of thought, but
"revolutionary freedom of thought" (BEM, p. 134). In short, it will be a soci­
ety in which hexis is greatly reduced and authentic praxis greatly encour­
aged.
The possibility that such a community, though it may never actually exist
as such, could be considered a kind of heuristic principle—a norm toward
which groups (including families) and societies might consider themselves to
be moving—is a topic I have considered further in an article (Cannon, 1985).
But whether or not such a community ever comes to exist on a large scale, it
is obvious that Sartre's later philosophy adds a new dimension to existential
psychoanalysis—a dimension that allows us to understand the experience of
being grouped as a phenomenon referring to the regulatory third party who
did not yet exist in the largely dyadic relations described in Being and Not/i-
ingness. The appreciation of the phenomenon of fraternity-terror which
results from this understanding is, I believe, also new to depth therapy in
general. And though systems analysis has long been familiar in family work,
a systems approach usually neglects the individual in favor of the group. It is
in this respect analytical rather than dialectical. I believe that the Sartrean
dialectic gives adequate weight to both the individual and the group. Be­
cause it is the individual who sustains groups (though deeply influenced in
his or her being by the experience of being grouped), it is possible to degroup
and to regroup in a more life-enhancing and authentic fashion.
 Sartre's Later Philosophy and the Sociomaterial World 221

Conclusion

We are now in a position to summarize the impact of Sartre's later philoso­

phy on existential psychoanalysis and to consider how the present chapter
prepares us to answer, in the next three chapters, the challenge of Lacanian
structuralist psychoanalysis to Sartrean existential psychoanalysis. Sartre's
later philosophy, as we have seen, does not discard the fundamental ontol­
ogy and insights into human conflicts so richly provided in his earlier work.
The task of existential psychoanalysis, in the later as well as the earlier phi­
losophy, is still to discover and elucidate an individual's fundamental project
of being. And the aim of the existentialist therapist remains that of aiding a
client in the difficult task of encountering and accepting himself or herself as
a responsible freedom with respect and caring for the free projects of others.
The difference between Sartre's earlier and later work is that the funda­
mental project in his later work has acquired a sociomaterial dimension
which is foreign to Being and Nothingness. Although human freedom still lies
at the heart of the Sartrean dialectic, it is a freedom which discovers itself in
an inescapably social world within which the power of humanized matter, of
groups, and of series is recognized in a new way. Existentialist therapy must
no longer simply discover the individual depths to a client's project; it must
also elucidate the sociomaterial depths of that same project. The beginning
point of this investigation is no longer just the desiring individual; it is also
the needing individual behind the desiring individual—an individual en­
meshed in a world of humanized matter and alienated (in the secondary
sense) from his or her authentic project but capable, because this person is
free, of transforming hexis into praxis. It is the aim of existentialist therapy
to aid a client in this endeavor.
In attempting this task, the existentialist therapist will differ from the ana­
lytical social scientist in that the therapist will not attempt to occupy an ob­
jective position apart from the client's difficulties. Instead, the existentialist
therapist must use his or her own humanness to attempt an empathic com­
prehension of the client's difficulties, thereby gradually building the kind of
authentic relationship which is often missing in the client's life. What this
means is that in order to understand a client's experiences, the existentialist
therapist must bring to bear his or her own awareness of having needs
shaped into desires in earliest childhood, of being the "thing" of humanized
matter, of experiencing serial impotence, and of being subjected to the
fraternity-terror which binds group members together in constructive and
destructive ways. Without this social dimension, a therapist may be tempted
222 Chapter Five

to interpret individualistically phenomena which are really signs of group

praxis, serial reactions, or the class-being of a class which is different from
the therapist's own. Furthermore, the impact of the family of origin as a
group, as differentiated from the impact of one's earliest dyadic relations,
can hardly be understood without these new concepts—or the possibilities
of group therapy realized to their best advantage.
I also believe that Sartre's social theory provides an answer to the chal­
lenge not only of analytical social theory in general, but of structuralism in
particular as a contemporary analytical approach. Particularly important
here, of course, is the challenge of Jacques Lacan's structuralist approach to
psychoanalysis to Sartrean existential psychoanalysis. As we shall see in the
following chapters, the existentialist therapist, unlike the Lacanian analyst,
has no need to "play dead" in order to cause the dead structures of the
psyche to appear. Instead, the existentialist therapist attempts to answer
with his or her own aliveness the aliveness or spontaneity which the client
wishes/fears to allow himself or herself to experience. Lacanian analysis, un­
like existentialist therapy, demonstrates in the extreme the error which
Sartre attributes to analytical social science theory in general: In the words
of an English poet, it "murders to dissect." From a Sartrean perspective, the
progressive moment must be added to the regressive moment for full under­
standing to occur—and for a client to be able to assume his or her freedom
within the bounds of his or her particular personal and sociomaterial con­
straints. Those constraints certainly include, as Lacan thinks, the con­
straints of language itself—though Sartre, as we shall see, would view lan­
guage as a practico-inert field rather than as unconscious structure.
6 ♦ A Challenge to Existential
Psychoanalysis: Ego, Mirror, and
Aggressivity in Sartre and Lacan

Introduction

In Chapters 1-4, we saw how Freud's failure to develop beyond the para­
digms of nineteenth-century materialist science contributed to the failure of
contemporary psychoanalytic theorists to get beyond the illusion of sub­
stance as they attempt to describe the development of the ego or self. Al­
though many of these theorists show unusual insight into earliest relational
needs, especially needs for mirroring as these affect personal development,
most of them nonetheless fail to transcend the reification of the psyche that
is implicit in Freud's structural hypothesis. In Jacques Lacan, we encounter a
psychoanalytic theorist who counters this egological orientation with ideas
which, at first glance, sound quite Sartrean.
Lacan, like Sartre, claims that the ego is not a subject but an object of
experience—and that current psychoanalytic attempts to buttress or build
the ego are misplaced. Indeed, Lacan has nothing but contempt for most
post-Freudian psychoanalytic theorists from the ego psychologists to the
culturists to the British object relations theorists. Like Sartre, he objects to
any attempt on the part of the analyst to colonize the analysand by substi­
tuting his or her own reified ego for that of the analysand. And like Sartre,
he believes that the only legitimate position the analyst may take toward the
analysand is a position of "ignorance." However much the analysand may
attribute to the analyst the position of the "subject supposed to know," the
analyst must never be taken in by this.
O n the other hand, though Lacan, like Sartre, emphasizes the "interper­
sonal" nature of the analytic experience—the fact that discourse is always ad­
dressed to an Other—Lacan's view of the analyst as "Other" differs signifi-
223
224 Chapter Six

candy from Sartre's in that for Lacan the Other whom the analysand
addresses is really the linguistic unconscious (the "Other [A]") for which the
analyst as the "other" (lower cased) stands as a substitute. And though La­
can, like Sartre, refuses to regard adjustment to the cultural norm as the aim
of psychoanalysis, the "full speech" at which Lacanian analysis aims is not at
all the same thing as Sartrean authenticity; rather, it is the realization and ac­
ceptance of the analysand as the plaything of the linguistic unconscious.
Similarly, though Lacan places great emphasis on the "mirror stage" in
which a young child discovers himself or herself in the other person, the La­
canian mirror is quite different from the Sartrean in that it refers not to the
discovery of the other person as a subjectivity through my experience of my­
self as an object but rather to the alienation of myself (ego) in the other.
Thus when Sartre and Lacan discuss ego development and each quotes ap­
provingly Rimbaud's statement that "I is another" (Sartre, TE, p. 97; Lacan,
1966, p. 23, and 1978, p. 7), the similarities between the two statements are
more apparent than real. Sartre means that reflective and prereflective con­
sciousness can never merge; Lacan means that I literally take the other per­
son for myself and that this situation of fundamental alienation can never
be overcome.
To confuse matters further, Lacan's version of the linguistic unconscious is
in some ways similar to Sartre's concept of the linguistic practico-inert—the
difference being that Lacan, as a structuralist, believes that language
"speaks" the person, whereas Sartre ultimately holds the contrary position.
Furthermore, Lacan's concept of desire, which is linked with his linguistic
theory, is similar to Sartre's ontological concept of desire in that it is defined
as a manque a etre—a lack of being or (as Lacan prefers) a "want-to-be" rather
than a Freudian "wish" (Wunsch).1 Lacanian desire is also, like Sartrean de­
sire, a socialization of need. O n the other hand, desire in the symbolic order
(as opposed to the primitive desire of the mirror stage) is for Lacan a move­
ment from signifier to signifier rather than a value-making process, as it is for
Sartre. From a Sartrean perspective, as we shall see, Lacan as an analytical
social scientist sometimes does a good job of analyzing the moment of the
antidialectic, but he is incapable of adequately grasping the dialectic of in­
tentional praxis which lies behind it.
All of this tells us that a comparison of Sartre with Lacan is not going to
be a simple matter. Lacan, who I believe proposes the only other major chal­
lenge besides Sartre's existential psychoanalysis to orthodox Freudian meta-
theory, makes matters even more difficult by claiming to be an orthodox
Freudian providing an approach to Freud which is a "return" to the master's
 Egoy Mirrory and Aggressivity in Sartre and Lacan 225

teachings rather than the revisionist fare of the post-Freudian psycho analy­
tic theorists. To support this claim, Lacan argues that the post-Freudian the­
orists are mistaken in emphasizing the early mother-child relationship at the
expense of the Oedipus complex, that they are incorrect in discarding the
death instinct, that they are simply wrongheaded in emphasizing ego devel­
opment over the influence of the unconscious, and that their attempts at a
humanistic perspective are a deviation from Freud's own attempts to create a
"scientific" metapsychology. Lacan, in fact, goes so far as to argue that Freud
himself would have taken a psycholinguistic position similar to Lacan's if
the necessary training in structural linguistics had been available to him. In­
deed, Lacan contends that Freud intuited the discoveries that later became
formalized by structural linguistics and that The Interpretation of Dreams
paves the way for later linguistic analysis "by the sheer weight of its truth"
(1966, p. 162).
Obviously, this argument is not acceptable to orthodox Freudians. None­
theless, Lacan has influenced, in one way or another, a whole generation of
French psychoanalysts, and his controversies with the International Psycho­
analytic Association (IPA) have left a deep scar in the French psychoanalytic
community.2 There is one way in which Lacan is right in thinking that his
approach is closer to orthodox Freudianism than the approaches of contem­
porary psychoanalytic theorists. Lacan, like Freud but unlike the more hu­
manistic post-Freudians, is a reductionist who is searching for a "scientific"
explanation for psychic phenomena that is experience-distant rather than
experience-near. He finds this not in discredited biological or physical theo­
ries but in structural linguistics. In this respect, and despite Lacan's being in­
fluenced to some extent by Sartre's own philosophical predecessors (Hegel,
Husserl, and Heidegger) and probably also by Sartre himself, Lacan is defi­
nitely non-Sartrean. Indeed, in this respect the post-Freudian theorists dis­
cussed in earlier chapters are closer to Sartre than is Lacan. While their sci­
entific positivism is being eroded, Lacan's new synchronic version of
determinism remains hardy and secure.
Yet despite this major difference, Sartre does not simply reject the ideas of
the structuralists in general or of Lacan in particular. Instead he attempts to
confront and incorporate structuralism into existentialism with an accompa­
nying "sea change" comparable to that undergone by Marxism and psycho­
analysis. This is particularly evident in the second book of the Critique of
Dialectical Reason, where Sartre explicitly critiques the ideas of his old friend
and contributor to Les Temps Modernes, Claude Levi-Strauss. But it is also
evident in the whole of the Critique, which seems at least in part intended to
226 Chapter Six

counter the analytico-synchronic perspective of structuralism with the

synthetico-diachronic approach of Sartrean dialectical reason.3
Sartre, as I noted in the preceding chapter, views analytical social science
approaches (including structuralist analysis) as having something to contrib­
ute to the dialectical process. But he maintains that analysis without syn­
thesis deforms and distorts the human individuals and groups which it
attempts to understand. At the same time, however, Sartre respected struc­
turalist technique enough to contemplate using it in the unfinished fourth
volume of his biography of Haubert to analyze Madame Bovary. That he
never got around to completing this analysis perhaps testifies in part to his
inherent distaste for structuralism (see Barnes, 1981, pp. 374ff). In any case,
Sartre never conceived of structuralism as a replacement for an existentialist
approach to biography; at most, it might provide an interesting supplement
to it.
As for Lacan, there is little doubt that his view of the development of the
ego was to some extent influenced by both Hegel and Sartre. Though La-
can's first presentation of his concept of the mirror stage (stade du miroir) an­
tedates both The Transcendence of the Ego and Being and Nothingness, nothing
remains of the paper he delivered at a meeting of the International Psycho­
logical Association in Marienbad in 1936. The first published version, which
dates from a paper delivered to the International Congress of Psychoanalysis
in Zurich in 1949, specifically refers to Sartre's "philosophy of being and
nothingness" (though Lacan does not mention Sartre by name) as providing
something of value in naming the "existential negativity" which lies at the
heart of primary aggressivity; at the same time, Lacan goes on to say that
"existential psychoanalysis" is essentially erroneous in maintaining the "self-
sufficiency of consciousness" (1966, p. 6). Since it is obvious that Lacan
knew Sartre's work at this time, it seems probable that his own view of the
mirror stage was influenced by Sartre's account of the Look. Later, Lacan
would recommend Sartre's account of the conflict of consciousness as essen­
tial reading for future psychoanalysts. Yet despite this praise, Lacan himself,
in the passage just quoted, points to a major divergence between his own
thinking and that of Sartre. Sartre, like Hegel, begins with consciousness as
a cornerstone of his theory; Lacan does not. The result is an antihumanism
of which Lacan is proud but which Sartre rejects. In doing so Sartre rejects
as well the major premises of Lacanian analysis. Hence Sartre's appropria­
tion of Hegel, as we shall see in the next section, is very different from La-
can's.
Indeed, Sartre would contend that Lacan, in dispensing with the con-
 Ego, Mirror, and Aggressivity in Sartre and Lacan 22J

scious subject as the starting point for his theory, gets rid not only of the ego
as controller of the psyche but also of the possibility for authentic action
and genuine relationship. The Lacanian mirror, unlike the Sartrean, is not
the other person as a conscious subject who sees me as an object, but my
own reflected image in a literal mirror which, augmented by the greater mo-
toric wholeness which I see reflected in my human counterpart, gives me the
illusion of a bodily integrity which I do not in fact possess. Such "mirroring"
leads me not to form an image of myself as an object, but to substitute the
other's image in the place of a self. Hence while Sartre's ego is a construct of
reflective consciousness, albeit a construct which is highly influenced by the
reflected appraisals of others, Lacan's ego is an adoption of otherness (my
own illusory mirror image plus the image of my human counterpart) in the
place of a self.
The Lacanian ego, unlike the Sartrean, therefore does not admit of trans­
formation by meta-reflection on the distorting reflected appraisals. Aggres­
sivity, according to this view, arises not out of my attempt to use the Other
who mirrors me to create a self, as in Sartre, but out of the fact that I am
condemned to mimic the desire of the other along with his or her physical
characteristics; it therefore cannot be obviated by the recognition of my own
and the Other's freedom, since there is no freedom in Lacan to recognize.
The natural consequence of Lacan's position, as I shall attempt to show, is
that reality itself vanishes along with the conscious subject; as for the Laca­
nian antidote to this loss of self and world in the "imaginary order," al­
though subsequent submersion of the subject in the "symbolic order" of
language might be said to allow the construction of a kind of reality, it for­
ever divides one from direct experiencing. Obviously, Sartre would not
agree with this characterization of human reality.

Hegelian Themes in Sartre and Lacan

In order to better understand the differences between Sartre's and Lacan's

conceptualizations of the ego and the mirror, we need first to look at what
each writer has made of Hegel's account of the master-slave relationship. Al­
though both Sartre and Lacan originally encountered Hegel in a common
source, Alexandre Kojeve's "left-Hegelian" lectures at the Ecole des Hautes
Etudes between 1933 and 1939,4 and although both object in the final analy­
sis to Hegelian idealism, there is a great divergence between Sartre's and La­
can's appropriations of Hegel—a divergence based on Sartre's acceptance
228 Chapter Six

and Lacan's rejection of HegePs idea that consciousness is the starting point
for these investigations. This difference has led Lacan to diverge from Hegel
in the direction of a kind of physicalization of the conflict Hegel describes,
while it has led Sartre to diverge in the direction of greater emphasis on and
more subtle understanding of the workings of individual consciousnesses
and of intersubjective relations.
Let us begin with Hegel's own views. According to Hegel, it is through the
recognition of the Other (person) that I first become conscious of myself in
the mode that is described as self-consciousness. Before this initial recogni­
tion, consciousness of external objects exists but consciousness of self does
not. In this situation, as Hegel puts it, there is "self-certainty" (subjective re­
ality) but no "truth" (objective reality). I experience, but I do not know my­
self objectively as an experiencing self. For this, I need recognition from the
Other, "fet according to Hegel, my first awareness of the Other is not as a
fully developed other person but as a "sublated" Other. In other words, the
Other is not a real person in his or her own right but is rather "another
self." This other self, however, is a danger to me in that he or she threatens
my self-sufficiency and therefore becomes a source of conflict. Hence at the
same time that I desire the Other's recognition, I desire the Other's death
because I do not wish to depend on the Other's acknowledgment of me.
This initiates a kind of primary aggressivity in which I attempt to prove my
mettle as a subject through a fight to the death based on pure prestige. The
problem with this is that my own death renders me a mere object rather
than a self-consciousness, whereas the death of the Other leaves me without
the objective recognition I need to achieve the truth of self-consciousness.
My next move will be to assume one of two positions: Either I will decide
that my life is of supreme value and refuse to risk death, thereby assuming
the position of the slave, or I will continue to risk death but will enslave the
Other rather than kill him (Hegel, of course, uses the masculine pronoun),
thereby assuming the position of the master. The master's solution is to
make himself the essential consciousness while relegating the slave to the po­
sition of the inessential consciousness. As a subsidiary consciousness, the
slave loses importance as a unique interiority and becomes important only
insofar as he is a consciousness of the master. As for the master, he has
proven his worthiness as a freedom (to himself and the slave) through his
willingness to go beyond mere existence and risk his life in a battle to the
death—a refusal of contingency that the slave was not willing to make.
This solution, however, also proves to be unstable, since an inessential
consciousness cannot very well give an essential consciousness the recogni-
 Ego, Mirror, and Aggressivity in Sartre and Lacan 229

tion it requires.5 And, indeed, the master-slave conflict is only the beginning
of a dialectical movement whose end, reached through various meanderings
of the World Historical Spirit, is Absolute Knowledge. At the point of Ab­
solute Knowledge, temporality, as the moving aspect of a dialectic that al­
ways points beyond itself, has no meaning since self-identity has been
achieved in the form of equivalence to world-identity.
Obviously, neither Sartre nor Lacan will follow Hegel here. Both main­
tain that human reality remains what Hegel refers to as an "unhappy
consciousness"—a consciousness hopelessly divided against itself. And La­
can would even deny that this division is wholly conscious. Nor would ei­
ther Sartre or Lacan agree with Hegel's view of history as a dialectical devel­
opment of which the various moments connote spiritual progress. Rather,
they would follow an interpretation of Hegel which regards his account of
the development of consciousness as psychologically rather than historically
descriptive. At this point, however, differences appear in Sartre's and La-
can's appropriations of Hegel.
Sartre, of course, has provided his own critique of HegePs view of inter-
subjectivity in part three of Being and Nothingness (pp. 235-44). Although
Sartre accepts HegePs ideas that consciousness is the starting point for the
investigation and that the battle for recognition is fundamental, he criticizes
what he believes to be HegePs erroneous identification of self-consciousness
with self-knowledge. Although Sartre believes that HegePs account of the
Other is superior to HusserPs in that for Hegel "the negation which consti­
tutes the Other is direct, internal and reciprocal," whereas HusserPs account
is merely external (BN, p. 238), he nonetheless believes that Hegel, too, fails
to solve the problem of solipsism. According to Sartre, HegePs attempt to ar­
rive at the "I am I" of self-consciousness and self-identity is misplaced since
there can never be an equivalence between the first and the second "I" in
this proposition. Hence the whole attempt to escape the contingency of life,
to cease to be mere objects in nature (which is the meaning of the life and
death struggle in Hegel), is mistaken.
What is at issue, according to Sartre, is not my own or the Other's exist­
ence as body-object but otherness itself. And otherness cannot be overcome
either by the risk of life or by taking otherness into myself. The ego, as we
have seen in previous chapters, is not on the side of the for-itself but on the
side of the in-itself. There is no coincidence between my consciousness for
myself (basic intentionality), my consciousness of myself (reflective con­
sciousness), and my knowledge of the Other's consciousness of me. Thus
Sartre argues that Hegel, by viewing the Other as an object through whom I
230 Chapter Six

apprehend my own objectness, removes the possibility of apprehending the

Other's consciousness of me since I could apprehend this only in an Other
who is a subject and not an Object. It is for this reason that Sartre believes
that the Other as mirror in Hegel "is clouded and no longer reflects any­
thing" (BN, p. 242).
What will be required for the Other's power as a mirror to be restored is
an apodictic certainty of the Other as another consciousness similar to the
certainty I have of my experiencing self. As we saw in earlier chapters, Sartre
finds this apodictic certainty in the experience of the Look. Although the
Look does not overcome the ontological separation which Hegel attempted
to supersede in the direction of the Whole, it does release me from the solip­
sism implied in a perception of the Other only as an Other object. It also
provides a new interpretation of the master-slave conflict. The fight to death
and the desire to enslave or to be enslaved still refer to the attempt to
achieve a sense of self, but this is no longer an empty, abstract identity: for-
itself equals for-itself. Rather, the Other who apprehends me is a particular
Other who does not constitute me in my being (as in Hegel) but who inter­
ests himself or herself concretely and "ontically" in the empirical circum­
stances of my life. It is this Other who pierces me to the heart of my being by
making me aware of myself as a transcendence transcended.
As for the master-slave conflict, it becomes part of the sadomasochistic
circle discussed in Chapter 3. In this context, the attempt to enslave or to be
enslaved in the sense of giving primacy to one's own or the Other's con­
sciousness no longer involves an attempt to recover myself as I am through
the Other but an attempt to recover myself as an object for another con­
sciousness. Thus, although Sartre follows Hegel in insisting on the impor­
tance of the desire for recognition, this recognition serves not the achieve­
ment of a real self-identity but the illusory quest for substantive freedom.
And, as we have seen, transformation of aggressivity in Sartre does not rest
on a Hegelian higher synthesis involving Reason and Spirit and leading
eventually to Absolute Knowledge; rather, it rests on a concrete acceptance
of the otherness of the Other, on a respect for the Other's freedom as such.
Later, Sartre would insist that positive reciprocity, except in a world domi­
nated by scarcity (which, of course, is our world), is the norm of human
relations—remarking that violence derives not from the mere existence of
the Other, as Hegel supposed, but from interiorized scarcity (CDR, p. 815).
Lacan's appropriation of Hegel is quite different from Sartre's. Instead of
beginning with consciousness and the battle for recognition from the Other
as a subject, Lacan begins with the body and the attempt to appropriate the
 Ego, Mirror, and Aggressivity in Sartre and Lacan 231

other person as an image of motoric wholeness. Thus we might say that

whereas Sartre takes a step away from Hegel toward giving more credit to the
recognition of the other person as a subject, Lacan physicalizes Hegel by
making the body and its image the focal point of his inquiries into the early
stages of human development. Although Lacan claims that his own account
of the mirror stage supports "the fundamental Hegelian theme—man's de­
sire is the desire of the other" (Lacan, 1975, p. 146)—his conceptualization of
primitive desire is, in fact, neither Hegelian nor Sartrean. Lacan means liter­
ally that the young child, mistaking himself or herself for the other person,
learns to substitute the other's desire for objects in the world for the child's
own desire; human conflicts result from the inevitable collision of desires
which follows from this proposition.
In order to understand how Lacan is using Hegel, we must therefore first
provide an account of his theory of early development, which includes both
the mirror stage and a state he refers to as "transitivism." Before doing so,
however, we should note that Lacan is less exact than other developmental
theorists in pinpointing the exact ages and sequence of the "stages" of early
development. At times, for example, he seems to say that transitivism fol­
lows the mirror stage, whereas at other times they appear to be concomi­
tant. What does seem clear is that transitivism comes to an end at about two
and a half years of age with the advent of the Oedipus complex. The exact
timing is not so important since, as one critic notes, Lacan's mirror stage
should be regarded more as a "structuring situation" than as an actual stage
which can be exactly placed chronologically (Green in Smith and Kerrigan,
1983, p. 166); I believe the same is true of transitivism. As Lacan puts this
matter, his account of "anteriority is not chronological but logical" (1975,
p. 170).
Part of the reason for this refusal to precisely pinpoint pre-Oedipal reality
appears to be Lacan's insistence that life before the advent of language, be­
fore the individual's insertion into the symbolic order at the time of the res­
olution of the Oedipus complex, can only be reconstructed symbolically—
through the very language which transforms it. Hence, even though the
mirror stage and transitivism provide the underpinnings of the symbolic or­
der, they can never be approached directly, without the intervention of that
order, in the course of analysis.
Despite these reservations about a literal reading of Lacanian developmen­
tal theory, Lacan does give some fairly clear indications about the chronol­
ogy of the mirror stage. It begins at about six months of age and lasts until
the acquisition of language at about eighteen months. Before this,
232 Chapter Six

in the stage that Lacan designates "autoeroticism" the infant had been
aware of objects only in terms of the pleasure or unpleasure they bring. Ob­
viously this is not Freudian autoeroticism, or primary narcissism, since La­
can (1966, p. 181) agrees with the majority of post-Freudian theorists that the
human infant has a rudimentary intersubjectivity which is present almost
from the beginning of life.
The mirror stage begins when the six-month-old baby becomes fascinated
with his or her mirror image, greeting it with a "flutter of jubilant activity"
in which the baby leans forward to hold the image in his or her gaze. The
baby at this time is also fascinated with his or her motorically developed
counterparts—older children or mother—with whom he or she comes to
identify. Lacan believes that this fascination with mirror images and images
of others derives from the "motor incapacity and nursling dependence" of
the infant, which signal the "specific prematurity of birth in man" as com­
pared with other animals—the "foetalization" of the human infant (1966, pp.
2 and 4).
Lacan also thinks that the behavior of the infant before the mirror might
indicate a special case of the need for an imago of one's species, seen in pi­
geons and locusts as well as human beings, to provoke maturation. Such
"mimicry" may be more complex in human beings (the young chimpanzee,
for instance, soon loses interest when it discovers that there is no other
chimp behind the mirror), but it indicates a connection between animal re­
ality and human reality in the imaginary order. The mirror image, according
to Lacan, anticipates a sense of motoric wholeness and integration which
the infant does not yet possess. The consequence is that the primordial "I" is
based on what Lacan refers to as the "Ideal-I," or the ideal ego, as opposed to
the ego ideal, which belongs to the symbolic rather than the imaginary or­
der. Thus, though most commentators believe that Freud uses the terms
"ideal ego" (Idealich) and "ego ideal" (Ichideal) interchangeably and as pre­
cursors to his concept of the superego, Lacan points out that Freud does in
fact use all three terms to make a distinction which is important to Lacan.
The ideal ego, unlike the ego ideal, is based on a "fictional" identification
with an image of wholeness that is intended to negate the human being's
"organic insufficiency in his natural reality" (Lacan, 1966, pp. 2 and 4).
The ego itself will always bear signs of this fictional, imagistic origin. This
is the first alienation, and it refers to an absolutely crucial gap which struc­
tures human reality as temporal—as referring from present insufficiency to
future wholeness:
 Ego, Mirror, and Aggressivity in Sartre and Lacan 233

This development is experienced as a temporal dialectic that decisively

projects the formation of the individual into history. The mirror stage is
a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to
anticipation—and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the
lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends
from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call
orthopaedic—and lastly to the assumption of the armour of an alienat­
ing identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject's entire
mental development. (Lacan, 1966, p. 4)

The result is that at the same time that the ego develops as an imaginary
wholeness, the fragmented body (corps morcele) becomes a staple of dreams,
of children's play, and of certain psychotic episodes; it is also, Lacan notes,
an inspiration for the horrific visions of an artist such as Hieronymus
Bosch. We are apparently never sure of our wholeness since it originally de­
veloped as a mirage. Similarly, the ego is symbolized in dreams by a fortress
or stadium, standing for our need to defend ourselves against fragmenta­
tion.
As for the aggressivity that Hegel believes lies at the heart of human rela­
tions, Lacan, following Charlotte Biihler, finds its origins in the situation he
calls u transitivism. ,, Transitivism refers to the tendency of the young child,
before the middle of the third year, to confuse his or her actions with those
of counterparts. The child will say, "John hit me," when the child hit John,
or "I fell down," when Francis was the one who fell down; indeed, the child
will cry when something has actually happened to the other child. Lacan
tells us that it is in transitivism, at the point of conjunction between the spe­
cular me and the social I, that the "paranoiac alienation of the ego" takes
place. This happens because of the very confusion of self with other and self
with mirror image which lies at the heart of ego formation. This confusion,
which is not to be mistaken for introjection (Lacan regards introjection as a
symbolic rather than an imaginary function), is the source of a "paranoiac"
projection which is absolutely fundamental not because I am dumping my
desires on the other (the usual conception of projection) but because the ego
is at its source formed out of the desire of the other (Lacan, 1966, pp. 1-7).
The basic aggressivity which is introduced in transitivism derives from the
fact that in identifying with the other's body, I come to identify also with his
or her desire. I want what the other wants. In one of his seminars, Lacan
gives the analogy of a little machine which gains its direction from the im­
printing of another little machine. Since each little machine is thereafter in-
234 Chapter Six

tent on the point where the other is going, the inevitable result is a
collision—a collision that is obviously Lacan's version of the Freudian no-
tion of sibling rivalry (Lacan, 1978, pp. 51 and 54). The intensity of such ri­
valry, whether with siblings or playmates, derives from the fact that pre-
Oedipal, or presymbolic, desire "is seen solely in the other": "At first, before
language, desire exists solely in the single plane of the imaginary relation of
the specular stage, projected, alienated in the other. The tension it provokes
is then deprived of an outcome. That is to say that it has no other
outcome—Hegel teaches us this—than the destruction of the other" (Lacan,
1975, p. 170; italics mine).
Thus the subject's desire is confirmed only in an absolute rivalry with the
other, in a projection outside which implies the "impossibility of all human
coexistence" (Lacan, 1975, p. 171). Indeed, Lacan believes that without the
mediation of recognition, which is a function of the entrance into the sym­
bolic order, "every human function would simply exhaust itself in the un­
specified wish for the destruction of the other as such" (1975, p. 171). Tran-
sitivism is therefore a "drama of primordial jealousy" (Lacan, 1966, p. 5) that
points to the Hegelian theme of desire for the death of the other.
Lacan gives as an example of this primary aggressivity a little girl scarcely
old enough to walk who hits her playmate from next door (around whom
she has constructed her first identifications) over the head with a good-sized
stone. Triumphantly and without the slightest trace of guilt, she announces
her deed: "Me break Francis head." In doing so, Lacan tells us, she "displays
the most fundamental structure of the human being on the imaginary
plane—to destroy the person who is the site of alienation" (1975, p. 172). The
aggressivity which characterizes transitivism does not, of course, disappear
from adult human relations. It appears in such phenomena as competitive­
ness, war, and the linking of aggression with "strength" in Western thought
(Lacan, 1966, p. 25). Transitivism also survives, Lacan tells us, in the familiar
phenomenon of the double as it appears in literary productions and in
dreams.
Lacan also links the early confusion of self with other to pre-Oedipal sexu­
ality. In identifying with the desire of his or her mother, Lacan tells us, the
pre-Oedipal child comes to identify with the all-fulfilling object of the moth­
er's desire—the phallus which the mother lacks. This is neither the real pe­
nis nor the symbolic phallus which is (as we shall see in the next chapter)
the primal "signifier"; rather, it is the "imaginary" phallus. At first believing
that the mother has this imaginary phallus, the child a little later, upon
comprehending her lack and her desire, wishes to impersonate it—a situa-
 Ego, Mirror, and Aggressivity in Sartre and Lacan 235

tion which is Lacan's refashioning of Freud's idea that the child, in the
mother's unconscious, stands for the penis of which she has been deprived.
It is also Lacan's rendition of the Hegelian desire for recognition. In the next
stage of development, this identification is overcome by the appearance of
the father (who stands between the child and the mother) and by the entry
of the child into the symbolic-linguistic order which this precipitates. At
this time, Lacan believes, the imaginary phallus is superseded by the sym­
bolic phallus—the "Desire-of-the-mother" by the "Name-of-the-father."
Obviously, though Lacan repeatedly cites Hegel's insights into the origins
of human aggressivity and the nature of desire as being similar to his own,
Lacan's is a strange Hegelianism. This is so because, as I have said, it is a He-
gelianism that denies the primacy of consciousness. Hence Lacan does not
really conceive of transitivism as the battle for pure prestige envisioned by
Hegel (though Lacan sometimes implies this correlation), but rather as a
battle over objects which each child, mimicking the desire of his or her
counterpart, grasps as his or her own. Indeed, the heart of transitivism can
be seen in Lacan's parable of the little machines which imprint each other
rather than in a Hegelian struggle for objective awareness of self. Even La-
can's version of the desire for recognition from the primordial object in­
volves not recognition as a person, but recognition as the imaginary
phallus—as that which the mother lacks rather than as that which I am.
In other words, for Lacan the meaning of transitivism and the identifica­
tion with the imaginary phallus is not the attempt to incorporate otherness
into the self as a means to objective truth (Hegel) or substantive freedom
(Sartre). It is the adoption of otherness in the place of a self. I do not dis­
cover myself either as a subject or as an object in the (Hegelian) Other;
rather, I lose myself (insofar as one can be conceived to have a self in a phi­
losophy that denies the primacy of consciousness) in the (Lacanian) other.
As for the transcendence of aggressivity (which I consider in more detail
in the next chapter), Lacan's view is again pseudo-Hegelian rather than gen­
uinely Hegelian. It is certainly not Sartrean. Lacan seems to follow Hegel in
developing an idea of "pacification" through universalization—through a
movement into the world of "law and command" that is associated with lan­
guage and culture (see Hegel, 1807, pp. 294-363). Lacan notes, in a passage
similar to certain passages in Hegel linking language with law and author­
ity,6 that "the dialectic of the ego and the other is transcended, is placed on
a higher plane, in relation to the other, solely through the function of lan­
guage, in so far as it is more or less identical, and at all events fundamentally
236 Chapter Six

linked with what we should call rule, or better still, the law" (1975, pp. 156-
57)-
Yet because there is no original consciousness in Lacan, the "I" is not a
point from which Absolute Knowledge in the Hegelian sense can develop; it
is instead a "subject" constantly subverted by the unconscious linguistic or­
der which creates it. And though the laws of the linguistic unconscious
(which, as we shall see, are the "laws" of metaphor and metonymy) indicate
a kind of rationality, this rationality is the product of neither the individual
consciousness (Sartre) nor of the World Historical Spirit realizing itself in ex­
istence (Hegel). As Lacan is fond of saying, "There is no Other of the
Other." There is nothing behind the static linguistic order which subverts
human beings to its structures.

Ego, Mirror, and Intersubjectivity in Sartre and Lacan

Lacan, then, is not a Hegelian idealist. Neither, however, is he a Sartrean ex­

istentialist. Lacan's qualified praise for Sartre's phenomenological accounts
of the Look and the conflict of consciousnesses does not imply an accept­
ance of Sartre's ontology. The truth is that where Sartre rejects Hegelian
idealism in the direction of an untranscendable individual consciousness
which alone is responsible for creating value and which in the course of do­
ing so posits a self as an object (ego) which is always divided from the tran­
scendent consciousness which posits it, Lacan rejects Hegelian idealism in
favor of a physicalist view of human conflicts transcended by a static linguis­
tic structure out of which the "I" as the successor of the specular ego
emerges, 'fet despite this fundamental difference, it is not surprising (consid­
ering the fact that Hegel provides a common source and that Lacan had
read Sartre) to find that Lacan's account of the ego and mirroring is not
completely at odds with Sartre's. This is, however, a similarity with over­
shadowing differences.
We have seen, for example, that Lacan follows Sartre in describing human
reality as a temporalization which attempts to move from present insuffi­
ciency to future wholeness. Indeed, Lacan goes so far as to suggest that anal­
ysis works "from the future to the past" because even though the analyst
may think that he or she is "looking for the patient's past in a dustbin," it is
actually "a function of the fact that the patient has a future that you can
move in the regressive sense" (1975, p. 157). And even though Sartre would
certainly agree with this statement, he would nonetheless disagree with La-
 Ego, Mirror, and Aggressivity in Sartre and Lacan 237

carts attempt to link future-directedness to animal ethology (or, as we shall

see later, with the movement of language) and with Lacan's view that the
lack inherent in desire refers initially to a desire for motoric development
and an image of physical integrity rather than to a desire for substantive
freedom.
Still, Sartre would agree with Lacan's conceptualization of the ego as an
object which is more often an object of misunderstanding (meconnaissance)
than of understanding. Indeed, Lacan echoes Sartre when he compares the
human subject to a paralytic who has been hypnotized by his or her image
in a mirror (the ego); Sartre had similarly described the ego as a "false repre­
sentation of itself" with which consciousness has "hypnotized itself" (La­
can, 1978, p. 50; TE, p. 101). The difference, of course, is that Sartre's subject
is paralyzed by the image of a substantive self which the ego represents,
whereas Lacan's paralytic is hypnotized by the substitution for a self of its
own mirror image or the image of its counterpart. Nonetheless, both theo­
rists would agree that the ego represents a kind of rigidity which it is the task
of psychoanalysis to call into question.
For this reason, both would also agree that contemporary psychoanalytic
theorists are mistaken in their attempts to build ego structure in the psyche
rather than to confront the illusory nature of the ego. Lacan, in fact, repeat­
edly faults the ego psychologists and British object relations theorists on this
score, insisting that such attempts at structure building in the psyche are ex­
amples of an unacceptable objectification and manipulation of the analy-
sand on the part of the analyst. And he further implies that the ideal ana­
lyst would be egoless (Lacan, 1978, p. 246), though he agrees with Sartre on
the practical necessity for an individual to develop an ego. Sartre has simi­
larly suggested on occasion that the annihilation of the ego might be a desir­
able goal. On the other hand, Sartre's position is different from Lacan's in
that the ego as an object for reflective consciousness (though contaminated
with the voices of others) is quite different from the ego as a fundamental ali­
enation in which the desire of the other takes the place of a self. For this rea­
son, it is possible from a Sartrean perspective to conceive of a transforma­
tion of the ego that is not possible from a Lacanian perspective.
As for the Look and the conflict of consciousnesses, Lacan recommends
Sartre's Being and Nothingness as "essential reading for an analyst" because it
so brilliantly captures "the entire phenomenology of shame, of modesty, of
prestige, of the specific fear engendered by the gaze" (1975, p. 215). Yet on
closer inspection, one discovers that Lacan believes that Sartre is mistaken
about the origins of the Look or the "gaze" (as Lacan scholars usually trans-
238 Chapter Six

late le regard) in one's human counterpart. In support of this idea that the
gaze, though linked to my human counterpart, really points elsewhere, La-
can cites Sartre's own admission that as soon as I turn to look at the Look, it
disappears; instead, all I see is eyes. Also, Lacan notes, Sartre himself admits
that I apprehend the Look in places other than real persons: I experience
the Look in the window behind which I suspect a person lurks, in the sound
of rustling leaves, or in the footsteps in a corridor at the end of which I am
acting the voyeur (Lacan, 1975) PP- 2 I 5 a n d 220,1973) PP- 85-85). Sartre, of
course, would reply that these experiences gain their significance from the
Other's Look, which is already a part of my intersubjective repertoire. As
for the fact that the Look disappears when I turn to look at the Other's eyes,
this happens because in so turning I assume the position of a subject con­
fronting an Other as object.
Lacan, on the other hand, presents us with suppositions about the origins
of the gaze which underscore his profound differences with Sartre—
differences which in the end lead Lacan to adopt a position that (despite La-
can's repeated insistence on the significance of inter subjectivity) reintro-
duces the problem of solipsism. Lacan believes that the gaze does not really
originate in my human counterpart (the Lacanian—lower case—"other"),
but rather in the linguistic unconscious—the great Other (le grand Autre), to
be written hereafter as the "Other(A)" to distinguish it from the other per­
son, the Sartrean "Other" and the Lacanian "other." Although the mirror
stage and transitivism remain backdrops for understanding the significance
of the gaze, its real significance lies in the interaction of the "I" with the lin­
guistic unconscious.
Yet the situation, as is often the case with Lacan, is not quite this simple.
This is so because Lacan believes that the linguistic unconscious itself refers
to one's original relations with others. Indeed, the linguistic unconscious,
according to Lacan, comes into existence with the repression of the mirror
stage and the primal attachment to the mother at the time of the entry of
the symbolic father into the child's life—leading to a lifelong linking of the
desire for recognition with other people. As Lacan scholar Ellie Ragland-
Sullivan notes,

Mirror-stage infants act in such a way as to attract the attention of the

Real other [mother], whose parole [speech] they "introject" and subse­
quently desire qua Other (A). This drama is reenacted throughout life
via substitutive others whose recognition is sought. . . . When the mir-
 Ego, Mirror, and Aggressivity in Sartre and Lacan 239

ror stage ends, the mother is repressed as a record of primordial, corpo­

ral, identificatory meaning. (1986, p. j6)

The mother reappears, then, as the subjective experience of the gaze of some
imaginary other pointing to the unconscious origins of the conscious sub­
ject. The conflict is no longer a conflict of consciousnesses but a conflict be­
tween the ego and the Other(A) via the path of others. In this way, Lacan
adds a third term to Sartre's subject-object conflict, transforming (or de­
forming, depending on one's position) it entirely.
Thus according to Lacan, although human conflicts may appear on the
horizon of the experience of the gaze, their actual origin is not my desire to
co-opt the Other as a mirror for me as an object (as in Sartre) but my desire
to mimic the other and thereby gain a self. And though Lacan views as irref­
utable Sartre's idea that love is at bottom the desire to be loved (1975,
p. 2l6), he nonetheless rejects Sartre's fundamental ontology. At the same
time, this rejection means that Lacan's and Sartre's views of the "fundamen­
tally narcissistic structure of love" (or, we might add, the fundamentally nar­
cissistic structure of inauthentic love, according to Sartre's later formula­
tions) are on closer inspection quite different. When Lacan says that
narcissistic love "is essentially an attempt to capture the other in oneself, in
oneself as an object" (1975, p. 276), he is practically quoting Sartre on the
masochistic position. What he means, however, is that one loves in the
other person "one's own ego [which, we remember, is modeled on the mir­
ror reflection and the counterpart and hence is in no way an actual reflec­
tion of self as subject or object] made real on the imaginary level" (Lacan,
1975, p. 142). In other words, Lacan conceives of both the self and the other
as objects, not subjects. According to this conceptualization, there is no
subject-object alternation and no possibility for transformation through
coming to respect one's own and the Other's freedom.
Such transformation as there is results from the entry of the lover into the
symbolic order. The "active gift of love," as distinguished from narcissistic
love, involves the bestowal of a symbolic promise in words such as these:
UT
)fou are my husband, you are my wife" (Lacan, 1975, pp. 216-17). Yet
though Lacan insists that love in the symbolic order moves beyond "imagi­
nary captation" (a neologism indicating, one presumes, capture, captivation,
bestowal of headship) toward the "being of the loved object, toward his par­
ticularity" (1975), p. 142), one cannot help wondering how the bestowal of
roles leads to an appreciation of particularity. In any case, Lacan believes
that despite this symbolic overlay, love at the most profound level involves a
240 Chapter Six

disturbance in the symbolic order made possible by the origins of affectivity

in the imaginary order. When you are in love, Lacan maintains, you are
"mad" because love involves a "veritable subduction of the symbolic, a sort
of annihilation, of perturbation of the function of the ego ideal"—which, as
we remember, is distinguished from the imaginary ideal ego by its participa­
tion in the symbolic order. Love "opens the door . . . to perfection"—and
perfection, of course, is the longing for an imaginary wholeness (Lacan,
1975, p. 142). Hence, the captation which we wish our beloved to experience
with respect to us, this desire which we have to become "for the other that
in which his freedom is alienated" (the Sartrean "object limit of our free­
dom"), is not motivated by a desire for substantive freedom (Lacan, 1975,
p. 217). Rather, it is motivated by a love of self which is not self-love at all
but a love for the image of wholeness by means of which the Other origi­
nally captured what might have been a self.
Actually, if Lacan is correct in his conception of the origins of the gaze
and of human conflicts, then the problem of solipsism remains unanswered
and the intersubjectivity on which Lacan repeatedly insists is meaningless.
A question asked by one of Lacan's students in a seminar on the gaze points
to this difficulty. Lacan has just remarked that it is the dialectic of desire as
related to the Other(A) which explains why the gaze disorganizes the field of
perception when a student remarks, "But I don't understand how others will
reappear in your discourse." Lacan's seemingly flippant reply is, "Look, the
main thing is that I don't come a cropper!" (1973, p. 89). The problem, I
think, is that others as other subjects or consciousnesses do not appear any­
where in Lacan's work. But perhaps this is only natural in a psychological
metatheory which views the ego, as Ragland-Sullivan notes, as "an orga­
nized object, which functions as a subject"—an object which is always veri­
fying and recomposing itself "in relation to objects 'out there' [who also
think they are subjects]" (1986, p. 96, brackets in original). In other words,
in place of Sartre's subject-object alternation, Lacan substitutes a relation­
ship of objects in which each is constantly chasing its own mirage in the
other.

The Sartrean Ego: Possibilities for Transformation

The implications of a Lacanian perspective on the ego and intersubjectivity

for psychotherapy are not, I believe, optimistic in the same way that a
Sartrean perspective may ultimately be said to lead to a kind of tough opti-
 Ego, Mirror, and Aggressivity in Sartre and Lacan 241

mism. Clearly, Lacan's view of human relations in no way allows a position

of authenticity or genuine intimacy since consciousness (one's own and the
other's) is rejected as a starting point and since mimicry of and rivalry with
the other is seen to be fundamental As for the Lacanian ego, since it is
purely and simply a mirage, it cannot admit of purification. Even if the Laca­
nian analyst succeeds in undermining the ego by making the analysand
aware of its specular origins, there is no spontaneity of consciousness that
can thereby be released. In Sartre, on the other hand, one can conceive of a
kind of purification of the ego effected by the same radical conversion to a
philosophy of freedom which allows for authentic relations with others. Al­
though the early Sartre primarily emphasizes the negative aspects of the ego,
there is, as Hazel Barnes notes, a positive side to the Sartrean ego.7 There are
also, as Sartre himself recognizes in the Flaubert biography, positive as well
as negative possibilities for ego development—possibilities which are not
present in a Lacanian perspective on the ego.
The question Barnes addresses is this: What would an authentic relation­
ship with one's own ego be like? In other words, what kind of transforma­
tion would the purifying reflection effect on this relationship? If the ego does
not simply disappear, which seems unlikely, it would have to be different
from the ego of the person in bad faith. Obviously, the answer must be im­
plicit in Sartre's description of bad faith with its implications about the na­
ture of good faith. Just as authentic love involves giving up the idea of using
the other person to create substantive freedom, so an authentic relationship
with one's own ego must involve giving up the ego as a means to an inau-
thentic substantialization of the self. We know Sartre's own description of
the ego as it is usually lived by the person in bad faith: This person reverses
the order of the ego's formation, assuming an underlying substantive ego
which generates psychic states and qualities which in turn determine one's
behavior. The ego is thereby assumed to be a cause, or source, rather than an
effect, or product. The person relating to his or her ego in this way is guilty
of the form of bad faith which denies freedom in favor of facticity. As Barnes
points out, however, this cannot mean that a person living in good faith has
no ego. There is, after all, a second form of bad faith, the denial of facticity,
and surely the person aspiring to an "egoless" state would be guilty of this
form of inauthenticity.
Barnes suggests that an authentic relationship with one's own ego would
involve recognizing that the ego is an object—that its "I" is the narrator
(consciousness, of course, is the author) of a story which one tells oneself
about oneself and which one must continually modify and revise as one
242 Chapter Six

modifies and changes one's relationship with the past in the direction of the
future. At the same time, one would take responsibility for the ego one has
created/is creating as the principal of one's personal narrative. Obviously,
the kind of story one tells oneself about oneself has a real effect—similar, as
Barnes notes, to the real effects produced by the "social imaginary" of liter­
ary works which Sartre discusses in the Flaubert biography. Telling myself a
story in which the ego is substantive support for a set of qualities and states
will have a very different effect than telling myself a story in which the ego is
the objective unity of qualities and states which I realize I have set up as re­
flections of free conscious choices. In the second situation, I may still speak
of "love" and "hate," for instance, but I will understand that it is free con­
sciousness rather than a substantialized ego which supports these states. I
may at any moment change, and as I change I must change the narrative
unity which is my ego.
This is very different, however, from becoming egoless or failing to develop
an ego. If I fail to develop an ego, as Barnes notes, the result might be at best
a person who is a mere weather vane, moving impulsively in the wind with
each external stimulus but certainly not living responsibly or meaningfully.
At worst, the result might be psychosis, and Barnes gives as an example
R. D. Laing's discussion of the case of Julie, whom Laing describes as a "cha­
otic nonentity" (Laing, 1959a, pp. 178-205). Julie, it seems, is an example in
the extreme of the kind of borrowed identity which Lacan describes as nor­
mative for ego development. She is literally a precipitate of all past object
identifications, speaking now in the voice of one family member and now in
the voice of another—with an occasional fleeting sense of being a unified
person. From a Sartrean perspective, Julie's "ego"—or rather her lack of ego
development—might be viewed as an aberration based on her failure to de­
velop a coherent "story line" which would allow her a sense of self. Julie's as­
sociative word salad, which from a Lacanian perspective might indicate a
failure of inclusion in the symbolic order, in fact testifies to this dilemma.
She says that she is a "tolled bell," which Laing interprets to mean "told
belle." She also calls herself "Mrs. Taylor," meaning that she is "tailor-
made," a "tailored maid," or "made, fed, clothed, and tailored" but denied
genuine autonomy (1959a, pp. 187 and 191). On entering the hospital, Julie
told the in-take psychiatrist that she was not a real person but that she was
trying to become a person (Laing, 1959, p. 178).
Laing, on questioning Julie's mother, discovered that Julie had been a per­
fectly obedient child, even asking her mother to tell her everything she must
do, until the age of fourteen when her mother began to encourage her to be
 Ego, Mirror, and Aggressivity in Sartre and Lacan 243

more autonomous, to date, and to go to parties. At this point, Julie accused

her mother of not having wanted her, of refusing to let her be a person, of
keeping her from breathing, and of smothering her. We can see from Laing's
interviews with the mother why Julie might have felt this way. According to
Julie's mother, Julie, unlike her older sister, had been a "good" baby—that is,
undemanding and never "a trouble" (Laing, 1959a, pp. 182-83). She never
cried for her feeds, was weaned without difficulty, was toilet trained at fif­
teen months, and generally did as she was told. Laing comments that
whether the mother's memory is accurate or not, what is significant is that
she praises in her child exactly those things that might connote an "inner
deadness" (Laing, 1959a, p. 183).
Julie's mother, however, does not understand her daughter's difficulties.
After all, Julie was her favorite child, the one for whom she "did every­
thing"—meaning, apparently, that Julie's mother tried to live Julie's life for
her. In doing so, she stifled all impulses toward autonomy. A n incident
which Julie's mother recounted concerning her daughter at about the time
of weaning gives some insight into how this may have happened. At this
time, Julie had tried to play a "throwing-away" game with her mother simi­
lar to the fort-da game described by Freud with respect to his grandson. The
difference from the usual version of this infantile game was that Julie's
mother inverted the roles, which she had played in the usual way with Ju­
lie's sister. "I made sure that she [Julie] was not going to play that game with
me," she tells Laing. "I threw things away and she brought them to me"—as
soon as she could crawl (Laing, 1959a, p. 185). Julie's mother also believed
that the separation anxiety which Julie showed until the age of three by "go­
ing crazy" if her mother was out of her sight signaled how much her daugh­
ter loved her (Laing, 1959a, p. 186).
Julie, as Laing describes her, apparently never developed autonomy, a will
of her own, a sense of being the source of her own actions. Instead, she was,
according to her mother, a child who always did as she was told. When she
was "told" to be more autonomous as a young teenager, this proved to be a
contradiction she could not sustain. The possibility for praxis had been too
severely limited too early. Hence the overt trouble began when Julie's
mother, no longer satisfied with the nonentity she had created, began "to
order this shadow to act as though it were a person" (Laing, 1959a, p. 193)—a
task of which Julie was incapable. When, at age seventeen, Julie became psy­
chotic, she accused her mother of having murdered a child wearing Julie's
clothes.
In a sense, of course, Julie was right. Her autonomous self, which was
244 Chapter Six

linked to her chance to develop a coherent ego, had been murdered. Accord-
ing to this view, the fragments of personalities who occupied her body—
whom Laing came to recognize as the "bad mother," the "good sister," and
the "compliant child"—were not remnants of earliest ego identifications in
the Lacanian sense, but rather signs of a radical failure to be in the existen­
tialist sense of creating a self out there in the world. Tragically, Laing occa­
sionally encountered the embryonic stirrings of a person who seemed to be
Julie herself—but this was always ruthlessly squashed by the internalized
voices of others.
Another manifestation of difficulties in ego development is the position of
the neurotic, who does not (like Julie) fail to develop a coherent ego but
whose ego is a false representation of the self based on the views of others.
Sartre himself presents us with an extreme example of neurotic ego develop­
ment in the Flaubert biography8—an example which has implications for a
Sartrean perspective on "normal" ego development as well. Sartre maintains
that Flaubert's basically passive "constitution," deriving, as we have seen,
from the failure of his mother in her dutiful handling of him as an object to
evoke his active participation as a subject, leads to the formation of an ego
which "scarcely belongs to him" in any real sense (FI, 1:165).
Flaubert's ego, Sartre tells us, is a matter of "belief" rather than of "truth,"
since truth emerges out of the engagement of a praxis in its project through
the mediation of (humanized) things of which Flaubert is incapable. Since
Flaubert is incapable of the activity that is required for verification, he sim­
ply accepts as truth what is "affirmed by others and etched into [him] by
them" (FI, 1:164). And since his relationship with his own ego as a psychic
object is similar to his relationship to external objects and to language
(which, as we shall see, he regards as the possession of the grown-ups with
only an incidental and external relationship to himself), Flaubert has no
means for verifying the opinions of others on the basis of which he has
formed his ego. He may try to playact the feelings and sentiments attributed
to him, but he has no means of verifying them in his being. He therefore
"limits himself to supporting passively the synthesis effected by the Other"
(FI, 1:156). The result is that he never develops an authentic ego.
Sartre understands that the reader of The Transcendence of the Ego is likely
to object at this point by noting that "the ego in everyone is a determina­
tion of the psyche and that it is entirely conditioned by others, full of alien
determinations which we can grasp only in their abstract significance but
cannot see because they only appear to others" (FI, I:l6jn). This is so, of
course, because the qualities that describe me are names provided by the
 Ego, Mirror, and Aggressivity in Sartre and Lacan 245

Other. It is from the viewpoint of the Other that I am "spiritual or vulgar,

intelligent or dull, open or closed." But even though this is true, it is also
true that my ego "is, in form at least, the pure correlative of. . . reflective ip-
seity" (FI, I:l6jn). That is, the ego is my turning on myself to reflect on what
I am—however much this reflection may also be influenced or contaminated
by the views of others or however much I may be said to discover and take
an interest in the act of reflecting because of the presence of the Other.
Thus in reality there are always two parts to the Sartrean ego—the "reflec­
tive ipseity" which is its basic structure, and the judgments of others (espe­
cially the original others) which figure in its construction. When I become
aware of these judgments, as Sartre points out, I leave the reflective terrain
and attempt to consider them through the Other's eyes; I then try to relate
the Other's observations to my own acts or gestures. In "normal" develop­
ment, I either accept or reject the Other's determinations; in either case, I
use them "to reshape the object-unity of my reflective experience, the ego."
The ego thereby becomes not only a reflection but a promise: I take a vow to
be this kind of person, to realize these qualities in myself. And this activity
allows my ego as a psychic object to become "a sector of knowledge and
truth"—which also means, of course, that it can be a "sector of non-
knowledge, error, and bad faith" (FI, I:l68n). At any rate, it is not merely a
sector of "belief" which has no real relationship to my experiencing self, as is
the case with the false ego of Flaubert.
The neurotic ego of Flaubert, and even the psychotically fragmented ego
of Julie, on the other hand, appear very close to the Lacanian norm. Sartre
tells us that since Flaubert is passive, since he has not developed an active re­
lationship with external objects, other people, language, or his own ego, his
ego "is not only a psychic object but an external and other object introduced
into the subjectivity from without." We might, Sartre goes on to say, even
describe Flaubert's self as "allogenous"—as born solely of otherness (FI,
I:l68n). Lacan, of course, proposes that the normal ego is allogenous in the
sense of being a mere mimicry of the other. This is so because for Lacan
there is no "reflective ipseity" at the base of ego formation; the Lacanian ego
is purely and simply other in its entirety.
From a Lacanian perspective, then, Flaubert and even Laing's Julie with
her bits and pieces of others which serve the place of an ego merely demon­
strate more dramatically than most of us the essential otherness of the ego.
How Lacan would go about working therapeutically with their situations, I
am not sure—except to say that he would probably view Julie's psychosis as
a failure to enter the symbolic order. In any case, it is certainly clear that La-
246 Chapter Six

can's characterization of the ego as "other" to the core makes impossible a

therapeutic transformation such as the one I have described as possible from
a Sartrean perspective. But perhaps this is not surprising in a metatheorist
who rejects the primacy of consciousness, as Lacan does.

Image, Reality, and "Normality" in Sartre and Lacan

Actually, I think the heart of this dilemma concerning the Lacanian ego can
be found in Lacan's insistence that the ego belongs fundamentally to the
"imaginary" order and therefore is inaccessible to the test of "truth" in the
Sartrean sense. Lacan's imaginary order, I have noted, refers to the specular
origins of the ego. It is to be distinguished from the symbolic order of lan­
guage and culture, which is superimposed upon it, and from the order of the
"real"—to which Lacan gives an odd definition which is significant for our
discussion. Lacan frequently refers to the real as the "impossible" (1973,
p. 167). It is, he says, "the accident, the noise, the small element of reality,
which is evidence that we are not dreaming" (l973> P- 60).
At other times, Lacan defines the real as "plenitude," observing that there
is "no absence in the real" (1978, p. 313). Here and also when he insists that
the world in which we live is always a "humanized, symbolised world, the
work of transcendence introduced by the symbolic into primitive reality"
(1975, p. 87), Lacan sounds quite Sartrean. But then we find that Lacan
identifies the real with traumas and with hallucinations (1975, p. 66); in­
deed, Lacan insists that the real is "that which is unassimilable," not in the
Sartrean sense of a "transphenomenality of being" but absolutely unassimi­
lable (1973, p. 49). Furthermore, Lacan does not conceive of a consciousness
that infuses the world with symbols as a manifestation of its own transcen­
dence (as Sartre does); rather, he believes that symbols produce the person—
that the person is the plaything of the symbolic order.
In a situation like this, the ego obviously is not going to admit of transfor­
mation through a Sartrean return to the "truth" (reality) of one's own expe­
rience since the problem is not inauthenticity in the Sartrean sense but the
nature of the human condition as fundamentally illusory. Sartre, of course,
though he would agree with the idea that we never encounter pure Being-in-
itself without the addition of human significance and meaning, would not
agree with Lacan's closing off of human experience from world experience.
Indeed, he would characterize such a closing off as a neurotic choice of the
imaginary in the Sartrean sense—a choice with which Sartre credits
 Ego, Mirror, and Aggressivity in Sartre and Lacan 247

Flaubert. Furthermore, Sartre would object to Lacan's definition of the

imaginary order as originating in the "image" I form of myself in the mirror
and the "image" of the Other's greater maturational wholeness with which I
identify since this is to place the image as a content within consciousness.
O n the other hand, Lacan's assertion that I "imagine" myself to be the
mirror image or the other who I am not would fall within Sartre's definition
of the imaginary as a nihilation of both the real self and the real world. Af­
ter all, I can enter an unreal world "only by unrealizing myself in it" (PI,
p. 188). There is, of course, no reason why one might not create this unreal
self out of a fantasy involving the mirror. Sartre, in the Flaubert biography,
conceives of a scene in which Flaubert, viewing himself in the mirror in an
erotic state, fantasizes that he sees there not a real man but an imaginary
woman. However, Sartre would not define the "normal" ego as resting on a
substitution of the imaginary for the real, as Lacan does. He would instead
see it as some kind of healthy interaction between imaginative conscious­
ness and reality-oriented consciousness. But before we can understand these
differences fully, we must take a look at Sartre's theory of the imagination.
In The Psychology of Imagination, Sartre defines an image as "an act which
envisions an absent or non-existent object as a body, by means of a physical
or mental content which is present only as an ' analogical representative' of
the object envisioned" (p. 26). The analagon, or analogue, is, briefly speak­
ing, some material on which I hang the unreal image produced by the act of
imagining. The analogue can be a photograph or portrait, brush or pen
strokes on a piece of paper, a piece of carved marble, sounds, the human
body in the act of producing an impersonation of a real or imagined person,
the flame, cloud, or rock formations which serve as analogues for faces or
other objects, or the emotions, movements, and words on which mental im­
ages are hung. It can even be the mirror image in which Sartre suggests that
Flaubert, in his masturbatory fantasies, imagines that the hands of a man
caress the imaginary body of a woman. In all of these cases, we animate a
certain material (the analogue) "in order to turn it into a representation of an
absent or of a non-existent object" (PI, p. 72). One wonders if Sartre would
consider the rapid eye movements (REMs) discovered by recent sleep re­
searchers to be analogues for the dreams that seem to accompany so-called
REM sleep.
The important thing is that Sartre views the act of imagining as radically
different from the act of perceiving in that the latter is a mode of conscious­
ness directed toward what is (the real), whereas the latter is a mode of con­
sciousness directed toward what is not (the imaginary). Imagining involves a
248 Chapter Six

double negation—first of the real perceptual world from which I withdraw

and then of the image which does not belong to it. We might surmise from
The Psychology of Imagination and other writings that a healthy relationship
with the imaginary for Sartre is one in which the individual stays anchored
in the real while retaining the capacity to go beyond the real which is char­
acteristic of the imagination. And, indeed, it is this idea of a balance be­
tween the imaginary and the real and the attendant idea that one can devi­
ate in one direction or another, overemphasizing either the imaginary or the
real, which solves an apparent paradox in The Psychology of Imagination.
Although throughout most of The Psychology of Imagination, Sartre insists
on the magical, impoverished character of the imagination as opposed to
perception, toward the end of the book he surprises the reader by noting
that without this capacity to imagine—to create the unreal—human beings
would be totally engulfed in the real. Indeed, Sartre identifies this capacity
to imagine with the very nihilating power of consciousness itself, stating
that "every concrete and real situation of consciousness in the world is big
with imagination in as much as it always presents itself as a withdrawing
from the real" (PI, p. 270); hence it "is because he is transcendentally free
that man can imagine" (PI, p. 271). A consciousness which does not imagine
would be a consciousness "completely engulfed in the existant and without
the possibility of grasping anything but the existant" (PI, pp. 271-72). And
though this is impossible, Sartre asserts that it is the person who avoids
imagining, the person who "is crushed in the world, run through by the
real, who is closest to the thing" (PI, p. 272). This would be, of course, the
person who engages in the form of bad faith which relies on an overempha­
sis on facticity—the person who attempts to be absorbed by the "serious
world." Such a person misses even the significance of the real since the
"imaginary . . . represents at each moment the implicit meaning of the real"
(PI, p. 272).
O n the other hand, Sartre certainly does not endorse a preference for the
imaginary over the real. To engage in such a preference, one presumes,
would be to embrace the second form of bad faith: overemphasis on tran­
scendence. The most extreme example of this is the psychotic, who attempts
to negate the real world entirely—presumably because of the intolerable pain
it has caused. Of course, the psychotic is no doubt doing this because the so-
called real or serious world is too weighty—because it offers no real paths to
self-realization. In this sense, such a flight could be considered an overem­
phasis on facticity as well, since one believes that one cannot alter the intol­
erable constraints of the real. It is for this reason that Sartre tells us that the
 Ego, Mirror, and Aggressivity in Sartre and Lacan 249

schizophrenic allows himself or herself to become "imprisoned" in the imag­

inary, thereby experiencing it as a trap for his or her freedom.
The hallucinatory act itself, Sartre continues, is "a pure event that ap­
pears suddenly to the patient while his perception disappears" (PI, p. 216).
This interpretation of hallucinations (with which Sartre was personally fa­
miliar from a medical experiment with mescaline given him by his friend
Daniel Lagache when he was a psychiatric intern9) correlates with the infor­
mation given me in two interviews with my friend Joanne Greenberg in
which I questioned her about the hallucinatory experiences which are fic­
tionalized in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1964):

Cannon: What do you mean by seeing a hallucination? Do you see

one in the same way that you see me?
Greenberg: It isn't really seeing in that sense. It's more being aware. YDU
see but you don't see—rats out of the corner of the eye.
When you're in that state, the world isn't real—it's X-ed out.
The hallucination is a metaphor for some inexpressible an­
guish. It says, "I am adrift. I am bereft. I am somebody for
whom gravity and the laws of the universe do not apply."10

In this same interview, Greenberg confirms Sartre's impression that the psy­
chotic person in some way recognizes the difference between hallucinations
and perceptions and that the very meaning of the hallucinations is an es­
cape from the perceptual world.
Greenberg also agrees with Sartre that the "poverty of the hallucinatory
material" derives from the fact that one has cut off the "real" world and
hence cannot enrich oneself with it. Perhaps this is so, Sartre says, because
"the unreal always receives and never gives" (PI, p. 198). Because I can only
find there what I have put there, the pure imaginary lacks "the depth and
richness" of the real (PI, p. 199). Or, as Sartre says in another place,

It is . . . a mistake to look upon the world of the schizophrenic as a tor­

rent of images possessing a richness and a glitter, which compensates
for the monotony of the real: it is a poor and meticulous world, in
which the same scenes keep on recurring to the last detail, accompa­
nied by the same ceremonial where everything is regulated in advance,
foreseen; where, above all, nothing can escape, resist or surprise. In
250 Chapter Six

brief, if the schizophrenic imagines so many amorous scenes it is not

only because his real love has been disappointed, but, above all, be­
cause he is no longer capable of loving. (PI, p. 212)

Greenberg agrees:

Creativity and psychosis are about as far apart as two experiences can
be. Creative things learn and grow. In psychosis, there's no meaning,
no future, the world is senseless. The whole thing is stuck. What I re­
sent about all this talk about the creativity of mental illness is that it
fails to recognize that mental illness is stuck. The hallucination is "dead
end productions." How can meaninglessness be creative? Mental illness
is boring in a way that's inconceivable. If there's no learning, all there is
is reacting. It's boring because there's no place to go.11

Greenberg, like Sartre, believes that there must be interaction between imag­
ination and the world for creative living to occur. When a person feels that
any viable traffic with a real future has been cut off, such "normative" inter­
action cannot occur.
Of course, I do not have to hallucinate to become trapped in the imagi­
nary in an unhealthy way. Actually, though this is not unhealthy, I am "im­
prisoned" there every night in my dreams. The dream, according to Sartre,
"is a consciousness that is incapable of leaving the imaginative attitude" (PI,
p. 238). It is a consciousness "completely deprived of the faculty of perceiv­
ing, [a consciousness] isolated from the real world, imprisoned in the imagi­
nary" (PI, p. 239). The dreamer, who cannot engage in reflection so long as
he or she is dreaming, continues to lay hold of image after image. There is
no conjecture in dreams: Instead of saying to myself in a dream that I could
have had a revolver in my hand, I suddenly find a revolver in my hand.
Since these images are merely a matter of belief, not of knowledge, one has
only to think a thought imagistically for the dream to change.
Dreaming therefore involves a "spellbound spontaneity" that has the "nu­
ance of fatality" because events in a dream occur as if a consciousness can­
not help but imagine them (PI, p. 245). The dreamer's " 'enchanted' con­
sciousness" (PI, p. 254), Sartre notes, "can help us to conceive what a
consciousness would be which would have lost its 'being-in-the-world' and
which would be by the same token, deprived of the category of the real" (PI,
p. 255). One cannot help wondering if such a consciousness is not akin to
the Lacanian subject, who has little if any traffic with the real either in the
 Ego, Mirror, and Aggressivity in Sartre and Lacan 251

imaginary mode or in the symbolic mode. In any case, while Sartre certainly
does not view the dream as emanating from the unconscious, he does not
deny that one might inquire into the "symbolic function of images" (PI,
p. 232)—a task which would be undertaken differently in existential psycho­
analysis than in Freudian psychoanalysis (and one that ought to be under­
taken in future inquiries).
In addition to entering into the imaginary each night in our dreams, all of
us probably also use the imaginary as an escape from the real at times. For
instance, Sartre points to the everyday example of the individual who, sepa­
rated from a loved one, is somewhat disappointed upon reunion with the
person to find that the real loved one does not match his or her image—an
image which can be made to conform more easily to one's desires than the
real person (PI, p. 208). Or perhaps, like Annie in~Sartre's Nausea, we wish
to imagine our loved ones as remaining the same so that we can measure our
own changes by them (N, pp. 182-206). Or again, we may be like the person
who has prepared himself or herself for an action by imagining it, only to be
confronted by the divergences between the real situation and the imagined
one. If this person goes ahead and performs the action, obstinately ignoring
the change from imaginary to real which has occurred, his or her actions
will appear "stiff and abrupt," as though that person is refusing to recognize
that he or she is dealing with -a real interlocutor by repeating the lines from
the imaginary dialogue (PI, p. 2IO).
Furthermore, I think that what is usually referred to as "transference" in­
volves a kind of superimposition of the imaginary (drawn, albeit, from real
past experience) on the real. And, indeed, this may be why it is so easy to
project parental criticisms onto strangers who have not yet had a chance to
become real. Interestingly, this phenomenon of substituting an imaginary
person for the real person and/or an imaginary self for a real self also fre­
quently occurs in a person's most intimate love relationships. Sometimes in
doing therapy with couples, I have noted that the partner actually closely re­
sembles the problematic parent—and the act of imagination involves fanta­
sizing that one is still a small child in one's partner's power. At other times,
the partner seems to me to have in reality very few of the imagined charac­
teristics. The latter situation is almost always accompanied by an odd phe­
nomenon: The person doing the fantasizing avoids really looking at the
partner when he or she is describing the "imaginary" relationship. Some­
times merely looking and listening will begin to dispel the illusions—
although the need to substitute an imaginary ogre (or prince/princess) for
the real partner will also need to be explored.
252 Chapter Six

Actually, Sartre notes, the act of imagining involves two selves: the dereal-
ized real self and the imaginary self that takes its place (PI, p. 210). Under­
standing this can be an important matter for therapeutic investigation—as it
proved to be, for example, in the case of a mild-mannered client who en­
gaged in murderous fantasies. This client, who had also experienced halluci­
nations some years previously, found that part of his task in therapy was to
humanize this anger and make it "real"—a crossing of the bar which
changed its character. I have noted, in fact, that people are often afraid of
their fantasies, as this client was, for the simple reason that they grasp the
possibility that the unreal emotions and images of imaginative states refer to
what is missing in the real. What they fail to understand is that "realizing"
that missing element changes it in a fundamental way. Sometimes, of
course, people do dimly recognize this, as was the case with a client who
clung tenaciously to her fantasies out of a deep conviction that the real
world could never measure up. Certainly it was not so easily manipulable as
the fantasy world in which she had lived for so many years. Like Sartre's
Flaubert, this client had made a fundamental choice of the imaginary over
the real—a choice which proved very recalcitrant to therapeutic interven­
tion and which was based, like Flaubert's, on earliest experience filled with
such a lack of valorization of her own real needs/desires that it hardly
seemed worth the effort to try to discover them.
Sartre's biography of Flaubert further clarifies the meaning of such a
choice together with the differences between a Sartrean and a Lacanian per­
spective on the significance of the imaginary for (normal or pathological)
ego development. According to Sartre, the roots of Flaubert's choice of the
imaginary over the real lie in those childhood experiences which made him
capable of "belief" but not of "knowledge" or verification. Sartre therefore
links that failure to develop a sense of praxis—the substitution of hexis for
praxis—with the development of an imaginary identity or ego. Because
Flaubert is incapable of engaging with the world, with the real, he becomes
subject to the traps of the imaginary.
Instead of becoming a real child, Flaubert becomes an imaginary child,
playacting the roles expected of him by adults rather than developing an au­
thentic sense of self. Later in his childhood, he would develop a penchant
for acting, even writing plays so that he could act in them, and he would
dream of becoming a great actor. He would also join his schoolmates in cre­
ating a collective character, the Garcon, who mocked ordinary human real­
ity and the bourgeois values of parents by embodying the grossest of appe­
tites. In connection with another figment of Flaubert's imagination, the
 Ego, Mirror, and Aggresswity in Sartre and Lacan 253

Giant who looks down on humanity with scorn, the Garcon is part of a
growing spirit of misanthropy in Flaubert. This misanthropy would find its
final embodiment in an art which, according to Sartre, attempts to
demoralize—"to devalorize the real by realizing the imaginary" (quoted by
Barnes, 1981, p. 188).
Flaubert's misanthropy, Sartre argues, is to some extent born of an envy of
those who, unlike himself, have learned to desire spontaneously. Like La-
can's mirror stage child, Flaubert wants to desire and to possess that which
satisfies the others who possess it. He envies them their satisfied desire.
Sartre, however, does not view as a matter of "normal" development Flau­
bert's inability to feel a spontaneous desire which is his own. Instead, he
notes that Flaubert's failure indicates a fundamental "anorexia" in his ap­
proach to life. Hence the lack of praxis in Flaubert's fundamental project
happens not because of some inevitable identification with the Other in
place of the self, but because Flaubert, as an unvalorized infant, has come to
find himself incapable of the engagement with the real which allows for au­
thentic living. Lacan would view this as the norm since for Lacan, reality it­
self is "the impossible." In any case, he certainly would not regard as abnor­
mal or neurotic Flaubert's development of what Sartre regards as a false ego
based on the designations of others which are left unchecked by referring
them to one's own authentic experience.
Sartre, of course, would not agree with Lacan that the self is fundamen­
tally derealized from the beginning of life, except in the case of pathologies
of the imagination such as that which he ascribes to Flaubert. If the ego is to
be regarded as basically and unalterably imaginary in the Lacanian sense
and if there is behind the ego no transcendent consciousness which can
grapple with the real, self and world are together caught up in an imaginary
morass. From a Lacanian perspective, there is purely and simply no way of
orienting oneself in the real—though there is (as we shall see in the next
chapter) a way of orienting oneself in the symbolic. Nonetheless, it seems to
me that this blurring in Lacanian metatheory of the imaginary and the real
(in the sense that my entrance into the imaginary is based on an imaginary
identification with a real other) at the most basic level of personality forma­
tion leads to a therapeutic perspective in which there is no way to counter
alienation and the sense of living a false life. In such a situation, not even
one's desires are one's own (as they are even in Freud), since in appropriating
the other in place of a self my desire is to desire what the other desires. And
while neither I nor Sartre would deny that in mental disturbances such con­
fusions do occur, one can hardly recommend them as being the norm.
254 Chapter Six

Conclusion

We can now see that Lacan's discussion of the development of the ego,
though it bears a superficial resemblance to Sartre's idea that the ego is a
subject rather than an object, is in the end anti-Sartrean. While Lacan does
indeed follow Sartre in maintaining that the ego is an object rather than a
subject, he does not posit a subject which creates this object and is responsi­
ble for it. Instead, he proposes, at the heart of human development, a substi­
tution of the other for the self as agent that makes of human reality an alien­
ation which (in the imaginary order at least) is without remedy. In terms of
this adoption of an image of the other where there should be a self, human
reality is at its core based on imaginary identifications and has no traffic
with the real. Nor is there any possibility for transforming the illusory na­
ture of the Lacanian ego, since it is not, like the Sartrean ego, based on a re­
flective ipseity which might allow meta-reflection on one's own reflective
process and hence, at least to some extent, a purging of the distorting views
of others.
Aggressivity, according to Lacan, results from this adoption of otherness (I
want what the other wants) and not from a Sartrean desire to use the Other
to create a substantive self. There is therefore no possibility for overcoming
this primary aggressivity with a Sartrean transformation based on a radical
conversion to a philosophy of freedom and a consequent learning to respect
my own and the Other's freedom. Indeed, there is no freedom in Lacan.
And since for Lacan both the other person and I are objects (egos) rather
than subjects, it would appear that intersubjectivity is meaningless. Lacan
maintains that it is not—and that the taming of primary aggressivity is
achieved through the adoption of a common world predicated on the child's
entrance into the symbolic order. In the next chapter, we shall see whether
this solution works or whether it, like Lacan's account of the ego, ultimately
throws us back into a position of solipsistic isolation and self-alienation.
7 • Sartre and Lacan on the Nature
of Language: Existentialist
versus Structuralist Metatheory

The Structuralist Challenge to Existentialism

The question I address in this chapter is whether or not the entrance into
the symbolic order saves Lacanian metatheory from the imaginary morass in
which we left it at the end of the last chapter by allowing the Oedipal stage
child to enter the human community. The answer is somewhat complex be­
cause Lacan's belief that language makes the person cannot be simply dis­
missed as absurd. In a certain sense, Lacan is correct, and Sartre acknowl­
edges this when he observes a connection between Lacan's idea that the
"unconscious is structured like a language" and his own conception of the
practico-inert. "In my view," Sartre says, "Lacan has clarified the meaning of
Unconscious* as discourse which separates through language, or if you pre­
fer, as counterfinality of the spoken word in which verbal groupings are
structured through the act of speaking into a practico-inert grouping." Like
all aspects of the practico-inert, language contains exigencies that eat away
at my freedom and produce counterfinalities in the sociomaterial world over
which I have no control. Sartre goes on to say, "These verbal groupings ex­
press or constitute intentions which determine me without being mine"
(Sartre in Contat and Rybalka, 1974, 1:482). In this sense, language makes
the person.
O n the other hand, it is not true that Sartre has been converted to Laca­
nian structuralism. Even if Lacan's statements about unconscious linguistic
structure may be reinterpreted in the light of Sartre's idea of the practico-
inert (and I am sure that Lacan would not accept this reconceptualization),
it would remain true that Lacan fails to take into account the power of
speech as praxis. And it is speech as praxis which saves the individual from
255
256 Chapter Seven

being the mere plaything of linguistic structure. Furthermore, from a

Sartrean perspective, language as structure is really not unconscious at all.
Rather, its power comes from the exigencies written in matter—a matter
which is in this case the squiggles on paper or the sounds out of which
words are made. And like all practico-inert objects, language can be detota-
lized and retotalized by the practical activity of the human beings who cre­
ate and sustain it. For this reason, a "healthy" approach to language for
Sartre is not, as it is for Lacan, constituted by the realization that one is the
plaything of unconscious structure; rather, it is the ability to speak in the
sense of using language as praxis (as opposed to a submission to language as
hexis) to fashion one's own enterprises and to fulfill one's own (material and
interpersonal) needs/desires.
This difference between Sartre and Lacan becomes even clearer if we place
it within the larger context of Sartre's dialogue with structuralism, which
finds its most thorough expression in his critique of Levi-Strauss in the sec­
ond book of the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960a, pp. 479-504). Al­
though Sartre begins by praising Levi-Strauss's accurate and enlightening
discovery of complex structures in primitive or tribal societies, he hastens to
add that Levi-Strauss's analytical account of social structures must be sup­
plemented with a dialectical perspective.
Hence Sartre criticizes Levi-Strauss's formula for the structures of exog­
amy governing the marriage possibilities between two groups. In The Ele-
mentary Structures of Kinship, Levi-Strauss argues that in a primitive society
where cross-cousin marriages are allowed and parallel-cousin marriages pro­
hibited, marriage itself is regarded as an exchange of women similar to the
linguistic circulation of words. Sartre disputes neither the existence of these
structures nor the possibility of representing them through mathematical
formulas. But he does deny that this is the end point of the investigation.
After all, it is organizing praxis which sets up the kinship structures in the
first place and it does so with an aim or purpose, which Sartre suggests is "to
combat, as far as possible, scarcity [of women for marriage] and its conse­
quences to the social 'ensemble'" (CDR, p. 483). The real source of the
seeming inertia represented by such social structures is the pledge by which
each group agrees to abrogate its future freedom (in this case, marriage to
any woman whatever) in exchange for an organized set of inextricably inter­
connected rights and duties which allow both stability and satisfaction (in
most instances).
Sartre maintains that structure itself is the objectified form of function as
lived praxis. As such, it is "active passivity"—a kind of hexis produced and
 Sartre and Lacan on the Nature of Language 257

sustained by the group as a condition of future praxis. Its difference from the
actual passivity of the physical structure of material objects is that the
group, under the pressure of new circumstances, can entirely dissolve its
structures. Sartre therefore argues that praxis cannot be reduced to the
structures which it produces since "it is more and it is different; it is the free
concrete realization of a particular task" (CDR, p. 489). The group, Sartre
goes on to explain, "acquires inertia in order to struggle against inertia; it
absorbs the passivity which enables matter to sustain the passive syntheses
which it needs in order to survive; it is precisely not, in itself, a passive syn­
thesis, and its passivity sustains the active synthesis which is praxis" (CDR,
pp. 489-90). Hence it is only by "silently ignoring the practical totalisation as
the support and reason for the inertia" (CDR, p. 492) that Levi-Strauss and
others can view structures as objective realities and inert totalities. In doing
so, they kill the intelligibility of the structures under consideration.
Levi-Strauss answers Sartre in the final chapter of The Savage Mind (1962)
by attacking as prescientific Sartre's conception of the dialectic as totalizing
praxis. Like "wild" or "untamed thought" (le pensee sauvage), the Sartrean
dialectic, according to Levi-Strauss, is able up to a certain point to grasp its
objects. For example, it is quite capable of "doing what every anthropologist
tries to do in the case of a different culture: to put himself in the place of the
men living there, to understand the principle and pattern of their inten­
tions, and to perceive a period or a culture as a significant set" (Levi-Strauss,
1962, p. 250). But Levi-Strauss believes that this approach cannot accom­
plish the fundamental scientific task of placing the data on a different
plane—that of an abstract structural analysis which avoids the pitfalls of
contextual analysis and with them androcentric and ethnocentric preju­
dices leading to incorrect conceptualization. For example, Levi-Strauss
claims that Sartre's insistence on the historical nature of the dialectic reduces
to subhumanity those repetitive tribal societies which do not possess a his­
tory in our sense. Sartre's "gratuitous contrasts" between primitive and civi­
lized societies, Levi-Strauss goes on to say, merely reflect his earlier postulate
of a "fundamental opposition . . . between myself and others" (1962, p. 241).
As for Sartre's concepts of the practico-inert and the totalization, Levi-
Strauss dismisses both. The practico-inert, he maintains, is a prescientific
concept which "quite simply revives the language of animism" (1962,
p. 249). And the totalization has been taken for granted since Malinowski—
and Malinowski's defects have demonstrated its shortcomings as a funda­
mental method. Hence Levi-Strauss believes that "this supposed totalizing
continuity of the self" is really "an illusion sustained by the demands of so-
258 Chapter Seven

cial life" and not a social science concept at all (1962, p. 256). And while
Levi-Strauss admits that dialectical reason is useful in putting "the human
sciences in possession of a reality which it alone can furnish them [that of
concrete understanding]," he nonetheless believes that "the properly scien­
tific work consists in decomposing and then recomposing on a different
plane" (1962, p. 250). Sartre's problem, Levi-Strauss concludes, is method-
ological: "He who begins by steeping himself in the allegedly self-evident
truths of introspection never emerges from them" (1962, p. 249). Sartre, ac­
cording to Levi-Strauss, remains trapped in the Cartesian cogito—which he
does not escape by his attempt to "sociologize" it (1962, p. 249).
Aside from the fact that to my knowledge no one other than Levi-Strauss
has ever accused Sartre of racial or ethnic chauvinism, it should be obvious
what Sartre's reply to Levi-Strauss would be. From what position outside
the social system, Sartre would ask, would the social scientist presume to
judge the social system? Also, does this "idealist" outside position not in ef­
fect do away with an understanding of the very social events one is trying to
conceptualize? While Levi-Strauss believes that the Sartrean dialectic is
"only a point of departure, not one of arrival" in social science methodology
(1962, p. 250), Sartre contends that the structuralist analytic must be sub­
sumed within the Sartrean dialectic. Sartre himself did not directly reply to
Levi-Strauss's response to him, presumably because Sartre believed that he
had already said what needed to be said.
Sartre's criticism of Levi-Strauss for his failure to see intential praxis be­
hind static structures is a criticism that might be levied against structuralism
and poststructuralism in general. Translating Ferdinand de Saussure's struc­
tural linguistic emphasis on language over speech into a general emphasis on
structure over event (that is, on the abstract possibilities of a system over
concrete lived happenings), structuralists in general have preferred a syn-
chronic study of cultures, psyches, or texts which looks at their static inter­
relationships to a diachronic consideration of their movement through his­
tory. The overgeneralization to which this perspective leads is again perhaps
nowhere better illustrated than in Levi-Strauss's own attempt to apply the
linguistic concepts of "phonemes" and "binary oppositions" to a study of
cultures and myths. The basic point of such an application for Levi-Strauss
is not, of course, the discovery of a transcending consciousness which cre­
ates these structures (as it would be for Sartre) but rather the discovery of
universal structures of the mind which govern all human endeavors.
What Levi-Strauss attempts to do is to construct a grammar of myths by
analyzing single myths, relating these to other myths within the same cul-
 Sartre and Lacan on the Nature of Language 259

ture, and relating these myths and their transformations to similar myths
and their transformations in other cultures. As Jonathan Culler points out,
"Levi-Strauss would argue that his procedure is analogous to the study of a
linguistic system: in both cases one compares syntagmatic sequences in or-
der to construct paradigmatic classes and examine those classes so as to de­
termine the pertinent oppositions between members of each paradigm"
(1975, p. 44). Yet, as even a sympathetic critic such as Culler admits, there is
a problem with Levi-Strauss's linguistic analogy in that structural linguistics
teaches that two items can be taken as members of a paradigm class only
when they replace one another in a given context; but in attempting to con­
struct a semiology of myths across cultures, Levi-Strauss extends his para­
digm classes to the point where they become extremely far-fetched (Culler,
1975, pp. 44-51). If there is a universal language of myths, Levi-Strauss may
be its only proficient speaker.
Similarly, Levi-Strauss's attempt to describe kinship systems as stemming
from universal mental structures that make the circulation of women equiv­
alent to the circulation of words in a language has been criticized for its fail­
ure to recognize that kinship structures involve more than this (for example,
the organization of groups; the transmission of rights, property, attitudes,
and expectations; and the circulation of goods) and that the circulation of
women is not linguistic in the sense of being a coded communication (Dan
Sperber in Sturrock, 1979, pp. 23-24).
I believe that Lacan similarly errs in attempting to reduce everything to
unconscious linguistic structure without adding human intentionality and
meaning. The problem is that in reducing the conscious subject to a mere
"effect of the signifier" (Lacan, 1973, p. 207), Lacan removes from the hu­
man subject the possibility of meaningful transformation. Lacanian struc­
turalism, as a new positivism, has moved from a determinism based on his­
torical causation (which includes Freudian determinism) to a determinism
based on (unconscious) structural causation. Both forms of determinism are
manifestations of an analytical reductionism in social science theory against
which Sartre aimed the arguments of Search for a Method and the Critique of
Dialectical Reason. And although analysis has a place in the Sartrean ap­
proach, Sartre believes that only dialectical reason can allow an understand­
ing of the humanness of human individuals and groups.
Hence though Lacan and Sartre come close to agreeing on certain issues,
their metatheories are in reality worlds apart. From a Sartrean perspective,
Lacan does have valid things to say about the power of language/culture as
(practico-inert) structure, but he does so at the expense of totally denying
l6o Chapter Seven

the creative power of praxis. And it is this denial of praxis that finally makes
of structuralism in general, despite the leftist political leanings of most of its
proponents, a new philosophical conservatism in that structuralist analysis
can explain stasis but not change. In this respect, it shares the limitations of
Freudian psychoanalysis in failing to explain how change can take place in
the context of psychotherapy or elsewhere.

Language and Desire: A Lacanian Revision

of Freudian Metatheory

The developmental stage which follows the mirror stage and transitivism,
according to Lacan, is the Oedipal stage with its accompanying insertion
into language and culture. Lacan believes that the child at this stage of de­
velopment moves from the mother to the father, from the specular ego or
"me" (moi) to the linguistic "I" (je), and from the imaginary to the symbolic
order. The ego and the mother do not, of course, disappear, but the whole
pre-Oedipal stage is repressed into the unconscious. In fact, it is at this point
that both the unconscious and consciousness as it is commonly conceived
come into existence. Sexual differentiation and gender identity also begin
here. In fact, Lacan says that it is with the insertion into the symbolic-
linguistic order that "desire becomes human" (1966, p. 103,1975, pp. 155 and
173). Since Lacan has already speculated that animals are capable of specular
identification, we must conclude that he means this literally. Language—the
fact that one becomes a "speaking animal"—literally makes the little human
animal human.
Because of the introduction of language, desire, in the symbolic order,
takes on a different character than desire in the imaginary order. Already
prefigured in the imaginary order as a gap between the baby's disorganized
body and his or her ideal ego, the gap now reappears as an unfillable lack of
being (manque a etre)1 which is characterized by a movement from word to
word and object to object. Lacan, as we shall see, identifies this movement
with metonymy, modeling his view of unconscious linguistic structure on
the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jacobson in structural
linguistics—though Lacan's use of their insights is heavily influenced by the
anthropological appropriations of their work by Levi-Strauss.
At first glance, it would appear that Lacan, in attempting to unite the
Freudian Oedipus complex with structural linguistics, has produced a misal­
liance that does not admit of reconciliation. Actually, the combination may
 Sartre and Lacan on the Nature of Language 261

in fact be forced at times. But what Lacan does with the Oedipus complex is
on the one hand to ally the father in the Oedipal triad with the symbolic-
linguistic order and on the other to ally the prohibition against incest with
the structures supporting the exogamous kinship systems described by Levi-
Strauss. According to Lacan, what is important for the child's entry into
language is not the presence of the real father or the imaginary father but
the symbolic father. And the symbolic father is so necessary to Lacan's sys­
tem that he declares that even without a biological knowledge of father­
hood, the father would have to be invented—as one might say, for example,
that the mother was impregnated by a water spirit. The symbolic father is
equivalent to what Lacan designates as the "law of the Name-of-the-father"
with its religious-legalistic connotations. The Name-of-the father in French
(nom-du-pere) also suggests the "no" of the father (non du pere), which is pro­
nounced similarly. Lacan believes that the symbolic father is, in effect, the
dead father of Totem and Taboo. In this respect, the Name-of-the-father is si­
multaneously equivalent to the introduction of guilt and to the entrance
into the symbolic order of culture and language (the heritage of fathers now
dead).
Of course, someone or something must symbolically pronounce the "no"
of the father if the child is to enter into language and culture. A failure or
"foreclosure" in the area of the prohibition against the desire for union with
the mother will leave the child psychotic This prohibition and the subse­
quent entry into language are Lacan's version of Freudian "primal repres­
sion,"2 which is necessary for the child to develop normally. If repression of
the primal relationship occurs normally, it will leave the child forever
searching for substitutes for the original object. The "object a" (sometimes
designated the objet petit a[utre], the "small object other," but usually left un­
translated in accordance with Lacan's request, which was based on a wish to
stress the relevance of the objet a as a kind of algebraic symbol) can be any­
thing from people to words to ideas; it is anything that momentarily appears
to fill the gap created by the "no" of the father.
As such, the objet a is a continual movement away from at the same time
that it is a continual attempt to recapture the jouissance which has been lost
through primal repression. Lacanian jouissance—a word usually left untrans­
lated but generally meaning "enjoyment," "sexual pleasure," and even
"ecstasy"—is not to be confused with the Freudian pleasure principle with
its insistence that pleasure derives from reduction of charge. Nor is Lacanian
primal repression exactly the same as Freudian primal repression. According
to Lacan, primal repression sets up a continual movement of desire from ob-
262 Chapter Seven

ject to object which is conceived to be the source both of linguistic develop­

ment and of transference in its more general sense—which Lacan redefines
as this very movement from object to object. It is for this reason that Lacan
claims that transference, contrary to traditional psychoanalytic opinion, is
not the opening to the unconscious but its closing. It is the objet a that pro­
vides the stopper (Lacan, 1973, pp. 129-34).
The entry into language of the Oedipal stage child is facilitated by the dis­
covery of the phallus as primary signifier and by the experience of (symbolic)
castration. Lacan's version of the castration complex is one in which the
child's recognition of the third (separating) term, the father (both symbolic
and real), dashes forever his or her hopes of being the phallus for the
mother—that is, of being the sole object of her desire. The castration com­
plex therefore does not involve a real fear of organ loss, as Freud thought,
but an emotional loss contingent upon the forswearing of primal union
with the mother. Symbolic castration is experienced by both boys and girls.
The successful resolution of the Oedipus complex leads to sexual differentia­
tion, whereas an unsuccessful resolution leads to various "abnormal" solu­
tions to the problem of sexuality or, in extreme cases, to a psychosis precipi­
tated by failure of the symbolic father to intervene successfully in the
mother-child dyad. The price of not being castrated is apparently being
mad.
It should be emphasized that sexual differentiation for Lacan is a cultural-
linguistic matter rather than a biological one, as it was at least in part for
Freud.3 Yet these cultural-linguistic distinctions are based on an aligning of
oneself on the plus or minus side of what Lacan refers to as the "primal
signifier"—the phallus. Although the phallus is not the biological organ,
just as the Name-of-the-father is not the biological father, it does in some re­
spects refer to the penis just as the symbolic father is often confused with the
real father. For example, Lacan notes that the penis, as "the most tangible el­
ement in the Real of sexual copulation," easily offers itself as a "primary
symbol" (1966, p. 287). Nonetheless, Lacan goes on to say, the phallus "can
only play its role when veiled," as in the Greek mysteries, for it is only thus
that it serves as a "sign of the latency with which any signifiable is struck"
(1966, p. 288). The image of the mother as possessing the phallus—the
Freudian "phallic mother"—derives from the child's experience of her as the
first person to transmit the symbolic order and to indicate the place of the
phallus in it. In this sense, she "contains" the phallus. The sexual identity of
both boys and girls is first established in relation to the mother's attitude to-
 Sartre and Lacan on the Nature of Language 265

ward the phallus and toward the child's relationship to it. Awareness of the
father's attitude, if he is present, comes later.
In "normal" heterosexuality, the movement is from attempting to be the
phallus for the mother to having or not having the phallus, which is at this
point associated with the penis. The boy, identifying with the father, takes
up the former position while the girl takes up the latter. This will have seri­
ous consequences for relations between the sexes, which will be asymmetri­
cal rather than complementary. Because the phallus is identified with the
symbolic order (Lacan says in no uncertain terms that it is a "fact" that "the
symbolic order, in its initial operation, is androcentric" [1978, p. 261]),
women will come to serve as objects of a cultural-linguistic-matrimonial ex­
change among men in the manner described by Levi-Strauss. Because they
are thus submerged in and transcended by the symbolic order, they will in­
evitably find their relationship to it problematic (Lacan, 1978, p. 262), and
they will consequently wish to use men as means to status in the social dis­
course.
Men, on the other hand, will want to use women as a means to
wholeness—to imaginary unity—and will regard "the woman" (who, as La­
can observes, does not really exist as a category [1985, pp. 137-48]) as access
to their own unconscious being or truth. They will also regard her as an im­
personation of the phallus, which, since she does not have it, she can be
imagined to be (Lacan, 1966, p. 322). Depending on his relationship with his
own unconscious, a man will either degrade a woman in an attempt to avoid
his own sense of castration or he will exalt her, sometimes endowing her
with a power equivalent to God as identified with the gaze of the Other(A)
(Lacan, 1985, pp. 137-48, 153, and 160). As Ragland-Sullivan observes, a
man makes love to complete himself, whereas a woman makes love to gain
access to the status conferred by the phallic signifier (1986, p. 293).
Yet despite this account of gender differentiation, there is for Lacan no
"genital drive" leading to a purely "genital love" which is the goal of psycho-
sexual development, as many post-Freudian theorists have contended (La­
can, 1966, pp. 245 and 287,1975, p. 139). This is so because men and women
are not products of biology but effects of the symbolization process. Gender
and gender roles are not determined by one's sexual organs but by the posi­
tion one takes with respect to the phallus as the instigator of castration or
loss of the primal mother. In the case of the "normal" woman and the ho­
mosexual male, the position taken is that of first experiencing and later de­
nying loss of incompleteness. As for the fetishist or the transvestite, the
former refuses to give up the idea of the phallic mother, substituting the fet-
264 Chapter Seven

ish for her missing phallus (as Freud suggests), whereas the latter imperson­
ates her. For the neurotic, especially the hysteric, sexual identity is much
more problematic than for the so-called normal person because of the neu­
rotic's continual pull to the imaginary order, whereas for the psychotic, sex­
ual identity has never gelled because the psychotic has never experienced
(or has rejected) symbolic castration. The psychotic, having refused a rela­
tion to the primal signifier, is consequently set adrift: in an ocean of de­
tached signifiers.
Lacan regards the phallus as the first pure signifier because it sets up the
first set of "binary oppositions" which the child, at the stage of entry into
language, learns. One must locate oneself with respect to the phallus in or­
der to enter the social order, taking up a position of plus (toute, usually male)
or minus (pas-toute, usually female) with respect to it. To do so means to en­
ter a social order that has been established before one's birth and within
which one is expected to take on certain predetermined gender roles. Be­
cause the phallic signifier is the first pure signifier of difference (the mirror
stage, or course, refers to identity or sameness), it becomes the reference
point for the child's developing capacity to use signifiers. Having instituted a
cut or gap between the infant and the mother, thereby relegating the mirror
stage experience to the primordial unconscious, the phallic signifier has in­
stituted that lack of being (manque a etre) by means of which desire (now be­
come human) will play itself out in an endless movement along the signify­
ing chain.
Lacan therefore reinterprets Freud's account of his young grandson's play
with the bobbin-reel (the fort-da example described in Chapter 2) as an in­
stance of the connection between separation and symbolization at the junc­
ture where the child enters the symbolic-linguistic order. Rather than dem­
onstrating the child's attempt to "master" his mother's departure through
play, this incident, according to Lacan, shows the beginning of the child's
insertion into language. Lacan says that the phonemes "ooh" (forty go away)
and da (here) create a binary opposition and a "presence in absence" which
mark that entry. Although these are not actually phonemes in the strict lin­
guistic sense, since they appear to have reference, one sees Lacan's meaning.
From this point on, the child will find himself or herself increasingly lost in
at the same time that he or she is created as a subject by the linguistic order.
Lacan also believes that Freud is correct in linking this throwaway game
with the repetition compulsion and the death instinct, since repetition with
variation is the meaning of metonymic displacement itself and since "the
symbol manifests itself first of all as the murder of the thing, and this death
 Sartre and Lacan on the Nature of Language 265

constitutes in the subject the externalization of his desire" (Lacan, 1966,

p. 104). As death opens its jaws in the gap created by the primal signifier, a
kind of Heideggerian "Being-toward-death" (Lacan frequently mentions
Heidegger in this connection) assumes an important place in Lacanian anal­
ysis. We might also say that the child, deprived of the hope of union with
the mother, uses words as "transitional objects" (Winnicott's "transitional
object" is one of the few concepts introduced by post-Freudian theorists of
which Lacan approves [Lacan, 1966, pp. 250 and 312]). Forever after, words
will provide a dual path toward and away from the primal puissance, which
is forever foresworn and at the entrance to which the phallic signifier stands
like the angel guarding the gates of Eden. Yex. primal repression, at the same
time that it implies renunciation and loss, is the beginning of cultural indi-
viduation.
Lacan believes that it is with the insertion of the individual into the
symbolic-linguistic order that both the conscious subject (je, I) and the un­
conscious subject (Other[A]) come into existence. The subject, as defined by
Lacan, is simply "the one who speaks." Not to be confused with Sartrean
consciousness, the Lacanian conscious subject (je) is far from being an inten­
tional praxis. Created by and existing only through language, the Lacanian
subject is in many ways identical to the linguistic shifter. According to La-
can's oft-repeated definition, "The signifier is that which represents a subject
for another signifier" (1966, p. 316, 1973, pp. 20J and 236). The conscious
subject is therefore no more the "real self" than the specular ego is. Its ori­
gins also lie outside, in the Other, though this time the Other referred to is
not the specular ideal but the grand Other (Other[A]) of one's sociolinguis-
tic heritage. This is the Other who speaks in unexpected places—in dreams,
jokes, slips of the tongue, and symptoms.
It is the Other(A) whose discourse the linguistic unconscious, as opposed
to the specular m(Other) unconscious, is. As Lacan says over and over
again, "The unconscious is the discourse of the Other" (1975, p. 85, 1978,
p. 89, and elsewhere). Or again, as Lacan is fond of repeating, "The uncon­
scious is structured like a language" (1966, p. 234,1973, pp. 20 and 149, and
elsewhere)—and, indeed, comes into existence with language. Antedating a
child's birth, the Other of the cultural-linguistic order "speaks" the child
rather than the child it. "Qa parle" (it speaks) rather than "je parle" (I speak)
is the truth of being human according to Lacan (1966, pp. 125 and 284). The
real subject, as opposed to the specular ego or the conscious subject of dis­
course, is therefore the unconscious Other(A) whose domain is the "other
scene" described by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams. The conscious
266 Chapter Seven

subject is a "decentered subject" which is constituted as a defense mecha­

nism against the truth of the unconscious. Truth itself comes to exist only
with the linguistic order, and the return to the Other (A) is its test (1966,
p. 306,1975, pp. 228 and 259).
Before these ideas about the decentered subject and the subject of the un­
conscious can be understood, however, a brief review of Lacan's appropria­
tion of structural linguistics is necessary. According to Lacan, it is this rela­
tionship to structural linguistics, and not Freud's physicalist and biologistic
metaphors, that will place psychoanalysis on a firm scientific footing. In­
deed, Lacan argues that Freud had an implicit understanding of linguistic
laws that he was unable to formulate precisely because the theory on which
these laws are based had not yet been articulated (1966, p. 162, and else­
where). Hence Lacan, in effect, proposes to edit Freud from the vantage
point of Saussure and Jacobson.
From Saussure, Lacan takes the twin concepts of the signifier and the sig­
nified. He follows Saussure (1916) in emphasizing that language works both
phonetically and semantically through a recognition of differences—though
Saussure does not, of course, define primary differentiation as sexual differ­
entiation along the phallic signifier. Saussure divides the "sign" into two
components: the signifier (signifiant), or image-acoustical component, and
the signified (signifie)^ or conceptual component. Neither the signifier nor
the signified is directly related to the world around us, to things themselves,
since the signifier is not a thing but a notion of a thing. The linguistic sign is
also arbitrary, both because there is no natural link between the signifier
and the thing it signifies (not the signified) and because the signified can be
divided up in different ways—for example, as colors are in different lan­
guages. Thus for Saussure, language is form and not substance, and he is
more interested in language (la langue) than in speech (la parole) because he
believes that the study of language as the theoretical structure which must
be obeyed if we are to communicate allows us to grasp the principles on
which language functions in practice (speech). This idea is the source of La-
can's discussion of the "law of the signifier" and of his understanding that
this law must impose itself on the child if he or she is to become human.
Lacan, however, radicalizes Saussure. Taking as a starting point Saussure's
idea of an arbitrary relationship between the sign and the thing, Lacan pro­
claims, in a discussion which is actually rather Sartrean and phenomenolog-
ical, that things themselves are unknowable. It is for this reason that he de­
fines the domain of the real, as distinguished from the imaginary and the
 Sartre and Lacan on the Nature of Language l6j

symbolic, as the "impossible." What is neither Sartrean nor Saussurean in

Lacan, however, is his inclination to divorce language from reference in any
sense. Following Levi-Strauss, Lacan inverts the Saussurean relationship be-
tween the signifier and the signified, giving primacy to the signifier:
Signifier
signified
for Saussure's
signified
signifier
Lacan also places a double bar between the signifier and the signified, in­
tending thereby to indicate a cut or break between the two. The signifier is
now viewed as occupying the structuring position, and the signifier and the
signified are no longer conceived to be inextricably interconnected (recto
and verso of a single entity, the sign, as Saussure thought) or even as existing
at the same level. The metaphor of the piece of paper is replaced in Lacan by
an image of the signifying chain as "rings in a necklace that is a ring in an­
other necklace made of rings" (1966, p. 153). Another of Lacan's metaphors
is the Borrhomean knot: In the world of the signifier, there is no clear de­
marcation between inside and outside, conscious and unconscious; instead,
there is an imperceptible gliding of one into the other without a differentia­
tion between them.
Lacan's double bar points to the character of Otherness which significa­
tion maintains because it refers to the whole unconscious linguistic system.
In order to understand how Lacan views the signifier as constantly "sliding"
or "gliding" beneath the signified and therefore as leading to distortion
(Freud's Enstellung), however, we must first understand Lacan's appropria­
tions of Jacobson. It is from Jacobson (Jacobson and Halle, 1956) that Lacan
borrows the idea of phonemes and binary oppositions which Lacan, follow­
ing Levi-Strauss's appropriation of these concepts for other than strictly lin­
guistic uses, applies in his own account of the fort-da story discussed above.
It was also Jacobson who renamed Saussure's laws of combination (syn-
tagmatic relations) and substitution (paradigmatic relations) by the rhetori­
cal devices of metonymy and metaphor; Jacobson then related these rhetori­
cal devices to Freud's account of primary process "thinking," asserting their
"primary significance and consequence to all human endeavors"—to the op­
eration of dreams, magic rites, and charms, as well as to the structure of
268 Chapter Seven

everyday discourse (Jacobson, 1962, p. 113). Where Jacobson identifies meta­

phor with identification and symbolization and metonymy with condensa­
tion and displacement, however, Lacan identifies metaphor with Freudian
condensation (Verdichtung) and metonymy with Freudian displacement
(Verschietung).
According to Lacan, metaphor is to be defined as "the structure of the su-
perimposition of the signifiers" (1966, p. 160). As Ragland-Sullivan notes, it
is therefore to be regarded as "first a function and only second an iconic
mode of meaning" (1986, p. 255). Metaphor is the function by which one sig-
nifier can be substituted for another, rather than simply a figure of speech
with a reference outside. In the course of this substitution, there is a "cross­
ing of the bar" between the signifier and the signified where the first signifier
is relegated to the place of the signified. Lacan gives as an example the line,
"His sheaf was neither miserly nor spiteful," from a poem by Victor Hugo in
which the hero, Booz, is replaced by his "sheaf" in the metaphor. Where the
item under the bar (the signified) is unconscious, this can lead to the forma­
tion of symptoms which are unintelligible to the conscious subject. And,
indeed, Lacan tells us that a symptom is "a metaphor in which flesh or func­
tion is taken as the signifying element" (1966, p. 166). The overdetermina-
tion of dreams is likewise a consequence of metaphoric substitution through
dream images acting as signifiers for unconscious signifieds. Since Lacan
conceives the initial metaphoric substitution to occur at the point where the
subject enters language and renounces the idea of dyadic union with the
mother, substituting the presence-in-absence of the word for the libidinal
object, this account of the unconscious use of metaphors is hardly surpris­
ing.
As for metonymy, it also has its origins in primal separation. But me­
tonymy is not so much the substitution of one object for another as the
movement from object to object—what Lacan frequently refers to as "this
intersubjective game of hunt-the-slipper in which desire makes itself recog­
nized for a moment" (1966, pp. 104-5, and elsewhere). Once the original gap
has been created, the subject is ever hungry for the objet a which will fill it.
Desire become human is itself metonymic. Thus metonymy is both a for­
ward movement and an attempt to return to the primordial object via dis­
placements, an attempt to regain the paradisiacal experience. Unfortu­
nately, desire is a perpetual lack, a want-to-be (manque a etre) which can
never be fulfilled and which therefore moves endlessly from object to object.
Linguistically, metonymy involves a word-to-word connection instead of the
 Sartre and Lacan on the Nature of Language 269

word-for-word substitution of metaphor (Lacan, 1966, p. 164). In this sense,

it is the very movement of language itself.
Obviously, Lacan means something more than the part for whole substi­
tution which is the usual definition of metonymy. Metonymy, Lacan con­
tends, operates according to a "veering off of signification [which is] used by
the unconscious to foil censorship" (1966, p. 160). In dreams and fetishes,
metonymy manifests itself as the displacement of one object by another—for
example, of the "glance at the [mother's] nose" that has replaced the origi­
nal "shine on the nose" required by one of Freud's fetishistic patients for
sexual arousal. Transference and love relationships also operate according to
the laws of metonymy, though they also refer back to the imaginary order;
as metonymic displacements, they involve repetition with variation.
Aside from one's suspicion that Lacan, like Levi-Strauss, is using linguistic
structure to explain too much, there are other serious objections to Lacan's
theory of the insertion of the individual into language which we must make
from a Sartrean perspective. For one thing, Lacan's account appears to make
the individual a mere epiphenomenon of the cultural-linguistic order, how­
ever carefully he explains that linguistic structure carves this same individ­
ual out of the bedrock experience of an imaginary order which is itself fun­
damentally alienated. One might, indeed, paraphrase Levi-Strauss's
statement that he does "not intend to show how men think in myths but
how myths think in men, unbeknownst to them" (1964, p. 12) by saying that
Lacan intends to show "not how men think in langauge but how linguistic
structure thinks in men, unbeknownst to them."
Behind all of this, of course, lies the structuralist emphasis on structure
over event. But the synchronic determinism which results from this empha­
sis opens Lacan's theory to the objections we have made to deterministic
psychoanalysis in general—that it denies the philosophical premises which
might sustain a theory of change in psychotherapy. One might, of course,
take Lacan's definition of the goal of psychoanalysis as a movement from
"empty speech" to "full speech" as a sign that transformation is possible. "¥et
on closer inspection, it appears that full speech has nothing to do with the
genuine communication which might be promoted in existentialist therapy.
It is instead openness to the "meaning" which "insists" in the linguistic un­
conscious. If that unconscious is (as I maintain in the next section) in reality
simply the Other's praxis as it is inscribed in the linguistic practico-inert,
then this can only lead to maintenance of the status quo.
As I noted, this is one of the difficulties with structuralism in general.
While most of its practitioners were affiliated with the political left, the anal-
270 Chapter Seven

ysis of structure to the exclusion of consciousness in their work does not al­
low for the possibility of change—social or individual. This is particularly
evident in Lacan's account of the development of gender differentiation.
Consequently, the question asked by feminist apologists as well as feminist
critics concerns whether or not Lacan's account of the phallic signifier im­
plies support for the patriarchy. Even if we disregard some of Lacan's more
disagreeable remarks, such as his idea that the female genitals have a charac­
ter of emptiness which causes them to be less desirable than male genitals
(see Ragland-Sullivan, 1986, p. 286), there is ample evidence that his theory,
unlike Sartre's, does not allow for going beyond the status quo in gender re­
lations.
The feminist apologists for Lacan (Mitchell, 1974; Mitchell and Rose in
introduction to Lacan, 1985; Ragland-Sullivan, 1986) have claimed that he is
not a "phallocrat"—pointing out that his view of gender is that it is "con­
structed" rather than biologically determined. 'Vet appearances to the con­
trary, Lacan's position is not equivalent to that expressed in the opening
lines of Book II of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex: "One is not born,
but rather becomes, a woman" (1949, p. 249). Both writers agree that the
crucial matter is not biology. But what Beauvoir means by this is that one's
childhood, one's immersion into society and culture, together with the as­
criptions of the original others, point out the paths through which one be­
comes a woman. What Lacan means is that the differentiation accruing
around the phallic signifier leads to the assumption of gender roles. And
while it is possible that this might change, it seems unlikely. After all, with­
out "castration," culture and language themselves would not, according to
Lacan, stick in such a way as to fashion a linguistic subject out of the little
human animal.
Indeed, certain feminists, taking Lacan at his word, have demanded that
women renounce the symbolic order, which is not theirs, and return to a
oneness with the pre-Oedipal mother (see Marks and de Courtivron, 1981;
Moi, 1987). The literary results of this effort promise to be idiosyncratic in
the extreme. The feminist writers who take seriously Lacan's idea that the
symbolic order is necessarily androcentric are not simply attempting to use
the "language of the oppressor" to undermine the oppressor, as Sartre claims
the African poets in Black Orpheus are doing. Rather, they are attempting to
use language to undermine language, with no hope of redeeming language
(as a practico-inert field) from its sexist bias.
Here is Xaviere Gauthier on the subject of women's language and writing:
 Sartre and Lacan on the Nature of Language TJ\

But perhaps if we had left these pages blank, we would have had a bet­
ter understanding of what feminine writing is all about. In fact, what
surprises us is the fact that men and women seem to speak approxi­
mately the same language; in other words, women find "their" place
within the linear, grammatical, linguistic system that orders the sym­
bolic, the superego, the law. It is a system based entirely upon one fun­
damental signifier: the phallus. And we can marvel (like Therese Plan-
tier in C'est moi Diego [I am Diego]) at the fact that women are alienated
enough to speak "the language of Man." "1/ there is a madman, then it's
definitely Woman, Believing themselves to be emancipated, women had
access to universities where they were fed by force a language in which
everything, verbs and subjects, was masculine. And so, having lost
their minds, women believed they could be men, equal to their masters
in adopting their grammar and syntax. Completely divorced from
themselves without knowing it, women were transformed into this
Crazy Sex which was nicknamed the 'Second Sex.' " (In Marks and de
Courtivron, 1981, p. 162)

Fortunately, the women writers in Marks and de Courtivron^ selection do

not leave its pages blank—and, indeed, most of the contemporary French
feminists represented there continue to register their protests in the usual
syntax of the "masters."
Still it seems worth noting that while Sartre's ontology has inspired per­
haps the most significant book in all of feminism in Beauvoir's The Second
Sex, Lacan's metatheory has inspired a revolt that seems to be almost nihilis­
tic in its essential import. After all, if the primal signifier is the phallus and if
culture is androcentric in essence, then where is a woman to go except out­
side it? ^Yet, as Ragland-Sullivan notes, there is no outside to go to. The re­
turn to the pre-Oedipal mother cannot be a return to an essential femininity
since masculinity and femininity are themselves created by the phallic signi­
fier (Ragland-Sullivan, 1986, pp. 267-308). One would therefore presume
that women are doomed to occupy the place of the second sex—exalted and
denigrated but never recognized as equals.
Of course, one could say that as a man—for instance, a man in Lacanian
analysis—gets more in touch with the voice of the Other in himself and with
his own castration, he will no longer need to identify these with women and
with femininity. But there remains the difficulty that culture is, by virtue of
its association with the Name-of-the-father, androcentric. As Ragland-
Sullivan, who is perhaps the best of the Lacanian apologists, notes, chang-
272 Chapter Seven

ing this androcentric orientation would from a Lacanian perspective

amount to changing nothing less than the whole unconscious symbolic or­
der, the Other(A) (1986, p. 306). But Lacan himself, as Ragland-Sullivan
also notes, was "generally pessimistic about the possibilities of altering the
Symbolic order" (1986, p. 303). And rightly so, since there is no transcen­
dent subject who might effect such change.
From a Sartrean perspective, of course, the power of language and culture
as practico-inert are also recognized, along with the fact that change is not
an easy matter. It is possible, however, since one is struggling not with an
unconscious Other from whence one is created as a subject, but with the
Other as (prior) praxis inscribed in the practico-inert. And though the
Sartrean subject does not exist outside of language, any more than con­
sciousness anywhere exists separately from its objects, the fact of human
transcendence makes it possible to struggle with a cultural order that makes
one as one makes it. Like Lacan, Sartre would not deny the fact that women
have been associated with otherness in most cultural situations; that is, of
course, the central thesis of Beauvoir's book. But he would deny Lacan's
premise that this sociocultural determination is inherent in an unconscious
symbolic-linguistic order which itself creates the speaking subject.
Beauvoir's book shows what has gone wrong; Sartre's idea that the
symbolic-linguistic order can be changed through revolutionary praxis sug­
gests what might need to happen for women to achieve equal status with
men. This is not an easy matter since even from a Sartrean perspective the
presence of the mother as first witness is going to affect subsequent relations
between men and women.4 To this extent, Lacan is correct in thinking that
change will be difficult—but it is certainly not impossible from a Sartrean
perspective.
This brings us back to the issue of change in general, especially therapeu­
tic change, which is also difficult though possible from a Sartrean perspec­
tive because there is a transcendent consciousness at the heart of the thera­
peutic enterprise. Opacity lies in the inertia of the practico-inert, not in the
human praxis which organizes and sustains it or infuses it with new mean­
ings. From a Lacanian perspective, on the other hand, it is difficult to see
how change might occur in psychotherapy. Of course, Lacan claims that the
slightest alteration in an individual's structuration in the symbolic order
changes everything, so we might imagine that Lacanian analysis must ad­
dress itself to finding the key to such changes. This, I believe, is in fact the
case (though Lacan's writings offer few case examples), and it is a point to
which we shall return in the next chapter. Still, as with deterministically ori-
 Sartre and Lacan on the Nature of Language 273

ented psychotherapy in general, there is the question of how the Lacanian

analyst, if the analyst is not himself or herself a transcendent consciousness,
can aid the analysand in effecting such changes. How is one to change a
cultural-linguistic order of which one is the plaything rather than the origi­
nator? I believe that Sartre's concept of language as practico-inert and
speech as praxis, while it takes into account the difficulties inherent in
changing the exigencies inscribed in the sociomaterial world, will allow the
solution that Lacanian analysis does not.

A Sartrean Reply: Language as Practico-inert

A serious Sartrean challenge to Lacan must attempt to account for those

phenomena which Lacan explains by applying the insights of structural lin­
guistics to psychoanalysis. I contend that Sartre's account of the insertion of
the individual into language provides the starting point for such a critique.
Of course, Sartre's philosophy, unlike Lacanian analysis, is neither a philos­
ophy nor a psychology of language, as Sartre himself makes clear—though
he concedes that a philosophy of language could be extrapolated from his
work (Sartre in Schilpp, 1981, p. 17). Therefore, what we expect from Sartre
is not a precisely developed linguistic system, but an idea of how language
fits into his overall philosophy and how the individual's insertion into lan­
guage fits into existential psychoanalysis. In the Critique, Sartre states une­
quivocally that language is practico-inert. The act of speaking, however, is
not. And speech as praxis has priority over language as practico-inert.
This does not mean, of course, that some of what Lacan says about the ef­
fects of language as structure will not appear true from a Sartrean perspec­
tive; indeed, Sartre understands that language involves an inscription of
otherness in the heart of my being. Such otherness is "unconscious" in the
sense that it is usually unexamined. It is not, however, unconscious in the
sense of being a realm beyond consciousness. And like all aspects of the
practico-inert, it may be lived either more as praxis or more as hexis. It is to
the exigencies written in language as practico-inert structure that Sartre re­
fers in the statement quoted in the introduction to this chapter where he
sees an affinity between Lacan's dictum that the "unconscious is structured
like a language" and his own view of the counterfinalities of the written and
spoken word.
On the other hand, it is equally true that Lacanian analysis, from a
Sartrean perspective, must appear mistaken in its attempt to attune the
274 Chapter Seven

analysand to the "discourse of the Other" without at the same time at-
tempting to restore speech as intentional praxis. This leaves structuralist psy­
choanalysis open to the criticism which Sartre makes of the structuralist an­
thropology of Levi-Strauss in the Critique. While structuralism accurately
describes a certain moment of human affairs—that of the practico-inert or
the antidialectic—it is analytical rather than dialectical in placing static
structures rather than totalizing praxis at the heart of social science research.
In this respect, structuralism is seriously one-sided in its approach to under­
standing human individuals and groups. From the perspective of existential­
ist therapy, the point would be to examine the insertion of the individual
into language (as Sartre does with Flaubert) with an end to increasing the
domain of real freedom, or praxis, and to decreasing the domain of hexis, or
acceptance of oneself as "spoken" by one's own language and culture rather
than as "speaking" in the sense of intentional (self-) creation.
Language, as antidialectic, betrays the characteristics of all practico-inert
objects: It is matter (in this case, "disturbances of the air" [CDR, p. 98] or
squiggles on a piece of paper) infused with human meanings and requiring
human praxis to sustain those meanings. And though I use language as a
medium through which to objectify myself, this medium is, like other as­
pects of the practico-inert, treacherous in that I must work with a matter
which is already alive with the meanings of past others and which may be
twisted by future others to their own ends—as, for example, when my state­
ments, written or oral, are turned against me or used toward ends which are
not my own. Sartre therefore notes that "whenever I form a sentence its
meaning escapes from me, is stolen from me; meanings are changed for every-
one by each speaker and each day; the meanings of the very words in my
mouth are changed by others" (CDR, p. 98). Like the practico-inert in gen­
eral, language also bestows a sense of exigency derived from the inscriptions
of the others who have engraved it with their meanings through the ages.
Speaking is not a private but a public act which "does not consist in insert­
ing a vocable into a brain through an ear, but in using sounds to direct the
interlocutor's attention to this vocable as public exterior property" (CDR,
pp. 98-99).
As a practico-inert repository of past praxes, language is both a way of pre­
serving cultural continuity and an invitation to hexis. Sartre agrees with La-
can that the insertion into language is equivalent to insertion into the socio-
cultural order—that otherness comes to be inscribed into my project
through language. He states that the "Other in me makes my language," but
he hastens to add that language is also "my way of being in the Other" (FI,
 Sartre and Lacan on the Nature of Language 275

1:12). Otherness, for Sartre, is not all there is to speech, and he laments the
fact that speaking may at times become almost pure hexis, pure otherness. A
striking example of language as "idea-hexis" is the racist/colonialist lan­
guage that supports the status quo in a situation of oppression. Racist slo­
gans, Sartre points out, are not really "thought" at all—that is, they are not
capable of verification or falsification. Rather, they are mindless repetitions
of serial ideas which belong to everyone and no one. Behind such slo­
gans, as with all idea-hexis, is the "secret hope that thought is a stone"
(CDR, p. 300n). Indeed, the racist slogan appears to have the "materiality of
a fact [precisely] because no one thinks it" (CDR, p. 30m). Certainly, all
mindless repetition similarly conveys a sense of "thought" as hexis, though
this does not mean that one may not use a conventional phrase in the ser­
vice of a linguistic act which is primarily praxis (see Sartre's discussion in FI,
I:6oi).
Language is also, like the practico-inert in general, capable of codification
and possibly even of quantification. In other words, it is accessible to analy­
sis. Although a living language is never a closed system, it appears, like
other practico-inert objects, to be an inert totality defined by the structural
relations of its parts. Thus Sartre would agree with Lacan and the structural
linguists that the study of language involves a study of the relations between
mutually conditioned elements in a system and not between self-contained
elements. O n the other hand, language is really a totalization. Sartre points
out that "the sentence is an actual totalisation where every word defines it­
self in relation to the others, to the context and to the entire language, as an
integral part of the whole." Language, he goes on to say, "contains every
word and every word is to be understood in terms of language as a whole; it
contains the whole of language and reaffirms it" (CDR, p. 99). He repeats
this idea in the Flaubert biography, noting that "no one doubts that the
whole of language is needed . . . for the sentence to define its own being and
its meaning, which is nothing but differentiation" (FI, 1:27). Obviously, La­
can would agree.
Furthermore, Sartre is as aware as Lacan of all the associations, possibili­
ties for substitution, connotations, and sound relations by which sentences
imply more than they say and sometimes suffer a deviation of meaning.
Sartre even defines a form of bad faith with respect to language which in­
volves a denial of the capacity of language and other people to derail one's
project as speaker or writer. Sartre tells us that the practitioners of L'Arts Afc>-
solu, including Flaubert and Mallarme, attempted to exclude all chance
from their literary productions. Flaubert, for instance, struggled desperately
276 Chapter Seven

to find precisely the right word which would produce only a specifically in-
tended response.
This position is comparable to the second form of bad faith discussed in
earlier chapters: the denial of facticity. It is unrealistic because chance neces­
sarily plays a role in every aspect of life, including speech and literary pro­
duction. The person of action, unlike the aesthete, realizes that his or her
project will be stolen by others because he or she is aware of its relationship
with "the whole of materiality through the mediation of men and the whole
of man through the mediation of materiality" (IF, 3:189; quoted by Barnes,
1981, p. 276). When one contrasts this position with that of writers such as
Flaubert and Mallarme, who, as "Knights of Nothingness," attempt to take
a position outside of humanity and outside the sociolinguistic order, one re­
alizes that it is an impossible aim. These writers cannot make themselves
"other than man" (IF, 3:145; quoted by Collins, 1980, p. 156)—they cannot oc­
cupy the Hegelian position of Absolute Knowledge or make themselves
gods. The refuge of the imaginary will not save them from the contingent
world. The book will remain "a human enterprise that partially escapes its
author and thus reflects his facticity as well as his freedom,, (IF, 3:191; quoted
in Collins, 1980, p. 158).5
If it is possible to live one's linguistic facticity in bad faith, however, it is
also possible to live one's linguistic freedom in bad faith. And, indeed, this is
the deeper form of bad faith exhibited by Flaubert as portrayed by Sartre. It
is also, I believes, a form of inauthenticity which is endemic to structuralism
in general and to Lacan's account of the insertion of the individual into lan­
guage in particular. The difference is that Flaubert's inauthenticity is a mat­
ter of lived experience, whereas Lacan's is a matter of psycholinguistic the­
ory. In any case, according to Sartre, speech/writing is—or ought to
be—praxis. He notes that "language as the practical relation of one man to
another is praxis and praxis is always language (whether truthful or decep­
tive) because it cannot take place without signifying itself" (CDR, p. 99).
The verb "signify" is important here. Sartre does not use "signification" in a
purely linguistic sense, as Lacan and the structuralists do. Rather, he uses
the term to indicate the intentional act of meaning creation. For Sartre, this
involves not just speaking and writing but all meaning-oriented activity—
that is, all human praxes. "Speaking," Sartre maintains, "is nothing more
than adapting and enriching a behavior which is already verbal, that is, al­
ready expressive in itself" (FI, 1:28).
Similarly, in Being and Nothingness, Sartre maintains that language arises
with my discovery of the necessity to express myself in a world where there
 Sartre and Lacan on the Nature of Language 277

are others. He notes that while "psychological and historical problems exist
with regard to the existence, the learning and the use of a particular lan­
guage, there is no special problem concerning what is called the discovery or
invention of language." That discovery, he goes on to say, is exactly equiva­
lent to my discovery of my Being-for-others:

Language is not a phenomenon added on to being-for-others. It is origi­

nally being-for-others; that is, it is the fact that a subjectivity experi­
ences itself as an object for the Other. In a universe of pure objects lan­
guage could under no circumstances have been "invented" since it
presupposes an original relation to another subject. In the intersubjec-
tivity of the for-others, it is not necessary to invent language because it
is already given in the recognition of the Other. I am language. . . . Lan­
guage is therefore not distinct from the recognition of the Other's exist­
ence." (BN, pp. 37^-73)

Thus for Sartre, there is no moment of entry into the symbolic-linguistic or­
der in the Lacanian sense (though Sartre would not deny that the child
learns at a certain point in time to speak and that this makes a difference).
Rather, speech is an enrichment of behavior which is always already signify­
ing.
The signifying act in Sartre therefore opens onto the world of reciprocal
relations with others, either directly or through the mediation of other
practico-inert objects. Thus "truth" in Sartre is not merely linguistic; verifi­
cation, as we have seen, involves checking out the indications that the Oth­
er's words give me about the world which we share in common and which
is, admittedly, partially created by language. Without this possibility of veri­
fication, words would be a matter of mere belief, leading to the creation of a
false ego and the development of a lifestyle which is primarily other-
directed. Not that all of us do not start out, as children, with some mixture
of belief and truth—but most of us (unlike Sartre's Flaubert) move in the di­
rection of verifying the statements of others in important areas.
Signification for Sartre does not imply a self-referential closed system, as
in Lacan. For Sartre, what the signifier signifies—the signified—points out­
ward toward the phenomenal world; although one can never get to Being-
in-itself as it is, one is not hopelessly trapped in a linguistic universe without
reference. The signifier points both to the humanized object and to the
other person, to reciprocity, since it is the purpose of words to "carry the
projects of the Other into me and . . . my own projects into the Other"
278 Chapter Seven

(CDR, p. 98). Where this does not occur, where words are appreciated for
their opacity rather than for their transcendent capacity, "aestheticism"
takes the place of genuine praxis. It would seem that structuralist psycho-
analysis, by defining the real as the "impossible" and by insisting that Ian-
guage is a closed structure where one glides from word to word without ex-
ternal reference, recommends the perspective of the aesthete—which is just
the perspective that Sartre sees as the key to Flaubert's neurosis.
Flaubert's position as an aesthete, according to Sartre, derives ultimately
from a childhood in which he found himself "badly anchored in the uni­
verse of discourse" (FI, 1:15-16). And while some readers, aware of Flaubert's
status as one of the world's great novelists, might wish to be as "badly an-
chored" as he, Sartre in his biography does make a good case for a stylistic
analysis even of Flaubert's greatest works as exemplifying this linguistic "fail­
ure." Obviously, this failure has its origins in those experiences of early
childhood in which Flaubert's relations with his mother failed to provide
him with a sense that he could actively seek to fulfill rather than merely pas­
sively suffer the satisfaction or denial of his needs. Because he experienced
only the dutiful ministrations of a cold mother, Sartre maintains that
Flaubert never came to know "that first communication, the reciprocity of
tenderness" (FI, 2:17) on which all later (verbal and other) communication
will rest. For this reason, Sartre maintains that language for Flaubert comes
to be a gesture rather than an act—representation or playacting rather than
presentation.
According to Sartre, we are all capable of having the world derealized
when we are unable to respond to its demands through effective action. He
gives as an example an experience of Gide's one night in a Venetian lagoon
where he was threatened by gondoliers who were deliberating over whether
to take his wallet or perhaps his life. Sartre himself had a similar experience
during the Second World War, when he was caught between German and
French guns and faced being shot by either side depending on whether he
advanced or retreated. In both situations, there was no real action that ei­
ther man might have taken to save himself, and in both situations there was
a feeling of unreality, pretense, role-playing about the scene. Sartre proposes
that this is what Flaubert's entire life is like (FI, 2:15-17).
Sartre contends that the young Flaubert's passive constitution prevents
him from even conceiving of speech as action or as reciprocity. For speech to
be real praxis, according to Sartre, it must refer to one's earliest experience as
praxis: One must be active from the beginning. This is exactly the converse
of Flaubert's earliest experience as presented by Sartre. Hence it is that
 Sartre and Lacan on the Nature of Language 279

words wound him, his whole body quivering with the shafts of arrows as if
he were a "little Saint Sebastian. ,, Words wound Flaubert because they do
not apply to his experience in the same way that they apply to the experi­
ence of those "loved sons" who are "princes" in their exercise of the "sover­
eignty that these denominations legitimatize." Words, Sartre tells us, are
value laden. They refer to "the autonomy of spontaneity, to the synthetic
unity of experience, to all the structures of praxis"—and in doing so, they re­
fer to a "creative and sovereign spontaneity that the child [Gustave] has
never encountered in himself" (FI, 1:148-49). Words, those practico-inert
objects, have been endowed with the past praxes of others—so that they
may be invoked in the interest of future praxis. But praxis has never been
awakened in Flaubert; from earliest infancy, his experience has been hexis.
Hence it is that the child Gustave comes to regard words as opaque; they
are a material gift, like a music box given to him by the adults but bearing
no reference to his own experience (FI, 1:14). For this reason, Gustave is un­
able to conceive of speech as reciprocity. For him "dialogue is not the actual­
ization of reciprocity through the Word, it is an alternation of monologues"
(FI, 2:l8). And though it is true that Flaubert has to maintain his passivity,
just as he has to learn language, he does so (as he himself complains) with­
out that sense of freedom which is the earmark of praxis. Although Flaubert
is forced to learn the language of praxis, its meanings are never measured by
"subjective certainty" based on active experience (FI, 1:342). Gustave misses
the "transcendental indication" in words which is an invitation to "escape
from the self toward" the world (FI, 1:152) for the simple reason that he has
never genuinely learned to act.
Instead, Flaubert develops a form of action which Sartre refers to as "pas­
sive activity" and he learns the "feudal" relationship of adoration, but he
never learns the reciprocity which leads to actual engagement with another
as another transcendence—to reciprocal love, antagonism, or mutual aid.
He never learns to subject belief to verification. Hence it is that Sartre ex­
plains a family story about Gustave at age six in which the future writer is
told by a servant to "go into the kitchen . . . and see if Pm there." The duti­
ful child trots into the kitchen to ask, much to the amusement of the other
servants. Sartre comments that if "Gustave, aged six, confuses sign and
meaning to the extent that the material presence of the sign is the evidence
that guarantees the truth of the meaning, he must have had a poor initial re­
lationship with the Other" (FI, 1:14). Like Lacan's mirror stage infant, then,
Gustave learns not a distinction but a "confusion of self and Other": "He is
himself as an Other and for an Other" (FI, 1:145). A little later, Gustave will
280 Chapter Seven

have difficulty learning to read for the same reason: Reading requires an ac­
tive synthesis of the material, which he finds exceedingly difficult.
Sartre reminds us that Flaubert all his life expressed an affinity for ani­
mals, children (who are often treated as small animals), and severely men­
tally disabled persons. Flaubert's sympathy was for those creatures on the
horizon but not quite included in the cultural-linguistic order. One of the
characters of his juvenilia, Djalioh, is a half-man half-orangutan who feels
deeply but communicates badly. Flaubert clearly identifies with him.
Flaubert, unlike those loved children who regard themselves as princes, has
been received with indifference. He is therefore, Sartre tells us, "wild
grass"—he does not fit into the cultural-linguistic order where action and
reciprocity are expected. "No mouth," Sartre says rather poetically, "gave
Gustave, that weed, the language of useless plants, the only language that
would be his own." Later on, he would try to invent it. For the time being,
"he never feels what he expresses and never expresses what he feels" (FI,
1:149). F° r Flaubert, only the stupors and half-mystical experiences into
which he had sunk since he was a child are "real."
As for communication, because Flaubert never feels that words represent
his own experience, he exaggerates and playacts, but he does not communi­
cate. He is excluded from the dialogical exchanges which are the mark of
true communication between people because

he is unaware that every word is a right over the Other; that every sen­
tence, even a purely informative one is imposed as a question, a solicita­
tion, a command, an acceptance, a refusal, etc., in the interminable
conversation men have pursued over the centuries; that every question
is answered, even by silence; that any two persons, different as they
may be, when placed in each other's presence, carry on a dialogue,
though fully intending to keep quiet, because even in the most com­
plete immobility they are necessarily seeing and visible, totally signify­
ing and totally signified. For the child Gustave—and later for the
man—dialogue is not the actualization of reciprocity through the Word,
it is an alternation of monologues. (FI, 2:17-18)

Even these monologues, however, are external. These "alien phrases that des­
ignate him from the outside and implant themselves in his head" do not
really belong to him—do not really designate his feelings and his experience
and he does not communicate this (FI, 2:l8).
As for inclusion in a common project, Flaubert is also incapable of this be-
 Sartre and Lacan on the Nature of Language 281

cause he is incapable of the common action on the world which it requires.

Knowledge is based on immediate evidence, and Flaubert, since he has not
learned to act, is capable only of belief. For this reason, he "can under no
circumstances consider himself a solid link in a chain of collective opera-
tions" (FI, 1:154). Collective knowledge is first "rigorously impersonal and
then it is us and then me." It is through evidence that "I appeal from rigor-
ous impersonality to the historical community, and from others to myself; I
recover myself by losing myself." But such common activity is an ethical
enterprise—"an act that establishes the person but can only be accom­
plished on the foundation of a previously recognized value" (FI, 1:154). Since
Flaubert has failed to develop the sense of reciprocity and world oriented-
ness which would enable him to act as a solid link in such collective opera­
tions, we might say that the cultural-linguistic-historical order is "fore­
closed" to him—he can represent it, but he can never become an active
participant in it.
What is thereby foreclosed to Flaubert is not the Lacanian Name-of-the-
father, but the ability to make speech a verbal act. And though his father's
demand for obedience later adds to Flaubert's passivity, it is not originally
the absence of the phallic signifier but the absence of reciprocity with the
first Other (his mother) which has laid the stage for this foreclosure. Al­
though others name him, Flaubert does not know how to name himself or
his experience—and it is this absence of intentionality in speech, an absence
which Lacanian psycholinguistic theory does not recognize, which has crip­
pled him. Forever after, he will be interested in ceremonies of naming, as
when he has Emma and Leon go through their ceremony of invoking nature
in the course of the ripening of their love in Madame Bovary (FI, 1:17); o r n e
will be interested in indications that others, like himself, are spoken objects
rather than speaking subjects—as when he collects commonplaces in his
Dictionnaire des idees recues.
Indeed, Flaubert's Dictionnaire perhaps illustrates more clearly than any­
thing else his attitude toward language. What interests Flaubert is not lan­
guage as living praxis but "human significations in the process of petrifica-
tion" (FI, 1:605). The " 'moving sidewalk' of banalities" which he enjoyed
capturing in his dictionary illustrates this process. Flaubert (like Lacan) ap­
parently "does not believe that people speak" but rather that "people are spo~
ken" (FI, 1:602). Or again, Sartre maintains that language for Flaubert "is
nothing but stupidity, since verbal materiality left to itself is organized semi-
externally and produces a kind of thought-matter" (FI, 1:603). Sartre gives as
an example the following entry under "railroads": "Talk about them ecstati-
282 Chapter Seven

cally, saying: 'I, sir, who am speaking to you now—I was this morning at X; I
left by train from X, where I had taken care of my business, and in X hours I
was back here'" (FI, I:6oo). Sartre comments that while it is true that all
travelers were at the time making such remarks about railroads (as they
would later make them about airplanes), Flaubert catches only the "stupid­
ity" of the commonplace while missing the expression of naive and sponta­
neous emotion common to everyone experiencing the "marvel" of railway
travel for the first time. Flaubert is unaware of the praxis indicated by the
truisms.
Hence, whether ironic or serious, Flaubert will remain, as Sartre says, a
"choirboy of language," ceremoniously serving an alien mystery but never
making it his own (FI, 1:153). F° r Sartre, this substitution of otherness in the
place of self through language does not lead to an openness to unconscious
Being, as in Lacan, but to a use of language which is in the final analysis in-
cantatory and magical rather than a work on the world. Linguistic truth, for
Sartre, is world oriented rather than unconscious oriented, as in Lacan.
Hence Sartre notes that in normal development the signifier is not divorced
from the "real existence of the signified." On the other hand, in pathologi­
cal development, "the development of language is arrested" and verbal pro­
cesses "seem meaningless." "We have encountered such imprisoned
thought," Sartre goes on to say, "in magical formulas, in riddles, and in the
carmina sacra; we find it each night in our dreams" (FI, 1:14). As a way of life,
it is, as we saw in the last chapter, a sign of a (pathological) choice of the
imaginary over the real.
Thus we might say that a healthy insertion into language is for Sartre ex­
actly the opposite of the one Lacan envisioned. Flaubert, Sartre tells us, is in
a certain sense not wrong. The problem is that for Flaubert, as for Lacan,
sensitivity to language as "thought matter" (practico-inert) eclipses recogni­
tion of speech as praxis. It is certainly true, Sartre admits, that "every pro­
nounced speech contains within it the counterfinality that consumes it" (a
point with which not only Lacan but also Derrida would agree) and that a
word is a "a ready-made idea since it is defined outside us by its differences
from other words in the verbal spectrum." But it is equally true that in an­
other way "we are all intelligent," even when we express ourselves in com­
monplaces, in that "commonplaces are words in the sense that, by using
them we move toward a thought that is always fresh" (FI, 1:603). In addition,
praxis as genuine creativity is always striving to find new ways to express
(and create through expressing) novel experience. According to Sartre, "in­
vention characterizes speech." Under favorable conditions, we will invent—
 Sartre and Lacan on the Nature of Language 283

"if not, we will have badly named experiences and live them badly" (FI,
1:29). Speech, after all, is behavior, and discourse and lived experience are
changed by each other.
It is the creative aspect of language, in which "intelligence is a dialectical
relationship between verbal intention [which is world-oriented] and words,"
that Flaubert—and Lacan—neglect. And it is this neglect that leaves
Flaubert in a constant "state of estrangement in the face of words [which] rep-
resent the outside transferred to the inside, the interior grasped as exterior"
without the intervention of free praxis (FI, 1:603). In this respect, Flaubert is
something like Lacan's "decentered subject" who realizes that he is de-
centered—that is, the analysand who has come to terms with the otherness
from which he or she emanates, Yet it is precisely because Flaubert's desire is
the "desire of the Other" (Lacan means the linguistic unconscious, but we
have seen how this is predicated on a repression of the desire of/for the
mfOther] on the part of the mirror stage child) that he is estranged from
himself; and it is precisely because he is unable to communicate his own de­
sire in words—indeed, because he has not been allowed to develop into an
actively desiring subject—that Flaubert mimics others.
Lacan, I would contend, by neglecting intentionality and denigrating con­
sciousness, takes a position close to the one that Sartre ascribes to Flaubert.
And by placing the source of otherness not outside in the practico-inert but
inside in unconscious linguistic structure, he considers "normal" the kind of
alienation which Sartre describes as symptomatic of "an internal disorder of
language" (FI, 1:148). Lacanian alienation is unsurpassable not in the sense
that Sartrean primary alienation is unsurpassable because I cannot refuse to
objectify myself in a practico-inert world that is already filled with the objec-
tifications of others; rather, it is unsurpassable because it is this Otherness
which creates me as a speaking subject. From a Sartrean perspective, Lacan
has got it backward: The "symbol" does not "beget intelligent beings," as
Lacan (1975, p. 142) thinks; rather, intelligent beings beget and sustain sym­
bols, albeit in a world already filled with symbols and in which there is no
return to a prior state of nature which pre-exists and retains its purity out­
side of the cultural-linguistic order (FI, 1:28).
Of course, if by unconscious structure Lacan means only that one is not
usually conscious of linguistic structure and that cultural and familial mean­
ings are often imposed on us without our critical awareness, then he would
simply be talking about the practico-inert and Sartre's agreement (in the
statement quoted at the beginning of this chapter) with his idea that the
"unconscious is structured like a language" would represent a real conver-
284 Chapter Seven

gence of thinking. There are certainly times when Lacan talks as if this
might be the case, as when he discusses the way in which an individual is in-
serted into his or her "prehistory"—that is, this person's place in the family
system or particular class and/or culture. Lacan also says that the uncon­
scious is "that which is inside the subject, but which can be realized only
outside, that is to say, in that locus of the Other in which alone it may as-
sume its status'' (l973> P- !47)- As such, the unconscious is transindividual.
Or again, Lacan contends that the unconscious "is neither primordial nor
instinctual; what it knows about the elementary is no more than the ele­
ments of the signifier" (1966, p. 170).
Yet if all this sounds as if Lacan is simply talking about the cultural-
linguistic order itself, an order which for Sartre is practico-inert, then we
must remember that the unconscious for Lacan is also that which speaks the
subject from the "other scene'' where dreams, slips of the tongue, and jokes
develop. It is the locus from which symptoms which are undecipherable to
the conscious subject emanate. It is that which "speaks me" without my be­
ing aware of it. It is the reason why transcendence and any ideas I may have
of myself as a unified subject are illusions. It is the guarantor of "truth" and
of "Good Faith," the very "kernel of our being" (Lacan, 1966, pp. 172-73
and 234) from which we each derive as a "decentered subject." It is also the
reason why Lacan rejects the existential-phenomenological view of inten-
tionality. As Ragland-Sullivan points out, when Lacan speaks of conscious­
ness, he does not mean consciousness of something: "Instead, consciousness
has become a mode of perception which negotiates Desire via substitutions"
(1986, p. 91). It is in the dimension of the Other, the unconscious, that "the
recognition of desire is bound up with the desire for recognition" (Lacan,
1966, p. 172). Hence it is there, in the repressed primal relationship with the
mother and in the linguistic laws which have been placed there in the wake
of the encounter with the primal signifier, that the various substitutions
with which I fill my life make sense.
There is, of course, a sense in which Sartre would agree that language
"speaks" the subject. It is not from the realm of the unconscious, however,
that this speaking occurs. Because language is practico-inert, it is imbued
with past praxes. Thus like the practico-inert in general, it contains exigen­
cies. For example, it is presently difficult—though it is becoming possible—to
speak many languages in the world without having oneself imbued with the
implicit sexism of the generic "he." 6 It is also true that having once applied a
word to an experience, the whole history of associations to that word carry
us along. For instance, Sartre discusses the way in which the application of
 Sartre and Lacan on the Nature of Language 285

the word "love" to tender feelings endows that tenderness "with a past, a
present, a future, an objective essence constituted by the historical evolution
of mores, of folk wisdom, with a positive value and often an antivalue that
bear witness to the contradictions of the current ideology or opposing ideol­
ogies" (FI, 1:28).
The way in which a quality such as love or hate becomes associated with
the ego is, of course, familiar from Sartre's early work. What is different here
is the recognition of the power of the word in inducing the tender emotions,
the desire, as a means to preserving the "being" of love as a practico-inert
linguistic reality linking one to the history and culture in which the word is
spoken. I believe that it is the power of the practico-inert which produces
the strange phenomenon of the relationship that is changed (sometimes for
the worse) by marriage; the meanings inscribed in the word "marriage" by
others, including, of course, the couple's families of origin, come to invade
and change the simple feelings the couple previously had for each other and
in some sense to direct the relationship.
Sartre does not say that it is absolutely wrong to submit to the exigencies
discovered in the linguistic practico-inert. After all, they are paths as well as
roadblocks, and, indeed, it is the teleological implications of words which
Sartre believes disturb and estrange Flaubert. Certainly, Sartre would agree
that where the project of loving (despite its cultural-linguistic associations
and imperatives) involves a commitment including real feelings and mutual­
ity, it can benefit both parties. But where the word does not apply to the felt
reality of the individual, where it simply induces playacting, as Sartre be­
lieves was the case with Flaubert, it becomes an obstruction. In this case, the
subject is literally spoken by words which alienate him or her from any au­
thentic sense of self. On the other hand, words can also liberate by implying
a path for praxis and by naming something that previously had remained
hazy because it was unnamed. Sartre notes that "nothing exists that does
not require a name, that cannot be given one and cannot even be negatively
named by the bankruptcy of language." At the same time, "nomination from
its very origin is an art" and "invention characterizes speech" (FI, 1:29).
It is true, then, that experience is often prescribed by language, but it is
equally true that through invention, through creativity, one finds new paths
for expressing experience through language—which in turn affect future ex­
perience (one's own and others'). In one sense, language can be perceived as
a totality, with an interrelationship among its parts. But as we have seen, the
sustenance of a totality always involves totalization—and the history of lan­
guages shows that they are developing totalizations. As for individual ex-
286 Chapter Seven

pression, it is always a totalization, although the relative linguistic health or

illness of the individual can be related to the extent to which the individual
either uses language creatively or allows his or her experience to be passively
dictated by language (or perhaps fails to find ways of expressing that experi­
ence in words at all)—in other words, to the relative degree of praxis or
hexis, authenticity or other directedness, in an individual's linguistic pro­
ject. Sometimes, as in cases of social oppression, what is required is to dis­
rupt the usual workings of language—to divert and twist the meanings of
the very words of the oppressor in order to make them vehicles of revolu­
tionary praxis, as Sartre, in his preface to Black Orpheus (1948), credited the
bla^ck African poets who wrote in French with doing.7
In individual psychotherapy, too, part of the task is revolutionary linguis­
tic praxis in the sense that the client must invent a new (to him or her) way
of talking about significant past (also present) experiences which were badly
named, misnamed, or not named at all. This power of naming in psycho­
therapy cannot be overemphasized. It is the path through which release of
spontaneity is largely achieved. Obviously, from a Sartrean perspective, this
path leads from a past in which language was used to distort or twist or deny
experience through a present moment of revolutionary praxis (the "psycho­
logical instant") in which expression becomes more real as one heads off into
a future which appears different partially because it can be more truly and
realistically named. The release of speech as intersubjective praxis through
the substitution of dialogue for monologue or genuine communication for
playacting would also be a goal of existentialist therapy. What the path of
transformation might be from a Lacanian perspective, or whether transfor­
mation is possible at all in Lacanian analysis, is the subject of the next chap­
ter.

Conclusion

As we come to the end of this discussion, I think it will be apparent that La-
can has not escaped from the solipsistic quandary in which we left: him at
the end of the last chapter. The "real" still lacks adequate representation in
his system. For this reason, although Lacan may be right in saying that we
encounter nothing outside the symbolic-linguistic system (pure Being-in-
itself), he is from a Sartrean perspective mistaken in advocating a view of
language in which "signification" refers only to the relationship among lin­
guistic components and not to human world-making activity (the workings
 Sartre and Lacan on the Nature of Language iSj

of praxis on the practico-inert). Hence though Sartre would agree with La­
can that language creates the subject in the sense of providing paths for
praxis and limitations in the form of hexis and linguistic counterfinalities,
he would not agree that this is the whole story. What is significant for Sartre
(and for existentialist therapy) is what the person has made of what he or
she is made of linguistically and otherwise—and what that person might
make of this through a reorienting linguistic praxis.
I suppose the crux of the matter is that for Sartre there is an intentional
praxis which creates and sustains the linguistic practico-inert which it takes
into its project, whereas for Lacan there is not. Hence from a Sartrean per­
spective it is possible to achieve a meta-reflective position on one's funda­
mental attitude toward and insertion into language and to change direc­
tions. For Lacan, as we shall see in the next chapter, the most that is possible
is an understanding and acceptance of the fact that one is the plaything of
the linguistic unconscious—that one is (in the Sartrean sense) a signified
rather than a signifier, an object pretending to be a subject. Lacanian analy­
sis, from this perspective, is conservative and supportive of the status quo—
even to the point of insisting that the entrance into language is predicated
on a gender differentiation that is supportive of patriarchy (though it has
other possibilities as well). Certainly, as a new synchronic determinism, La­
canian metatheory offers no better explanation for the transformative possi­
bilities of depth therapy than does traditional Freudian (diachronic) deter­
minism.
Language, for Lacan, ultimately refers neither to intentional praxis nor to
intersubjective relations, but rather to the relationship of the conscious sub­
ject to the unconscious Other(A)—the subject beyond the subject which is
no subject at all in that it is an "acephalic," nonintentional subject. For
Sartre, on the other hand, language is fundamentally intersubjective (since
it arises with my Being-for-others) and world-open. Consequently, there is
the possibility both for the action of authentic speech and for the meta-use
of language to reflectively purge the distortions handed down by the original
others. And this is possible, as we have seen, because the ego and language
are not for Sartre (as they are for Lacan) unalterably other in the sense of de­
riving solely from the specular image overlaid by the Other (A). Hence,
though Sartre would not deny that language is other in the sense of con­
taining exigencies placed there by others which affect me at the most pro­
found levels of my being, he would deny that this in itself makes it impos­
sible for me to exercise the creative power of speech. One's life in the world
of language, like one's life in the practico-inert world in general, is an ines-
288 Chapter Seven

capable mixture of praxis and hexis, freedom and necessity. The question is
rather which predominates. Certainly, one of the aims of existentialist ther­
apy, as contrasted with Lacanian analysis, would be to release or restore the
creative power of language where it has been undermined by a clients earli­
est intersubjective experience.
8 ♦ Clinical Implications:
Sartrean Revolutionary Praxis
versus Lacanian Amor Fad

Introduction

From the discussion in the preceding two chapters, it would appear that the
critical question for Lacanian analysis is whether and how change is possi­
ble from this metatheoretical perspective. Obviously, change is possible from
a Sartrean perspective, although this becomes more complex in the later
philosophy with the introduction of the practico-inert. We have seen in ear­
lier chapters what the goals of change are from a Sartrean perspective. Now
we must ask what the goals of change are in Lacanian analysis. In other
words, what are the marks of a successful Lacanian analysis? These are not
easy questions to answer, especially since Lacan himself gives so few clinical
examples.1 Still, Lacan has said that the sole purpose of his teaching is to
train analysts, and Stuart Schneiderman, in his introduction to the only
book in English with extensive examples of Lacanian case studies, Returning
to Freud: Clinical Psychoanalysis in the School of Lacan, insists that "any ap­
proach to Lacan that does not see his theory in its relationship to analytic
practice is doomed to an irreducible obscurity and confusion" (1980, p. 9).
Lacan apparently did not mean his theory to be a plaything for literary crit­
ics and other intellectuals. He meant it to have an impact on clinical prac­
tice. The problem, however, as I see it, is that Lacan, by making the linguis­
tic unconscious the source and director of "subjecthood," leaves us with an
extremely unclear idea of who is to change and how this change is to occur.
It may be, as Lacan says, that "the slightest alteration in the relations be­
tween man and the signifier . . . changes the whole course of history by
modifying the lines which anchor his being" (1966, p. 174). The question is:
Who is to effect the change, individually and/or historically? It may also be,
289
290 Chapter Eight

as Douglas Collins notes, that psychoanalysis "becomes for Sartre what it

was for Hesnard and Lacan: the discovery of the invading Other within an
unhappy host" (1980, p. 109). The problem is that in Lacan it is hard to see
who the host is, other than the "animal" who learns to speak (that is, the
subject's biological underpinnings), since the little human animal is suffused
with otherness from the mirror stage identifications onward and since it is
the Other(A) who creates the conscious subject. It therefore becomes diffi­
cult to see how a kind of absolute self-alienation can be modified, much less
overcome, from a Lacanian perspective.
Actually, I do not think these problems are finally theoretically or even
practically surmountable, though I do think that the Lacanian analysts
make some interesting and even valid discoveries along the way. Nonethe­
less, I believe that Sartre's theory of praxis and the practico-inert, with its
implications for a possible movement from hexis to praxis, provides a better
clinical path for dealing with the otherness which is ensconced in the heart
of our being than Lacan's theory of the Other (A). And I contend that
Sartre's idea of the therapist as another person is fundamentally at odds
with Lacan's idea of the therapist as stand-in for the Other(A), the linguistic
unconscious, and that the aims of Sartrean existential psychoanalysis are
fundamentally different from the aims of Lacanian structuralist psychoanal­
ysis. Described briefly, the aim of Lacanian analysis might be said to be a
kind of Nietzschean amor fati or love/acceptance of the fate of being the
plaything of the linguistic unconscious predicated in part on a recognition
of the specular origins of the ego. The contrary aim of Sartrean existential
psychoanalysis could be described (as I have said in earlier chapters) as
transformation to a more authentic mode of living—"revolutionary praxis"
on the individual level.

Lacanian Analysis: Transformation or Amor Fati?

Throughout Lacan's work, despite the paucity of case histories, we find scat­
tered indications about what Lacanian analysis does, or, sometimes more
clearly, what it does not do. First of all, Lacanian analysis is not egologically
oriented; rather, it is oriented toward an opening up to the Other(A). Laca­
nian analysis is not "ego analysis" but "discourse analysis"—both the con­
scious discourse of the subject and especially the unconscious discourse of
the Other(A) which is the source of conscious discourse (Lacan, 1975, pp.
62-70). Its aim is "full speech" as opposed to "empty speech" (a point I shall
 Sartrean Revolutionary Praxis versus Lacanian Amor Fati 291

take up below). Lacan's position is therefore the opposite of most post-

Freudian psychoanalytic theorists. With the single exception of Melanie
Klein, whose work Lacan once offered to translate (Macey, 1988, pp. 220-
21), we have seen that these theorists are more interested in the development
of the ego from earliest infancy, a task suggested by Freud, than they are in
the workings of the unconscious. They prefer the structural to the economic
hypothesis of Freud.
Lacan, of course, is not a follower of Klein. Although, like Klein, he
would emphasize the unconscious, it is an unconscious of linguistic laws
rather than an unconscious of primitive instinctual forces. Still, Lacan obvi­
ously prefers Klein, whose cases he cites from time to time, to the ego psy­
chologists and the British object relations theorists.2 With the exception of
Winnicott's transitional object, Lacan universally rejects the major ideas of
the majority of post-Freudian theorists. He especially regards the attempt by
ego psychologists and object relations theorists to reconstruct the develop­
ment of the ego and to restructure the ego in analysis as undermining the
power of the Freudian achievement. For Lacan, such approaches are a do­
mestication of Freud in the interest of a false ideal of genital bliss to be
achieved in so-called normal development or (a word that Lacan, along with
Sartre, does not relish) "adjustment." As for the concentration of these the­
orists on the mother-child duo in early infancy and childhood, Lacan insists
on a "return to Freud" in the sense of placing theoretical and clinical em­
phasis on the "third term" of the Oedipal conflict—though, as we have seen,
this is an Oedipal conflict which has been radically reinterpreted by Lacan.
Lacanian analysis would therefore concentrate not on analyzing or
structuring/restructuring the ego but on bringing the analysand to an un­
derstanding of the illusory nature of the ego in the interest of a fuller attune-
ment to the subject beyond the subject who is introduced through the phal­
lic signifier and the experience of castration—the Other (A). As Lacan insists
again and again, the aim of psychoanalysis is not, as many contemporary
psychoanalysts seem to believe, to strengthen the analysand's ego, to substi­
tute the strong ego of the analyst for the weak ego of the analysand, or to in
any other way manipulate the analysand with the precepts or example of
the analyst. Lacan complains that such an analysis leads the analysand to a
"reinforced alienation" (1966, p. 274). In attempting to strengthen the ego,
contemporary analysts fail to recognize that the ego is an illusion, a mirage,
a center of misunderstanding (meconnaissance) (Lacan, 1975, p. S3)- Indeed,
the ego, far from being a force for reality organization and cooperation with
the treatment, "represents the center of all the resistances to the treatment
292 Chapter Eight

of symptoms" (Lacan, 1966, p. 23). This is so, of course, because the ego is or-
ganized around the specular images which give the individual a sense of
imaginary coherence and order based on identification. In other words, ego
analysis takes place on the plane of the imaginary, whereas Lacan believes
that effective psychoanalysis is played out "on the frontier between the sym­
bolic and the imaginary" (1978, pp. 254-55).
This perspective leads Lacanian analysts to a different treatment in analy­
sis of such issues as transference, resistance, repetition, and repression. La­
can links repetition with the desire to maintain the static illusion of the uni­
fied ego through the use of signifiers and regression with the structural traces
of previous periods as they are preserved in the signifiers rather than with an
actual movement backward to a prior "stage" of development. He regards
the contemporary analyst's attempt to overcome the analysand's resistance
through analysis of the defenses as "inquisitorial"—a position he believes is
based on an idea of the analysand's "ill will" (1975, p. 30). Indeed, he some­
times insists that the only real resistance in analysis is the resistance of the
analyst (1978, p. 324), which presumably results from the analyst's resistance
to the truths of the Other (A) and attachment to the illusory ego. In any
case, Lacan believes that if the analyst lets go of his or her need to structure
and direct the patient (Lacan insists that the analyst must direct the treat­
ment but not the patient [1966, p. 227]) and listens to the discourse of the
Other(A) as it appears in the discourse of the patient, then there will be no
need to analyze and struggle with the analysand over the analysand's resis­
tances and defenses.
As for the transference, the analyst needs to recognize that the actual fo­
cus of the transference, the place where the patient situates the analyst, is
the Other(A). It is the analyst as the "subject supposed to know" (le sujet-
suppose-savoir), but who does not really know, who takes the place of the un­
conscious Other at the beginning of analysis (Lacan, I973> P- 269). In the
course of the analysis, the analysand uses this misconception to get to know
his or her unconscious. This does not happen, according to Lacan, by the
analyst's calling the analysand's attention to disparities between what the
analysand thinks the analyst is doing (or being) and what is actually the
case. To proceed in this way is to totally mistake the nature of transference,
which acts simultaneously in the three registers of the imaginary, the sym­
bolic, and the real and is not therefore a real case (however unconsciously
motivated) of mistaken identity (Lacan, 1975, pp. 112-13). As a replay of the
past in the register of the imaginary, the transference provides not an open­
ing to the unconscious but a closing of the unconscious. Desire, for the mo-
 Sartrean Revolutionary Praxis versus Lacanian Amor Fati 293

ment, has been tossed an objet a which assuages its hunger and prevents the
backward movement along the chain of the signifiers which leads to an un­
derstanding of the original composition of the subject.
What, then, is the analyst to do? We have seen that the Lacanian analyst
does not analyze the ego and its defenses; rather, he or she waits for the
opening of the unconscious and apparently reinforces this by responding. In
the following passage, Lacan has just condemned the practice of conducting
the analysis of the transference on the basis of an alliance with the healthy
part of the analysand's ego and "appealing to his common sense by pointing
out to him the illusory character of certain of his actions in his relation to
the analyst" (Lacan, 1973, pp. 130-31). He goes on to say:

This is a thesis that subverts what it [analytic practice] is all about,

namely the bringing to awareness of this split in the subject, realized
here, in fact, in presence, To appeal to some healthy part of the subject
thought to be there in the real, capable of judging with the analyst
what is happening in the transference, is to misunderstand that it is pre­
cisely this part [represented by the transference] that closes the door, or
the window, or the shutters, or whatever—and that the beauty with
whom one wishes to speak is there, behind, only too willing to open the
shutters again. That is why it is at this moment that interpretation be­
comes decisive, for it is to the beauty one must speak. (Lacan, I973>
p. 131)

While this passage may be an example of what some critics have referred to
as Lacan's u occultation ,, of the unconscious (see Antoine Vergote in Smith
and Kerrigan, 1983, p. 217), what it makes clear is that Lacanian analysis is
not an analysis of defenses and resistances or even an analysis of the trans­
ference in the usual sense; it is instead an attempt to speak directly to the
unconscious Other (A).
Lacan's (famous or notorious) experiments with "short sessions" were ap­
parently one practical attempt to surprise the "beauty" and get her to
"speak." Against the objections of the International Psychoanalytic Associ­
ation (IPA) to this deviation from standard practice, Lacan argued that leav­
ing the analysand unsure about the length of the session speeds up the proc­
ess of analysis by lessening a routine which has long been recognized to
foster avoidance and allowing the analyst to punctuate the session wherever
the punctuation might naturally fall—rather like a metric beat or a Zen mas­
ter surprising his students (Lacan, 1966, pp. 44 and IOO-IOl). Furthermore,
294 Chapter Eight

Lacan argued, since the unconscious is timeless, standard sessions make

little sense. The IPA did not agree. Lacan's short sessions were only the most
blatant example of the heterodoxy which finally got him expelled from the
organization as a training analyst in 1963.3
The short sessions, however, were discarded after a time and, at any rate,
were not central to the practice of Lacanian analysis. In what other ways,
then, does the Lacanian analyst attempt to induce this opening of the un­
conscious? First, he or she does this by keeping silent. Lacan insists that the
analyst must not instruct, overinterpret, or otherwise get in the way of the
opening of the unconscious through the thread of the signifiers in the prac­
tice of free association. This silence of the analyst is not, however, a nonre-
sponse since the speaking of the analysand implies a response, even if that
response is silence. The analysand, for his or her part, attempts through the
transference to get the analyst to enact the part of the objet a, to enter the
imaginary loop of the ego to alter ego relations which constitute the analy-
sand's everyday interactions (Lacan, 1978, p. 324). The analyst must reject
all of the analysand's "demands," that is, the analysand's concrete indica­
tions of what the analyst must do in order to satisfy the analysand (at bot­
tom, this is a demand for love or recognition) in the interest of provoking an
opening up of the analysand's desire.
This desire, which Lacan defines as the splitting that results from the sub­
traction of need (for organismic satisfaction) from demand (for recognition
or love) (1966, p. 287), occurs in what Lacan refers to as the "defiles of the
signifier" (1966, p. 264 and elsewhere). Desire, Lacan says in another place,
"begins to take place in the margin in which demand becomes separated
from need: this margin being that which is opened up by demand, the ap­
peal of which can be unconditional only in regard to the Other, under the
form of the possible defect, which need may introduce into it, of having no
universal satisfaction (what is called Anxiety')" (1966, p. 311).
Most analysts, in Lacan's view, reduce desires to demands (1966, p. 262)
and thereby fail to get at the symbolic regression which leads to cure.
Through demand, the analysand's "whole past opens up right down to earli­
est infancy," and the analyst, by "supporting" that demand through failing
to satisfy it, allows "the signifiers in which [the subject's] frustration is
bound up to reappear"—to, as it were, recross the bar of repression and gain
access to conscious cognition (Lacan, 1966, pp. 254-55). What is important
in the recovery of the past, however, is not that the analysand relive his or
her history but that the analysand reconstruct it and by doing so restructure
 Sartrean Revolutionary Praxis versus Lacanian Amor Fati 295

the signifying chain by which he or she has been constructed (Lacan, 1975,
P. 13).
Lacan suggests that the analyst must take the position of the dummy (le
mort) in a game of bridge in order to introduce the fourth player—the
Other(A), who is the partner of the analysand and "whose hand the ana­
lyst, by his tactics, will try to expose" (1966, p. 229). The Lacanian analyst,
in fact, plays dead. He "cadaverizes" his position—"either by his silence
when he is the Other with a capital O, or by annulling his own resistance
when he is the Other with a small 0" (Lacan, 1966, p. 140). Only by playing
dead, according to Lacan, does the analyst become the one to whom the dis­
course of the Other(A), by whom death enters the human scene in the sense
that the word is the death of the thing, is addressed. Thus Lacanian analysis
works by means of the analyst's refusing the position of the objet a in favor
of the position of the Other(A).
Lacan therefore notes that the

analyst partakes of the radical nature of the Other, in so far as he is

what is most inaccessible. From this point on, and beginning at this
point in time, what leaves the imaginary of the ego of the subject is in
accordance not with this other to which he is accustomed, and who is
just his partner, the person who is made so as to enter his game, but
precisely with this radical Other which is hidden from him. What is
called transference happens precisely between A [the Other(A)] and m
[moi or ego], in so far as the a [objet a], represented by the analyst, is
lacking. (1978, p. 324)

Hence it is that Lacan insists (though he knows it is impossible) that the

ideal analyst, far from displaying his or her "strong ego" for the emulation of
the analysand, would be "egoless" (1978, p. 246).
Only by diminishing his or her own ego involvement will the analyst be
able to act as the "harmonic vibration" which allows the passage of the
"fundamental speech" of the Other(A) to the conscious subject (Lacan,
1978, p 325). Thus Lacan, far from endorsing the image of the analyst as an
empathic or living mirror offered by theorists such as Heinz Kohut,4 views
the proper function of the analyst to be that of the "empty mirror" through
which the analysand's discourse with the Other whom he or she is truly ad­
dressing on the other side of the "wall of language" may pass (Lacan, 1978,
p. 244). The resolution of the transference therefore hangs not on the dis­
persal of illusions but on the analysand's progressively discovering the
296 Chapter Eight

"Other he is truly addressing, without knowing it, and of him [sic] progres­
sively assuming the relations of transference at the place where he is, and
where he didn't know he was" (Lacan, 1978, p. 246).
Lacan is being characteristically enigmatic here, but his students know by
now how to interpret the enigma. It is in terms of a frequent reference to
Freud's famous dictum, "Wo Es war, soil Ich werden" which Lacan goes on to
mention. Translated as, "Where id was, there ego shall be," in the Standard
English Edition (Freud, 1923, p. 80), this has usually been interpreted to
mean that psychoanalysis seeks to increase the dominion of the reality prin­
ciple over the pleasure principle, to bring id impulses under the control and
understanding of the ego.
Lacan absolutely rejects this rendition, noting categorically that Freud did
not mean that "the ego must dislodge the id" (Lacan, 1973, p. 44). Instead,
Lacan views this statement as an imperative commanding the return to the
Other (A). He retranslates Freud's statement, citing Freud's deletion of the
definite articles (das Es and das Ich) as a reason for discounting the idea that
Freud was referring to the psychic structures ego and id (Lacan, 1966,
p. 128). According to Lacan, Freud meant to say, "There where it [the lin­
guistic unconscious] was, it is my duty that I should come to being" (Lacan,
1966, p. 129). Ragland-Sullivan interprets this to mean, "Only in the move­
ment of seeing oneself emerge from the unconscious can knowledge become
truth" (1986, p. 12). Furthermore, Lacan playfully identifies Es with S, which
is now considered to be not the conscious subject but the real subject, the
Other (A), who speaks in the conscious subject's unconscious. "At the end
of [psychoanalysis," Lacan says, "it is him [S] who must be called on to
speak, and to enter into relation with the real others. Where the S was, there
the Ich should be" (1978, p. 246). One should return to one's unconscious
origins and use them (one wonders how) as a basis for intersubjectivity.
These ideas point to the meaning of that "full" or "veridical" or "true
speech" at which Lacanian analysis aims. Ideally, this would be a speech
which occurs without the disrupting intervention of ego identifications—
though Lacan admits that even after a Lacanian analysis, the ego does not
"volatilize" and the analysand "doesn't go to heaven, disembodied and pure
symbol" (1978, p. 325). Rather, the ego is little by little linked with a subject
who has come to identify with the Other (A). Full speech, according to La­
can, differs from "empty speech" in that it "realizes the truth of the subject."
In empty speech, on the contrary, the subject "loses himself in the machina­
tions of the system of language"—a statement which might sound Sartrean
except for Lacan's explanation that this loss entails an entanglement in "the
 Sartrean Revolutionary Praxis versus Lacanian Amor Fati 297

labyrinth of referential systems made available to him by the state of cultural

affairs to which he is a more or less interested party" (1975, p. 50). I take this
to mean that movement inward toward the unconscious is preferable to
movement outward toward the social order.
Again Lacan may appear Sartrean when he says that the goal of analysis
can only be "the advent of a true speech and the realization by the subject
of his history in his relation to a future" (1966, p. 88). What Lacan means by
assuming my history, however, appears to be more similar to Nietzschean
amor fati than to Sartrean responsibility—in other words, it seems to imply
an acceptance of what is as inevitable rather than a movement toward genu­
ine transcendence. The analysand's "truth," according to Lacan, is "the sig­
nification taken on in his particular destiny by those givens which are pecu­
liar to him and which one can call his lot" (1978, pp. 325-26). Thus
although I may call on my counterpart to recognize me through his or her
speech, the real recognition I require is the understanding of my destiny
which I will find in the Other(A).
In order to understand myself as a product of the "discourse of the
Other," I must understand what this discourse is. It is neither an abstract
discourse nor the discourse of my counterpart or even my slave, Lacan says.
It is instead "the discourse of the circuit in which I am integrated" and
where I am "one of its links." It is the "discourse of my father" in that I am
doomed to repeat his mistakes, "not simply because I am his son, but be­
cause one can't stop the chain of the discourse, and it is precisely my duty to
transmit it in its aberrant form to someone else" (Lacan, 1978, p. 89).
Obviously, this is a kind of synchronic determinism in which a human be­
ing is caught in a symbolic circuit. Lacan reiterates this idea in an oft-quoted
statement from the lecture known as the "Rome Discourse" wherein he first
laid out his system as a psycholinguistics: "I identify myself in language, but
only by losing myself in it like an object. What is realized in my history is
not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present per­
fect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall
have been for what I am in the process of becoming" (1966, p. 86). Lacan
does not mean that down there in the future I am projecting an in-itself-for-
itself. He means that at the moment the subject enters the stage of history
"the die has already been cast." "Don't you feel that there's something deri­
sory and funny," he asks his students in a seminar, "about the fact that the
die has already been cast?" (1978, p. 220). According to Lacan, the aim of
analysis is to lead the analysand back to "his signifying dependence" (l973>
p. JJ). After all, as Lacan puts it, "somewhere in the Other, it knows." And
298 Chapter Eight

it knows "precisely because it is upheld by the signifiers through which the

subject is constituted ,, (Lacan, 1985, p. 158).
I think we can now decipher the meaning of Lacan's enigmatic statement
that the lofty goal of the psychoanalyst is nothing less than to act as a "me­
diator between the [Heideggerian] man of care and the [Hegelian] subject of
absolute knowledge" (1966, p. 105). The "man of care" (according to Heideg­
ger, the structure of consciousness is sorge [care or concern]), aside from rep­
resenting the cares or troubles which the analysand brings the analyst, is the
conscious subject with all his or her (albeit illusory) involvements, whereas
the "subject of absolute knowledge" is the Other(A). Lacan, however, is no
metaphysician. He declares categorically that "there is no Other of the
Other" (1966, p. 311): There is no point outside the linguistic system from
which to judge it. The subject of absolute knowledge, in an ironic reversal of
Hegelian idealism, becomes the Lacanian acephalic subject (Lacan, 1978,
p. 167, and elsewhere). This subject without a head, this subject which is no
subject at all, is the "truth" to which the Lacanian analyst would have his or
her analysands return.
The analysand's return is therefore to a symbolic order which Lacan links
with the death instinct and which "is simultaneously non-being and insist­
ing to be"—a symbolic order "in travail, in the process of coming, insisting
on being realised" in the history of the analytic subject (Lacan, 1978, p. 326).
In such an order, the Lacanian analysand must discover that before his or
her birth the analysand had been constituted "in the chorus line" of con­
crete discourse as a message which "is entirely located in the succession of
messages" (Lacan, 1978, p. 283). The Lacanian analysand, then, is a decen-
tered subject who recognizes his or her decenteredness—a person who recog­
nizes that he or she is caught up in the "gears" of language and therefore
"isn't master in his own house" (Lacan, 1978, p. 307). It is at the point where
the analysand recognizes his or her dependence on the signifiers, one pre­
sumes, that the Lacanian analyst graces the "true speech" of the analysand
with a reply (Lacan, 1966, p. 95).
The problem with Lacan's system is that it is a system which closes in on
itself, continuously swallowing its own tail. For the transparency of a con­
sciousness opening out onto the world, Lacan substitutes "the opacity of the
signifier that determines the I" (1966, p. 307). No genuine praxis is possible
in a system where the conscious subject is merely an "effect" of the uncon­
scious signifiers (Lacan, 1973, pp. 126 and 207) and where the signifier is the
determinant of a signified which glides ceaselessly beneath it (Lacan, 1966,
p. 299). As Antoine Vergote notes,
 Sartrean Revolutionary Praxis versus Lacanian Amor Fati 299

Actually, [for Lacan] the subject of discourse is fundamentally the sub­

ject of "modern game theory." . . . The subject is but the locus of the
combinative production of autonomized signifiers. The clinician might
even wonder if this is not the nonsubject of schizophrenia, the one who
is the stake of the word but who is no longer playing the game of lan­
guage. (In Smith and Kerrigan, 1983, p. 202)

Certainly, Lacan means to distinguish between the language of the psy­

chotic, which, having never been anchored in the phallic signifier, lacks
"anchoring points" (Lacan, 1966, p. 303) which can give it sense, and the
language of the normal person or the neurotic. The question, however, is
whether intelligible discourse can be accounted for in a system which denies
both intentionality in the phenomenological sense and reference. If the "re­
ality of the subject" is unconscious (Lacan, 1978, p. 58) and if this uncon­
scious subject lacks a head with which to think in the usual sense, then
madness would seem to be the norm of human reality. Lacan says that belief
in the ego, since it is a mirage, is a kind of madness (1978, p. 247). But is not
Lacan's insistence on the primacy of language over all else also a kind of
madness? Lacan says that psychoanalysis induces in the subject a "con­
trolled paranoia" (1966, p. 15); one wonders if Lacanian analysis might not, if
it succeeds in its avowed aims, produce an actual schizophrenia.
This point about the linkage between Lacanian analysis and psychosis is
reinforced by an unlikely source: Lacanian Jacques-Alain Miller's explica­
tion of Lacan's interview with a psychotic patient published in Stuart
Schneiderman's book as "A Lacanian Psychosis" (Lacan in Schneiderman,
1980, pp. 19-41). Miller argues that this psychotic man (who had, in any
case, read Lacan's Ecrits) demonstrates Lacan's theory of the linguistic un­
conscious. The patient was subject to the delusion of "imposed speech," in
which he could not recognize himself as the speaker. He responded with
what he called "reflexive statements," which he did recognize as coming
from himself. Miller contends that the patient "witnessed in this way
[through the imposed statements] the emergence of the discourse of the
Other, but directly, without this soothing misapprehension of the reversal
that makes us believe that we speak, when in fact we are spoken." Lacan, re­
sponding to this, asks, "How do we not sense . . . that the words we depend
upon are imposed on us, that speech is an overlay, a parasite, the form of
cancer with which human beings are afflicted?" (Miller in Schneiderman,
1980, p. 49). The question which this Lacanian psychosis brings up "is no
longer 'What is a madman?' but 'How can one not be mad?'" (Miller in Sch-
300 Chapter Eight

neiderman, 1980, p. 48). One wants to know why indeed, from a Lacanian
perspective, we are not all mad—since this attentiveness to the truth of the
unconscious is exactly the point of Lacanian analysis.
The truth of the human subject, according to Lacan, lies in the inhuman
interrelation among the signifiers, in linguistic structure—leading to an in­
sistence on the primacy of the "letter" over the "spirit" in discourse:

Of course, as it is said, the letter killeth while the spirit giveth life. We
can't help but agree, having had to pay homage elsewhere to a noble
victim of the error of seeking the spirit in the letter; but we should also
like to know how the spirit could live without the letter. Even so, the
pretensions of the spirit would remain unassailable if the letter had not
shown us that it produces all the effects of truth in man without involv­
ing the spirit at all. (Lacan, 1966, p. 158)

Lacan therefore inverts the Cartesian dictum in this way: "I think where I
am not [in the Other(A)], therefore I am where I do not think [in my every­
day discourse]." Hence it is that "the ring of meaning flees from our grasp
along the verbal thread" (Lacan, 1966, p. 166)—and this is true of the so-
called normal person, who does not recognize it, as well as of the psychotic.
Perhaps the little bit of ego, itself an illusion, which "remains at the conclu­
sion of a Lacanian analysis saves one from psychosis.
In any case, it would appear that Lacanian analysis rescues the analysand
from one alienation, the specular identifications of the ego, to immerse him
or her in another, the otherness of the linguistic order itself. Lacan says,

If it speaks in the Other, whether or not the subject hears it with his
ear, it is because it is there that the subject, by means of a logic anterior
to any awakening of the signified, finds its signifying place. The discov­
ery of what it articulates in that place, that is to say, in the unconscious,
enables us to grasp at the price of what splitting (Spaltung) it has been
constituted. (1966, p. 285)

The split subject, the subject beyond a subject, the acephalic subject, the
"fading" subject, the subject who is not a subject in the usual sense—these
are the concerns of Lacanian analysis. One is tempted to say that what is re­
vealed here is the madness of a metatheoretical system which denies inten-
tionality and reference. The result, one might conclude, is a therapeutic
practice which offers no escape from the linguistic order which creates the
 Sartrean Revolutionary Praxis versus Lacanian Amor Fati 301

conscious human subject, but which the conscious human subject does not
create. In the next section, I will consider how a therapeutic practice in­
formed by Sartrean premises, without simply rejecting all of the insights of
Lacanian analysis, can offer a way out of this dilemma by resituating inten­
tional praxis at the heart of the therapeutic endeavor.

A Sartrean Critique of Lacanian Analysis

The aim of depth therapy from a Sartrean perspective would be just the op­
posite of the aim of Lacanian analysis. It would be to increase the domain of
real freedom in which Lacan simply does not believe, to transform hexis into
praxis. Existentialist therapy would involve a movement not inward toward
the symbolic unconscious, but outward toward an inter subjective and
practico-inert world which can be grappled with and changed. From a
Sartrean perspective, the only time an individual is the mere plaything of
the signifiers is when, like Flaubert, this person has been badly inserted into
language—by which Sartre means that he or she has accepted language as
hexis rather than as praxis, as that which determines me without my using it
to determine myself in return. Yet this is exactly the aim of Lacanian
analysis—to bring the analysand to an appreciation of his or her "signifying
dependence." Sartre would not, of course, claim that we are absolutely free
with respect to our use of language; his position is not that of Humpty
Dumpty in Lewis CarrolPs Alice in Wonderland.5 To believe that one can ab­
solutely control the meaning and the impact of one's words is, as we have
seen, just as much a matter of bad faith as to believe that one is absolutely a
product of the symbolic order. Yet Sartre would aim at greater linguistic free­
dom, based (as we have learned from the Flaubert biography) on the recog­
nition that words, far from being magical invocation, have reference and rel­
evance to the "real" world of which the linguistic order itself, as a
practico-inert field, is a part.
Thus unlike Lacanian analysis, a therapeutic practice based on Sartrean
principles would not aim to take a client from recognition of the illusory na­
ture of the ego to recognition of the "truth" of the linguistic unconscious.
Rather, to the extent that the world of symbols imposes itself on me without
my learning to use it to name and shape my experience, existentialist ther­
apy would recognize that the world of symbols itself can become a support
for an imaginary rather than a real existence (as Sartre claims happened
with Flaubert). Although otherness will always invade a person in the form
302 Chapter Eight

of the exigencies of the practico-inert, including those of the linguistic order,

there is still for Sartre a translucid consciousness which supports—and may
therefore cease to support—this otherness. Where such a view of praxis as
free future-directed activity is missing, reality becomes a dream—or, at most,
a disturbing "noise" in the street soon to be forgotten. Far from perceiving a
disparity between phenomenal reality and the linguistic order, Sartre be-
lieves that the latter must come to be a means for grappling with—and possi­
bly changing—the former.
Nor does Sartre see the ego as arising from a different area of experience
than the linguistic order, since the ego requires for its reflective support cer­
tain linguistic determinations first learned from the Other, ^ t even though
the ego will remain on the side of the practico-inert (rather than simply "on
the side of the in-itself," as in Sartre's earlier philosophy) if for no other rea­
son than that it is sustained by these designations, the Sartrean ego is, as we
have seen, amenable to purification where the Lacanian ego is not. This is
so, of course, because for Sartre there is a prereflective consciousness to do
the purifying; for Lacan, on the other hand, the otherness of the ego is ab­
solute since it is composed entirely of identifications, whereas the "con­
scious" subject is composed entirely of significations. These differences in
perspective will necessarily lead to significant differences in therapeutic ap­
proaches both to the ego and to insertion of the individual into the order of
language.
To begin with, it should come as no surprise that the therapist with a
Sartrean orientation will use as his or her main tool exactly that empathic
comprehension and mirroring which Lacan proscribes.6 Indeed, Sartre pre­
scribes comprehension, which he defines as the understanding of individual
or group praxis in terms of the purposes of its agents, as the primary method
of inquiry for the social sciences in general. Later, apropos of the Flaubert
biography, he explains that the "necessary attitude for comprehending a
person is empathy" (quoted by Barnes, 1981, p. 9). Empathic comprehen­
sion, as we noted in an earlier chapter, is supplemented by intellection
where this is necessary to grasp that which goes beyond individual praxis in
the life of an individual or a group. But while Sartre admits that it is always
possible to learn something about people from the perspective of analytical
reason, structuralist or traditional, he believes that an exclusively analytical
approach leaves out the one thing which makes human affairs comprehensi­
ble: free future-directed praxis.
Thus although one may certainly reduce any human action to its compo­
nent elements, even creating an "ordinal mathematics" out of the "ossified
 Sartrean Revolutionary Praxis versus Lacanian Amor Fati 303

structures of groups" (CDR, p. 561), one will not thereby understand the
thing which makes us human—the ability to create, admittedly out of a so-
ciomaterial world which already is, the "irreducibly new" (CDR, p. 58).
Sartre therefore points out that while there is "no human action [including,
of course, the act of speech] which cannot be decomposed, dismembered,
transformed, and infinitely varied by an 'electronic brain/" it would none­
theless "be impossible to construct or use an 'electronic brain' except within
the perspective of a dialectical praxis of which the operations under consid­
eration were merely a moment" (CDR, p. 562). It is this all important mo­
ment of praxis, of which contemporary artificial intelligence people as well
as structuralist psychoanalysts might well take note, which analytical social
science in general ignores.
Sartre maintains that the structuralist effort to analyze passive structures
at the expense of praxis is a mistake. Although one may, as Levi-Strauss
claims he would like to do, invent a "genuinely logico-mathematical analy­
sis" of social data (Levi-Strauss, 1964, p. 31), this is not enough. And while
Levi-Strauss himself admits that his own use of mathematical symbols is
purely illustrative and not meant to prove anything, Lacan is not quite so
humble in his use of what he refers to as "mathemes" in his various (pseu-
do)mathematical graphs and charts and in his attempts to create "al­
gorithms" of human experience. Lacan does not mean these as part of the
truth of human existence; he believes that they illustrate this truth insofar as
they graph the unconscious structures which create human subjects. Hence
though Lacan repeatedly refers to psychoanalysis as "dialectical," his view of
the dialectic is of an external combinatory of signifiers. And though Lacan
claims that the therapeutic relationship is necessarily intersubjective, it is an
intersubjectivity in which one of the partners plays dead.
Obviously, the existentialist therapist will not play dead. He or she will in­
stead use his or her own humanness to understand the humanness of cli­
ents. This does not mean that the therapist will accede to the "demands" of
the client; Lacan is right in thinking that Freudian "technical neutrality"
guards against the analyst's becoming involved in the web of the analy-
sand's neurosis. O n the other hand, if the primary demand of any human
being is a demand for recognition, as Lacan says, then the existentialist ther­
apist does in a sense accede to this demand. There are, however, many
machinations and strategies standing in the way of the client's asking for
genuine recognition, strategies which were adopted in the wake of an origi­
nal interpersonal failure. The existentialist therapist does not bow to these.
Nor does the therapist with a Sartrean orientation try to accept the role
304 Chapter Eight

which the parents originally abdicated—the role of valorization which

ought to have given the infant a sense of absolute value. Since existentialist
therapists are not Kohutian self psychologists, they will not try to fill in a cli­
ent's missing "ego structure" in this way.
The key to working with failed mirroring is not to assume the parental
role (Lacan is right about this), but rather to work with the client so that he
or she can see what is missing and thus awaken from the sleep of hexis
which this lack has induced. In this way, the therapist offers a mature ver­
sion of positive reciprocity, which does involve recognition, instead of the
infantile version of total acceptance. After all, the therapist is not a parent
and can never take the place of a parent. Also, the goal of existentialist ther­
apy is twofold: to awaken in the client the desire for recognition which was
squelched in the first place and to promote the mutuality which transcends
this position by encouraging the client to abdicate the hope of being the
"object limit" of anyone's freedom. In this respect, existentialist therapy, like
Lacanian analysis, is not oriented toward psychogenesis and real
regression—though it would not avoid creating opportunities within the
therapeutic context in which affective states which were previously pro­
scribed could be experienced. Such affective unblocking would aim at facili­
tating an opening to a new present/future reality—though the means for fa­
cilitating this would, of course, differ depending on the complaint and the
person.
Whatever approach it takes, however, existentialist therapy differs from
Lacanian analysis. The latter is oriented toward acceptance and assumption
of one's history as it is written in the laws of the signifiers, whereas the
former would aim not at amor fati but at revolutionary praxis. The existen­
tialist therapist does not have to play dead for the simple reason that he or
she is not standing in for a symbolic order whose ultimate meaning is the
murder of the thing in the advent of the word. Certainly, negation or lack of
being is primary in Sartre's description of Being-for-itself, but Sartrean nega­
tion derives from a consciousness seeking to fill its lack in a future fullness
rather than from a subject enmeshed in and created by the symbolic order.
Although Sartre might conceivably agree that projecting, negating con­
sciousness has invented language as a means to making absence present, he
would never agree that language creates the lack. Rather, he would insist
that negating consciousness is fundamentally and unalterably signifying (in
the Sartrean sense of creating meaning) whether the material which it in­
scribes with significations be words, other material objects, or (at the level of
fundamental need) the simple biological organism re-created down there in
 Sartrean Revolutionary Praxis versus Lacanian Amor Fati 305

the future. And although the linguistic practico-inert may turn back on an
individual to suggest or prescribe paths for praxis, this is not because the lin­
guistic order has created the human subject, as Lacan thinks, but because
the prior praxes inscribed there produce exigencies in the form of rigidified
teleology.
As materialized praxis, words have reference. The paths they suggest (by
both describing and prescribing) are paths in the world, not links in a self-
enclosed system. Hence where words do not point to experience, where they
are opaquely appreciated in themselves, as Sartre claims was the case with
Flaubert, something is definitely wrong. The point of existentialist therapy,
in working with a person such as Flaubert, would not be to induce in him or
her a recognition of "signifying dependence" but to awaken linguistic praxis.
Existentialist therapy would not aim at communication with the elusive
Other (A), though it certainly would involve an examination of the practico-
inert structures which have created exigencies in one's life. Rather, it would
aim at promoting as authentic a communication as is possible with one's fel­
lows. In a sense, the existentialist therapist, like the Lacanian analyst, an­
swers the client at the point where "true speech" emerges. But Sartrean true
speech differs from Lacanian true speech in that for Sartre such speech is ad­
dressed by a free praxis to another free praxis whose freedom is accepted and
respected; it is an opening to the other person rather than to the Other(A).
Of course, Lacan also insists that true speech is intersubjective, but what he
seems to mean by this is that it is addressed from one self-conscious link in
the signifying chain to another rather than from free praxis to free praxis.
At the same time that there are fundamental disagreements, however, ex­
istentialist therapy would not deny the validity of all of Lacan's discoveries.
Like other analytically oriented social science approaches, Lacanian analysis
has a piece of the truth—though this piece, for full comprehension, must be
recast in terms of the Sartrean dialectic. For instance, the Lacanian analysts
in Schneiderman's collection do good work with examining what they call
the patient's "prehistory"—the patient's position as a link in a particular
cultural-familial system. Sartre, in the Flaubert biography, similarly con­
siders an investigation of an individual's prehistory to be important to un­
derstanding both that individual's "protohistory" (the earliest mother-child
interaction, which shapes the person's affective "constitution") and "his­
tory" (the person's historicization of himself or herself, the fundamental
project).
Yet Sartre, unlike Lacan, does not attribute everything to the person's
place in a particular transgenerational cultural-linguistic chain. Instead, he
306 Chapter Eight

is interested in what an individual makes of what he or she is made of—the

moment of praxis which Lacan in effect denies in favor of an account which
makes everything of the practico-inert heritage. For Sartre, on the other
hand, an individual is both constituted and constituting—and the impor­
tant thing is to increase the domain of real freedom, to reconstitute oneself
in such a way that the domain of hexis decreases.
Similarly, Sartre would not deny the importance of the effects of the fa­
ther or of the cultural-linguistic order on individual development, nor
would he disagree with the importance this is given in the cases reported in
Schneiderman's collection. Although Lacan has accused Sartre of failing to
find a "third term" which transforms the subject-object dyad (Lacan, 1975,
p. 224), this is a valid criticism only for Sartre's earlier philosophy. In the
Critique, as we have seen, the third term in the form of the regulatory third
party is made the basis of social organization. As for the importance of the
father, Sartre had as early as the biography of Baudelaire (1946a) recognized
the connection between the failure of the father to intervene successfully in
the mother-child dyad and the development of narcissism. In Baudelaire's
case, Sartre maintains, it was the late and traumatic intervention of his
mother's second husband, the authoritarian General Aupick, in the "inces­
tuous couple" of mother and son which fixed Baudelaire's fate as a narcis­
sist. As Douglas Collins notes, the influence of Angelo Hesnard's L'individu
et le sexe: Psychologie du narcissisme is apparent in Sartre's study of Baude­
laire's narcissism (Collins, 1980, pp. 60-79). According to Collins, "Before
Jacques Lacan and Melanie Klein, Hesnard showed that the father, as the
third party in the oedipal situation, is not only the hated and feared rival,
but also the agent whose presence brings to a close the unlimited relation­
ship between mother and child. If the separation of the child from the
mother is particularly traumatic, the child becomes narcissistic" (1980,
p. 66). This, of course, is exactly the trauma which Sartre presents Baude­
laire as having suffered.
Actually, Baudelaire's childhood, as depicted by Sartre, is in some ways
similar to Sartre's own. At the time of the death of his natural father when
he was six, the young Baudelaire is depicted as feeling himself justified in his
existence through the adoring eyes of his mother, as was Sartre himself. But
his enjoyment of being part of this "incestuous couple" ended too abruptly
when Baudelaire's mother married General Aupick a year later and after­
ward sent her son away to boarding school (Sartre also appears to have been
affected by his mother's remarriage to Joseph Mancy, though this happened
much later, when Sartre was twelve). Baudelaire, according to Sartre, would
 Sartrean Revolutionary Praxis versus Lacanian Amor Fati 307

spend his life resenting this event and attempting to recover a sense of self as
object through an overly developed reflective consciousness: "He was at
once inside and outside, object and witness for himself; he introduced other
people's eyes into himself so that he could look at himself as though he were
another person" (B, pp. 85-86). One wonders if a similar decision to capture
oneself as object through reflection is not at work in all narcissism—a deci­
sion which is extended to others who come within the narcissistic circle
since their task is obviously to adoringly reflect the narcissist if they are not
to be scornfully rejected by him or her. Certainly, behind narcissism lies a
"wound" to self-esteem similar to the one Sartre says Baudelaire suffered.
'fet despite this almost Lacanian interpretation of Baudelaire's narcissism,
it should also be noted that Sartre, unlike Lacan, has no love either for fa­
thers or for the rules or laws of conventional society which they seem to rep­
resent. In his autobiography, Sartre announces his agreement with "the ver­
dict of an eminent psychoanalyst: I have no Superego" (W, p. 19)—a
development he attributes to the fortunate (for Sartre) circumstance that de­
prived him of a father before he was a year old. Perhaps if Sartre had under­
gone the analysis he proposed to Pontalis at the time he was working on his
autobiography, he would have discovered that his grandfather had served as
more of a father figure than Sartre himself realized. We cannot, however, for
this reason discount Sartre's lifelong aversion to the prefabricated destinies
he saw fathers as laying on their sons. As for himself, Sartre says, "Amidst
Aeneas and his fellows who carry Anchises on their backs, I move from
shore to shore, alone and hating those invisible begetters who bestraddle
their sons all their life long. I left behind me a young man who did not have
time to be my father and who could now be my son" (W, p. 19). Rather than
the son of a dead man, whom he in any case did not remember, Sartre was
given to understand that he was "a child of miracle." Sartre attributes his
own "incredible levity" and sense of freedom to the impressions these early
experiences left on him (W, p. 21).
The situation in the Flaubert household, as presented by Sartre in The
Family Idiot, is just the opposite to Sartre's own. Sartre depicts Gustave's
older brother, Achilles, as following the path of accepting such a prefabri­
cated future, while Gustave, dispossessed from the beginning, finds a way
out—albeit one which involved the "passive activity" of inventing on the
psychosomatic level a nervous illness (hysterico-epilepsy) which prevented
him from following the law career his imperious father had chosen for him.
Part of Flaubert's dilemma, however, derives from his inability to use his fa­
ther to find viable paths for himself in the world. It is his early maternal dep-
308 Chapter Eight

rivation, rather than a too prolonged symbiosis or a failure of his father to

assume the proper authority, which makes this impossible. According to
Sartre, Flaubert, like many children whose first bonds with their mothers
proved unsatisfying, looked to his father for a second mothering rather than
for fathering. When his father also rejected him, it was more like a traumatic
"second weaning" than the loss of a model for world making (FI, 2:24).
Thus The Family Idiot is an indication of the possible uses of fatherhood as
well as a comment on the abuses of patriarchy as represented by Achille-
Cleophas Flaubert. Obviously, not all fathers are as authoritarian as those
whom Sartre imagines as laying, or attempting to lay, prefabricated lives on
their sons. We may therefore read Sartre's usual stance against fatherhood as
a personal predeliction which is not a necessary consequence of his philo­
sophical position.
What is fundamental in Sartre's later philosophy, however, is a matter
which is also of great significance for existentialist therapy: his idea that hu­
man relations, linked in a world of humanized matter, are always ternary.
The first third party may well be the father (or his representative) who in­
trudes into the mother-child dyad. But the importance of the ternary rela­
tionship in Sartre's philosophy is ultimately that it makes group relations,
including relations within the family as a group, possible. The family, then,
as a little unit organizing itself in the larger practico-inert field, becomes the
transmitter of one's sociocultural heritage. One's mode of insertion into the
family will therefore have great bearing on one's way of inserting oneself
into later groups or into one's society as a whole. For Sartre, it is not just the
father but the family group as a shifting complex of dyadic and ternary rela­
tions which shapes the mode of an individual's insertion into the practico-
inert world of language and culture.
Where the traditional patriarchal family resembles the institutionalized or
authoritarian group, the father (or mother) will, of course, assume more im­
portance as each of the family members becomes serialized in relation to the
patriarch or matriarch. But to believe, as Lacan does, that the third term is
only a matter of the intrusion of paternal authority (in whatever form) is,
from a Sartrean perspective, to fail to take ternary relations far enough. Ac­
cording to Sartre, aggressivity marks the authority-ridden family not be­
cause of a failure of the paternal metaphor which prevents specular identifi­
cations from being detoxified by the symbolic order, but because seriality in
some form has invaded the family structure and positive reciprocity has
failed to become the predominant mode in family dynamics.
The existentialist therapist would therefore work not on introducing a
 Sartrean Revolutionary Praxis versus Lacanian Amor Fati 309

client with problems in the area of reciprocity to the law of the Name-of-the-
father, but on looking at how a particular combination of earliest dyadic re­
lations with failure in the family group itself (including the client's develop­
ing choices as a member of that group) has led to the development of these
particular difficulties. This, of course, is the kind of analysis Sartre con­
ducted on the Flaubert family. It is, I would submit, more complex than La­
canian analysis in that it considers not only the father, mother, and child
but also the whole complex of family relations and relational failures.
Lacan and the Lacanian analysts are, however, again correct from a
Sartrean perspective in seeing desire as linked to the symbolic-linguistic or­
der. As we saw in Chapter 5, Sartre, like Lacan, believes that need is trans­
formed into desire as the child becomes acculturated. Sartre would also
agree that desire, unlike need, is that which on principle cannot be fulfilled.
But this is so for Sartre because desire aims at the impossible goal of Being-
in-itself-for-itself and not because it passes along an unending chain of elu­
sive signifiers with their origins in the linguistic unconscious. According to
Sartre, the lack has been instituted by negating consciousness, not by the
linguistic order. Therefore, from a Sartrean perspective, it is possible to
transform need/desire lived as hexis into need/desire lived as praxis at the
same time that it is possible to transform negative reciprocity into positive
reciprocity in interpersonal relations. And this transformation of conflictual
relations is possible not because of a linguistic "pacification" of specular
identifications, as Lacan believes, but because it is possible to arrive at a po­
sition where one respects and claims as a fundamental value one's own and
the Other's freedom. Obviously, a therapeutic practice based on Sartre's as­
sumptions about desire will be radically different from a therapeutic practice
based on Lacan's assumptions. The future, for Sartre, is open, whereas for
Lacan, it is in a certain sense closed.
Finally, Sartre would have to agree that Lacanian analysis has some bene­
ficial contributions to make to psychotherapy in its refusal to substantialize
the ego. Yet although Sartre agrees with Lacan in viewing the ego as object
rather than as subject and though he often sees the ego as a source of misun­
derstanding, the existentialist therapist would not take the Lacanian view of
the ego as total mirage. The ego, as I noted in Chapter 6, is redeemable from
a Sartrean perspective. Yet it is precisely to the extent that an individual's
ego is other-directed (which to some extent, of course, the ego always is) that
it is a false ego. Thus existentialist therapy would not aim at a Lacanian re­
duction of the ego in favor of an assumption of one's place in the symbolic
3io Chapter Eight

order, but at a purging of the ego of as much of its alienating otherness as

possible.
A Sartrean perspective does not, of course, suggest that the ego can cease
to be "on the side of the in-itself" or that it will lose its affiliations with the
practico-inert. One cannot step outside one's concrete situation, one's lan­
guage, one's culture, and one's moment in history. It does mean, however,
that one can begin to reflect on one's assumption of an identity (including
cultural identifications) to the extent that it is based on the unchecked des­
ignations of others. If one is as passive as Flaubert, this may mean finding a
way to verbalize one's experience of oneself as passivity and from there to be­
gin the painful project of turning hexis into praxis. From a Lacanian per­
spective, it is difficult to see how one could do anything with the ego other
than to discover and acknowledge its fundamental existence as illusion. But
since for Lacan there is no translucid consciousness involved in the con­
struction of the ego, it is difficult to see how any movement toward authen­
ticity is possible. The most one could expect from such an analysis is an ex­
posure to the rules of the game in which one is a pawn of the unconscious
signifiers. But even then, to whom would they be exposed?
In summary, a therapeutic practice based on the metapsychological princi­
ples of Sartre would emphasize the link between praxis and the practico-
inert, between individual freedom and sociocultural necessity, while giving
primacy to praxis. It is to be contrasted with Lacanian analysis in that Lacan
seems to have eyes only for what Sartre refers to as the linguistic practico-
inert and thereby to advocate a therapeutic system which, taken to its logi­
cal conclusion, would promote hexis rather than praxis, stasis rather than
change. If we take Sartre at his word, we have to recognize that a disem­
bodied freedom without a practico-inert world in which to exercise itself is
an impossibility; however much Sartre stands on the side of freedom over
necessity, praxis needs the practico-inert. Thus while the existentialist thera­
pist would encourage a movement from hexis to praxis, this would always be
with the understanding that the practico-inert is the ground of praxis.
Whereas for Lacan the symbolic order subsumes praxis, for the therapist
with a Sartrean orientation desirable change is a movement from "being
spoken" to "speaking," from passivity to authentic action. Thus while it is
certainly true to say that in a world where praxis always occurs in conjunc­
tion with the practico-inert one is in some sense an effect as well as a cause,
it is simultaneously true that for existentialist therapy the goal is to increase
the domain of the individual as cause.
For the existentialist therapist, then, subjecthood is not to be found in the
 Sartrean Revolutionary Praxis versus Lacanian Amor Fati 311

linkage of the signifiers. Rather, it is to be found in one's objectifying actions

in a practico-inert world, including the linguistic order, in which one is al­
ways making something new of what the exigencies inscribed in the
practico-inert have made of one. Existentialist therapy must also be sensitive
to the ways in which an individual's desire has been cut off, muted, or devi­
ated by other people directly or indirectly through the exigencies of the
practico-inert, sometimes to the extent that a person moves toward the
imaginary rather than toward the real. Such a person must be encouraged to
find a way to reinsert himself or herself not only into the symbolic order but
also into the real (practico-inert) world. From a Lacanian perspective, en­
gagement is not what I am looking for; rather, I am looking to assume the
opacity of the signifiers which constitute me. The difference in these posi­
tions, I believe, makes a great deal of difference to the way one conducts
therapy—either from the position of otherness itself (by impersonating the
Other [A], by playing dead, and by assuming that one's task is to bring one's
patient to an appreciation of his or her "signifying dependence") or from the
position of sameness which is comprehending praxis. Obviously, I prefer the
latter to the former of these two positions.

Conclusion

As we come to the end of these three chapters answering the challenge of

Lacanian structuralist psychoanalysis to Sartrean existential psychoanalysis,
I think it might be well to summarize our findings. Although Lacanian anal­
ysis at first seems promising as an alternative to the egological emphasis of
most post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory, it does not fulfill this promise. I
believe this is so because Lacan, like the structuralists in general, throws the
baby out with the bath water. Intending to discredit the transcendental ego,
the structuralists deny the notion of transcendent consciousness altogether.
Levi-Strauss even accepts Paul Ricoeur's description of his own version of
structuralism as "Kantism without a transcendental subject" (Levi-Strauss,
1964, p. II). In fact, Levi-Strauss goes so far as to assert that the aim of struc­
turalism is "not to constitute but to dissolve man" and in doing so to pro­
vide for "the reintegration of culture in nature and finally of life within the
whole of its physico-chemical conditions" (Levi-Strauss, 1962, p. 247). Cer­
tainly, Lacan would see this aim as a return of the speaking subject to the
linguistic unconscious which constitutes that subject.
To take the viewpoint which apparently is Lacan's—that human reality
312 Chapter Eight

has its origins in a situation of mistaken identity (the specular ego) and that
the order of the signifiers is ascendant over the signifying human subject—is
from a Sartrean perspective to take a position beyond the world which elim­
inates the possibility for genuine praxis. The Lacanian ego does not admit of
transformation in the same way that the Sartrean ego does; and the truth of
the Other (A) is a dead rather than a living truth. The true speech at which
Lacanian analysis aims is a speech which is not true speech in the Sartrean
sense at all since, as Lacan says, it is a "speech which is in the subject with­
out being the speech of the subject" (1978, p. 171).
Although Sartre would consider language to be practico-inert and al­
though he is aware of its exigencies, he would maintain that if speech is not
praxis, it serves no authentic purpose and opens up no genuine intersubjec-
tive possibilities. The opacity which Lacan attributes to the signifiers is for
Sartre an opacity combined with praxis which points not to a controlling
unconscious realm which lends an opacity to the human subject it defines,
but rather to a common practico-inert field which all of us must work and
work as creatively as possible. For Sartre, the person who is attracted to the
opacity of language itself rather than to the transcendent possibilities of
speech is a person who is fleeing—or who has somehow failed to get a taste
of—his or her freedom.
At times, Lacan's account of the return to the "truth" of the signifying
chain which has been lost in the Other(A) sounds simultaneously like a
great mystery and a great boredom, resembling the automatic writing of the
surrealists whom Lacan admires (see Macey, 1988, pp. 44-74) and who sup­
pose themselves to be putting Freud's great discovery of the unconscious to
work in their automatic writings. I think this may be so partially because La­
canian analysis is ultimately on the side of stasis rather than of movement—
of death rather than of life. Lacan himself says that life is "a detour, a dog­
ged detour, in itself transitory and precarious and deprived of any
significance" (1978, p. 232). Life, he goes on to say, "doesn't want to be
healed. . . . All that life is concerned with is seeking as much repose as possi­
ble while awaiting death" (1978, p. 233).
One might, of course, agree that a life enmeshed in the opacity of signifi­
ers without reference is indeed a living death. I do not, in any case, see a ba­
sis for Lacanian analyst Moustapha Safouan's idea that the Lacanian jour­
ney through the corridors of death leads to a courtyard where the analysand
experiences "death's death" (in Schneiderman, 1980, p. 166). Rather, it
seems to me that any metatheory which is to be life-oriented must provide a
sense of intentionality and freedom that allows an opening toward the phe-
 Sartrean Revolutionary Praxis versus Lacanian Amor Fati 313

nomenal world in which engagement, individual and group, is possible. A

psychotherapy based on Sartrean metatheoretical principles, as I have ar­
gued throughout this book, offers such a possibility for authentic transfor­
mation based on a transformation of self and world together—since for
Sartre the two are indivisible.
9 * Conclusion:
Toward a Sartrean Clinical Practice

Sartrean Metatheory and the Practice of Psychotherapy

Throughout this book, we have noted a compatibility-incompatibility be­

tween Sartrean existential psychoanalysis and traditional Freudian and
post-Freudian psychoanalysis. Obviously, Sartre has learned much from
Freud just as subsequent existentialist theory has much to learn from the
post-Freudian psychoanalytic theorists. Sartre's own appraisal of the signifi­
cance of psychoanalysis increased rather than decreased with time to the
point where, in Search for a Method, Sartre asserts that psychoanalysis is the
"one privileged mediation" (p. 6l) which would allow a Marxist-oriented so­
cial theory to achieve an appropriately concrete understanding of particular
individuals and particular historical events. His three-volume (unfinished)
biography of Flaubert is both a final synthesis of all his philosophical ideas
and a tribute to his persistent attempts to revise and refine existential psy­
choanalysis. Yet at the same time that the later Sartre remains convinced of
the value of a psychoanalytic approach which takes into account the inser­
tion of the individual in childhood into that person's class and culture, he
also revises both Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxism from an existential­
ist perspective. The resulting metatheory is neither traditionally Marxist
nor traditionally Freudian in its refusal to accept either historical or psycho­
logical determinism.
The later Sartre continues to place the existential project and free individ­
ual action, or "praxis," at the heart of group and other social relations. He
continues to reject Freudian drive theory in favor of an intentionality which
is meaning oriented, to favor a view of consciousness as translucid and free
over the Freudian idea of the psyche as substance and structure, and to see
314
 Toward a Sartrean Clinical Practice 315

self-deception in terms of bad faith and reflective misconception or failure of

conception rather than in terms of unconscious motives. While admitting in
the Flaubert biography to the enormous impact of the early mother-child re­
lationship on the very way in which a child comes to grasp self/world as
praxis or hexis, activity or stasis, Sartre nonetheless views an individual's
"personalization" as a constantly developing project which includes this
original "constitution" even as it surpasses it. A life, according to such a
view, involves not static repetition or fixed character structure but a spiral
which "passes again and again by the same points but at different levels of
integration and complexity" (SM, p. 106).
Although need rather than desire now provides the bedrock connection
between the individual and the sociomaterial world, need (like desire) is de­
fined as a future-directed project, the project of renewal of the organism, and
is seen as being slowly shaped by one's experiences into desire. The later
Sartre, unlike the earlier Sartre, also recognizes the enormous power of
groups and of the practico-inert, particularly of the family group and of lan­
guage and culture, to shape an individual's project; but he insists at the
same time that free individual praxis creates and sustains groups and other
cultural forms. Presumably, radical change through conversion to a philoso­
phy of freedom is still possible.
Thus while the later Sartre attempts to account for the insertion of the in­
dividual into language and culture, he nonetheless rejects the new syn-
chronic determinism represented by structuralism. And although Sartre be­
lieves that structuralism has some contributions to make in analyzing
cultural and linguistic structures, he maintains that structuralism, like ana­
lytical social science in general, fails to account for novelty. Sartre would
therefore refuse to view Lacanian analysis as providing a solution to the
problems in post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory surrounding the idea of a
substantialized ego—an idea to which Lacan and Sartre both object. In dis­
posing of transcendent consciousness along with the transcendental ego, La­
canian analysis appears to leave no room for either individual freedom or
significant therapeutic change.
Indeed, in some respects mainstream post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory
has more to offer than Lacanian analysis to the psychotherapist with an exis­
tentialist orientation. Although from a Sartrean perspective the traditional
post-Freudians are incorrect in substantializing the ego and the self, they
have nonetheless provided more in the way of understanding the interper­
sonal needs of childhood and the needs for an authentic sense of self than the
Lacanians. It is the understanding of these nondrive-related needs on the
316 Chapter Nine

part of the theorists discussed in this book which have caused me to propose
that the new wine of post-Freudian psychoanalytic insights bursts the old
bottles of traditional psychoanalytic metatheory. These bottles are not
mended, however, by Lacanian structuralist psychoanalysis. What is needed
is a metatheoretical perspective which accounts both for the new relational
needs and for cultural "necessity" without denying the primacy of the free in­
dividual. I argue that Sartrean metatheory provides such a perspective.
In the third chapter of this book, I noted that the needs for adequate mir­
roring, emotional resonance, and interpersonal relatedness from earliest in­
fancy discovered by the post-Freudian drive theorists in reality point to an
overthrow of the Freudian pleasure principle in favor of a Sartrean concept
of the significance of the Other as subject (rather than as need-gratifying ob­
ject) to a child's developing sense of self. The objective is not instinctual
gratification but human valorization. A Sartrean approach to human devel­
opment would therefore look for a series of existential crises leading ideally
to the development of a mature capacity for reciprocal love in which I am
able to respect my own and the Other's freedom rather than for the laying
down of a firm ego structure. Failure to develop this capacity would be re­
garded as leading to sadomasochistic and other relations in bad faith in
which one attempts to use others to create a self. Sources of such failed reci­
procity, as well as those failures in self-esteem which are omnipresent in ther­
apy, would be investigated from the perspective of attempting to understand
how the looks, touches, and words of the original others led to the develop­
ment of present difficulties.
As for the Sartrean ego, it must be viewed as an object of consciousness
rather than as a psychic structure in consciousness. Thus the goal of therapy
is not to strengthen the ego in the Freudian sense, but rather to promote ac­
curate self-reflection together with a confrontation with the ontological
truth that one can never become a substantive entity—though one may cer­
tainly value and take responsibility for the ego (in the Sartrean sense) or self
one has created and is continually in the process of creating/re-creating.
Similarly, although existentialist therapy has something to learn from the
ideas about the self proposed by the post-Freudian relational theorists dis­
cussed in Chapter 4, the self from a Sartrean perspective can never be
viewed as substantive. And although these theorists understand very well
the interpersonal origins of most psychological distress, they create confu­
sion by discussing the self as if it were simultaneously a substantive entity
and an active center of personality organization and choice. We have seen
that much of this confusion can be cleared up if we follow a Sartrean dis-
 Toward a Sartrean Clinical Practice 317

tinction between the self as agent, the self as object or ego, and the self as
aim or value. Indeed, faulty relations between reflective and prereflective
consciousness, in which the self as agent fails to accurately reflect or under­
stand the self as object as this relates to the self as value, are responsible for
much human misery. Nor does existentialist therapy aim at the discovery of
a "true self" hidden somewhere beneath the disguise of a "false self," as psy­
choanalytic theorists following Winnicott would insist. Rather, it aims at a
radical conversion to a philosophy of situated freedom which will under­
mine the various structures of bad faith or lying to oneself about one's free­
dom or one's facticity which have kept one trapped in interpersonal and in-
trapersonal inauthenticity.
"Pure reflection" is the reflective mode in which such change is able to
take place, since it is only in something approaching pure reflection that I
am able to let go of that false substantializing by which accessory reflection
turns choices into qualities or states of being and thereby to grasp my funda­
mental project as an existential choice. Pure reflection, therefore, can precip­
itate one of those psychological instants in which a new choice of a way of
being in the world may be made. Since such instants are feared as much as
they are hoped for, it is the task of the existentialist therapist to be aware of
their appearance and of that form of resistance which cannot be understood
as resistance to this or that disclaimed feeling or idea but as resistance to
change as such. The repetition compulsion, according to such a view, may be
reconceived as a desire for the security of the known over the fearful con­
frontation with a self who never is but is instead always in the process of be-
coming. If the therapist understands that such resistance is a matter of exis­
tential anguish rather than a manifestation of the death instinct, then the
therapist will be better able to aid the client in confronting that anguish and
letting go of the past.
Lacanian structuralist psychoanalysis, although it notes the problem, does
not provide a comparable solution to the substantialization of the ego or the
self on the part of mainstream post-Freudian theorists. This is so because La-
can replaces a view of the psyche as substance and psychological structure
(ego, superego, id) with a view of the psyche as imaginary imprinting under­
lying linguistic structure. Although Sartre's association with the structural­
ists may in part have provoked him to attempt to develop in his later philos­
ophy a social theory which goes beyond the individual psychology and
dyadic relations described in his earlier work, he accepts structuralism as
representing only a part of the truth of human affairs. By taking the mo­
ment of the linguistic practico-inert as the whole truth and by making the
318 Chapter Nine

conscious subject a plaything of the unconscious symbolic-linguistic order,

Lacan appears to invert the actual state of affairs and to leave Lacanian psy­
choanalysis without a viable approach to change.
The later Sartre rejects all analytical social science approaches in favor of a
dialectical approach which gives priority to event over structure and reintro-
duces the existential project as the basis for the dialectical relationship be­
tween human beings and the material world. Existential psychoanalysis can,
of course, learn something from Lacanian analysis in recognizing the power
of language in shaping an individual's project—though an existentialist per­
spective will insist that the power of language comes from the exigencies in­
scribed in a practico-inert field rather than from unconscious "laws." Like
Lacanian analysts, existentialist therapists will want to look at a client's pre­
history as well as at his or her history. They will want to question how a cli­
ent was inserted into his or her family group and through this into the larger
history and culture. Existentialist therapists will, however, want to move be­
yond structuralism to question from a Sartrean perspective the ways in
which serial and group relations, including other-direction and the struc­
tures of fraternity-terror, inhibit a client from changing in a positive direc­
tion. And in addition to recognizing the power of the practico-inert and of
groups in shaping an individual's fundamental project, they will want to
look at what a client has made of what he or she is made of—at the novelty
which each individual and each generation introduces, whether positive or
negative. And they will want to encourage the conversion of hexis into
praxis.
In working with clients from these perspectives, existentialist therapists
will, of course, regard their own role in the therapeutic enterprise differently
from either Lacanian analysts or traditional Freudian analysts. Throughout
this book, the emphasis has been on a view of the client-therapist relation­
ship which is nontraditional in regarding the therapist as a participant in a
therapeutic process which aims not at objectivity in the usual sense but at
empathic comprehension. This does not mean, of course, that therapy is an
enterprise like any other, that the therapist does not have a sense of the di­
rection of the therapy, or even that those phenomena which Freud refers to
under the heading of "transference" do not occur. They certainly do. But
the existentialist therapist sees both the transference and his or her own role
in handling it differently than the traditional Freudian analyst does. I have
noted, for instance, that transference is an aspect of a person's future-
directed project rather than mere repetition of the past. Sartre believes that
it emanates not from a repetition compulsion associated with the death in-
 Toward a Sartrean Clinical Practice 319

stinct but from a fundamental choice of self in a particular interpersonal

world which may have imaginary as well as real components. Furthermore,
an existentialist perspective on the client-therapist relationship would not
reduce the whole relationship to the workings of transference and counter-
transference. Rather, a part of the goal of therapy would be a movement to­
ward positive reciprocity within a developing real relationship.
Perhaps these differences can be further clarified by taking another look at
the incident of the man with the tape recorder mentioned in Chapter I. Pon-
talis, who is certainly an eminent psychoanalyst, regards Sartre's insistence
on publishing the transcript of this incident in Les Temps Modernes as proof
positive that Sartre does not understand the role of transference in the psy­
choanalytic process (Pontalis in BEM, p. 220).1 And there is no doubt that
Sartre, who did not know the clinical process firsthand, did not fully under­
stand these issues, "fet the man with the tape recorder's appearance in his an­
alyst's office with a device which might help him turn the tables on his ana­
lyst, reversing the subject-object roles in the therapeutic dyad, perhaps points
to a "transference" issue of which Freud himself, lacking a Sartrean perspec­
tive on the subject-object conflict, was undoubtedly unaware.
I am referring, of course, to the fact that children experience an imbalance
in the Look: The Look of the parents at the child is more powerful than the
child's Look at the parents for the simple reason that the parents, as the first
powerful others, have more impact on the child's developing sense of self.
Thus most of us resonate to some extent with the idea of a powerful Look
which cannot be looked at—the Look of God, if you will. It is also probably
true that to some extent clients always project this all-powerful Look onto
their therapists. Indeed, we have seen that a part of the therapeutic process
involves the therapist's acting as a counter to the parents as original
mirrors—thereby facilitating the client's taking a meta-reflective position on
his or her own reflective process as it is contaminated by the voices of the
original others. But I believe it is equally important for the therapist, by the
end of therapy, to have decisively refused this position of power. In other
words, I think it is important, insofar as this is possible, for the Looks of the
therapist and the client to be equalized. Otherwise, though the client may
have learned much in the therapeutic context, he or she has not learned the
positive reciprocity between equals which is one of the aims of existentialist
therapy.
It is obvious from the dialogue which the man with the tape recorder re­
cords with his analyst that reciprocity is exactly what this man's analyst
does not wish to allow. Rather, he wishes to designate without being
320 Chapter Nine

designated—to look without being looked at. In a parody of Aristotle's idea

of God as the "unmoved Mover," we might designate the therapist who
takes such a position as the "unlooked-at Looker." It is this illusion of om­
nipotence which the intrusion of the tape recorder apparently breaks, finally
reducing the terrified analyst to emitting a series of cries for help which cul­
minate in "a final dismal sound like a dying animal—followed by a long si­
lence" (BEM, p. 2l8). There is no doubt that the analysand's act is an act of
aggression—or is it, as Sartre maintains, an act of counteraggression? In any
case, it not only breaks the analyst's "neutrality," it also exposes his posture
as the all-knowing observer for the ruse that it is.
Sartre comments that he finds this incident fascinating because it spot­
lights "the irruption of the subject into the consulting room, or rather the
overthrow of the univocal relationship linking the subject to the object"—
that is, the analyst to the analysand. The analysand's rebellion is provoked
by the analytic situation itself—a situation in which the analyst, as "the in­
visible and silent witness to the discourse of the patient . . . transforms his
speech, even as it is uttered, into an object." Sartre continues,

Why? For the simple reason that there could never be any reciprocity
between these two figures, the one lying on the couch, his back to an­
other sitting down, invisible and intangible. . . . [The analysand] is dis­
appointed, it is true; he takes it out on his doctor and some will say that
he thus merely demonstrates an incomplete transference, gone awry.
But how are we to answer him when he tells us that a 'patient's' cure
has to begin with a face-to-face encounter in which each person takes
his chances and assumes his responsibilities? . . . The interpretation
should be proposed to him in the course of a long common adventure,
in interiority, and not 'come' to him anonymously, like stone tablets.
This particular subject hopes to gain some comprehension of himself as
a damaged, derailed subject. For lack of any inter-subjective collabora­
tion, he 'acts it out'—as analysts say—which means he turns praxis, and
the situation, upside-down. In the 'Psychoanalytical Dialogue,' the
roles are reversed, and the analyst becomes the object. For the second
time, a rendezvous of man with man is missed. This episode, which
some people will find funny, represents a tragedy of impossible reciproc­
ity. (BEM, pp. 200-202)

Existentialist therapy aims not to repeat this tragedy. Sartre, however, is not
simply objecting to the technique of having the analysand lie on the couch.
 Toward a Sartrean Clinical Practice 321

Indeed, in a footnote, he states that "depth psychology . . . presupposes a

general loosening of self-abandon on the part of the patient, and thus makes
the couch mandatory." Rather, Sartre is objecting to a situation in which
"no progress will be made unless both approaches [reciprocal humanness
and the loosening of ordinary reality, which is achieved by some technique
such as lying on the couch andliree associating] are grasped together" (BEM,
p. 205).
A therapist working from a Sartrean orientation, then, will approach the
people he or she works with in therapy not from a position of godlike objec­
tive observation or even from a position of immovable and antiseptic
neutrality—though we have seen that there are times when neutrality is an
appropriate counter to a client's attempts to suck the therapist into the cli­
ent's interpersonal project. There are also times, and some modern psycho­
analytic theorists are recognizing this (see, for example, Masterson and
Klein, 1989), when other attitudes are more appropriate—for example, em-
pathic mirroring, confrontation, collegial working on a common project, or
even sharing of self.2 Obviously, sensitivity to the client and the situation
ought to determine the therapist's response.
O n the other hand, existentialist therapy is neither a matter of manipula­
tion nor of nonparticipation. In fact, the existentialist therapist, unlike cer­
tain modern Freudians who attempt to model an unchanging healthy ego
for the analysand, risks change along with the client in the therapeutic proc­
ess. This risk is inherent in an approach which prescribes empathic compre­
hension supplemented by intellection, together with active engagement
with the object of study, as the appropriate means to knowledge in the hu­
man sciences in general. The necessity for such risk is even more evident in
the practice of psychotherapy than in other social science approaches since
psychotherapy is by definition both a common project and a combination
of knowledge and praxis. If in my work as a therapist my own humanness is
the only means I have to understanding/affecting the humanness of my cli­
ent, then it is obvious that in order to achieve that understanding/efficacy, I
have to risk myself. One cannot engage deeply with a client in the (mutual)
project of therapy without being in turn deeply affected by that project.
Furthermore, as I have noted, the existentialist therapist does not take the
position of the one who knows what is in the client's unconscious. Al­
though as a therapist I may suspect that the client is hiding things from him­
self or herself through various strategies of bad faith, I will understand that
the truth has not been reached until the client recognizes it. In other words,
I will accept Sartre's dictum that the "final intuition of the subject is deci-
322 Chapter Nine

sive" in existentialist therapy (BN, p. 574). Nor will I, as an existentialist

therapist, attempt to reach the "truths" of the linguistic unconscious by
playing dead or impersonating the Other(A), as the Lacanian analyst does.
From a Sartrean perspective the Other(A) is simply the antidialectic of the
linguistic practico-inert and not the Lacanian unconscious subject beyond
the conscious subject. Rather than the object of unconscious forces or struc­
tures, the client in existentialist therapy is regarded as a conscious subject
who plays an active role in the therapeutic process—the role of allowing that
pure reflection from which deep change springs. And it is the client's discov­
eries in the mode of pure reflection, and not the speculations of the therapist
(however probable), which provide the truths of existentialist therapy.
The existentialist therapist, unlike either the Lacanian or the traditional
Freudian analyst, will also not forget that good therapy is both regressive
and progressive—that it attempts to establish the conditions under which a
given fundamental project came into being (including the individual's inser­
tion into language and other practico-inert structures) together with the
ways in which the individual has come to transcend those givens in a partic­
ular direction. Instead of reducing human lives to static structures or uncon­
scious forces, the existentialist therapist will attempt to catch the future-
directedness of a client's past or present project—where a client was/is going
as well as where he or she came from. While it is certainly true that good
psychoanalysts (like good therapists of any persuasion) have their portion of
humanness and empathic comprehension, the emphasis in traditional psy­
choanalysis on investigating the past as ground to the neglect of the future
as meaning has sometimes led to those therapeutic impasses in which a cli­
ent seems to learn more and more about the past conditions of his or her dif­
ficulties without experiencing significant change. Traditional psychoanalysis
neglects the psychological instant and the fear of change as such which are
so important to existentialist therapy.
Finally, the existentialist therapist will not hide behind a generalized no­
sology in order to distance himself or herself from clients, nor will he or she
neglect the sociomaterial as well as the individual strains in a client's funda­
mental project. There is, of course, some usefulness in nosological categories
such as neurotic, psychotic, borderline, narcissistic, and schizoid if one un­
derstands that they are descriptions of general strategies for solving the
problem of Being rather than actual illnesses. But these categories should
not be used to exempt the therapist from attempting to fully understand a
client's project in all of its rich particularity—including the particularities of
the structures of bad faith which the person may have adopted. After all,
 Toward a Sartrean Clinical Practice 323

there are many concrete means—many ways of doing, being, and having—
which I may employ to flee my freedom and/or to flee my facticity. Indeed,
the existentialist therapist must even avoid falling into ontological over-
generalization. As Sartre points out over and over again, the ontological
structures manifest themselves not behind concrete lived experience but in
lived experience. Hence concreteness and particularity take on a signifi­
cance in existentialist therapy which they do not have in other systems.
There is, however, one area where the existentialist therapist should be at­
tentive not to particularity but to its lack. This is where a client has adopted
strategies of other direction in response to serial impotence, simple submis­
sion or hexis rather than genuine praxis in response to the exigencies of the
practico-inert, or conformity to group norms in response to the pressures of
fraternity-terror. Of course, there is a sense in which all of us are "concrete
universals" rather than concrete individuals. But where the general tends to
efface the particular so that one's own life is lived as the life of the Other,
this situation needs to be recognized and worked with, To the extent that an
individual has become "overgeneralized" or "overuniversalized," it is the
task of existentialist therapy to work toward the awakening of authentic in­
dividual and/or group praxis as an antidote to serial impotence, other direc­
tion and overconformity. Although Sartre's social theory adds a new dimen­
sion to existentialist therapy, it does not change its fundamental aim—to aid
a person in matching the ontological freedom which is the condition of our
being human with a greater practical freedom to live, to love, and to engage
in an authentic process of self-creation which is fluid rather than static. The
later philosophy adds the caveat that this self-making process must occur in
a sociomaterial world whose exigencies and counterfinalities we attempt to
recognize without allowing them to crush us.
In approaching a client's past/present experiences of being grouped or of
submitting to the exigencies of the practico-inert, the existentialist therapist
will need to use his or her own experiences in the sociomaterial world as a
basis for understanding—just as one hopes that the therapist will be able to
use his or her own experiences of turning hexis into praxis and of develop­
ing positive reciprocity in pointing to the direction of healing, "fet it is only
to the extent that the therapist is aware of the sociomaterial depths of his or
her own project, the insertion into his or her own class or social group in
the family of origin, that the therapist will be able to aid the client in explor­
ing this dimension of the client's fundamental project. If the therapist does
not understand that his or her own life (like the life of the client) is "centu­
ries old" at the same time that it is completely new, then the therapist will
324 Chapter 'Nine

perhaps explore well the individual dimensions of a client's difficulties with­

out taking into consideration the sociomaterial dimensions. Or, worse yet,
the therapist may mistake a group or serial phenomenon for an individual
symptom without catching a glimpse of the interconnection between the
two.
Obviously, the ideal existentialist therapist will be able to use the insights
of both the early and the later philosophy of Sartre to aid a client in clarify-
ing both the individual and the sociomaterial dimensions of that client's
project. It is a large task. And though most of us will probably fall short of
this ideal, it does remind us of the immense complexity of the issues in­
volved in the practice of psychotherapy.
While I have throughout this book attempted to suggest ways in which
the metatheoretical premises of Sartre can be applied to clinical practice, I
think it might be helpful, now that we have come to the end of this process
of laying out those premises, to give a more detailed clinical example. The
case history in the next section does not demonstrate all of the insights I
have discussed here and in preceding chapters, but it does demonstrate
many of them, including the ways in which needs may be shaped as hexis
rather than as praxis; the power of fraternity-terror in enforcing family
norms; the significance to clinical insights of a Sartrean view of the ego as
object versus the Freudian view of the ego as a center of reality orientation;
the impact of failed mirroring in early childhood on later difficulties; the im­
portance of considering ontological issues in "diagnosing" a client's "prob­
lem"; and the effect on the therapist of participating in the joint project of
therapy.
I would also like to note that this book is intended as a beginning, a pro­
logue to Sartrean studies in existentialist therapy, rather than as any final
word on the subject. I am aware, as I said in the first chapter, that others
have used Sartre together with other existentialist philosophers to develop a
more generalized existentialist approach to psychotherapy. Although I find
those approaches very interesting and useful, my own approach has been to
try to explore the significance of a systematic application of Sartre's ontol­
ogy and social philosophy to the issues of depth psychotherapy. In compar­
ing and contrasting Sartre's metatheory with traditional and not so tradi­
tional psychoanalytic approaches, I have not, of course, had time to follow
many interesting avenues of inquiry, both theoretical and practical. There­
fore, in the final section of this chapter, I suggest some directions for future
inquiry—though I am sure there are many others. My own hope, as I said in
 Toward a Sartrean Clinical Practice 325

the introduction, is that this book will provoke further inquiries into the
usefulness of Sartre's ideas for clinical theory and practice.

A Sartrean Case History: Martha the "Marvelous Mirror"

The case I will discuss here is the story of "Martha," a young woman in her
early thirties who at the time she began therapy with me was working as a
psychotherapist at a local college and experiencing an acute personal crisis.
Before beginning to tell Martha's story, I should probably say why I chose it.
Although Martha's story might not be the most dramatic example of
Sartrean themes among the people I have worked with, I think it does pro­
vide a significant illustration of those themes which is in no way unusual
among my clients in general. I thought that a fairly typical example might
be more useful than one which was more striking but less "usual." At the
same time, of course, Martha was very much an individual with issues and
concrete choices which were particular to her and her alone. I hope that the
reader will find the story of our unraveling the various turns in her original
project as engrossing as she and I found it to be in the joint work of psycho­
therapy.
The reader has probably already noted, however, that Martha's case is un­
usual in at least one respect: Martha was herself a psychotherapist. Because
this was so, I think it may be easier for me to talk about the impact her ther­
apy had on her therapist, especially as it touched on issues surrounding our
common profession. Certainly, I am deeply affected when I work with other
clients as well, but it seemed somehow less difficult to identify this in my
work with Martha. Also, Martha's issues as a therapist augment the points I
wish to make about how it is impossible for the therapist as a person not to
be involved (for good or ill) in the therapeutic process—and how the choice
of the profession of psychotherapy always relates to the therapist's own fun­
damental project. Finally, I have chosen Martha's story because she very
graciously permitted me to tell it in some detail—though I have changed cer­
tain distinguishing features in order to protect her identity.
As Martha worked with me (once, twice, and occasionally three times a
week) over a three-year period, her work seemed to fall into three more or
less distinct stages. The initial stage, which lasted around seven to eight
months, involved an exploration of the crisis which had brought her into
therapy and its relationship to the ontological structure of her fundamental
project. Although we explored some of Martha's personal history during the
326 Chapter Nine

first stage, this work deepened considerably during the second stage, which
lasted approximately a year and a half. During this time, Martha was in­
creasingly challenged to confront and to understand her fundamental pro­
ject both in its regressive and progressive dimensions—and to question how
she came to be who she thought she was and to see whether she wished to
continue to live her life as she was living it.
As her work deepened during this second stage, Martha found herself in­
creasingly confronting issues which probably had their origin in a past she
no longer remembered or had never personally lived—issues which un­
doubtedly originated during infancy and earliest childhood (which Sartre
refers to as a person's "protohistory") and even in the family situation into
which she was born (which Sartre designates as one's "prehistory")- In work­
ing with such material, one is dealing with highly elusive feelings, impres­
sions, and convictions which have never been reflectively examined, par­
tially because they go so far back and partially because they seem to be so
much a part of the fabric of what oneself/one's world is that one has never
thought to challenge them. The final seven or eight months of therapy dealt
primarily with the existential crisis which developed as Martha faced the
ramifications of her work and confronted the possibility of making profound
and far-reaching changes in her fundamental project of being.
I should probably add that in dividing Martha's therapy into "stages," I
do not mean to imply that the same themes did not appear again and again
throughout the course of therapy or that there was not considerable overlap
between them. Rather, I think that something like the gradual deepening of
insight leading to an existential crisis of greater or lesser intensity which in­
augurates a radical reorientation of a client's fundamental project such as I
describe here often happens in existentially oriented psychotherapy. This is
one of the ways in which I find Martha's therapy "typical" of many clients
with whom I have worked. I am not at all sure that this is as typical of the
experience of depth therapists working from more traditional models. Al­
though I do not deny that Martha's difficulties might be explicable from
other points of view or even that my work with her was influenced by the
insights of classical and contemporary psychoanalysis, I contend that atten­
tion to the ontological/existential issues made a great deal of difference to
the resolution of her difficulties in the context of our work together.
Stage One, The first stage of therapy dealt primarily with investigating the
ontological structure of Martha's fundamental project and some of its his­
torical underpinnings as these related to the severe personal crisis with
which she entered therapy. This crisis, as often happens, revolved around
 Toward a Sartrean Clinical Practice 327

the breakup of a love relationship. Martha's lover of three years had just left
her—as it turned out, for a relationship with a man. The fact that "Mark"
was bisexual was not so much the issue, however, since Martha had known
this from the beginning. Nor was the problem exactly that he had left her
for someone else, though this was deeply painful to her. The relationship, it
seems, had been on a downward spiral for almost a year anyway. What was
shocking to Martha was the effect the dissolution of this relationship had on
her.
As Martha described it, she felt completely disoriented by Mark's leaving,
as though he had taken with him her sense of who she was. "Nothing seems
real," she told me. "I can't get my feet on the ground. I just feel like running
and there's no place to run to." She experienced extreme panic over being
alone, a panic which sometimes impelled her to call (or call on) friends in
the middle of the night. She felt that she was very "forgetful" and "dis­
connected"—as though she were going through the motions of living with-
out really being present. Sometimes she could not remember what she had
done or said in a recent interaction. At the same time, Martha carried on in
her head endless dialogues in which she attempted to "justify my existence"
to her former lover. In fact, only at these times did she lose the anxiety
which otherwise characterized her mental and emotional state when she was
alone. It was replaced by pain and depression over the impossible task of
"convincing a phantom of my value as a person."
We began our work together with the focus of Martha's own attention—
the lost love relationship. Indeed, for several months, Martha did nothing
but talk obsessively about Mark. Her pain was so palpable and the sense I
had of her fragility so strong that most of the time I simply lent a sympa­
thetic ear, reflecting back what I heard about her difficulties. During this pe­
riod, I had an image of myself as a life raft at which Martha was clutching in
the midst of a stormy ocean. Her hopes of restabilization seemed to rest on
my constancy. After about two months, when I felt that Martha was a little
stronger, I began to confront her about the meaning of her obsessive rumi­
nations about her former lover, suggesting that there must be something
which these "dialogues" were giving her that she held so tenaciously to
them.
This led to the first crisis in therapy. Martha withdrew, saying she was un­
sure whether I could understand her. She also began to lecture me about
therapeutic method—claiming she deserved from me the same "uncondi­
tional positive regard" she offered to her own clients as a Rogerian nondirec-
tional therapist. This was the initiation of what Martha herself would later
328 Chapter Nine

designate the "marvelous mirror" theme—the idea that Martha ought some­
how to be able to find the ideal mirroring she attempted to offer to others,
friends and lovers as well as clients. As it turned out, one of the most
difficult—and significant—tasks which Martha would face in therapy would
be accepting the fact that I was not and could not be the perfect mirror
which she longed to find in a therapist.
For the time being, I replied that it was hard to watch Martha continue to
wound herself in this way without saying something. Her rage at me over
this confrontation grew more vocal before it began to subside, as she ap­
peared to make a new choice to look more deeply at the meaning of these di­
alogues in the larger context of her life and at the significance of her desire
to find the perfect mirror. In most of her relationships, it seems, Martha had
played the listener, the facilitator, the "mirror." In this position, she had
rarely felt that her feelings and concerns took center stage or were even of
much interest. During a two-year marriage during graduate school, for ex­
ample, she had "nurtured" her husband through his Ph.D. and then split up
with him when he moved to another city to begin a successful career. But al­
though this was painful, it was nothing like the pain she was experiencing
now over the breakup with Mark. She began to ask herself why this was so.
Martha's relationship with Mark, as she told it, had not been totally dif­
ferent from her other relationships in the beginning. Indeed, at first she had
listened to him, drawn him out, even discussed with him in detail the ambi­
guities of his sex life—all in the interest of establishing an "openness" which
she valued in relationships. As time went on, however, Mark had suggested
that this openness was not exactly reciprocal and had indicated that he
wished to know more about Martha as well. At first tentatively and then
more and more obsessively, she began to tell him. The problem was that at
the same time that Mark seemed to want to know her better on a "friend­
ship" level, he distanced her physically. "Sex itself was OK," as Martha put
it, "but he didn't want to hold me or cuddle with me." This caused Martha
great pain—to the point where, as she said, "My skin burned with longing
for his touch." During this time, if she reached out to him and saw him pull
back, as she frequently did, she responded by weeping profusely, sometimes
for hours. And she started to keep mammoth journals which she insisted on
reading to him. Sometimes she went into rages if he seemed disinterested or
critical. I reminded her of her recent rage with me over my lack of perfect
mirroring, and she agreed that this felt somewhat similar—although she in­
sisted that the experience with Mark had been much more intense.
The problem Martha experienced with her memories of this relationship,
 Toward a Sartrean Clinical Practice 329

which had deteriorated considerably when they decided to live together

during the third year, was that she "hated the person I became with him."
She was now deeply chagrined by some of her behavior—for example, when
she had put her fist through a window or when she had knocked dishes off a
table in her rage over Mark's indifference to her. Finally, as the last year of
their relationship dragged on, Martha had become severely depressed as
Mark pulled away more and more. Although she still maintained in the
back of her mind the hope that things would improve, she sank into a leth­
argy which made it difficult for her to get out of bed in the morning or to get
through routine tasks of the day. Nonetheless, her work as a therapist, by
her account, did not appear to suffer. "The only time I felt OK," Martha
said, "was when I was working with a kid on his problems." She maintained
that the same was true now; her anxiety or obsessive ruminations subsided
only when she was working with others—an apparent anomaly which
would be clarified later as we worked more deeply with her mirroring issues
in the second stage of therapy.
For now, Martha began to understand her internal dialogues with Mark
in a way that fits in well with Sartre's description of the "conflict of con­
sciousnesses" and the attempt to use the other person to create a self. As we
looked more carefully at these dialogues, the first thing that became appar­
ent was that they centered around a desire to absolve herself of guilt in
Mark's eyes. The problem was that as Martha began to imagine Mark's reac­
tions to her, she could only imagine condemnation. For example, she imag­
ined with excruciating pain what he must be telling his new lover about his
relationship with her. Or she invented words for the slight smile of con­
tempt she thought she saw on his lips when they met. A poem Martha
wrote around this time expressed her feelings: In it she describes a woman
who feels fixed like an insect at the end of a pin by her lover's hostile gaze.
Obviously, what Martha was experiencing was the hostile Look of an Other
who is beyond her influence—the Look which cannot be looked at, trans­
forming her into an object which she does not wish to be but which she in
some respects recognizes as herself. After all, Martha had subjected Mark to
her obsessive self-ruminations, and it was she who had put her hand
through the window in a masochistic rage over his indifference. She there­
fore felt that the Look of her lover which she carried within her was an irre­
mediable judgment that she was this monster whom she had, as we later
came to learn, spent a lifetime trying not to be.
At this time, some of the roots of Martha's pain over being this object
which she imagined she was for Mark began to emerge. In her family of ori-
330 Chapter Nine

gin, the worst sin appears to have been "selfishness"—which was apparently
defined as any attentiveness to one's own needs and interests. Martha's
mother was herself a self-styled martyr whose worst accusation was the terri­
ble pronouncement: <rfou only care about yourself." Martha, it seems, had
always feared that this judgment, which she tried valiantly to disprove by
being "unselfish," was the real truth about herself. It was against this accusa­
tion that her "understanding nature" had in part evolved as a counterposi-
tion. Her behavior with Mark therefore seemed to validate her deepest fears:
She was, undeniably and irremediably, this self-centered person she had
early on been accused of being. Her mother was right in her initial judg­
ment of Martha. Her counteridentity as the helpful, other-oriented child
had finally been exposed for the ruse she had always suspected it was.
%t as Martha began to see all this, she began to see something else as well:
The needs/desires which she as a child had worked so hard not to feel were
really not so horrific after all. She was beginning to get some insight into
how she had, by accepting her parents' mislabelings, begun to live them as
hexis rather than as praxis. And though she did not yet appreciate how
deeply these distortions went, she began at this time to feel anger and grief
over the counteridentity which had evolved at such a sacrifice of spontane­
ity and authentic relatedness—so that she could now only grope in the dark
to find what she really wanted and needed and to express this.
There was, however, more to Martha's reaction to her breakup with Mark
than the fear of being the selfish and unacceptable object which she felt she
was in his eyes and which she had always feared she would become in the
eyes of her mother. Although she hated and feared the misery of being for­
ever fixed as an object beneath his imagined gaze, there was nonetheless, as
we began to discover, something she feared even more than this. Worse than
the hostile Look is the indifferent Look. A question I asked Martha one day
in therapy initiated this theme. I said something such as this: ""fou know,
you keep imagining that Mark is thinking this or that about you, and you
see that this continues to torment you. But the truth is that you don't really
know what he's thinking at all. He might be thinking what you imagine, he
might be thinking something else, or he might not be thinking anything at
all. I wonder what it does for you to keep imagining that he's judging you in
this way." Martha's response was a gasp followed by an explosion of tears
which surprised me. "The worst" she proclaimed vehemently, "would be if
he's not thinking anything at all. How can he not think anything when Ym so
miserable? I hate him if he's not thinking anything at all."
This, it seems, was Martha's greatest fear—not being regarded at all. But
 Toward a Sartrean Clinical Practice 331

what, she began to wonder, were its roots? After all, had she not been firmly
established as the confidante of every member of her family? Surely she was
not ignored when her mother spent hours discussing with Martha the diffi­
culties with her husband and her mother-in-law (who had lived in the
household since Martha's younger brother was born when she was two and
a half); when her father discussed with her his business plans and difficulties
and made her his "playmate"; and when even her grandmother and her two
younger brothers confided their unhappinesses to her. "fet Martha now be­
gan to remember as well the lonely hours she had spent worrying over
things, feeling isolated from schoolmates, and feeling that she had no one
she could talk to about her own difficulties. It seemed that her family
wanted to be with her when she was there for them, but that for some reason
she did not expect them to be there for her.
At this point, Martha began to question her mother's "goodness" and her
father's "strength," qualities she had previously taken for granted. If her
mother was too harassed and busy to be there for her daughter and yet took
full advantage of her daughter's willingness to be there for her, who was the
"selfish" person in this family? Also, she remembered how her father's need
to have her be a "happy" child had left her with a feeling of unreality about
herself. She began to question who this child was who had been her adored
father's favorite (for Martha was sure she had been her father's favorite
child). After all, it was becoming increasingly apparent that this "happiness"
which he had ascribed to her and which she had playacted for him had not
been real. Also, Martha's father had been erratic in his attention to her—
picking her up and putting her down (as she now realized) "like a toy which
was there only for his amusement."
As Martha allowed herself to reexperience the loneliness of being a child
in her family, she started to recall the bitter tears shed alone in her room,
the taunts by schoolmates which could be shared with no one, and the un­
reality of being a child in a family where one's real needs and feelings were
simply not acknowledged. Ultimately, her suspicion had been this: If I
weren't there for them, would they care about me at all? Deep inside herself,
she believed that they did not.
This suspicion that no one really cared, kept carefully at bay in most of
Martha's relationships, was, of course, behind her outburst over the notion
that Mark might not be thinking about her at all. She now began to under­
stand that part of her motive for holding so tenaciously to the idea that
Mark was criticizing her had been the terrible thought that he might simply
be no longer concerned with her. Certainly, she hated and suffered from her
332 Chapter Nine

obsessive fantasies, but this suffering warded off an even deeper suffering—
the suffering of the person who is not even important enough to be judged.
As she had done with her mother before him, Martha latched onto the idea
that the reason she was being rejected was that she was "selfish" and "bad."
The contrary idea that her mother was simply too preoccupied with her
own difficulties to pay much attention to Martha was much more
threatening—as was the idea that Mark might not be talking to his new lover
about her.
In terms of the future-directed side of her project, Martha continued to
hold onto the idea of her "badness" both as a way of having a self and as a
means to believing that she might somehow become a "better" self at some
time in the future. In other words, this strategy had evolved as a way of
avoiding the despair of realizing that she was simply not deeply significant to
either of her parents—or probably, in the present, to Mark. Only when she
fully understood both sides of the motives for her unhappy internal
dialogues—her desire to hold onto the negative Look of the Other in order
to try to counter it and her desire to hold onto the negative Look of the
Other in order to counter the deeper fear of not being important at all—was
Martha able to let go of this relationship. This letting go constituted the end
of what I have designated as the first stage of Martha's therapy.
Stage Two. The work of the second stage of Martha's therapy centered
around her taking a deeper look at her present difficulties, at her family dy­
namics, and at the primitive underpinnings of her fundamental project—
that is, at the infantile experiences which underlay her contemporary choice
of a way of being in the world. This second stage was inaugurated by a shift
in Martha's interactions with me during the therapy hour. Where before she
had been a kind of fountain overflowing with misery, Martha now became
hesitant and silent, complaining of feeling uncomfortably "on the spot" as
she began each session. It appeared that I had begun to occupy the position
of source of the disquieting Look—except that Martha now seemed to wish
to escape my Look rather than to use it as a means to self-validation. Instead
of pleading with me to see her accurately, she attempted to divert my atten­
tion elsewhere. She began, for example, to try to discuss general therapeutic
issues with me or to ask me questions about myself—suggesting that know­
ing me better might lead to an increased trust which would facilitate the
movement of her therapy.
I was suspicious of this request, especially since it was accompanied by a
shift in Martha's relations with people outside the therapy room. She re­
ported feeling that her "old self" had returned—the self she had been more
 Toward a Sartrean Clinical Practice 333

comfortable with for most of her life. Despite the work we had done with
the "selfishness" theme in her family, Martha was obviously quite relieved
by this shift. She felt, as she put it, that she had become "less self-absorbed
and more open to others." The question, of course, was whether she was suf­
ficiently open to herself. Martha also became very absorbed in her work at
this time, remarking that she approached it with a new energy and enthusi­
asm. I commented that she seemed to be more comfortable in the role of
therapist than in that of client—with listening rather than being listened
to—and she agreed. The question was why she should continue to prefer to
be there for others at the expense of her own needs/desires.
About two months into this phase of therapy, Martha became briefly in­
volved in a relationship with a rather narcissistic man which provided some
keys to understanding these issues. "Harry" felt completely comfortable
with Martha's attempts to draw him out and to place his interests and ideas
in the limelight. Martha herself also felt comfortable with this arrangement,
especially as it seemed to counter her suspicions about the "craziness" she
had displayed in her relationship with Mark. Indeed, the position Martha
took in this relationship felt more like the norm for her adult relationships.
It signaled the return of the Martha she had known in her friendships, in
her relations with clients, even in her marriage and previous love relation­
ships. Martha's newfound satisfaction with Harry, however, was short-lived.
As she began to want more from the relationship, she was clearly aware that
Harry was not a person who could offer her genuine intimacy, "fet her at­
traction to Harry confirmed something she had vehemently denied up to
this point—that Martha herself, and not only the men with whom she be­
came involved, was responsible for the lack of closeness she had experienced
in most of her love relationships. What was most difficult for Martha in all
of this was to see how her assumption of the role of the "good" reflective
mirror for others distanced people and attracted the very narcissistic men
who would later disappoint her.
As Martha began to understand how this might be so, she also started to
question why she might be so fixated on this role. And as she began to ob­
serve how she insisted on maintaining the mirroring position in most of her
relationships, she became aware that it was not only in therapy with me that
she felt uncomfortably spotlighted when attention turned to her. A simple
question from a stranger at a party, "Why don't you tell me about yourself?"
provoked momentary panic. Even with friends, she found herself diverting
attention from questions about herself to questions about the other person.
As for public situations in which she was required to give a speech or make a
334 Chapter Nine

presentation, these simply sent her into paroxysms of anguish. Asked by her
university to teach a training course during this time, Martha found herself
in total agony before and during each of the lectures she gave. As she stood
before the class, she wished for nothing so ardently as to "be invisible."
Only by eventually redirecting the attention from herself to discussion of
her students' difficulties, thereby (as she put it) turning her class into "group
therapy," was Martha able to begin to feel effective in her teaching.
During this time, Martha also began to see how disabling her desire for
anonymity had been—not simply in her personal relationships but in her
professional life as well. For one thing, it had made it extremely unlikely that
she would be able to realize her dream of going into private practice since
she felt unable to promote herself in any way or even to receive the credit
she deserved from her colleagues and her institution. Furthermore, Martha
began to glimpse the limitations of positive mirroring as a sole therapeutic
tool. Although she often remarked on her effectiveness as an individual
therapist, she now recognized that there were certain situations where the
Rogerian techniques she preferred simply did not appear to work. For one
thing, she found it difficult to work with groups or with couples using only
reflective paraphrasing and unconditional positive regard. For another, cer­
tain clients seemed to respond adversely to her offer of positive mirroring.
These limitations became especially apparent in Martha's work with a
very disturbed client who eventually began to display both suicidal and
homicidal tendencies. In working with this client, Martha discovered to her
dismay that she seemed to be getting more and more caught up in a delu­
sional system in which she also started to feel "crazy." By the time she
turned this case over to another therapist, she had recognized that what ap­
peared to be positive mirroring in this situation may have amounted to col­
lusion rather than useful therapeutic intervention. And though this client
would undoubtedly have been hard for most therapists to work with, Mar­
tha could see that her own limitations—the rigidity of her role as the perfect
mirror—had made this even more difficult for her. She was greatly disturbed
by this experience, not only because of the apparent danger to her client,
herself, and others but also because it challenged some of her own most
cherished beliefs about the nature of the therapeutic process—beliefs which
reinforced her own project of "being the perfect mirror."
Shortly after the termination of her work with this client about the mid­
dle of the second phase of her own therapy, Martha had another experience
which provoked her to get more deeply in touch with some of the primitive
roots of her present difficulties. This incident involved an experience of
 Toward a Sartrean Clinical Practice 335

"identity diffusion" which she had while attending a professional conference

in a distant location. Usually reluctant to travel alone, Martha had origi­
nally planned to attend this conference with a colleague. When her friend
backed out, she decided to go alone. Arriving late one evening, she felt a
definite sense of foreboding and fear as she bedded down in an unfamiliar
room at the conference center. When she arrived at the dining hall for
breakfast the next morning, she felt "completely lost" as she was greeted by a
"sea of strange faces." For most of the morning, she "felt as though I didn't
exist—as though a ghost were floating around and no one saw her." By her
own account, Martha experienced "complete and utter panic."
When I asked if this was at all like the severe anxiety she had felt after her
breakup with Mark, she agreed that it was—"except that this was more pure."
What Martha did with her panic was to latch onto a fellow conference mem­
ber during the middle of the first day and begin to draw her out. "The more
she talked," Martha said, "the more real I felt." I suggested that in order to be
a mirror, one must have something to reflect; otherwise, one has no "iden­
tity." Martha was profoundly shaken by this experience, which she described
as "suddenly falling into the abyss." She could see that her response to the
situation was not a "reasonable adult reaction"—and she and I both began to
wonder if it might have its origins in some kind of preverbal trauma or trau­
mas. It felt, as she put it, "primitive and hard to get hold of."
At this time, Martha began a series of conversations with her mother in
which she asked questions about those earliest years. Fortunately, her
mother was willing to share her memories with Martha. First of all, Mar­
tha's mother described how difficult the birth of her only daughter, which
had followed three miscarriages, had been. Also, though her mother had
initially nursed Martha, her milk had dried up after about four months and
she had found it difficult at that time to switch the baby to the bottle. Fi­
nally, her mother's account of Martha's response to the feeding schedule on
which she had placed her on the advice of her doctor proved especially re­
vealing. According to her mother, Martha had "cried furiously for hours"
between feedings. Asked why she thought Martha did that, Martha's
mother replied, "I guess it was because you wanted your own way." Here it
was then—a mother who regarded her infant daughter's needs for holding
and nourishment as "demanding" and "bad." Martha the adult therapist
was shocked.
This early deprivation of physical/emotional nourishment and holding
apparently led Martha, by her mother's account, to become a shy and fear­
ful toddler. The world, to use Margaret Mahler's terminology, was definitely
336 Chapter Nine

not her "oyster." Indeed, rather than triumphing over her abilities at up­
right locomotion, Martha had developed a phobia about "bugs" that caused
her to demand hysterically that her parents pick her up and carry her when­
ever they went outside. Perhaps in this way she had tried to compensate for
the deprivation of her needs for secure holding in infancy. *\fet this need to
remain a baby was in some ways contradicted by Martha's otherwise preco­
cious development. Not only did she walk early, she also talked early and
(according to her mother) was toilet trained by fifteen months. Perhaps she
felt pushed to please a mother who regarded her as a burden—or perhaps
she simply decided that she had better learn to do these things for herself
since her original others were unreliable.
Martha's mother also reported that Martha had experienced severe stran­
ger anxiety up until after she started school—and that this had made it very
difficult for her paternal grandmother (who was virtually a stranger at this
time) to look after her when she took over her care when Martha's mother
was hospitalized for six months after the birth of her second child. As for
the illness itself, Martha's mother was vague about what it was—though
Martha herself remembered hearing something about a "nervous break­
down" when she was a child. Also interesting was Martha's mother's ac­
count of Martha's reaction to her mother's homecoming and to her new
brother. At first Martha refused to talk to her mother and displayed anger
toward the baby. Then, about six months later, when she was three, Martha
became extremely protective of "my baby"—carrying him about like a doll
and dressing and feeding him. She also developed at this time a strong at­
tachment to her grandmother.
All of this, of course, provides a picture of a little girl who had been se­
verely deprived of the valorizing looks, touches, and words which might
have helped her develop a secure sense of self. As a result, she had come to
substitute "goodness" or conformity for spontaneity and authenticity in her
interactions with the important people in her life. It is easy to see from this
account how Martha's needs had, from a Sartrean perspective, been social­
ized as "guilty needs" and consequently how she had come to regard with
suspicion the emergence of desires which were genuinely her own.
Martha, as she began to understand this and to give up certain habitual
tactics for reinforcing her mirror identity, began to experience in a deeply
physical way the hunger for holding and support which had been lacking
since infancy. Deep breathing in one session provoked the reemergence of
the "skin hunger" which she had reported feeling with Mark, as Martha be­
gan to actively and poignantly long for the security of a calm breast on
 Toward a Sartrean Clinical Practice 337

which to lay her head and for loving arms to hold her. She remarked also on
her continuing temerity about touching, as she began to understand how
her avoidance of physical contact in most situations kept this hunger in
check at the same time that it helped her to avoid the anticipated rejection.
At this time, Martha began to reexperience a rage similar to the rage which
had so disconcerted her in her relationship with Mark and to connect this
with the infantile deprivation which she had obviously suffered. Her lack of
valorization, she could now clearly see, went far deeper than the remem­
bered childhood experiences to which she had hitherto attributed it.
Martha now began to put together strands from the various periods of her
personal history and to see how later childhood (her personalization) and
her family ethos allowed her to find ways to compensate for and deal with
her earliest deprivations (her protohistory). Obviously, Martha's early lack
of valorization had left her with a "mirror hunger" which is often displayed
by clients with so-called narcissistic issues. Yet Martha did not become a
classical narcissist. Instead, her fundamental project was not to get the miss­
ing mirroring, but to be the mirror for others. This choice, it seems, fit in
well with the family situation which she discovered in early childhood. The
truth was that Martha's developing capacity for empathic resonance both
filled an apparent hole in the lives of her family members and gave her a
sense of self-worth and (pseudo)contact which would otherwise have been
missing in her life. It also fit in with the family "ethos" of centering on father
and his business goals/difficulties and developing the capacity for
"unselfishness"—which were the criteria for belonging, the structures of
fraternity-terror, in Martha's family.
Each member of Martha's family, it seems, was peculiarly suited to re­
spond to her offer of empathic mirroring. Martha's mother had come to her
marriage with an apparent lack of self-esteem which may in part have ex­
plained why she chose to marry "beneath herself" in the sense of choosing a
man from a family with considerably less social and financial status than her
own. The middle child in a family where her older sister was reputed to have
all the brains and her younger sister all the beauty, Martha's mother's pride
was almost entirely in her well-connected and upwardly mobile family
rather than in herself. As a wife and mother, she showered all her attention
on a husband who seemed to look elsewhere for satisfaction—to his daugh­
ter or to several mistresses (a suspicion Martha confirmed by talking with
her mother about this during therapy). Only on those occasions when he
felt "down" and "needy" did he turn to his wife.
This "lack" in Martha's mother's relationship with her husband, which
338 Chapter Nine

further confirmed the feelings of inferiority and worthlessness she had

brought into the marriage, no doubt led her to feel that she had little real
emotional support to give to her children—a feeling which was masked by
the adoption of the role of harassed wife and mother, the martyr whom
Martha simultaneously pitied and rejected as a role model. Part of Martha's
mother's martyrdom, by her mother's account, consisted of the interfer­
ences of her mother-in-law in the household. And, indeed, Martha's
mother, in the endless complaints which she shared with her daughter,
blamed this strong-willed old woman for all of the difficulties in the family
from her husband's declining interest in her to her children's misdeeds or
difficulties. Martha, who listened to complaints from both sides, felt caught
between them.
Less obvious to Martha initially was the fact that she was also caught in a
second family "triangle"—one in which she was made the third party in a
struggle between her mother and her father. Martha's father, it seems,
brought with him into his marriage extreme feelings of deprivation from a
childhood spent in relative poverty after the death of his father when he was
three. Martha herself had as a child felt great empathy for the unhappy
child her father had been. She had even now in her mind a very clear image
of him trudging to school in hand-me-down clothes and accepting the
taunts of other children because his mother worked as a maid. In compari­
son, she had as a child felt that her own vague unhappiness was totally un­
justified; it was simply nullified by the events of her prehistory which related
to her father's disadvantaged childhood. Martha's father reinforced this idea
by his constant insistence that his children were happy and well cared for in
a way that he had not been—a point of honor with him which seemed to
have been a source of combined pride and resentment. Even now, although
she was experiencing considerable difficulties and although her youngest
brother had had a psychotic breakdown in high school from which he had
never fully recovered, Martha found it hard to shake the idea that she and
her brothers had somehow been exceptionally "fortunate." According to
her father's perceptions, they were.
Perhaps because of his own early deprivation, Martha's father required
great loyalty and support from his family—which he attempted to repay with
the material advantages which his growing business empire afforded them.
Dinner table conversations, as Martha remembered them, all centered
around her father and what his day had been like rather than around other
family members. Martha's father was especially reliant on his daughter, who
seemed increasingly to replace her mother as his chief confidante and play-
 Toward a Sartrean Clinical Practice 339

mate. In addition to listening to his concerns about his business, Martha

also shared his interest in the various sports which he took pride in teaching
her. And it was Martha whom he took for rides in the fast cars which were
his endless delight and to Martha that he confided some of his dissatisfac­
tions with his wife.
As for Martha, she realized now that she had never shared with her father
her own unhappiness and self-doubts—since these were things he appar­
ently despised in a woman and considered unthinkable in his children. At
the same time that Martha's father was entertaining and fun, however, he
was also rather distant and cold physically—literally keeping her at arm's
length. Only once, at the age of thirteen, did she remember feeling a kind of
warmth edged with physical seductiveness coming from him—and this had
sent her, when they returned home from a drive, to the bathroom in a par­
oxysm of vomiting. Nonetheless, as Martha now began to see, she had felt
considerable guilt toward her mother about her father's attentions to her—
guilt which was uncomfortably laced with feelings of superiority over her
mother, fear of her mother's jealousy, and pity for her mother's pain. Per­
haps this was why, Martha now began to see, she had always been so un­
comfortable with the idea of competition with other women—and why in
part she had yet to form a successful relationship with a man which would
have allowed her to have the family of her own which she felt was long over­
due.
Martha's solution to her earliest feelings of emotional deprivation, then,
had been to become the empathic mirror in a family where everyone else's
feelings of deficiency made them susceptible to valuing her for her abilities
in this direction. Not that this was openly acknowledged, but rather that
Martha increasingly found that her family members (her brothers and her
grandmother, as well as her mother and father) showed their regard for her
by using her as a listening post. Perhaps this was not genuine contact since
Martha's own needs/desires got pushed into the background, but it ap­
peared to be the next best thing in a family where genuine intimacy ap­
peared impossible. Also, Martha found a great deal of vicarious satisfaction
for her own repressed needs for mirroring in providing other people with the
empathic mirroring she lacked. So far, her solution would appear to be to­
tally benign with respect to others, though it might not be fully satisfactory
for herself. This, however, as we learned, was not all there was to Martha's
assumption of the role of the perfect mirror. It had its hidden vindictive side
as well.
This became apparent in a series of therapy sessions which also helped to
340 Chapter Nine

elucidate Martha's extreme discomfort with sharing herself with me in the

beginning of the second phase of therapy. Martha, as she began to explore
the mirroring theme, became increasingly aware that she found it very diffi­
cult to let go of her identity as a mirror. As she confronted this fact, it be-
came clear that part of what was behind her reluctance was a distrust of
other people—including me as her therapist. "I will not allow other people
to mirror me," she finally said, "because I know they will do it badly and I
don't want to be disappointed." This statement was followed by much weep-
ing.
When I asked how she knew this since she so rarely shared herself, Martha
announced in a voice that sounded both angry and proud, "No one is as
good a mirror as I am. They simply cannot do it. I am the world's most per­
fect mirror." When I remarked on the grandiosity of this statement, Martha
ironically dubbed herself "Martha the marvelous mirror"—a designation
which indicated that she was beginning to distance herself slightly from this
identity. Still, it seemed that she was much invested in her superior mirror­
ing talents.
Gradually, Martha was able to grasp the anger in her assumption of this
role. It was as though, in impersonating the perfect mirror, she was able to
say to her parents, "Look how miserably you have failed me and how well I
am able to do what you could not do." In insisting on being the mirror,
Martha was also assuming the role of subject before whom her parents and
others whom she mirrored were objects. This allowed her a kind of triumph
over them at the same time that it served to protect her from the narcissistic
wounds which their insensitivity had inflicted/might inflict on her. Conse­
quently, in most situations where Martha found herself the center of atten­
tion (as she did as a client in therapy), she felt small and weak from two per­
spectives: First, she felt like the small weak child who had never received the
empathic mirroring she needed and, second, she imagined that the other
person felt a superiority similar to that which she herself secretly felt when
she took the position of mirror.
Indeed, as it turned out, it was Martha's attribution of this feeling of su­
periority to me at the beginning of this phase of therapy which had caused
her to fall silent. She had felt that she was "one down" and that I was "one
up" in the relationship. As she was now able to tell me, it was my response
that I could understand how difficult it was to exchange the position of ther­
apist for that of client which had allowed her to break this impasse—since
my remark seemed to imply that I understood her dilemma and might even
share her vulnerability in this respect. Obviously, it was a Sartrean perspec-
 Toward a Sartrean Clinical Practice 341

tive on the implications of the subject-object alternation in therapy that had

allowed me to be sensitive to her feeling put down by my presence as a
witness—though I did not understand at the time why she had been so sen­
sitive to this. How her discomfort in assuming the position of object tied in
with her past and with her own fundamental project would not become
clear until the later sessions.
Obviously, my intuitive feeling that self-revelation was not what was
needed in the earlier session had been correct. What had been needed in­
stead was the lengthy work through which Martha eventually came to un­
derstand the way in which her demand that I reveal myself to her related to
her own mirroring issues. Certainly, there was a real present circumstance
which provoked this: I did not deny that I was in the position of witness and
she in the position of the object of that witnessing. But the reason why this
was so difficult for Martha was that she was projecting onto me an attitude
of superiority similar to the one which had long served to bolster her own
fragile sense of self-esteem.
In the end, what I did reveal to Martha was my own surprised delight as
she began to face all of the complex twists and turns of her fundamental
project and to move beyond her previous sense of identity as the "marvelous
mirror." As the second phase of therapy came to a close, Martha was thor­
oughly convinced that she did not wish to continue to live her life as a mir­
ror. Her work on these issues had been deeply affecting at a "gut level." It
had touched her in her being. She had wept, she had raged, she had resisted
knowing what she was really about, and she had finally confronted the proj­
ect she had constructed/was constructing for herself of impersonating the
valorizing mirror which had been so lacking for her as an infant and young
child. Eventually, Martha came to feel great compassion for the small child
who had given up her own needs/desires for the impossible project of giving
what she never got and thereby becoming a substantial self (the ego as ob­
ject).
This, however, was not the conclusion of therapy. Martha was now faced
with the difficult task of allowing those long disallowed needs and desires to
emerge and of communicating with others in a way that might allow for the
positive reciprocity and intimacy which she had until now only dimly sus­
pected was possible—or else had convinced herself was already there in her
attempt to merge with others through acting the perfect mirror. The task of
the third stage of therapy would therefore be a confrontation with the void
which Martha now found at the heart of her experience as she began to let
go of the old mirror identity.
342 Chapter Nine

Stage Three. Up until now, Martha had examined the regressive and pro­
gressive aspects of her project as they formed a connection between past,
present, and future. In the third stage of therapy, she would largely confront
the task of making a new choice of being. And as might be expected, this
provoked extreme anxiety. Martha did not, in making such a new choice,
cease to have the past which she had; she merely began to live it differently
by projecting herself toward a different future. Hence her anxiety at letting
go of an "identity" that had never really jelled in the sense of providing her
with the security she desired was perhaps more extreme than a similar let­
ting go might have been for a person with a more solid sense of self. None­
theless, Martha did take this step. In doing so, she experienced an existential
anguish of almost overwhelming proportions. But she experienced good mo­
ments as well.
On the positive side, Martha began to share herself more often with oth­
ers and found at times that she enjoyed doing so. She gave a talk at a profes­
sional conference and delighted in the positive feedback she received. She
told a funny story at a party, she became exuberant during a night out with
friends, or she allowed herself to enjoy the spotlight she was given in ther­
apy. Of course, she sometimes retreated into her old patterns, suffering ago­
nies of remorse as she imagined some silent person across the room judging
her uself-centeredness." By and large, however, Martha was developing a
new vulnerability and aliveness which had not been present before—a vital­
ity which showed in her eyes and in her walk; as well as in the things she did
and said.
During this time, I encouraged Martha to do things which challenged her
old identity—to in a sense court the "identity diffusion" which had previ­
ously caused her so much trouble and which had brought her into therapy
in the first place. As she did so, she experienced greater pleasure and more
distress. Often she found it hard to share herself in a conversation for the
simple reason that she was unsure whom she was trying to share. Living her
own needs as hexis for so long made it difficult to get in touch with them;
her desires, it seems, had been muted before they ever had the chance to see
the light of day and for this reason would require much coaxing to do so.
Now that she wished to allow them to emerge, she found herself frustrated
by the inner emptiness she felt instead.
When Martha did manage to allow herself more spontaneity, the conse­
quences were often even more difficult to bear. She experienced deep feel­
ings of longing and isolation—an isolation which had, of course, in a sense
been present all her life, but which she could only now feel in its devastating
 Toward a Sartrean Clinical Practice 343

immediacy. She felt a grief which seemed endless and which would not leave
her for days, as she mourned the years of lost life she had spent as the "mar­
velous mirror" with no needs of her own. She developed psychosomatic
symptoms—migraine headaches, heart palpitations, nervous stomach, and a
variety of hypochondriacal illnesses which she was half-convinced would
kill her. She "felt like an utter fool." And she awoke nightly from horrible
dreams, reminiscent of Lacan's corps morcele dreams, in which body parts
were strewn about rooms. I interpreted these symptoms as a reaction to the
dissolution of her ego in the Sartrean sense—that is, of her image of herself
as the perfect mirror. It was this image which was experiencing its death
throes. Fortunately for Martha, the "marvelous mirror" had cracked and a
new agent with authentic needs and desires of her own was beginning to
emerge from behind it.
Just before she completed therapy, Martha began dating a man who
seemed to be capable of the reciprocal intimacy which she was coming more
and more to desire. Although "Jack's" genuine interest in her was frighten­
ing to her at times and although she was disappointed at other times by his
lack of perfect empathy, even to the point of retreating into her old position
of mirroring to avoid intimacy, Martha was able to catch herself and to
work toward a genuinely reciprocal sharing. "After all," she said, "if he
doesn't love me, then what difference does it make if he likes what I can do
for him?" Gradually, Martha began to be able to accept the inevitable fail­
ures in understanding which occur even in the closest of relationships—and
thereby to come to terms with the separation of consciousnesses which her
project of believing in the possibility of perfect mirroring had in a sense de­
nied.
At the same time, she began to note a new potency in her work as a thera­
pist. She was now able not only to mirror but to confront, to interpret, to
refuse to participate, or even to share herself if this seemed appropriate. She
shared her feelings and thoughts easily in her own therapy sessions. And she
was able to recognize and accept the fact that she had no fixed self in the
substantive sense. As she phrased this, "I find it scary to realize how fluid I
am, but I guess that's what being alive is all about." From a living death as
the perfect mirror, Martha had resurrected herself into a life where recipro­
cal sharing means not perfect selfless understanding but a respect for her
own and the Other's freedom. Even Rogerian "unconditional positive re­
gard" seemed less appealing to her now than before.
M;y Response. As we come to the end of Martha's story, I think it only fair
(and I believe it will be useful) to briefly discuss my own responses to her
344 Chapter Nine

work with me in therapy. First of all, I should note that Martha's "issues"
resonated with some of my own and that I found myself changed by witness­
ing and facilitating her struggle with them. For one thing, as Alice Miller
has accurately observed in The Drama of the Gifted Child (1979), narcissist^
cally used children who learn to meet their parents' needs for mirroring of­
ten grow up to be therapists—since it is exactly these talents which are
needed in the work of therapy. I am no exception.
Also, as I came to see very clearly with Martha, being a therapist is one
place where one may indulge one's needs to mirror without being expected
to reveal oneself as a person in return. Naturally, I began to question my
own "use" of the therapeutic process to this end. And, indeed, it was at this
time that I saw more clearly the meaning of the incident of the man with the
tape recorder and the grandiosity of the therapist who insists on playing the
"unlooked-at Looker." I was even uncomfortably aware, as I listened to Mar­
tha talk about her difficulties in the classroom, that I myself also experi­
enced some of this same discomfort with being "in the spotlight"—and I
wondered whether I might at times have turned my own classes into some­
thing resembling group therapy in order to avoid this discomfort.
Martha's struggles with existential anxiety also affected me deeply. It was
impossible to watch her go through this without having some of my own
identity issues surface and to question the comfortable roles behind which I
sometimes hide from myself the fact that I too have no substantial self. My
own anxiety surfaced as hers grew stronger. Also, there were times, especially
when Martha was at the height of her second experience of "disintegration
anxiety" during the third year of therapy, when I questioned whether I was
indeed helping her. Perhaps, I thought, the traditional psychoanalysts were
right in attempting to build ego structure in the psyche. Perhaps Martha
would become psychotic. Most of the time, however, I simply felt the power
of the struggle in which she was engaging and admired her courage in stick­
ing with it. Her emerging vulnerability and spontaneity affected me deeply.
I was also aware of confronting some of my own limitations in working
with Martha on her desire to have me enact the perfect mirror. I was, for ex­
ample, aware at times of being tempted to play the role which she seemed so
badly to want to assign to me—to be the "good guy" rather than the "bad
guy" in this situation. Yet I was at the same time aware that this was proba­
bly not what Martha needed from me. Certainly, my own discomfort was
considerable as I confronted her on the meaning of her desires to give or re­
ceive perfect mirroring and received her angry remonstrances. Happily, I
later discovered that this was exactly the kind of intervention which pro-
 Toward a Sartrean Clinical Practice 345

voked her to move (I was afraid, of course, that it might send her out the
door). I believe that in thus challenging Martha to move past her stuck
points as a therapist and a person, I was challenging some of those same
stuck points in myself. Hence when, at the end of her therapy, I felt that
Martha was a more genuine person with me, I felt that I was in some ways a
more genuine person with her as well. And though I did not often directly
discuss my personal difficulties and challenges with Martha, I believe that
she was aware from my responses and interpretations that I was there with
her as a person and not simply as a mirror or neutral observer to her heart­
felt struggle. In the end, I shared with her my admiration for the way in
which she had been able to stay with and work through some very difficult
issues in therapy—and how deeply her work had touched me as a person.
Comparing the Sartrean Approach with More Traditional Psychoanalytic Ap-
proaches. Obviously, I believe that Sartrean attention to the existential di­
lemma of fear of change as such, together with a careful examination of the
roots of Martha's dilemma in the original failed mirroring which led her to
distrust the Other as subject, contributed to a favorable outcome of her
therapy. Certainly, Martha's own courage in facing what seemed at times to
be unbearable anxiety over the disintegration of the only self (the "marvel­
ous mirror") she had ever known was the deciding factor. But I believe that
it was fortuitous that this courage was allowed to manifest itself in a thera­
peutic context in which I recognized her so-called disintegration anxiety as a
sign not of the failure to achieve an adequately structured ego but of the fail­
ure to cope with the ontological dilemma of being human. Empathic reso­
nance along Kohutian (or Rogerian) lines in the early part of Martha's ther­
apy undoubtedly paved the way for her to develop the capacity to tolerate
the existential anguish of the final seven or eight months. But empathic res­
onance alone, without the challenge to seek out and face the ontological di­
lemma that all of us lack an ego or self in the substantive sense, might not
have prepared the way for that release of spontaneity which Martha experi­
enced at the conclusion of therapy. A more traditional psychoanalytic ap­
proach would certainly have taken her partway there, but it would have
been difficult to go the whole journey with her if one took the perspective
that the sole aim of therapy was either to concentrate on the Oedipal strug­
gle (classical psychoanalysis) or to build ego structure in the psyche (post-
Freudian psychoanalysis).
In emphasizing the Sartrean themes in Martha's therapy, I do not mean to
imply, however, that the regressive part of our investigation was altogether
different from work she might have done either with a classical or post-
346 Chapter Nine

Freudian analyst. For example, there certainly emerged in Martha's therapy

themes which might have been designated Oedipal by a classical analyst.
Her loyalty to her father, for instance, was so persistent at times as to make it
difficult to look at the flaws in their relationship. And there is no question
that a so-called Oedipal triangle existed between Martha, her father, and
her mother—though in looking at this I would, with Alice Miller (1984),
question whether the suppressed sexual desire did not exist more on the side
of the father than on the side of the child. In other words, I believe that
what Martha desired from her father was physical warmth and love, not spe­
cifically sexual attention. It is also certainly true that Martha feared her
mother's jealousy, had difficulty identifying with her mother as a role model
(while worrying that she might be like her mother), and both desired and
feared her father's attention—all traditional Freudian themes. And it is true
that Martha repeated many aspects of her relationship with her parents in
her later love relationships—a phenomenon Freud would attribute to trans­
ference and the repetition compulsion.
We have also seen how projection of her own motives onto her therapist
and denial or repression of certain motives were issues which Martha had to
work through in therapy. No doubt Martha's guilt over having needs/
desires of her own could also have found its place in a classical Freudian
analysis—though I am sure that the idea of repressed libidinal impulses and
unconscious conflicts would have played a part in a classical interpretation
of these difficulties that it did not play in my own work with Martha.
Also, despite these classical themes in Martha's therapy, I believe that
even most traditional post-Freudian psychoanalytic theorists would agree
that the crux of her difficulties was not Oedipal. They would rather see
them, as I myself do in part, as lying in the failure of her parents to provide
early relational needs for a holding, mirroring, and empathic resonance
which might have led to the development of a firm and coherent sense of
self. Certainly, the issues that arose most persistently in Martha's therapy
were "narcissistic" ones deriving from failed mirroring. On the other hand,
as I have said, Martha's issues were not those of a classical narcissist. Perhaps
they more closely resembled those of the "closet narcissist" described in
passing by James Masterson (1981).
According to Masterson, narcissists (either classical or closet) are stuck in
the "practicing subphase" of early infancy as described by Mahler. To a nar­
cissist, other people are not real separate others but extensions of the self.
Hence comes the classical narcissist's lack of genuine sensitivity to others
combined with his or her feelings of entitlement and needs for attention
 Toward a Sartrean Clinical Practice 347

and praise. Like the practicing subphase infant, the classical narcissist can­
not hear too much applause. Narcissism is a pathological condition not only
because such grandiosity is unrealistic, but also because beneath the narcis­
sist's "false grandiose self" lives an empty, devalued self which the grandios­
ity is intended to camouflage.
The closet narcissist shares this sense of deep emptiness and devaluation,
but instead of needing to be applauded and praised, he or she appears to
need to applaud and praise and thereby to participate in the other person's
grandeur. Like the classical narcissist, the closet narcissist is caught up in a
"partially fused self-object unit" which is basically intrapsychic but which is
projected interpersonally.3 In such a unit, the grandiosity of one of the mem­
bers is reflected by the other. It is just that the closet narcissist's needs for
mirroring and idealization are more deeply buried than the classical
narcissist's—or perhaps the closet narcissist is more in touch with the origi­
nal lack of adequate mirroring. Hence, as Richard Fisher of the Masterson
Group notes, the closet narcissist "does not display overt exhibitionistic be­
havior and may even present as humble, anxious, inhibited or shy" (in Mas­
terson and Klein, 1989, p. 70). The truth is, however, that grandiosity is not
absent in the closet narcissist. The false grandiose self of the closet narcissist
is simply projected onto the other person rather than lived directly. Indeed,
as Fisher also notes, in certain situations the closet narcissist's defenses
against manifest grandiosity may break down and a more classical pattern of
seeking mirroring and idealization may emerge.
Kohut believes that therapy with narcissists is largely a matter of providing
failed mirroring while Masterson considers interpretation of narcissistic in­
jury to be the technique of choice. The aim of such therapy, according to
both Masterson and Kohut, is to repair defective development and allow the
establishment of a separate self which can fully relate to a separate other. Ko­
hut believes, as we have seen, that such repair happens through "transmut­
ing internalization" of the therapeutic relationship. Masterson adds that the
therapist must promote the development of the "real self" as opposed to the
"false grandiose self "—an idea which he obviously borrows from Winnicott.
In Mahler's terms, the goal of therapy with such patients would be the
achievement of "self and object constancy." Other post-Freudian theorists,
such as Kernberg, would say it is the repair of defective ego structure.
Clearly, many of Martha's difficulties can be explained in terms of the
phenomenon which post-Freudian theorists refer to as the "narcissistic
wound"—and her solution to these difficulties as being in many ways similar
to the solution of the closet narcissist as described by Masterson. Masterson
348 Chapter Nine

would probably view Martha as either a high-functioning narcissist or as a

neurotic with strong narcissistic issues. Like Masterson's closet narcissist,
Martha attempted to repair the defective mirroring she received in infancy
and early childhood by taking the position of the mirror for others. Also,
Martha in her relationship with Mark had experienced the reemergence of
mirror hunger and with it the breakthrough of manifest grandiosity, which
Fisher describes as characteristic of closet narcissists in special circum­
stances. Furthermore, in the course of therapy, Martha experienced the
emptiness and lack of a sense of value which are said to underlie the narcis­
sist's grandiosity. And she both practiced (in the form of Rogerian nondirec-
tional therapy) and demanded of me as her therapist that very empathic res­
onance which Kohut prescribes as the treatment of choice for narcissists.
When she did not receive this, like the narcissists described by many post-
Freudian theorists, she unleashed her fury on me and threatened to discon­
tinue therapy.
^ t the reader has probably already noted that it was only in part that I of­
fered Martha empathic mirroring. I also confronted her on the meaning of
her needs to mirror and to be mirrored. My practice with her in this regard
points to a fundamentally different conceptualization of her difficulties and
to a different idea of the aims of her therapy than those discussed by the
post-Freudian theorists. Indeed, I attributed the grandiosity in Martha's
project not to her wish to recover a lost omnipotent selfobject unit but
rather to her fantasy that she could give perfect mirroring and thereby ab­
sorb into herself the Other as object. A part of this grandiosity also involved
her attempt to assume the (vengeful) position of only subject reflecting the
others as objects—thereby creating for herself a sense of superiority based on
a kind of ontological fantasy that she could obliterate the pain involved in
her original awareness of her Being-for-others by making the others into per­
petual objects. In this respect, her position is similar to Sartre's account of
the "sadistic" position in his description of the "conflict of conscious­
nesses"—though Martha's sadistic strain was subtle and secret. It also led to
much suffering for herself.
Thus while I did, in fact, agree with the post-Freudian theorists that Mar­
tha's "pathology" derived from her attempt to use mirroring/being mirrored
to create a union of self and Other, I did not view this desire as representing
a regressive pull to a real earlier state of development. Rather, I viewed it as
referring to Martha's painful discovery that the original others were unable
to give her the sense of the valorization she needed in order to develop a via­
ble project—a situation which led to her subsequent attempts to create such
 Toward a Sartrean Clinical Practice 349

a self by any means she could. From this perspective, the narcissist's lack of
regard for the Other as separate from self is a prospective fantasy rather than
a regression to an earlier stage of life—a move designed to create the illusion
of substantive freedom by absorbing the Other's Look into oneself or one­
self into the Other.
Because I was working with Martha from a Sartrean perspective, I did not
view her as a defective self or ego in need of structuring or restructuring.
Nor did I see her problem as lying in a failure to achieve a self or object con­
stancy which the rest of us more "normal" souls somehow have. Rather, I
saw her historical dilemma as being that of an unvalorized child who had
come up with a very elegant solution to her lack of valorization—a solution
to the "problem of being" which allowed her to deal with many aspects of
the ontological dilemma of creating a self as value within a family context
which seemed antagonistic to viewing her as genuinely valuable.
Indeed, it was amazing to me how many sides this assumption of the posi­
tion of the perfect mirror had as a solution to Martha's childhood difficul­
ties. It allowed her to experience a vicarious satisfaction of her own denied
needs for mirroring; to believe in the possibility of having a secure substan­
tialized self; to uphold the family "pledge" of centering on father and being
"unselfish"; to get revenge on her family for their failure to mirror her by as­
suming the position of the "superior" perfect mirror; to avoid her own feel­
ings of hurt and disappointment about not being genuinely noticed and
regarded by the important people in her life; and to cling to a semblance
of contact and personal belonging in a family that did not offer real re-
latedness. Holding onto this idea of herself as the perfect mirror also al­
lowed Martha to avoid looking at the unstable nature of this solution to
the problem of Being and—except in the moments when she experienced
identity diffusion—to escape the intolerable anxiety of recognizing that she
did not have a substantial self. And it helped her to avoid the terrible
grief which she later felt over a life lived without genuine intimacy and spon­
taneity.
I did not, of course, regard it as my task as Martha's therapist to aid her in
continuing to avoid the hurts and emotional deprivations of her childhood.
But neither did I see the aim of her therapy as being the creation of a struc­
tured ego or self which had hitherto been lacking. Indeed, from a Sartrean
perspective, there is something slightly askew about the views of psychoana­
lytic theorists that the aim of therapy is to repair the ego, find and develop a
real self, or coach one's client to finally develop self and object constancy.
This is so because from a Sartrean perspective the real self, the ego as a seat
350 Chapter Nine

of personality organization, and the notion that one carries about inside
oneself internalized objects are all illusions in that they fail to recognize the
fundamental translucidity of consciousness.
Hence I did not follow the traditional post-Freudian theorists in regarding
Martha as a simple case of arrested psychological development. Obviously,
Martha had not become developmentally fixated in the sense of remaining
an infant, despite her carrying with her certain difficulties which originated
in her protohistory and which she continually detotalized and retotalized as
part of the givens of her future-directed project. The later turns of the spiral
which was Martha's life project—for example, her discovery that her ability
to mirror made her valuable to her parents and other family members and
her later application of this ability to her profession—were not merely reduc­
ible to earlier life problems. Martha the Rogerian therapist was by no means
exactly equivalent to Martha the unvalorized infant.
Hence while I was well aware that the disintegration anxiety which Mar­
tha experienced so dramatically at various stages of her therapy did indeed
refer to her lack of valorization as an infant and young child, I was equally
convinced that her anxiety resembled in kind—even if it was more intense—
the anguish which we all must face in confronting the fact that we cannot
become substantive selves. Certainly, this was more difficult for Martha,
who had never experienced herself as the recipient of parental adoration
and regard, but it was not an anguish from which I could save her by help­
ing her (as many post-Freudian theorists would insist that I should) to build
a more solid ego structure or to discover a substantial true self beneath the
disguised false self she had hitherto displayed.
Instead, I saw my function in working with Martha as not only to explore
with her the past sources of those terrible feelings of personality disintegra­
tion which she experienced, but also to promote that very disintegration of
the ego (in the Sartrean sense) which she so deeply feared. In other words, I
believed that a large part of Martha's difficulty was the tenacity with which
she clung to the illusion that she could, in fact, be a person as a table is a
table—that she could be the perfect mirror. When she was able to give up
this ultimately quixotic quest, she experienced a release of spontaneity, an
ability to experience her own needs/desires, and a growing capacity for gen­
uinely reciprocal relations which only an acceptance of and respect for her
own and others' freedom could have allowed. I believe that a Sartrean con­
ceptualization of her issues was in part responsible for this positive outcome.
In coming to the end of Martha's story, I am aware that it takes more than
one case history to demonstrate a clinical theory. My hope is that this
 Toward a Sartrean Clinical Practice 351

longer example, together with the shorter vignettes and the suggestions for
therapeutic application which are scattered throughout this book, have
given the reader a sense of the difference which a Sartrean perspective can
make to the practice of psychotherapy. Further clinical illustrations will have
to await a later book, as will a detailed discussion of technique from an exis­
tentialist perspective—though I might add that my own techniques in work­
ing with Martha included empathic mirroring, interpretation, confronta­
tion, body-oriented psychotherapy, and Gestalt role playing. At times, I
simply shared my own thoughts and feelings directly with her. Later work
will have to describe more precisely how these and other techniques come to
be modified by an existentialist conceptualization of therapeutic issues. In
this account, however, I wanted to concentrate on the existential/ontolog-
ical concerns which are the focus of the present book.

Some Directions for Future Inquiry

In coming to the close of this last chapter, I am aware of numerous prelimi­

nary thoughts and discarded notes on topics and subtopics relating to exis­
tentialist therapy which did not seem to fit within the scope of this book.
For one thing, the focus on Sartrean metatheory as it relates to Freud and
the post-Freudian psychoanalytic theorists precluded the pursuit of many
side issues which I found both intriguing and significant for the practice of
psychotherapy. In the interest of suggesting some directions for future in­
quiry, I will share some of those discarded paths and ideas with the reader.
First, I found myself with more to say about Sartre's theories of the emo­
tions, the imagination, and sexuality as these relate to clinical practice. Af­
ter all, Sartre himself wrote books on the first two, and his treatment of the
third not only in a major section of Being and Nothingness but also in the
psychobiographies is extensive and careful. With respect to sexuality, it
seems to me that more needs to be done, both theoretically and in terms of
case examples, with relating sexual difficulties to the fundamental project, as
Sartre has done in the psychobiographies.3 If this connection holds, I think
it would be particularly useful to show how one's sexual relations change as
the fundamental project shifts. Also, more work could be done to describe
precisely the ontological structure of various sexual deviations—from those
which are close to the norm to those which are bizarre and even sinister.
With respect to the imagination, it seems to me that the suggestions made
in Chapter 6 about the possibilities for using the capacity to imagine (or
352 Chapter Nine

refusing to use this capacity) in the interest of a project lived in bad faith
need to be much extended. Perhaps various forms of "psychopathology"
could be redescribed by noting a person's overuse or failure to make ade­
quate use of the capacity to imagine. For example, psychotic hallucinations
might be regarded as the substitution of an imaginary future for a seemingly
impossible real one or certain neuroses as a refusal to allow oneself to imag­
ine a different future. Furthermore, it seems to me that more needs to be
done in the direction of precisely defining and distinguishing between
dreams and hallucinations as two forms of what Sartre refers to as "capture"
by the imaginary. After all, the former seems to be a necessary condition of
health, whereas the latter is usually associated with extreme psychopatho­
logy.
Furthermore, my own suggestion in Chapter 6 that transference is at least
in part a matter of living one's relationships in the imaginary needs to be
more precisely worked out, especially that aspect of it where memory, imagi­
nation, and the hope for a different future seem to intersect in explaining a
particular interpersonal strategy based on a particular view of self/world.
Furthermore, the idea that there is an imaginary self as well as a real self
with the consequences of this idea for such things as body image needs fur­
ther exploration. Perhaps it might help to explain, among other things, how
schizophrenics, anorexics, and others come to have such distorted body
images.
As for Sartre's theory of the emotions, this is one place where I find myself
balking at what Sartre himself refers to as the overly rationalist strain in his
early philosophical thinking. But though I do not believe that emotion is a
purely magical changing of self in a situation where one feels frustrated with
the world (I agree that emotion may be magical just as rationality itself may
serve the purpose of a magical release from the constraints of the real), I do
accept Sartre's idea that feeling is something one does rather than some­
thing one undergoes or suffers—that it is a particular way of (prereflectively)
choosing one's world-consciousness. Future inquiry might reopen Sartre's
question about the ontological significance of emotionality in general and of
particular emotions, as well as try to account from a Sartrean perspective for
the phenomenon of "repressed affect," which is well known to all depth
therapy.
Perhaps repressed affect could in part be accounted for by considering a
second topic which, although I have pursued it only tangentially in this
book, interests me greatly. This is Sartre's idea that consciousness lives the
world bodily—that "Being-for-itself must be wholly body and it must be
 Toward a Sartrean Clinical Practice 353

wholly consciousness; it cannot be [a separately existing consciousness

which is] united with a body" (BN, p. 305). From this perspective, it would
seem that repressed affects would not be feelings which are repressed once
and for all into the unconscious, but rather feelings which are constantly be­
ing held back through muscular constrictions in the body as part of a funda­
mental project in which I live these particular feelings as (reflectively) de­
nied. I believe from my experience as a therapist that, despite the numbness
which accompanies certain habitual holding patterns, this "repressed mate­
rial" is available to reflective comprehension.4 Nor do such holding patterns
relate merely to the past, for, as Sartre has shown with regard to the similar
issue of somatization in the case of Flaubert's hysterico-epilepsy, psychophy-
sical symptomatology can only be fully deciphered in terms of strategies for
solving present problems in the direction of a particular future which this
person is attempting to bring into being.5
From this perspective, it would seem that an existentialist reconsideration
of psychosomatic illnesses and the bodily manifestations of "psychopatho-
logy" would need to include the future as meaning as well as the past as
ground for these particular symptoms. It would also need to include the in­
terpersonal meaning of those same symptoms, since the body exists not sim­
ply for-itself but also for-others. Indeed, it is my body which is the recipient
of the Look through which I discover the Other as another consciousness.
And it is with respect to myself as embodied consciousness that I experience
the shame, the fear, and the pride which Sartre associates with my aware­
ness of my Being-for-others. In this respect, the questions arise: For whom is
this bodily repressed affect or frozen attitude repressed or frozen, and to
what end? Looked at in this way, the "character armor" which Wilhelm
Reich (1945, 1948) associates with past traumas leading to the repression of
orgasmic potency would have to be reconceptualized as having both an in­
terpersonal and a future-oriented dimension. The dissolution of character
armor would also be expected to reveal an ontological significance to human
existence beyond the release of the capacity for satisfactory orgasm which
Reich seems to regard as the sole aim of life.
This observation does not mean that Sartre, who was interested in
Kretschmer's studies in character and body structure, would deny that
"character is identical with the body" (BN, p. 350). But when Sartre speaks
of character and the body, he is referring to my character as read in my body
for-others; it has a relevance to my fundamental project, but this relevance is
to that project as a transcendence transcended. I believe that a Sartrean re­
casting of Reichean-bioenergetic therapy, which I have found enormously
354 Chapter Nine

useful in certain aspects of my own clinical practice, would need to take into
account the future and the interpersonal dimensions of character armor, as
well as the ontological significance of the various holding patterns which
Reich and his follower Alexander Lowen (1967a, 1967b, 1980,1983) ignore.
Obviously, traditional psychoanalysis, since Reich's defection from Freud,
has defined itself more and more exclusively as a purely "talking cure." But
since the body also "talks," I see no reason why depth therapy should ignore
what it is saying. I also think, however, that Reich's literalization of Freud's
concept of the libido6 needs to be superseded in the direction of exploring
the ontological/existential issues which are locked within particular bodily
holding patterns. Furthermore, from an existentialist perspective, one needs
to consider the meaning of habitual movements, facial expressions, intona­
tions, and gestures as they relate to a person's fundamental project as well as
the habitual muscular contractions which seem to be the focus of Reichean
and bioenergetic therapy. All of this, however, will need to be worked out
more precisely in future studies.
A third area which seems to me to be particularly promising for future
theoretical and clinical exploration is Sartre's idea that the for-itself is tern-
poralizing and spatializing. For Sartre, as we have seen, time and space are to
be discovered neither out there in the world nor in here in the psyche but
rather in the intersection between the two. They are operations of the for-
itself on the world rather than static givens. Thus it would seem to be im­
portant from a clinical perspective to conceptualize an individual's way of
temporalizing and spatializing self/world.
All of us are aware, of course, that subjective time frequently has little rele­
vance to clock time—as is evidenced by such statements as, "This afternoon
disappeared before I knew what was happening," or, "This has been the
longest month of my life." There is also little doubt that subjectively lived
space differs from person to person and situation to situation. Both my
awareness of the closeness and distance of objects and people and my sense
of what is figure and what is ground differ from yours and from my own in
other situations and at other times. As Sartre himself notes, space is always
"hodological space"—that is, it always consists of paths to and away from
objects which figure in my fundamental project. Furthermore, my awareness
of my own body in space—for example, my trying to take up much or little
or no space—will vary with the character of my project.
In the case of severe psychopathology, these differences are, of course,
much more obvious. For example, the schizophrenic (like Roquentin in
Sartre's novel Nausea) seems to lose a so-called normal awareness of time
 Toward a Sartrean Clinical Practice 355

and space.7 The world may seem two-dimensional or things may appear to
intrude relentlessly and meaninglessly into one's consciousness; one's bodily
orientation in space may be severely distorted; and the ordinary awareness
of succession may be replaced by a kind of timelessness in which a truncated
future gives way to an imaginary present. 'Vet even in cases involving less se­
vere difficulties, attention should be given to the spatial and temporal di­
mensions of a client's project—and case studies illustrating the ontological
significance of temporalizing or spatializing oneself/one's world in this way
or that should be attempted.
For example, with respect to temporalization, the therapist might consider
the significance of a project in which a client is always feeling overwhelmed
by the past at the expense of the future as contrasted with one in which a cli­
ent perpetually denies the past in favor of a future which seems unrealisti-
cally "open to anything." One also wonders if human development might
not be partially conceptualized in terms of stages of learning to spatialize
and temporalize, as Piaget's studies (see Piaget and Inhelder, 1948) seem to
indicate—though from a Sartrean perspective one would want to grasp the
ontological and interpersonal significance of such development.
Temporalization seems especially relevant to the experience of psychother­
apy, which may itself be defined as a client's remaking the past as he or she
comes to pro-ject a different future. The present, as simple "presence to be­
ing" (BN, p. 208), allows the psychological instant of reorientation to occur.
Of course, in saying that one can remake the past, we are really saying that
one reorients oneself toward it. There is an aspect of the past which is pure
in-itself—or, in Sartre's later conceptualization, pure practico-inert—and
which remains simply and immovably there as the "unalterable background-
depth of all my thoughts and all my feelings" (BN, p. 141). This past is "irre­
mediable" in the sense that I cannot change its pure facticity or refuse in
good faith to be a person with this particular past (BN, p. 496). But since "it
is fairly impossible for me to distinguish the unchangeable brute existence
from the variable meaning which it includes" (BN, p. 498), it will remain
true that the past is changeable in the sense that its "urgency" and "illumi­
nation" come from the future (BN, pp. 498-99).
In this connection, all depth therapists are probably aware of those mo­
ments in therapy when the past takes on a shockingly new character as a cli­
ent's present/future project changes. As Rollo May observes, therapists of­
ten find "that a patient cannot recall what was vital and significant in his
past until he is ready to make a decision with regard to the future" (1983,
p. 167). Also, the therapy session itself is often experienced as an odd sort of
356 Chapter Nine

time, and clients frequently remark on the unusual rapidity or slowness of

the therapy hour. This and other aspects of "therapeutic time" need to be
explored further from a Sartrean perspective.
A fourth area of inquiry might involve developing more exact descriptions
of the client-therapist relationship in existentialist therapy, together with
clinical illustrations of how the existentialist therapist deals with the tradi­
tional Freudian issues of transference, resistance, and the defenses. Obvi­
ously, Sartre would recast these as choices rather than as mechanisms. But
beyond this, detailed case histories demonstrating the handling of transfer­
ence and other relationship issues in existentially oriented psychotherapy
need to be written.
Also, I suspect that the defenses need to be precisely formulated as strate­
gies in bad faith for living what originally seemed like an unhappy or even
intolerable life situation. Sartre discusses projection in the Genet biography,
where he views Genet as the recipient of the disowned wishes and impulses
of ordinary "good citizens." But there projection has sociopolitical as well as
personal implications, a point which could perhaps be made about the
other defense strategies as well. I also think that the defenses, like other as­
pects of one's project, are lived bodily and not just psychically. For example,
denial is associated with a certain way of "not looking" as reality which has
physical components. Furthermore, I believe that the defenses were origi­
nally developed as strategies for dealing with the reflective implications of
one's interpersonal relations—and that they therefore always involve both
reflective and prereflective components. But all this will need to be worked
out more precisely in further studies.
Finally, I am aware that Sartre's later social philosophy can be more thor­
oughly mined for its rich theoretical and clinical implications. In Being and
Nothingness, Sartre suggests a "psychoanalysis of things" which might help
to illuminate the meaning of an individual's tastes and material preferences.
The significance of one's way of living the exigencies inscribed in the
practico-inert could be added to this investigation. Furthermore, case stud­
ies investigating the social shaping of need as desire could be undertaken
with the aim of describing the ontological structures of various "pathologi­
cal" projects.
As for serial alterity, other-direction, and groups as ternary relations, the
implications of these concepts for existentialist therapy need to be explored
in more detail. In particular, the connection between the dyadic relations of
earliest infancy and an individual's insertion into the ternary relations of
the family group needs to be explored in individual case histories—an en-
 Toward a Sartrean Clinical Practice 357

deavor Sartre himself initiates in the Flaubert biography. Further studies

dealing with the intersections between individual projects, class-being, and
the Objective Mind of a generation need to be undertaken. And the effects
of serial alterity on contemporary psychopathology need to be explored in
more detail. It might even be possible, combining the insights of Sartre's
early philosophy with his later social philosophy, to develop a specifically
Sartrean approach to family and group therapy.
Needless to say, Sartre's later philosophy also has far-reaching implica­
tions for social psychology—and for therapeutic work with socially disad-
vantaged individuals, families, and groups. Social workers, in particular,
might find Sartre's concepts of scarcity, the power of the practico-inert, se­
rial alterity, other direction and the demands of an inhuman work world
useful. Certainly, the ways in which particular individuals have been in­
duced from childhood to live their needs/desires more as hexis than as
praxis have special poignancy when one is dealing with situations in which
racism, sexism, and social disadvantage play a significant role in the
alienation/exclusion of specific individuals and groups from the larger
society.
Attention to the effects of prejudice as "idea hexis," a topic Sartre dis­
cusses in the Critique (pp. 300-3o6n), on the individuals and groups against
which such prejudice is directed (and perhaps also on those who engage in
such prejudice) might prove particularly relevant here. Even the problems of
the homeless, which have currently received so much focus both from psy­
chological and sociological perspectives, could be investigated from the
Sartrean perspective of attempting to understand the ways in which a soci­
ety "chooses" its disadvantaged and its disfranchised, or, in this case, its
unhoused—and the ways in which the individuals in question are induced
to cooperate with these choices.
Ultimately, as we know, Sartre in his later philosophy views individual
and social difficulties as being inextricably interlinked—not just for the dis­
advantaged but for all of us. Thus a social psychology operating from a
Sartrean perspective would be activist rather than merely descriptive in its
interactions with its objects of study—who would, of course, be recognized
as other human subjects. The aim of such a "dialectical" social psychology
would be not only to elucidate contemporary social interactions but also to
help facilitate the development of an authentic future society—the "true in-
tersubjective community" in which Sartre hopes that the only "real rela­
tions" will be those between people (CDR, p. 3<D7n). A place to begin would
obviously be the development of techniques for community building in
358 Chapter Nine

both advantaged and disadvantaged groups—a community building which

has as its objective the dissolution of hexis and serial alterity in favor of the
development of group praxes in which other individuals and other groups
appear not as my "demonic double" but as "another self" (CDR, p. 132)
whose oppression/oppressiveness affects me in my being. Clearly, such a so-
cial psychology would also recognize that individual praxis is the creative
force behind all social relations, whether positive or negative; it would
therefore refuse to sacrifice the individual to the group, either conceptually
or practically, although it would certainly recognize the significance of
groups and series in shaping individual praxis.
All of these topics, as I have said, could provide fruitful directions for fu­
ture inquiry into the value of Sartre's philosophy for the practice of psycho­
therapy or existentially oriented social projects. In the meantime, my hopes
for this book will have been fulfilled if it succeeds in encouraging depth ther­
apists and others to reconsider the therapeutic issues which I believe Sartre's
metatheory can aid us in conceptualizing more adequately than other depth
approaches—including classical psychoanalysis and the various "schools" of
contemporary post-Freudian psychoanalysis. Chief among those issues, as I
have emphasized throughout these chapters, is a Sartrean approach to
change in therapy and to the existential anguish which accompanies a radi­
cal reorientation of one's fundamental project of being. If a therapist does
not encourage a client to confront and deal with fear of change as such, as I
have said, exploring the past can become a new source of self-reification
rather than an instrument of release. Indeed, without learning something
like the Sartrean technique of "pure reflection," a client's "stuckness" in old
patterns might conceivably increase rather than decrease as he or she inves­
tigates the regressive but not the progressive aspects of his or her fundamen­
tal project—its past "pastness" but not its past or contemporary future-
directedness.
Sartre's ideas can also be extremely useful, as I have noted, to depth thera­
pists attempting to understand the nature of the interpersonal needs and
conflicts which form the core of most unhappy life projects. Particularly im­
portant here, of course, will be an investigation of the ways in which the
looks, touches, and words of the original others have affected a client's fun­
damental project, in both its reflective and prereflective dimensions, and the
ways in which the interpersonal/intrapersonal aspects of that project have
been carried forward (and changed/modified/augmented) in the present.
Sartre can also aid depth therapists in clarifying those "identity" issues
which inevitably arise in therapy—issues relating to confusions about the
 Toward a Sartrean Clinical Practice 359

nature of the self as agent, the self as object, and the self as aim or value
which derive from the structures of bad faith described in these chapters.
And, finally, the later Sartre can add to depth therapy an appreciation of
the sociomaterial aspect of a clients difficulties which is missing in most in-
dividually oriented psychotherapy. In these ways, whether or not one ac-
cepts all of Sartre's ideas, I believe that an appreciation of Sartrean existen-
tialist metatheory can add a new and valuable dimension to the practice of
depth psychotherapy.
Notes

Chapter 2. Sartre versus Freud:

Two Approaches to Metapsychology

1. Actually, although Sartre credits Lefebvre with the discovery of the progressive-
regressive method, Sartre had already sketched its outline in his discussion of how the
fundamental project becomes explicable in existential psychoanalysis in Being and Noth-
ingness. He says that this comprehension of the fundamental project "is effected in two
opposed senses: by a regressive psychoanalysis one ascends back from the considered act
to my ultimate possible [original choice]; and by a synthetic progression one redescends
from this ultimate possible to the considered act and grasps its integration in the total
form" (BN, p. 460).
2. Freud actually presents the formation of the superego in a more complex fashion
t h a n this. For one thing, since all of us originally have bisexual tendencies, the boy loves
as well as hates his father. For another, there is a secret connection between the id and
the superego that the ego does not share. T h u s a particularly harsh superego may not in­
dicate that a person has had particularly harsh parents, but rather that he or she has
very strong aggressive instincts, which are now (through this connection between the id
and the superego) placed in the service of the superego. O n e turns what might have been
aggression toward the parents for mild disappointments into aggression against the self,
thereby satisfying this id impulse through superego attacks on the ego. Finally, what is
most often introjected as a superego is not the actual parent but the parent's superego
(Freud, 1933, pp. 61-69).
3. Freud did n o t always describe primary narcissism as a withdrawal from the world.
For example, in Civilization and Its Discontents^ he describes an original state in which the
"ego includes everything," only later separating "off" an external world from itself. O u r
present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive—
indeed, an all-embracing—feeling which corresponded to a more intimate b o n d between
the ego and the world around it" (1930, p. 68). This "oceanic feeling," Freud thinks, is
the origin of much religious sentiment (1930, p. 64). T h e "symbiotic stage" described by
many post-Freudian theorists might be considered, from a Sartrean perspective, to be the
stage of prereflective consciousness relating directly to the world before the advent of a
truly reflective awareness. In a way, Roquentin's horrific "ecstacy" in Sartre's novel Nau-
sea is a fictional description of how disturbing such a state would be to an adult. It is in-
361
362 Notes to Pages 45-85

teresting how closely this description resembles the description of psychotic states by
some psychotics (see Keen, 1970, pp. 211-31). Obviously, mystical experiences of oneness,
as Freud notes, also resemble this state. The point is, however, that such an original and
basic connectedness between consciousness and the world fits more adequately with
Sartre's phenomenological view than with Freudian drive theory.
4. Reason and Violence is a description of Sartre's later works—Saint Genet, Search for a
Method, and Critique of Dialectical Reason—but not the Flaubert biography (which had
not yet been published). It is an example of the continuing influence of Sartre on Laing,
though this letter indicates a kind of counterinfluence of Laing on Sartre.
5. An interesting development since the gay rights movement is the number of male
homosexual clients who assert that their sexual preference is biologically determined.
What this seems to give them is a sense of justification—of being a homosexual as a tree is
a tree. Asked if it would be all right if being gay represented some kind of fundamental
choice and this choice were okay to make, one client replied, "Yes, I see what you mean.
That would be wonderful" Lesbian clients, by contrast, frequently represent their homo­
sexual lifestyle as a political choice; however, one suspects that it is a much more funda­
mental and basic choice with roots in childhood experiences.

Chapter 3. Sartre and the Post-Freudian Drive

Theorists: A Crisis in Psychoanalytic Metatheory

1. Mahler, of course, was European- rather than American-born—in the small Hun­
garian town of Sopron near the Austrian border. Although she was later a part of the Vi­
ennese psychoanalytic circle (Helen Deutsch conducted an unsuccessful analysis with
her, and Mahler was part of Anna Freud's child analysis seminar), Mahler by her own
admission did not feel comfortable enough working in the shadow of the giants to de­
velop her own path in child studies (Mahler and Stepansky, 1988). Thus her really origi­
nal work followed her immigration to the United States after the rise of Hitler. Interest­
ingly, Mahler did a (this time successful) analysis with Edith Jacobson after immigrating
to this country. Her earlier contacts included the circle surrounding Carl Jaspers, who
also influenced Sartre.
2. Greenberg and Mitchell, in an amusing example, note the extremes to which
Mahler is willing to go to retain the orthodox language of Freud or, in this case, Hart-
mann. In an early paper, she describes the parents of a young child with a variety of psy­
chosomatic and psychological symptoms with the following periphrasis: "The environ­
ment, extremely overanxious, consulted one doctor after another" (quoted by Greenberg
and Mitchell, 1983, p. 282).
3. Sartre discusses the way in which the appearance of a third person unites a duo into
an "us object." The original two become a unit beneath the Look of the third. It is for
this reason that people falling in love often wish to avoid the company of others (BN, pp.
415-23). I might also add that once lovers become a "couple," arguments often arise be­
cause of the way in which each perceives that the other makes him or her "look" in the
eyes of others.
4. In other words, it might well be conceivable from a Sartrean perspective—indeed, it
would appear that this is the case from Sartre's description of infant development in The
Family Idiot—that the Other would not all at once present himself or herself in his or her
full power as a Look. That is, there might be a developing recognition of the power of the
Other as a subject. It is entirely possible that at the very beginning the Other is not fully
distinguished from other objects in the world—though recent infant studies have sug-
 Notes to Pages 93-III 363

gested that babies recognize their mothers almost from birth. Still, as Mahler's studies
suggest, there is growing awareness of t h e power of the Other, which is greatly aug­
mented by t h e appearance of language—a fact that makes perfectly good sense from a
Sartrean perspective.
5. George Klein (1976) comes very close to an existentialist perspective o n sexuality
while maintaining that he is simply following Freud's emphasis o n psychosexuality. For
Klein, who proposes that his is a purely "clinical" (as opposed to metatheoretical) orien­
tation, the central organizing principle of the personality is the creation of a unified self.
We might argue that Klein has not so much escaped from a metatheoretical orientation
as shifted that orientation from metaphysics to ontology. In doing so, he recognizes that
sexuality, like other h u m a n experiences, refers to this goal of creating a unified self. Hav­
ing "excised" the "energy model" from his thinking (1976, p. 7), Klein goes o n to redefine
the Freudian pleasure principle to include such things as "benign messages of acceptance
and affirmation, communicated through bodily responses of pleasure" (l9j6i p. 222) and
as pleasure in being able to "affirm and be affirmed by others" (1976* p. 229). Like Sartre,
Klein believes that sensual/sexual experience provides a microcosm of one's way of living
one's life in the world, one's fundamental project in Sartre's language; and like Sartre,
Klein insists that sensual/sexual experience "always involves . . . value meaning to the
self" (1976, p. 97).
6. Recent critics have, I think, been unnecessarily hard o n the Beauvoir-Sartre
relationship—perhaps as a consequence of its having been held up for so long as a kind
of ideal love between two well-known intellectuals. I think much of this criticism is un­
called for. Certainly, some of it is merely silly, as when John Weightman, in a review of
several recent books about Sartre (including Cohen-Solal's and Hayman's biographies),
states that if Sartre h a d "ever proposed marriage to [Beauvoir]—as he did to various
other women, b u t only halfheartedly and for tactical reasons—it seems obvious that she
would have accepted him" (Weightman, 1987, p. 43). Anyone familiar with the volumes
of Beauvoir's autobiography knows that Sartre did propose marriage to her—on the occa­
sion of their being otherwise separated by their teaching posts—and that she declined.
But Weightman's vision of the Sartre-Beauvoir relationship is undoubtedly gained from
reading Hayman, who also seems bent o n disparaging this relationship while playing up
Sartre's "contingent loves."
I think that Hazel Barnes's (1982, 1985) assessment of this relationship is much more
balanced t h a n Weightman's or Hayman's. In her discussion of Beauvoir's final tribute to
Sartre in Adieu (Barnes, 1985), she notes that the respect the two h a d for each other and
the centrality of the relationship remains obvious b o t h in the narrative account of the
last ten years of Sartre's life and in the "Conversations" with Sartre that Beauvoir re­
cords there. A n d even though it is clear from Beauvoir's own account that there were
times when the "contingent loves" (his if n o t hers) caused pain in their relationship, it is
also true that t h e respect, openness, loyalty, and love between them is apparent from
Sartre's statements and letters, as well as from Beauvoir's autobiographical writings. Af­
ter fifty years together, Sartre's last significant words to her were, "I love you very much,
my dear Castor" ("Je vous aime beaucoup, m o n petit Castor") (Beauvoir, 1981, p. 123).
7. Sartre himself has said that the sequel to Search for a Method is the Flaubert biogra­
phy.
8. Hazel Barnes points out to me that Sartre's idea of the "melodious child" is strik­
ingly different from Freud's concept of the infant as a bundle of instinctual (sexual and
aggressive) drives which must be tamed by interaction with the (civilized) world and the
acquisition of a superego.
9. I want to distinguish this natural acquisition of empathy for the parents with the
364 'Notes to Pages 118-149

enforced empathy at the expense of the child's own needs and desires which is frequently
demanded of children of narcissistic parents. Alice Miller describes this situation with
great clarity and eloquence in The Drama of the Gifted Child (1979).

Chapter 4. Sartre and the Post-Freudian Relational

Theorists: Toward a Psychoanalytic Theory of the Self

1. I want to be clear about my use of the term "self." W h a t I am calling the "self as
agent" is really not a self in the usual sense. Rather, it is a "for-itself," a self-in-the-
making. But because Being-for-itself includes "nonpositional self-consciousness," I think
we can refer to it as a self as agent so long as we understand that this does not imply sub­
stantiality or content.
2. Actually, for H a r t m a n n (1939), the self is the whole of the psychophysiological orga­
nism and therefore not a psychological concept at all. T h e "self-representation" is a set of
images of oneself similar to the set of images one has of objects. Post-Freudian theorists
such as Jacobson have shortened "self-representation" to "self," even where they follow
Hartmann's traditional line of thinking.
3. Despite these theoretical confusions, Master son is often very helpful when he dis­
cusses practical techniques for dealing with borderline a n d / o r narcissistic patients (Mas-
terson, 1976,1981,1983; Masterson and Klein, 1989).
4. Sullivan is also uniquely modern in recognizing that the "mothering one" does not
necessarily have to be the infant's mother—he might, for instance, just as easily be the
child's father.
5. Sullivan derives "parataxic" from the Greek term paratassein, "to lay side by side."
By this, he means distorted perceptions, judgments, and relational experiences resulting
from a distortion of new interpersonal relations based o n an expectation that they will
be like the old childhood relationships. T h e corresponding "parataxic mode" refers to
the normally subjective, autistic interpretation of experience and events characteristic of
very young children. "Syntaxic" by contrast, refers to "being with" others in the sense of
consensual validation, the development of rational thought, reality orientation, and the
expression of ideas in a commonly accepted language. T h e "syntaxic mode" is the high­
est stage of development; where an individual has not reached it, the goal of therapy is to
promote its development. T h e "prototaxic mode," by contrast, refers to the chaotic, un-
differentiated, and incommunicable mental states that occur in infancy when self-
awareness and concepts of time and space are lacking. N o t all personal experience can be
or should be translatable into the syntaxic mode, although excessive indulgence in pro­
totaxic or parataxic distortion is characteristic of mental illness.
6. Sartre says at one point in Being and Nothingness, "If bad faith is possible, it is be­
cause it is an immediate, permanent threat to every project of the human being; it is be­
cause consciousness conceals in its being a permanent risk of bad faith. T h e origin of this
risk is the fact that the nature of consciousness simultaneously is to be what it is not and
not to be what it is" (BN, p. 70). In another part of the book, he says that "most of the
time we flee anguish in bad faith" (BN, p. 556). Nonetheless, Sartre proposes toward the
end of Being and Nothingness that the purpose of existential psychoanalysis is to present
the possibility of authentic living, to use its techniques as a "means of deliverance and
salvation" which would mean a full acceptance of oneself as t h e being by whom values
come to exist—a validation of oneself as freedom (BN, pp. 626-27).
 Notes to Pages 163-169 365

Chapter 5. Sartre's Later Philosophy and the Sociomaterial

World: A New Dimension for Existential Psychoanalysis

1. Although the term "dialectic" is as old as Plato and Aristotle and was used by Kant,
Sartre's usage derives immediately from Hegel and Marx, who conceive of the dialectic
as a dynamic process of interpenetration of opposites. According to this view, change is
the distinguishing feature of reality. For Hegel, the Aristotelian principle of contradic­
tion n o longer obtains in the realm of the dialectic; in its place, Hegel would put the
principle of contrariety, with the dialectic being equivalent to the resolution of contra­
rieties. Hence Hegel believes that history moves not by means of simple laws of cause and
effect but by means of the dynamics of the dialectic: A thesis confronted by an antithesis
leads to a synthesis. T h e "dialectical materialism" of Marx differs from Hegelian idealism
in making the material world primary and in considering the world of ideas to be sec-
ondary or epiphenomenological; at the same time, Marx's philosophy differs from older
(mechanistic) materialism in emphasizing movement through interpenetration of oppo­
sites rather t h a n simple cause and effect. Because Marx believes that all existences are
complexes of opposing elements and forces with the character of a changing unity, he
can speak of "contradictions" (note the new usage of the term) as producing movement.
2. Nominalism, in scholastic philosophy, is the theory that abstract or general terms
(universals) represent no objective real existents, but rather are mere words or names
which exist post res rather t h a n ante res—that is, they follow rather than precede the con­
crete existence of things in the world. Its obverse, realism, which we would now identify
with idealism, is the theory that universals exist ante res.
3. Sartre defines process as "a development which, though orientated, is caused by a
force of exteriority which has the result of actualising the series as the temporalisation of
a multiplicity in the fleeting unity of a violence of impotence" (CDR, p. 304n). A process
is something which happens as the result of the work of individuals o n the sociomaterial
world, but it lacks the goal-directed unity of individual or group praxis. O n the other
hand, to view praxis as process, as analytical social science is fond of doing (Sartre partic­
ularly cites American sociologists Kurt Lewin, A . Kardiner, and J. Moreno), is to make
human affairs incomprehensible (CDR, pp. 551-52).
4. W h e n Sartre, in Search for a Method, says that Marxism is the philosophy of our age
and that existentialism is merely an "ideology" (or minor application of major ideas)
within the philosophical domain of Marxism, he is referring to the Hegelian-Marxist no­
tion that each age has a dominant philosophy in the sense that a particular philosophy
encapsulates the awarenesses and struggles of that period. Sartre concludes that Marx­
ism is the philosophy of our age because it is "one with the movement of society" (SM,
p. 7). W h e n the class conflicts and conditions of scarcity which Marxism addresses have
been overcome, Sartre goes on to say, t h a n a "philosophy of freedom will take its place,"
though we at present have "no means, no intellectual instrument, no concrete experi­
ence which allows us to conceive of this freedom or this philosophy" (SM, p. 34).
Later, Sartre questions the wisdom of insisting that the Critique is Marxist. In an inter­
view in 1975, for instance, he admits that he used the word "Marxist" "a bit lightly
then." " A t that time," he continues, "I considered the Critique to be Marxist; I was con­
vinced of it. But I have changed my mind since then. Today I think that, in certain areas,
the Critique is close to Marxism, but it is not a Marxist work." A n d this is so, Sartre says,
precisely because his "idea of freedom" makes of existentialism a "separate philosophy"
(Sartre in Schilpp, 1981, p. 20). Sartre, of course, does not mean that he has turned his
366 Notes to Pages IJO-182

back on class conflicts or the human misery which derives from scarcity, but he does real­
ize that to call his philosophy Marxist is to confuse those readers who equate Marxism
with materialist determinism—as Marx himself did.
5. See, for example, Flynn (1984) and Aronson (1980,1987).
6. Hazel Barnes reminds me that the umlaut in exis renders the English equivalent
hexis rather than exis, as it appears in Sheridan-Smith's translation of the Critique.
7. "Praxis" in Aristotle is activity which has its goal within itself and, as such, is distin­
guished from "poiesis" which is production aimed at bringing into existence something
distinct from the activity itself. Praxis is also "practice" as distinguished from "theory."
Sartre's usage of the term in the Critique does not signal an ontological shift, but it does
indicate the greater emphasis in his later philosophy on action in the world as opposed
to consciousness. Still, we must remember that the intentionality of the for-itself had al­
ways implied action—that world-consciousness is world-involvement and world-
transcendence.
8. The section on need and desire is part of 589 pages of unorganized notes from the
mid-1960s, which is in the Bibliotheque Nationale. This manuscript is also discussed by
Robert Stone and Elizabeth A. Bowman in an article soon to be published in Sartre
Alive, ed. Ronald Aronson and Adrian Van den Hoven (Detroit: Wayne State Univer­
sity Press) and by Juliet Simont in "Morale esthetique, morale militante: Au dela de la Jari-
bole'?" Revue philosophique de Louvain 87 (1989). The paraphrase here is my own and is
based on the original manuscript.
9. Contemporary work on anorexia does not contradict Sartre's thesis. Hilde Briich
(1988), for instance, notes that though the typical anorexic comes from an upper-middle-
class, seemingly successful family, the underlying problems are problems of emptiness
and despair arising from a disturbance in self-concept. Such children were early on too
compliant, too "good." Presumably, they gave up their own needs for the desires of their
parents. Perhaps, in doing so, they at the same time presented the anorexic symptom as a
metaphor for what had happened. They cannot "eat," cannot partake of life, because
they have learned that their needs are (in Sartrean terms) guilty needs. For a Heidegge-
rian interpretation of a case involving anorexia nervosa, see Ludwig Binswanger's "The
Case of Ellen West" (in May, Angel, and Ellenberger, 1958, pp. 237-364).
10. In the following passage, Sartre pictures at random some of the "hundreds of exi­
gencies" by means of which the practico-inert shapes the everyday life of the Parisian citi­
zen: "The field exists: in short, it is what surrounds and conditions us. I need only glance
out of the window: I will be able to see cars which are men and drivers who are cars, a
policeman who is directing traffic at the corner of the street and, a little further on, the
same traffic being controlled by red and green lights: hundreds of exigencies rise up towards
me: pedestrian crossings, notices, and prohibitions; collectives (a branch of the Credit
Lyonnais, a cafe, a church, blocks of flats, and also a visible seriality: people queueing up
in front of a shop); and instruments (pavements, a thoroughfare, a taxi rank, a bus stop,
etc., proclaiming with their frozen voices how they should be used). These beings—
neither thing nor man, but practical unities made up of man and inert things—these ap­
peals, and these exigencies do not yet concern me directly. Later, I will do down into the
street and become their thing" (CDR, p. 323).
11. Sartre uses the volcano which destroyed Herculaneum as an example of the fact
that simple matter, pure Being-in-itself, "does not appear anywhere in human experi­
ence": "At any moment in History things are human precisely to the extent that men are
things. A volcanic eruption destroys Herculaneum; in a way, this is man destroying him­
self by the volcano. It is the social and material unity of the town and its inhabitants
which, within the human world, confers the unity of an event on something which with-
 Notes to Pages 183-218 $6j

out men would perhaps dissolve into an indefinite process without meaning" (CDR, p.
180).
12. Sartre, however, notes that the brace, bit, and monkey wrench address him as a
petty-bourgeois intellectual in a purely abstract, general way as dead possibilities since he
will not, like the skilled worker, actually use them to ply his trade (CDR, p. 186).
13. For a fuller description and evaluation of both the brilliance and the occasional
flaws of Sartre's socioliterary analysis in the third volume of the Flaubert biography, see
Hazel Barnes's Sartre and Flaubert (1981), pp. 245-309, and Douglas Collins's Sartre as Bi-
ographer (1980), pp. 151-83.
14. I have rendered group-en-fusion as "group-in-fusion" rather than as "fused group,"
which is the term used in Sheridan-Smith's translation of Sartre's Critique, because the
more literal translation seems to capture more accurately the dynamic quality of this
kind of group.
15. In the following passage, Sartre notes the lack of chronological order in the emer­
gence of groups: "I will recall here that . . . there is no formal law to compel [groups] to
pass through the succession of different statutes described above [the movement from
group-in-fusion to institution]. A fused group [group-in-fusion] may either dissolve in­
stantaneously or be the beginning of a long development which will eventually lead to
sovereignty; and in the complex world glimpsed here, the sovereign group itself may arise
directly from the collective itself (or rather from its sector of other-direction). . . . But in
itself this should come as no surprise, and only the whole historical complex can deter­
mine whether the group will emerge already half-petrified, since in concrete reality, this is
to say, in every moment of temporalisation, all statutes of all groups, whether alive or
dead, and all types of seriality . . . are given together as a tangle of strict relations and as
the dispersed raw material of the developing totalisation" (CDR, p. 6j6).
16. Actually, R. D Laing (1969; Laing and Esterson, 1964) has begun this exploration
of the family as series and group along Sartrean lines; in an interview, Laing explicitly
cites Sartre's later philosophy as an influence on his work (Laing in Charles worth, 1980-
81).
17. Sartre cites many clues to the "autosuggest ability" which he maintains fashioned
Flaubert's hysterico-epilepsy—including his childhood impersonation of an epileptic
beggar which Flaubert mentions in a letter as being extremely satisfying. Not that Sartre
suggests that Flaubert is playacting the nervous crisis which made him an invalid until
his father died two years later, thereby relieving the son of fulfilling the father's voca­
tional plans for him. Rather, Sartre sees in Flaubert's epilepsy a somatization represent­
ing a repressed dual desire for suicide and parricide as well as a perfect passive-aggressive
solution to an impossible dilemma.
18. Wallerstein's work should not be used, as she herself did not intend it to be used,
to persuade people to stay in bad marriages. On the other hand, I do think it is worth­
while to look into the ways in which the dissolution of a family may have far-reaching ef­
fects on children's lives—effects which are perhaps more understandable if we accept the
Sartrean premise that the family as a group is more than a collection of individuals.
Hence even if both parents remain in contact with the children, the grief of losing the se­
curity of the experience of being grouped (and the damage this does to the child's trust in
groups) may have to be faced as well.
19. For example, Martin Grotjahn's The Art and Technique of Analytic Group Therapy
(1977) summarizes much of the wisdom of conducting groups in a psychoanalytic mode.
My own favorite book on group therapy is Irvin D. Yalom's The Theory and Practice of
Group Psychotherapy (1970).
368 Notes to Pages 224-241

Chapter 6. A Challenge to Existential Psychoanalysis:

Ego, Mirror, and Aggressivity in Sartre and Lacan

1. The translation of Wunsch as "desire" rather than "wish" may have done much to
spur a philosophical orientation in French psychoanalytic theory which finds its culmi­
nation in Lacan. As Marion Michel Oilner says concerning Lacanian desire, it "lacks
the specificity of aim, source, or object associated with the drives" in traditional Freud­
ian metatheory (1988, p. 122).
2. For a sketch of Lacan's quarrel with the International Psychoanalytic Association
and the splits that developed in the French psychoanalytic community over the IPAs
treatment of Lacan, see David Macey (1988, pp. 222-57) a R d Marion Michel Oliner
(1988, pp. 40-58).
3. See Howard Davies's Sartre and Les Temps Modernes (1987) for an excellent account
of the interactions between structuralists and existentialists within the pages and behind
the scenes of Sartre's own journal.
4. Kojeve (1947) taught Hegel to a generation of French intellectuals. In addition to
Sartre and Lacan, Raymond Queneau (who later published the lectures), Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, E. Weil, Emmanuel Levinas, and Alexandre Koyre were to be found
among those attending Kojeve's lectures. They were the core of a group with whom Ko­
jeve continued the discussion over coffee and beer in a local cafe after adjourning class
(Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman in the introduction to Hyppolite, 1946, p. xxiii).
Kojeve's reading of Hegel, which preceded the French translation of The Phenomenology
of Mind, is careful and detailed. It also stresses a view of the Hegelian Absolute which is
nonreligious in making humanity the focus of a developing dialectic at the center of
which lies the master-slave relationship. For Kojeve, Hegel's philosophy definitely points
in the direction of Marx and Heidegger. There is no doubt that Kojeve's "left-Hegelian"
perspective influenced both Sartre and Lacan.
5. In addition to the slave's devaluation as an inessential consciousness, there is a sec­
ond instability in the master-slave relationship as described by Hegel. While the slave re­
mains the truth of the master, the slave begins to discover his own truth through another
avenue—through the labor by which he initially serves the master but through which he
discovers in worked objects his own objectification. The master does not have this ave­
nue to truth. Instead, his relationship with things is one of pure consumption, pure nega­
tivity. Thus the slave has an objective truth which the master does not have. Obedience
and servitude have led to a kind of freedom, which will indeed be freedom if the slave
can overcome the master. The slave will then have both his freedom and the objective
truth of his labor—as, for example, the medieval master craftsman does.
6. Hegel, like Lacan, links language with law and authority: "In the world of ethical
order, in law and command, and in the actual world, in counsel only, language has the es-
sence for its content and is the form of that content; but here it has for its content the
form itself, the form which language itself is, and is authoritative as language." On the
other hand, Hegel goes on to suggest a view of language which is more Sartrean when he
notes that "in speech, self-consciousness . . . comes as such into existence so that it exists
for others" (Hegel, 1807, p. 308).
7. Hazel Barnes's discussion of the positive side of the ego occurs in "The Role
of the Ego in Reciprocity," in Sartre Alive, ed. Ronald Aronson and Adrian Van
 Notes to Pages 244-262 369

den Hoven (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, forthcoming), and in "Sartre's O n -
tology Reconsidered: T h e Reality and Role of the Ego," a paper presented at the meet­
ing of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association in t h e spring of
1988.
8. It is possible that Flaubert (as he is presented by Sartre), with his inability to relate
to others as other persons, his avoidance of intimate relationships with women, his pas-
sivity, and his preoccupation with mirrors, would be regarded by modern psychoanalysts
as a high functioning character disorder (probably narcissistic) rather t h a n as a neurotic
personality.
9. In The Prime of Life (i960), Simone de Beauvoir tells the story of Sartre's experience
with mescaline, which took place in February 1935 at Sainte-Anne's Hospital, where La-
gache was a psychiatric intern. Sartre experienced visual hallucinations ranging from an
umbrella which appeared to be a vulture to an attack by devilfish. Flashbacks precipi­
tated a deep depression in which Sartre feared he might be entering an incurable
"chronic hallucinatory psychosis." O n e of his hallucinations involved a lobster (one re-
members Sartre's distaste for crustaceans as symbolic of the in-itself) that followed him
on a hiking tour he took with Beauvoir in the summer of 1935.
Sartre's obsessional preoccupation with Olga Kosakiewicz, who is the model for Xav-
iere in Simone de Beauvoir's novel She Came to Stay, also dates from this period. Sartre
apparently tried to exchange the madness of hallucinations for the madness of love. Fi­
nally, one evening o n a crowded bus he announced that he was tired of being mad and
thereafter recovered. Beauvoir attributes Sartre's psychological difficulties during this pe­
riod, including the unhealthy attachment to Olga (the three later became separate
friends), to resistance to accepting the passage of youth. In any case, Sartre makes use of
the mescaline experience b o t h in his discussion of hallucinations in The Psychology of
Imagination and in his description of Roquentin's horrific experience in Nausea.
10. These quotes are from two tape-recorded interviews which took place on July TJ
and August 24, 1987. I am grateful to Joanne Greenberg for permission to quote from
them. T h e passage quoted here is from the July TJ interview.
11. Interview, August 24,1987.

Chapter / . Sartre and Lacan on the Nature of Language:

Existentialist versus Structuralist Metatheory

1. Lacan insists that manque a etre be translated into English as "want to be." I have
sometimes used the more usual "lack of being," with the French following it in parenthe­
ses to let the reader know that I am using Lacan's usual term.
2. Freud defines "primal repression" as the first (archaic) phase of repression, which
forms nuclei that constantly attract those contents of consciousness which are due to be
repressed (Freud, 1911,1915c, I9I5d, 1926).
3. Freud's famous remark that "biology is destiny," together with other statements
about feminine sexuality, have led many feminists to regard him as sexist. Feminists of
the Lacanian persuasion, such as Juliet Mitchell (1974), have on the other h a n d argued
that Freud's theory is not implicitly sexist since it indicates that gender identity is created
rather t h a n biologically given.
370 Notes to Pages 2/2-302

4. I have considered this issue of the influence of the mother's role as first witness on
the subsequent "need" to denigrate women in "Sartre, Transcendence, and Education
for Equality," in Men's and Women's Liberation: Testimonies of Spirit, ed. Haim Gordon,
Leonard Grob, and Riffat Hasan (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, forthcoming).
5. For a fuller discussion of Flaubert and the Knights of Nothingness, see Barnes, 1981,
pp. 268-77, and Collins, 1980, pp. 151-83.
6. For example, it is acceptable in contemporary scholarship to use "he or she," as I
have chosen to do in the present book, rather than the generic "he." But the substitu­
tion is often awkward and usually less than elegant. Other solutions, alternating be­
tween the generic "he" and the generic "she" or using s/he, are perhaps even more prob­
lematic. In any case, there is nothing automatic in this changing area. One does not
simply write the generic pronoun—one thinks about it and chooses what to do.
7. Sartre says that the poets in Black Orpheus, by wrenching French words away from
their normal meaning, are "stripping them of their white underclothes" and thereby
forcing them to serve revolutionary praxis (quoted in Barnes, 1981, p. 392).

Chapter 8. Clinical Implications: Sartrean Revolutionary

Praxis versus Lacanian Amor Fati

1. Lacan explains this paucity of clinical examples by noting that he wishes to protect
the privacy of his analysands—an admirable sentiment, but one which often leaves the
reader at sea with respect to picturing concretely how his insights might be used in the
practice of psychotherapy.
2. Lacan, for example, praises Melanie Klein's intuitive ability to bring a client ("Little
Dick") into the symbolic order—despite her inadequate conceptualization of what she is
doing (Lacan, 1975, pp. 68-70).
3. Lacan's controversy with the Societe Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP), of which he
was a member, over his use of short sessions in training analyses dates back to the 1950s.
Lacan was elected president of the SPP in 1953; six months later, a vote of no confidence
forced his resignation. At this time, a number of well-known French analysts (including
Sartre's friend Lagache) resigned over the SPP's treatment of Lacan and formed the So­
ciete Francaise de Psychanalyse (SFP). The International Psychoanalytic Association
then entered the controversy, making Lacan's exclusion as a training analyst a condition
for recognizing the SFP. When the SFP made the decision to exclude him from its teach­
ing program in 1964, Lacan formed his own school, the Ecole Freudienne de Paris (EFP).
The EFP continued to draw important members of the French psychoanalytic commu­
nity until Lacan dissolved it shortly before his death in 1980 (see Macey, 1988, pp. 222-
57; Oliner, 1988, pp. 40-58).
4. Moustapha Safouan provides a Lacanian critique of Kohut in an article in Stuart
Schneiderman's collection (1980, pp. 160-64).
5. Lacan, on the other hand, jokingly suggests that the goal of analysis is to restore to
the analysand the illusory freedom of Humpty Dumpty: "But we analysts have to deal
with slaves who think they are masters, and who find in a language whose mission is uni­
versal the support of their servitude, and the bonds of its ambiguity. So much so that, as
one might humorously put it, our goal is to restore in them the sovereign freedom dis­
played by Humpty Dumpty when he reminds Alice that after all he is the master of the
signifier, even if he isn't the master of the signified in which his being took on its form"
(1966, P . 81).
6. Lacan contemptuously rejects contemporary psychoanalytic practice which is affec-
 Notes to Pages 319-354 371

tively oriented: "Our experience is not that of affective smoochy-woochy. We don't have
to elicit in the subject the return of more or less evanescent, confused experience, in
which would consist all the magic of psychoanalysis" (l975> P- 55)-

Chapter 9. Conclusion: Toward a Sartrean Clinical Practice

1. What Pontalis actually says is that Sartre, who "projects" into this transcript "the
antagonistic couples of which he is so fond," demonstrates by his call for an equalization
of the analytic relationship "a fundamental misunderstanding of the whole of psycho­
analysis" (BEM, p. 220).
2. Masterson believes that his own approach does involve technical neutrality, though
he is certainly willing to go further than purely classical analysts in noting that to inter­
pretation must be added mirroring, communicative matching, and confrontation-
depending on the nature of a client's psychopathological difficulties. Masterson, like Ko-
hut, is also aware of the curative power of empathic understanding. Other
analysts—Harold Searles (l979)> f° r example—will go much further in insisting that it is
the humanness, and the willingness to risk oneself, on the part of the analyst which aids
his or her patients in curing themselves.
3. The theoretical base for the Masterson Group is British object relations theory
combined with Mahler's account of early childhood development. Masterson (1981;
Masterson and Klein, 1989) conceives of actual internalized self and object representa­
tions which inhabit a person's psyche. In the case of borderline patients, whose develop­
mental impasse Masterson believes occurred at the rapprochement crisis, the object rela­
tions unit is split—consisting of a rewarding maternal part object which offers approval
for regressive and clinging behavior linked with a good, passive child over against a with­
drawing maternal part object which withdraws or is angry and critical of efforts toward
separation-individuation linked with an inadequate, empty, bad self.
In the case of narcissistic patients, who are supposedly arrested at the practicing sub-
phase, there are two fused object relations units. The first is a grandiose self-object with a
sense of specialness supported by an omnipotent, powerful, and perfect object; it covers
an aggressive or empty object relations unit consisting of an attacking and punitive ob­
ject and a humiliated, shamed, and empty self. Although a Sartrean perspective would
deny the existence of objects within the self or even the idea that it is the Other as an ob­
ject (rather than the Other as a subject) who is at issue, it is nonetheless true that the de­
sire to create a substantive self can motivate many of the clinical phenomena Masterson
describes.
4. Asking a client to notice or breathe into habitual body patterns will often bring the
so-called repressed material to light—which seems to indicate that it is prereflectively
lived rather than unconscious.
5. In Flaubert's case, of course, the present impasse was his desire to escape the law ca­
reer which his father was attempting to impose on him. Sartre throughout a masterly
narrative demonstrates the significance not only of this present impasse but also of the
roots of Flaubert's ability to somatize—and to catch himself in the psychosomatic symp­
tom he had created.
6. It seems to me that Reich's (1951a, 1951b) later dubious experiments with orgone
boxes and the like demonstrate ad absurdum the fallacies in Freud's own insistence on
psychobiological and psychophysical metaphors for the workings of the psyche. Reich
372 Notes to Page 355

himself, though brilliant in analyzing character structure, falls prey to this literalization
to the point of believing that he can quantify and measure libido. Eventually, he ends up
with a metaphysical principle—universal visually perceptible orgone energy dancing its
way through the universe.
7. O t h e r writers (Kaplan, 1964; Keen, 1970) have noted the similarities between Ro-
quentin's "horrible ecstasy" (N, p. 176) and the experience of psychotics. What Sartre
wishes to present is an experience of the world without the addition of h u m a n meaning,
including temporalization and spatialization. In such a world, things seem to overwhelm.
Keen (1964, p. 228) compares Roquentin's experience with the chestnut tree to the expe­
rience of meaninglessness and being overwhelmed by things recounted in Marguerite Se-
chehaye's Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl (1951).
Like Roquentin, Renee (the schizophrenic girl) feels overwhelmed by objects which
seem to take on a life of their own in a world where they have lost their names, their
functions, and their meanings. Again like Roquentin, Renee attempts to stave off her ter­
ror by counting, naming, and thereby reintroducing h u m a n meaning to the world where
things have assumed the character of pure Being-in-itself. As Roquentin says, "In vain I
tried to count the chestnut trees, to locate them by their relation to the Velleda, to com­
pare their height with the height of the plane trees: each of them escaped the relation­
ship in which I tried to enclose it, isolated itself, and overflowed" (N, p. 173).
Roquentin's and Renee's experiences remind me of the schizophrenic patient of a col­
league, who meticulously catalogued the happenings in the daily newspaper in a desper­
ate attempt to hold onto a sense of succession which otherwise escaped him. In an effort
to ward off the terrible feeling of lacking a viable personal future, he became obsessed
with the external passage of time. Eugene Minkowski similarly analyzes the paranoid
schizophrenic delusions of another patient in terms of an experience of loss of temporal-
izing potency: "There was n o action or desire which, emanating from the present,
reached out to the future, spanning the dull similar days. As a result, each day kept an
unusual independence, failing to be immersed in the perception of any life continuity;
each day life began anew, like a solitary island in a gray sea of passing time" (Minkowski
in May, Angel, and Ellenberger, 1958, pp. 132-33). This m a n also experienced being over­
whelmed by things once time had stopped.
In all of these cases, the point is that once a viable future, one's ability to project one­
self, has been truncated, objects in the world take on a strange, almost "surreal" quality
in which spatial relations seem altered or distorted. T h e point is not, as some critics have
thought of Nausea, that such experiences should be regarded as more "authentic" t h a n
our everyday experiences, but that this is how the world might be experienced without
the addition of h u m a n meaning—a condition which most of us would regard as patho­
logical if it persisted for any period of time.
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Index

Absolute Knowledge, 229, 230, 236, 276, 298 Anthropology, 163, 257, 274
Acorn theory, 139 Anti-Semitism, 186
Actions, 142-43,173 Anxiety, 5, IIO, 122,125-26,127,128,130,132,
Adam and Eve story, 83 135,136,138,158, 243, 294, 336, 342,
Adler, Alfred, 34 344. See also Castration anxiety;
Adolescent, 74, in Disintegration anxiety
Adultomorphization, 62 Apodictic certainty, 82,172, 230
Aestheticism, 278 Appearance and reality, 81
Affection, 66 Aristotle, 43,139,140, 320
Affects, 69, 75, j6, 79, 80 Aron, Raymond, 3, 4,13
repressed, 352-53 Aronson, Ronald, 366(n5)
Aggression, 23, 27, 29, 33, 41, 6j, 69, JJ, 79, Artificial intelligence, 303
81,112,119,133,134, 320 Arts, L, Absolu, 275
Aggressivity, 227, 233, 235, 254, 308 Aupick, General, 306
primary, 226, 228, 234, 254 Authenticity, 224, 227, 241
transcendence, 235 Authentic living, 149, 253, 364(n6)
transformation, 230, 254 Authentic relatedness, 169, 241, 330
Alcoholic, 48 Autobiography (Freud), 7
Alice in Wonderland (Carroll), 301 Autoeroticism, 119, 232
Alienation, 198, 224, 254, 283, 291, 310, 357 Automatic writing, 312
Alma (patient), 4 Autonomy, 243-44
Amor fati, 290, 297, 304
Anal stage oppositionalism, 5,112 Bad faith, 41, 45, 46-47, 49, 55, 5*, 58, 59, 60,
Analysand, 8,18, 20, 32, 36,135,137,148, 84, 87, 97,144,146,147,149,157,160,
167, 274, 283, 291, 294-95, 297, 298, 301, 241, 248,275, 276, 301, 315, 316, 317, 321,
320 322, 352, 356, 359, 3^4(n6)
and therapist, 167-68, 223-24, 291, 293, 294, Bad-me, 125,126
295, 319-20 Balint, Michael, 69, 87,119,123,132
Analysis Terminable and Interminable (Freud), 23 Barnes, Hazel E., 8, 97, 98,150, 241, 242,
Analytico-regressive moment, 22 363(nn6,8), 366(116), 367(1*3), 368(n7),
Androcentric culture, 271-72 370(n5)
Angel, Ernest, 5 Basic needs, 190
Anger, 143,152,160 Bastille, 209
Anguish, II, 317, 334, 342, 358 Baudelaire, Charles, 108, 306-7
Annihilation anxiety, 132,135 Beauvoir, Simone de, 3,100, 270, 271, 272,
Anonymity, 334 363(n6), 369M
Anorexia, 176, 352, 336O19) Behaviorism, 2, 81
384 Index

Being, 4, 5,12, 38, 39-40, 43, 45, 5L 322, 349 Capitalism, 185
alienation of, 85 Caress, 91-92, 94
cardinal categories of being, doing, having, Carroll, Lewis, 301
40-41, 53, 323 Cartesian cogito, 258, 300
fundamental project of, 18-19, 39, 40, 41, Cartesian dualism, 2
43, 44-45, 46, 50-51, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, Cartesian rationalism, 8,10
58, 103, 153,162-63, 188, 221, 305, 315, Castration anxiety, 30, 81,132,135, 262, 263,
318, 322, 325, 326, 332, 341, 353, 354, 356, 264, 271, 291
358 Catalano, Joseph S., 4
in-itself, for-itself, 40, 44, 45, 48-49, 58, Cathexis, 25, 26, 27, 61, 63,1, 6
59-60, 87, 91, 97, III, 121,140,144,145, object-, 31, 64, 80
147,148,151,153,171,173, 211, 246, 277, Cause and effect, 3, 22, 35
286, 304, 309, 352, 353, 354 Censor/censorship, 35-36, 50, 269
lack of, 260, 264, 268 Change, 47, 50, 51, 52-53, 54, 58,137,139,152,
as object, 84 153,154,158,160,161,162, 260, 269, 270,
original choice of, 19-20 272, 289-90, 301, 302, 310, 317-18, 322,
for-others, 49, 58, 82-83, 90, 93, 277, 287, 355, 358
353 fear of, 127-28,130, 322, 345, 358
philosophy of. See Ontology resistance to, 317
sense of, 4 Character armor, 353, 354
Being and 'Nothingness (Sartre), 4, 9,12,19, 21, Charlie (patient), 4
35, 84, 97, 98, 99,100,101,103,104, ill, Child abuse, 192
146,147,151,162,163,169,170, Childhood, 8,13,19, 20, 56, 62, 63, 69-70, 2,
171,172,173,182,191, 204, 205-6, 207, 3, 4,102-3,106-7, l°9, HO, 112,134,168,
221, 226, 229, 237, 276, 351, 356 170,177,179, l8l, 188-89, 203, 212, 315,
"Concrete Relations with Others" chapter, 326, 337, 350, 357
9^,97 play, 33,131,134, 233
Bettelheim, Bruno, 2 self-system, 125,127,156
Betty (patient), 4 Choice, 21, 24, 46, 47, 54,154,162,179, 317,
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud), 23, 25, 342, 347, 356
29,33 prereflective, 39-40, 41, 52, 53,139,152
Binary oppositions, 264, 267 See also Being, original choice of
Binswanger, Ludwig, 5 Circuit of selfhess, 42-43,145
Bioenergetic therapy, 353-54 Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud), 29,
Biology, 25, 27, 28, 34-35 36l(n3)
Bisexuality, 132 Class, I97, 198-99, 200, 220, 222, 323, 357
Black Orpheus preface (Sartre), 270, 286, Classical psychoanalysis, 3. See also Freudian
370(n7) psychoanalysis
Body, 57, 94, 99,104,105, 351, 353-54 Claus, Carl, 28
-in-action, 90, 91, 92 Clift, Montgomery, 7
boundaries, 2 Clinical metatheory. See Metapsychology
-as-flesh, 90-91, 92 Colet, Louise, 179
image, 232-33, 352 Collins, Douglas, 290, 306, 367(1113), 370(n5)
Borderline personality structure, 62, 68, 69, 5, Common good, 208
7, 8, 9,103, in, 132,135,138, 214, 371(113) Community building, 357-58
Borrhomean knot, 267 Complex, 19
Bosch, Hieronymus, 233 Comprehension. See Empathetic human
Boss, Medard, 5 comprehension
Bowlby, John, 119 Comradeship, 98
Bowman, Elizabeth A., 174, 366(n8) Concern, 133,134
Breast, 69 Concrete universal, 168, 323
Briich, Hilde, 366<n9) Condemned of ALtona, The (Sartre), 107,108
Brucke, Ernst von, 25 Condensation, 25, 26, 268
Bugental, James E, 5 Confrontation, 341, 351
Buhler, Charlotte, 233 Conscious, 2, 3, 23, 26, 30, 35, 37, 47
Bus queue, 185,186 subject, 265-66, 268, 290, 295, 298, 318, 322
 Index 385

Consciousness, 14,16,17, 21, 22, 24, 36-37, 8 1 - Death of Desire, The: A Study in Psychopathology
82, 120, 122, I 4 0 , I4I, I44, I49, 164, 229, (Thompson), 5
260 Deceiver and deceived, 36
conflict of, 49, 8 4 , 1 0 4 , 1 4 6 , 1 5 0 , 1 9 1 , 206, Decentered subject, 283, 284, 298
236, 237, 329, 348 Decision-making, 4 7 - 4 8
essential, 228 De Courtivron, Isabelle, 271
free, 43, 4 4 Deep breathing, 336
merging, 82 Defenses, 36, 64, 7,138,158, 217, 292, 293, 356
negating, 304 Delusions, 20,153, 299, 334
prereflective, 18-19, 38, 39, 41, 42, 4 7 , 4 8 , 51, Demands, 294, 303
55,109,124,139,142,145,149,150,151, Depression, 63
152,154,155,157,158,159,162, 224, 302, Depressive position, 69
317, 352 D e p t h therapy, 5, 9,15, 31-32, 35,153,155, 220,
and reality, 17, 35 287, 301, 324, 326, 352, 354, 355, 358, 359
reflecting and reflected on, 10, 56,145,150, Derrida, Jacques, 282
154-55 Descartes, Rene, 82
reflective, 18,19, 37, 38, 41, 42, 45, 4 8 , 50, 51, Desire, 2 4 , 43, 4 4 , 61, 90-91, 92,172,175, 330,
55, 59, 84,140,141,142,143,145,150, 341, 342, 343, 357
151,156,157, 224, 227, 229, 237, 307, 317 Lacanian, 224, 231, 233-34, 235> 237> 2 4 0 ,
self-sufficiency of, 226 253, 260, 265, 268, 284, 292-93, 294,
spontaneous, 37,151,157 309
and structure, 157,161 /sadism, 84, 9 0 - 9 2 , 93, 9 4 - 9 5 , 97,100,114,
transcending, 43, 236, 253, 258, 272, 273, 311, U6
315 Sartrean, 174, 224, 256, 309, 311, 315
transformation, 237 sexual, 346
unreflected, 152,155 sexual, unconscious, 4 8
and the world, 4 , 2 0 , 38, 41, 4 2 - 4 3 , 49,141 value-oriented, 169
See also under Lacan, Jacques; Sartre, Despair, II, 89, 97,151
Jean-Paul Destructiveness, 135
Constancy, principle of, 25, 34, 6 4 Determinism, 13,14,16,17,19, 21, 22, 52,163,
Constituent dialectic, 205 164, 259, 287, 314
Constituted dialectic, 205 synchronic, 225, 269, 287, 297, 315
Contat, Michel, 99 Developmental theory (Sartre), 102-8,170-81,
Conversion, 25, 26, 27 209-12, 316
Cooper, D G., 45 and self, 122
Counteridentity, 330 See also Existentialist therapy, and relational
Covert operations, 127 needs; Lacan, Jacques, development the­
Craig (client), 218-19 ory of; Post-Freudian psychoanalysis, and
Creativity, 134, 250, 282 drive theory
Critique of Dialectical Reason (Sartre), 13, 22, 99, Dialectical nominalism, 164
IOI, 163,168,169,170,171,172,173,174, Dialectical reason, IOI, 164,172, 257, 258, 259,
182, 185, 2 0 4 , 206, 211, 212, 213, 225, 256, 365(111)
259, 273, 274, 306, 357 synthetico-diachronic approach, 226
Culler, Jonathan, 259 See also Sociomaterial world, dialectical rela­
Cultural achievement, 34 tionship with
Cultural experiences, 58 Dictionnaire des idies recues (Flaubert), 281
Cultural heritage, 182, 2 0 0 - 2 0 1 , 308 Differentiation stage, 109,110
Cultural individuation, 265 Dilman, Ilham, 81
Dirty Hands (Sartre), 152
Darwin, Charles, 28 Disguise, 8
Daseinsanalysts, 5 Disintegration anxiety, 122,133,135, 344, 345,
Davies, Howard, 368(n3) 350
Death, 6, 91, 96,146, 209, 265, 312 Displacement, 25, 26, 28, 30, 268, 269
instinct, 23, 25, 27, 28, 29, 33, 34, 68, 81,114, Distance, 140-41,149
119, 225, 317, 318-19 Divorce, 214, 367(1118)
psychological, 135 Djalioh, 280
386 Index

Dora (Freud's patient), 26 Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation

Double, 234, 358 (Hartmann), 63
Double reciprocal incarnation, 92, 97 Elementary Structures of Kinship, The (Levi-
Drama of the Gifted Child, The (Alice Miller), Strauss), 256
344, 363(114) Ellenberger, Henri F, 5
Dreamer, 46, 250 Emotional responsiveness, I, 55, 6, 7, 8
Dreams, 27, 29, 58,136,137,144,161, 233, 234, Emotions, 115,143, 351, 352
247, 250, 251, 268, 269, 343, 352 Emotions, The: Outline of a Theory (Sartre), 7
Drive/structure theory, 65 Empathetic human comprehension, IOI, 165,
Drive theory (Freud), I, 2, 8, 29, 30-31, 32, 302, 318, 321, 322
34, 37, 43, 51, 61, 64, 69,112,119-20, 314.Empathetic resonance, 345, 346, 348
See also under Post-Freudian Empathy, 137,159
psychoanalysis Empiricism, 80
Dual unity, 4, HO Enstellung, 267
Duquesne University, 5
Environment, 63,139,147,160,168
Dyadic relations, 162,170, 206, 212, 306, 356
Envy, 7,112
Dynamic hypothesis (Freud), 25, 29, 30, 309
and gratitude, 69
Equivalence theory, 26
Eating, 175-77, 366(n9) Erikson, Erik, 65, 6j, 120,122,124,135
Ecole des Hautes Etudes, 227 Ethics, 97,151
Ecole Freudienne de Paris (EFP), 370(n3)
Ethics (Sartre), 99
Economic determinism, 164
Ethology, 237
Economic hypothesis (Freud), 25, 29, 30, 63,
Euro-American tradition, 201
64-65, 5, 93, H9, 291
Evolution, 23, 24
Ecrits (Lacan), 299
Evolutionary theory, 27, 28, 29, 31, 43
Edmund HusserVs Phenomenological Psychology
Excitement, 34
(Kockelmans), 5
EFP (Ecole Freudienne de Paris), 370(n3) Exigencies, 183,184, 287, 305, 318, 356,
Ego, 2,14,15,19, 25, 26, 27, 30, 31, 36, 48, 51, 366(1110)
129, 292, 293, 296, 315, 316, 321, 324, Existence (Ellenberger), 5
Existential Foundations of Psychology
345, 349
(Van Kaam), 5
conflict-free, 1,126
defenses, 63 Existentialism, 13
development, 62, 63, 6j, O, 9,105,148, 223, and structuralism, 225-26
224, 225, 233, 241, 242, 244, 245, 252, See also under Sartre, Jean-Paul
253, 291, 347 Existentialism (Sartre), II
ideal, 232, 260 Existentialist philosophers, I, 5-6
Lacanian, 224, 225, 226, 227, 231, 232-33, Existentialist therapy, 17, 303-5, 309, 310-H,
236, 237, 239, 241, 245-46, 247, 253, 317, 318-19
254, 260, 264, 279, 290, 291, 292, 293, dialectical approach, 165,167,187-88,198
295, 299> 3°o, 301, 302, 308, 309, 310, for future inquiry, 351—59
311, 312, 315, 317 and generations, 201-2, 318, 357
as object, 237, 254, 309, 324, 341 goal, 161,169,171, 221, 304, 319
overinvestment, 5, 6 and groups, 212-20, 221-22, 318
psychology, 34, O, 237, 291, 304 and language, 274, 287, 288
Sartrean, 142,143,144,146,158, 225, 227, praxis, 181, 200, 204
229, 237, 240, 241-42, 245, 247, 254, and relational needs, 112-16
285, 302, 309, 310, 312, 315, 316, 324, and self, 139,149,150,157-61
343, 349-50 and therapist, 318, 319, 321-24, 356.
splitting, 64, 7-78, 300 See also Martha
as subject, 254 See also Practico-inert
transcendental, 4,148,158, 315 Existential psychoanalysis, 9,12,13,14,16,17,
See also I; Self 18-19, 20, 21-22, 24, 52-60, IOI, 147-48,
Ego and the Id, The (Freud), 36, 63 149,151-52,154,168, 203, 204, 221, 314
Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, The (Anna and choice, 154
Freud), 63 dialectic moments, 169
 Index 387

Existential psychoanalysis (continued) Fleiss, Wilhelm, 8

and empathetic understanding, 191-92, 221, Flynn, Thomas R., 366O15)
302 Forgetting, 56
and Freudian psychoanalysis, differences, Forlornness, II
16-17,18,19-20, 21, 22-23, 2 4 , 34; Fort-da game, 33, 243, 264
35-38, 41, 43, 4 7 , 50, 51-60, 92, 93 Frankl, Viktor E., 6
and similarities to Freudian psychoanalysis, Fraternity-terror, 205, 2 0 8 , 209, 210, 212, 213,
18-19, 22, 34, 41, 4 7 , 50, 52, 92-93 214-15, 2l8, 220, 221, 318, 323, 324, 337
and group, 211-12, 220, 221-22 Freedom, 6, H, 13, 21, 22, 4 4 , 45, 4 6 , 4 7 , 4 9 ,
Lacan on, 226, 303 5i, 55, 59,83, 8 4 , 1 0 0 , 1 0 9 , i n , 115,122,
and language, 273, 286, 318 138,141,145,146,147,148,150,151,153,
and Marxism, 168,169 J
56,159,161,164,168,172,182,183,184,
objective, 2 0 , 1 4 8 , 1 5 0 , 290, 364O16) 203, 2 0 4 , 2 2 1 , 241, 254, 288, 301, 305,
Sartrean definition, 168 306, 309, 310, 312, 317, 323
therapist, 290 escape from, 4 6 , 1 4 4
and transformation, 20, 290 evasion of, 211
See also Existentialist therapy in group, 208
Existential Psychotherapy (Yalom), 6 of thought, 220
"Experience-distant," 4 , 34, 225 valuing of, 97,121
"Experience-near," 4 , 52, 225 See also under O t h e r
Exploitation, 191 French Institute (Berlin), 4
Freud, A n n a , 63
Facticity, 4 6 , 59, 86, 91, 92, 93, 95, 241, 2 4 8 , Freud, Sigmund, 202
276, 317, 355 autobiography, 7
Fairbairn, W. Ronald D., 65, 69,119,123 biography, 23
Family Idiot, The (Sartre), 103,104,144,177, empirical observations, 17
178, 202, 213, 307, 308, 362(114) -Fleiss correspondence, 7
Family interactions, II, 55,123,168,193-94, insights, 31-32, 50
195-97, 205, 212, 213-17, 308-9, 315, and metapsychology, 2, 3, 4 , 5, 8, 225.
330-31, 333, 335-36, 337-39, 346, 349,
See also Metatheory, Freudian
356-57 movie on, 7
Family of origin, 32, 206, 215, 217, 222, 323,
self-analysis, 17
326,329-30
writings, 7
Fantasy, 23, 27,133,134,176, 203, 247, 251,
See also Freudian psychoanalysis; Post-
252, 332
Freudian psychoanalysis; Unconscious;
Father, 4 , 1 9 9 , 213, 214, 215, 216, 235, 260, 262,
under Lacan, Jacques; Sartre, Jean-Paul
263, 306, 307, 308, 337
Freudian psychoanalysis, I, 8, 9 , 1 4 , 1 5 , 1 6 , 1 7 ,
symbolic, 261, 262
18-19, 2 ° , 2 2 » 2 4 , 57, 60,155-56,159,
Faulkner, William, 95
Fear, 8 3 , I 4 3 " 4 4 , 2 3 7 167, 260, 291, 314, 316, 318, 345, 356
Feminists, 270-71 methodology, 20-21
Ferenzi, Sandor, 132 See also under Existential psychoanalysis
Fetish, 27, 6 4 , 263-64, 269 Freud Scenario, The (Sartre screenplay), 8
Fisher, Richard, 347, 348 Friendships, 31, 80, 333
Flaubert, Achilles, 213, 214, 307 Fromm, Erich, 123
Flaubert, Achille-Cleophas, 108,178,191,199, Fromm-Reichmann, Frieda, 123,138,153
213, 214, 281, 307, 308 Fundamental project. See under Being
Flaubert, Caroline Fleuriot, 213, 214, 281, Future, 15, 20, 21, 22, 43, 45, 52, 53, 54, 56,
307-8 128,140,142,145,147,153,162,163,167,
Flaubert, Gustave, 8,13, 51,101,102,103,108, 172,173, 204, 236-37, 242, 302, 304,
109,144-45,151.168,174,175,176,177- 305, 318, 322, 332, 342, 350, 352, 353, 358
79,180,191,197,198,199, 2 0 0 , 201, 202, closed, 309
213, 214, 226, 241, 242, 244, 245, 247, lack of, 103,105,151,171,172,173
252-53, 274, 275-76, 278-83, 285, 301, open, 184, 309, 353
302, 305, 3 0 7 - 8 , 309, 310, 314, 315, 353, prefabricated, 183
357, 367(ni7), 369(n8), 371(115) society, 357
388 Index

Games, 33, 2 Homeless, 357

Game theory, 299 Homosexual male, 263, 362^5)
Gauthier, Xaviere, 270 Homey, Karen, 123
Gaze, 237-38, 240. See also Look Hostility, 31, 33
Gender identity, 260, 262, 264, 270 Hugo, Victor, 268
Gender roles, 264, 270 Human reality, theory of, 35, 38, 40, 42, 46,
Generations, 182,197,199, 200-202 52,139,148, 227, 229
Genet, Jean, 94,100,101,105-6,107,108,114, as diachronic and synchronic, 204, 236
356 Sartrean definition of, 140-41,147
Genitals, 270 Human relations. See Interpersonal relations
Germany, 201 Humpty Dumpty, 301, 370(n5)
Gestalt, 39, 44,195, 351 Hunger, 27,175
Gide, Andre, 278
Husserl, Edmund, 3, 4, 5, 38, 225, 229
Gill, M., 2
Giovacchini, Peter L , 105 Huston, John, 7
God, 43, 44, 83, 84, 87,150, 211, 320 Hysteria, 26, 214, 264
Good faith, 49, 84, 99,146, 241 Hysterico-epilepsy, 307, 353, 367(1117)
Good-me, 125,126
I, 45,141,142,160, 224, 236, 241, 260, 265,
Gorz, Andre, 106
Grandiosity, 347, 348 298
Gratification/frustration, 61, 66, 69, O, 80,125, Id, 2,19, 25, 27, 30, 31, 48, 51, 63,126,131, 296
129,133 psychologist. See Klein, Melanie
Greenberg, Jay R., 62, 65,125,132, 362(112) Idealism, 4, 80, 81
Greenberg, Joanne, 153, 249, 250, 369(1110) existentialist, 167
Grotjahn, Martin, 367(1119) Hegelian, 164, 227, 236, 298
Group-in-fusion, 208, 209, 211, 220, 367(1114) Idealizable other, 135,136,137,138
spontaneous, 209 Idealization, 217, 347
Group therapy, 215, 216-19 Identity. See Personal identity; Self
Guilt, 28, 31, 56,133,160,176,177, 261, 339 Identity diffusion syndrome, 122,135, 335, 342,
and reparation, 69 349
Gunpowder, 183 Image, L', dans la vie psychologique, Role et nature
Guntrip, Harry, 65, 69,119,120,123,136,138 (Sartre), 7
Imaginary order, 239, 240, 246, 247, 251, 254,
Hallucinations, 27, 249, 250, 252, 352, 369^9) 260, 264, 266, 269, 292
Happiness, 153,157 Imagination, 251, 351-52. See also under Sartre,
Hartmann, Heinz, 63, 65, 6j, 1,120, 364(112) Jean-Paul
Hate, 96, 97,143,152, 242, 285. See also under Imagination: A Psychological Critique (Sartre), 7
Love Immaterial matter, 220
Hayman, Ronald, 8,13 Incest taboo, 28, 31, 81,132, 261
Hegel, G. W. R, 163,164, 225, 226, 227-31, Indifference, 84, 85-86,116,132, 214
233-35, 236, 276, 298, 368(nn4,5,6) Individu, L\ et le sexe: Psychologie du narcissisme
Heidegger, Martin, 3, 4, 5, 6,12,109,167, 225,
(Hesnard), 306
265, 298
Individual, 164,168,170,171-81,184, 203-4,
Heisenberg principle of indeterminacy, 165
212, 220, 305-6, 323
Herculaneum, 182, 366(1111)
normal (Freudian definition), 202
Hermeneutics, 24, 58
Hesnard, Angelo, 306 Individualism, 13
Hexis, 170-71,173,174-75* VI\ 179,181,184, Individualist action, 208
185,194,202, 204, 212, 213, 220, 221, Inertia, 257, 272
252, 256,273, 286, 290, 301, 304, 309, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (Greenberg),
310, 315,318, 323, 3M, 330, 342, 357, 358 153, M9
passive activity of, 183, 310 Infancy, 14,19, 30, 31, 38, 61, 62, 63, 65, 67, 4,
and speech, 275 9, 80, 94, 98,104-5, I 0 9, I I 2 , n 9 , 170.
History, 199-200, 204, 229 175,177-78, 212, 231-32, 305, 316, 326,
Hitler, Adolf, 201 335, 336, 350, 356
Holocaust, 201 nuclear self and, 138
 Index 389

Infancy (continued) Kernberg, Otto F, 64, 65, 68, 5-80,103,108,

and post-Freudian psychoanalysis, 68-69, 109,120,124, 347
70-73, 6, 9,109,123,125,129,131, Kirsner, Douglas, 9
133-34,138 Klein, George, 2, 93, 363(115)
Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (Freud), 63 Klein, Melanie, 33, 64, 65, 68-70, 5, 7, 8, 9,
Instinct, 2,18, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 108,109, in, 119,123,133,134,291, 306
34, 35, 37, 43, 51, 57, 6i, 62, 81, 92, 93, "Knights of Nothingness," 276, 370(n5)
131,132. See also Drive theory; under Kockelmans, Joseph, 5
Death Kohut, Heinz, 64, 65, 5, 7, 8,118,120,122,123,
Institution, 208-9, 210-11, 220 124,134-38,148,149,150,156,158, 295,
Intellection, 101,165, 302, 321 304, 345, 347, 348, 371(112)
Intentionality, 14,17, 21, 22, 24, 42, 47, 48, Kojeve, Alexandre, 227, 368(114)
101,229,283, 284,299,300, 301,312, 314 Kosakiewicz, Olga, 369^9)
prereflective, 48 Kretschmer, Ernest, 353
International Congress of Psychoanalysis
(1949), 226 Lacan, Jacques, 10,14, 222, 306
International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), and consciousness, 226-27, 228, 235, 236,
225, 293,294, 368(112), 370(n3) 246, 270, 283, 284, 287
International Psychological Association, 226 death (1980), 370(n3)
Interpersonal relations, 9,11-12,15, 30, 51, 53, development theory of, 231-32, 234-35,
54, 56-57, 59, 6i, 62, 5, 6, 8, 9, 97, 99, 238-39, 255, 260-62, 264, 265, 291, 304
104,112,115,125-26,162-63,174, 309, and ego, 223. See also Ego, Lacanian
315, 316, 319, 356, 358 and Freud, 224-25, 232, 261, 264, 266, 291,
and psychoanalysis, 34,101,122,123,128, 296, 303
148,157,158, 223 and Hegel, 227, 228, 229, 230-31, 234, 235,
sexual, 91, 92, 93, 94 236
See also Relational needs; Self; Ternary and IPA, 225, 293, 294, 370(n3)
relation and linguistics, 14,15, 33, 222, 224, 225, 237,
Interpretation of Dreams, The (Freud), 25, 225, 255, 259, 262, 265, 266-69, 273, 276,
265 281, 282, 284, 287, 305
Intersubjectivity, 232, 238, 240, 268, 287, 288, and post-Freudian theorists, 291
301, 303, 305, 320 as reductionist, 225
Intimacy, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57,131-32, 241, 333, and Sartre, 14, 223-24, 225, 226, 236-38,
339, 341, 343, 349 239, 246-47, 254, 255, 259, 306
Intuition, 18, 56 See also Desire, Lacanian; Metatheory,
IPA. See International Psychoanalytic Lacanian; Other, Lacanian; Structuralist
Association psychoanalysis; Unconscious, linguistic
Isolation, 6, 342 "Lacanian Psychosis, A" (Lacan), 299
Izenberg, Gerald N., 22 Lagache, Daniel, 249, 369^9)
Laing, R. D , 9, 45,102,132,136,138, 242-44,
Jacobson, Edith, 65, 6j, 9,120,124 362(114), 367(m6)
Jacobson, Roman, 260, 266, 267-68 Lamarck, Jean, 28, 31
Jan (client), 215-17, 218 Language, 176, 256, 266, 274
Janet, Pierre, 143 acquisition, HO, 231, 262, 264
Jaspers, Karl, 6 constraints, 222
Jealousy, 88,194,196, 234, 339, 346 and culture, 235
John (client), 179-81 See also Linguistics; Symbolic order; under
Jonah complex, 49 Sartre, Jean-Paul
Jones, Ernest, 7 Laplanche, J., 3
Jouissance, 261, 265 Law and command, 235-36
Joy, 112,143,157 Learning, 68, 355
Julie (patient), 242-44, 245 Lefebvre, Henri, 22, 361(111)
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 225, 256, 257-59, 260,
Kant, Immanuel, 81, 311 261, 263, 267, 269, 274, 303, 3n
Keen, Ernest, 5, 372(n7) Lewin, Kurt, 39
390 Index

Libido, 2,17, 20, 25, 26, 30, 31, 34, 37, 50, 51, Marxism, IO, 13,16,163,164,166,167,168,169,
57, 68, 5, 6,112,114,131, 346, 354 198, 314, 365-66(114)
as object-seeking, 119,120 Mary Ann (client), 195-96
Light in August (Faulkner), 95-96 Masochism. See Love, /masochism
Linguistics, 14,15, 259, 262 Master-slave relationship, 227, 228-29, 230,
structural, 225, 258, 259, 260, 266, 275 368(n5)
See also Unconscious, linguistic; under Lacan, Masterson, James, IO, 120-21, 346, 347-48,
Jacques 364(n3), 37l(nn2,3)
Lived experience, IO, 17,18, 24, 276, 283, 323 Masterson Group, 347, 37l(n3)
Locomotor independence, 2, 3, no, 336 Mathemes, 303
"Logotherapy," 6 Matriarch, 308
Look, 82, 83, 85, 86, 94, 95, 98,101,104,106, Matter, humanized, 169
107-8,109,113,116,191, 206, 230, 236, May, Rollo, 5, 6, 9, 355
^37, 319, 329, 330, 332, 353 Me, 141,143, 260
-as-exchange, 98 Meaning, 6,17, 57, 276, 314
forms of, I02,104, IO5-7,108 Freudian, 22-23, 35
origins, 237-38, 240 production, 14, 24
Love, 26, 31, 37, 42, 81, 84, 87, 88-89, 94, I O ° - Sartrean, 23-24, 35, 42, IOI, 103,159
101,115,143, 206, 239-40, 242, 269, 285, Melodious child, 107, 363(n8)
294, 316 Memory, 352
authentic, 12, 98, 241 lapses, 29, 56
and hate, 69 Mental illness, 18, 28-29, 45-46, 250
loss of, 89, 327, 328-29, 330-31 Mescaline, 249, 369^9)
/masochism, 84, 86, 87, 89, 90, 94-95, 97, Metaphor, 236, 267, 268, 269
n6, 329 Metaphysics, 3, 4,17
maternal, 104 Metapsychology, I, 4, 9,14, 310, 325
object, 119 definition of, 1-2, 3
parental, 151 experience-distant, 24, 25
self-, 64, 2, 6 See also Ontology; Psychoanalytic metatheory
Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Fsychother-Metatheory, 12,15
Freudian, 2, 3, 4, 5,14,15,16,17,18, 22-24,
apy (Yalom), 6
25-35, 36, 48, 52, 55, 60, 61, 63, 64,
Lowen, Alexander, 354
66-6J, 80, 81, 262, 267, 268. See also
Lust, 135
Freudian psychoanalysis
Lacanian, 255, 260-73, 287. See also
Macey, David, 368(112) Structuralist psychoanalysis
Machines, 183,186, 202-3 post-Freudian, 15, 61-62, 64-65. See also Post-
analogy, 233-34 Freudian psychoanalysis
Madame Bovary (Flaubert), 226, 281 Sartrean, 14,15,16-17,18, 22, 24, 35-51, 52,
Mahler, Margaret S., 65, 68, 69-75, 8, 9, 80, 60, 65, 313, 314-15, 316, 351. See also Exis-
108-9, no, 119,120,124,125, 335, 346, tentialist psychoanalysis; Martha
347, 362(111) See also Metapsychology
Maids, The (Genet), 106 Metonymy, 236, 260, 264, 267, 268-69
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 257 Meynert, Theodor, 25
Mallarme, Stephane, 275, 276 Miller, Alice, 344, 346, 363^9)
Mancy, Joseph, 306 Miller, Jacques-Alain, 299
Mandate to live, 102,103 Mind, 2-3, 4, 23
Manichaeism, 193 Mirroring, 66,1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 80,102,108,109,
Manipulated series, 186-87 in, 124,125,133,135,136,137,138,144,
"Man of care," 298 150,156,157,159,194-95, 212, 223, 227,
"Man with the tape recorder," 8-9, 319-21, 302, 304, 316, 324, 328, 329, 333, 334,
37l(nl) 337, 339, 340, 341, 343,344, 34*, 347,
Marks, Elaine, 271 348, 349, 350, 351. See also Ego, Lacanian
Martha (client), 325-51 Mitchell, Juliet, 369^3)
Martyr, 330, 338 Mitchell, Stephen A., 62, 65,125,132, 362(112)
Marx, Karl, 163,164 Mitsein, 12
 Index 391

Modesty, 237 Non-thetic, 152

Moments, 22, 58 Normal autism, O, I
Monism, 166 Nosology, 20, 57, 322
Mother, 30, 31, 67, 69, O, I, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 80, 98, Nothingness, 140,145
104-5, no, 123,126,131,132-34,176,215- Not-me, 125,126
16, 234-35, 260, 262, 272, 305, 308, 315 Novelty, 184, 315, 318
environment, 133,135 Nursing couple, 119,129
object, 133,135
phallic, 262, 263 Object, 38-39, 43, 49, 59, 89,104,119,145,
primary relatedness, 65-66, 2,119,129 341, 350
Motivation, 20, 47, 48, 51, 64, 6 a (objet a), 261, 262, 295
Motives, 21, 22, 54,113-14, 315 collective, 185,186, 205, 209, 211
"Mourning and Melancholia" (Freud), 63 constancy, 108,109
Myths, 258-59, 269 libidinal, 30, 31, 32, 65, 5, 7, 9, 81,120,135
pseudo, 140
Nameof-the-father, 261, 262, 271 relations theory, 34, 61, 64, 65, 6jy 69, 87,
Naming, 281, 286 122, 223, 237, 291, 37l(n3)
Narcissism, 26, 38, 6, 239, 306, 307, 344, transcendent, 88, 89
347-48 us, 162, 206, 362^3)
definition of, 64 valued, 105
positive, III women as, 263
primary, 61, 64, 65, 68, 6% I, 5, 6, 80, 81,119, See also Subject/object; under Ego; Other;
125,129,130,131, 36l(n3) Self
Narcissistic personality disorders, 62, 68, 69, 5, Objectification moment, 169,170-81
7, 8,9,103, in, 123,135, 333, 346, 349, Objective Mind, 197, 200-201, 202, 357
37i(n3) Objectivism, 164,165
closet, 345, 346, 348 Objectivity moment, 169,182-205
as treatable, 138 Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory
Natural science, 16,17,19, 23, 24, 25, 28, 31, 34 (Greenberg and Mitchell), 62
and social science, 166 Obsessional neuroses, 26
Nature/nurture, 19 Oedipus complex, 28, 30, 34, 50, 6jy 68, 9, 81,
Nausea (Sartre), 3, 9, II, 13, 251, 354, 36l(n3), 112,132,135, 225, 231, 255, 260-61, 262,
3*9(n9)> 372(n7) 291, 306, 345, 346
Necessity, 184, 288, 310 Oliner, Marion Michel, 368(nnl,2)
Need, 24, 34, 51, 57, 65, 5, 80, 93, 115, 190, 256, Onanism, 94
315, 324, 330, 341, 342, 343 "On Narcissism: An Introduction" (Freud), 63
organismic, 171,172-73,174,181, 257, 294, Ontogenetic development, 28
315 Ontological insecurity, 102,136
satisfaction, 173,175,176 Ontology, I, 4, n, 12,13, 24, 40-41, 49, 54, 80,
socialized, 174, 224, 336, 357 83,93, 97, no, 118,122,139,157,163,172,
survival-oriented, 169,171,172,173,174, 202, 221, 236, 239, 271, 316, 324, 345, 354, 355
209 definition of, 3
transformation of desires, 175-81, 309 and emotionality, 352
See also Relational needs; Satisfaction final discoveries of, 16, 58
Neglect, 129 and metaphysics, 4
Neurophysiological paradigm, 22-23, 24, phenomenological, 16, 66
25-26, 27, 29, 43 structures, 17, 48, 51, 52, 56, 58, 323, 325,
Neurosis, 26, 64, 65, 7, 8, in, 132, 303 326, 351, 356
Neurotics, 25, 26,103-4,150, 244, 264, 299 See also Being
Neutrality, n6, 303, 320 Oppression, 174,175,192, 275, 358
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 290 Oral rage, 7,112
Nihilation, 141,171,173, 247 Organization, 208, 209
Nihilism, II Orgasm, 353
No Exit (Sartre), 9, 97,107 Ostracism, 208, 209, 217
Nominalism, 365(112). See also Dialectical Other, 35, 49-50, 52, 57, 59, 65, 66, 9, 80, 81,
nominalism 87-88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94,95, 97,100,
392 Index

Other (continued) Phenomenological Approach to Psychiatry, The

108,109, in, 113,115,145,150,154,162, (Van den Berg), 5
175,177,182,185,187,191-92,193, 244- Phenomenological description moment, 22, 67
45, 265,274, 277, 279, 281, 284, 290, Phenomenological investigation, 24
294, 332, 349, 353 Phenomenology, 3-4, 5,16, 24, 34, 52,120,
(A). See Unconscious, linguistic 237, 299
existence of, 82-83, 277 Phobia, 336
experience of, 84-85 Phylogenetic memory, 28, 29, 30, 61, 69, 8,132
freedom of, 86-87, 88, 89, 90, 94, 95, 96, 98, Piaget, Jean, 355
114, 210, 227, 230, 239, 254, 309, 316 Pine, Fred, I
Hegelian, 228, 229, 235 Pingaud, B., 9
Lacanian, 223-24, 227, 233, 234, 271, Play, 33, 47,131,134
295-96, 297, 298, 299 Pleasure, 20, 25, 29, 34, 43, 56, 64, 94,119,138,
and language, 274 148,156,158,162, 231
as object, 83, 84, 85, 86, 90, 229, 230, 238, principle, 23, 25, 33, 68, 296, 316
248 sexual, 23
objectifkation, 191 Pledge, 208, 219, 349. See also Statutory group
original, 19, 61, Il6,157,160, 358 Polly (client), 194-96
as subject, 66, 84, 85, 86, 90, 98, 99,108, ill, Pontalis, J.-B., 3, 6, 9, 307, 319, 371(111)
137, 230, 316, 345 Positive regard, 66, 2,102,144, 327
Other-directedness, 169,186-89,197, 318, 356 Rogerian, 343
See also Valorization
Pacification, 235 Positivism, 3,14,16,167, 225, 259
Pain, 25, 29, 34, 42, 95,153,158,162 Post-Freudian psychoanalysis, 1,12,14,15, 24,
Paranoia, 299 31, 34, 38, 61, 62,102, 225, 263, 291, 314,
Paranoid fears, 7 315, 345-46
Parapraxes, 29 and death instinct, 33
Parataxic distortions, 127,128, 364^5)
and drive theory, 61-80,102,108-9, IIO-H,
Passion (Sartrean definition), 147,158
Passive activity, 183,185, 214, 256, 257, 279, 119,120,124,133,156, 316
307 and self, 109, Il8,119-20,121,122,123-39,
Passive into active need, 34,178-81, 310 148-49,150,156-57,162, 316, 317, 347,
Past, 22, 24, 38, 43, 46, 47, 52, 53, 54, 56, 60, 348, 350
115,128,142,152-53,159,160,177, 202, and sexuality, 93
204, 236, 242, 294, 317, 318, 326, 342, Post-Freudian relational theorists. See Post-
353, 355, 358 Freudian psychoanalysis, and self
Patriarchy, 270, 308 Poststructuralism, 13, 258
Peekaboo, 2,109 Practical ensembles, 163
Penis, 64, 68, 69, 235, 262, 263 Practicing subphase, 2,109-10, HI, 112, 346
envy, 81 Practico-inert, 175,177,182-205, 220, 257, 272,
Personal identity, 68,1, 2, 3,120,148. 273, 289, 290, 301, 302, 305, 306, 310,
See also Self 3H, 312, 315, 318, 323, 355, 356, 357
Personality, 139,140,141 as anti-dialectic, 182, 274
archaic structures, 62, 68 linguistic, 224, 255, 256, 259, 269, 270, 272,
changes, 127 273, 274-75, 277, 279, 282, 284, 285,
formation, 122 287-88, 302, 305, 310, 317, 322
organization, 125,130 Praxis, 166,169,170,171,172,173,174-75,177,
as source or product of actions, 142 179,181,183,184,185-86,187,189,192,
structure, 135 194,199, 200, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207,
unified, 18 212, 213, 220, 221, 222, 224, 243> 244>
Personalization, 179, 315, 337 252, 257, 258, 260, 269, 273, 276, 286,
Phallus 288, 29O, 301, 302, 303, 305, 309, 310,
imaginary, 234-35 311, 312, 314, 315, 318, 321, 323, 357
as signiner, 262-63, 264, 265, 266, 270, 271, definition of, 171, 366(n7)
291, 299 materialized, 305
symbolic, 235 revolutionary, 272, 286, 304
 Index 393

Praxis (continued) Public opinion, 186

and speech, 255-56, 273, 274, 276, 277, 278, Pure reflection, 4, 45,150-52,154-55,159,160,
282, 283, 286, 287, 312 317, 322, 358
stereotyped, 210
Preconscious, 2, 25, 35 Racism, 186, 275, 357
Predictability, 166 Radical conversion, 97-98, 99, in, 151,159,160,
Prehistory. See Family of origin 161, 241, 254, 315, 317
Prejudice, 357 Radio, 187
Pre-Oedipal conditions, 64, 65, 6f, 68, 5, 8, 9, Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie, 238, 240, 263, 268,
231, 234, 260, 270, 271 271-72, 284, 296
Pre-self disorders, 132 Rapid eye movements (REMs), 247
Present. See Future; Past Rapprochement subphase, 3-74, 5, 8, 9, 80,
Prestige, 237 no, in
Pribram, G., 2 Rationalism, n, 166. See also Cartesian
Price, 186 rationalism
Pride, 82, 83 Rationalist voluntarism, 35, 47
Primary maternal relations. See Mother, Reaction formation, 27
primary relatedness Real, 266, 292, 311
Primary process, 23, 267 Realism, 4
Prime of Life, The (Beauvoir), 369^9) Reality, 47, 55, 58, 81,130,136,139, 302
Process, 167, 365^3) Lacanian, 246
Progressive-regressive method, 22, 52,165, 222, objective, 228
322, 326, 342 principle, 27, 296
Project for a Scientific Psychology, A (Freud), 23 structure, 128
Protohistory. See Childhood; Infancy subjective, 228
Psyche, 14,16, 25, 29, 34, 51, 52, 61, 63,109, Real Self, The: A Developmental, Self, and Object
120,121,124,129,137,141, 223, 227, 314, Relations Approach (Masterson), 10,121
345. See also Consciousness Reason, 165
Psychical energy. See Cathexis Reason and Violence (Laing and Cooper), 45,
Psychic manifestations, 18 362(114)
Psychoanalysis, 290, 314, 322 Reciprocity, 52, 92, 97, in, U5,125,159,191,
Freud's definition of, 17-18, 24 277, 278, 280, 281, 309, 320, 321, 343
Psychoanalytic metatheory, 134,162 negative, 99,169,193,194,195,196,197, 204,
crisis, I, 62, 63 309
human approach, I, 2 positive, 12, 97, 98, 99, U3,115,116,168, 230,
See also Metapsychology 308, 309, 319, 323, 341
Psychobiological force, 17, 20, 35 Recognition, 230, 234, 235, 238, 294, 297, 303,
Psycholinguistics, 297 304
Psychological birth, O Reductionism, 23, 225, 259
Psychological instant, 58,152,153, 286, 317, Reflected appraisals, 125,129,134
322,355 Reflective ipseity, 245, 254
Psychological structures. See Ego; Id; Superego Reflective resolution, n6
Psychology, 25, 34 Reflective self-analysis, 17, 59
Psychology of Imagination, The (Sartre), 247, Reflective understanding, 10, 54
248, 369(119) Regard, le. See Look
Psychopathology, 28, 9,117,148,186, 352, 353, Regression, 22, 28, 29, 33,132, 349
354, 357 symbolic, 294
Psychoses, 4, 7,132, 242, 250, 299, 300 Regressive analysis, 20-21, 52, 345
Psychosexuality, 20, 51, 69 Regulatory third party, 205, 206, 207, 209, 2U,
Psychosexual stages, 28, 6j, I, 5,130,132, 263 306
Psychosomatic illness, 307, 343, 353 Reich, Wilhelm, 353, 354, 37l-72(n6)
Psychotherapy, 199, 319-20, 321 Reification, 123,124,129,130, 223
body-oriented, 351 Relational needs, I, 4, 62, 66, 67, 68, 69, 0-71,
Winnicott definition of, 134,157 4, 5, 7,9,80, 82,108,112,114, n6,119,
Psychotic disorders, 62,135,138, 201, 233, 248, 123,124,125,133,162, 223, 315-16, 346.
264,299 See also Self
394 Index

Relational structure theory, 65, O psychology, writings on, 8,163, 320, 321. See
REMs (Rapid eye movements), 247 also specific titles
Reparation, 133-34 screenplay o n Freud, 7
Repetition, 292 and self concept, 139-48,149,157,174, 242,
compulsion, 29, 31, 32-33,114, 317, 318, 346 252-53, 254, 316-17, 349, 358-59
Repression, 8, 26, 30, 35-36, 55-56,127,192, and unconscious, 35, 36-37, 255
260, 292, 346 unpublished writings, 174,175, 1 7^> 366(n8)
primal, 261-62, 265, 284, 369(112) U.S. visit (1946), 187
Repugnance, 143 See also Desire, Sartrean; Development
Resistance, 18,128,158, 292, 317, 356 theory; Meaning, Sartrean; Metatheory,
Responsibility, 297 Sartrean; Ontology; Sociomaterial world;
Responsiveness, O, I, 80 under Lacan, Jacques
Returning to Freud: Clinical Psychoanalysis in the Satisfaction, 31, 34, 4 3 , 62, 65, 80,126,131,133,
School ofLacan (Schneiderman), 289 149,173,175,176, 294
Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, 6 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 258, 260, 266, 267
Ricoeur, Paul, 24, 311 Savage Mind, The (Levi-Strauss), 257
Riesman, David, 186 Scandal, 186
Rimbaud, Arthur, 224 Scarcity, 175,182,190-91,192-94, 219, 220,
Rogerian nondirectional therapist, 327, 348, 230, 357
350 Schaffer, Roy, 2, Il8
"Rome Discourse" (Lacan lecture), 297 Schizoid personality structure, 62, Il6,129,132,
Rybalka, Michel, 8 136,138
paranoid-, 69
Sadism, 87, 95-96, IOO, 348. See also Desire, Schizoid World of jean-Paul Sartre and R. D.
/sadism Laing, The (Kirsner), 9
Sadomasochistic power struggle, 12, 316. See Schizophrenics, 46,123,127,138,153, 249-50,
also Desire, /sadism; Love, /masochism 299,352, 354-55, 37^(n7)
Safouan, Moustapha, 312, 3 7 0 ^ 4 ) Schneiderman, Stuart, 289, 299, 305, 306
Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr (Sartre), IOO Scientific materialism, 16, 24
Sartre, Jean-Paul, I, 3-4, 5, 6, 9-IO, 249, 278, Search for a Method (Sartre), 8,13, 20, 22, 97,
290, 369(n9) 99, IOI, 163,168,174, 259, 314
autobiography, 6, 307 Search for Authenticity, The (Bugental), 5
and behaviorism, 3 Searles, Harold E., 138, 37l(n2)
biography, 8,13 Sechehaye, Margeurite, 372(n7)
childhood, 306, 307 Second Sex, The (Beauvoir), 270, 271, 272
and consciousness, 38-39, 42, 4 4 , 51, 52, 99, Security, 126,138,149,171, 213, 214, 317, 342
140,141,144,149,151,153,155,164,172, Selective attention-inattention, 56,127
226, 228, 229, 236, 248, 302, 304, 314, Self, 1,14,15, 35, 4 0 , 4 2 - 4 3 , 57, 65, 67, 2 , 1 0 4 ,
316, 329, 348, 350, 352-53 105,117,138,150,162,174, 243, 317, 319,
death (1980), 6 344, 347
and ego, 14. See also Ego, Sartrean as agent, 121,123,124,139,140,155,157,159,
existentialism, 9-IO, II, 13,14. See also Exis­ 161, 317, 359, 364(nl)
tential psychoanalysis creation of, 20, 4 4 - 4 5 , 50, 58, 59-60, 83, 84,
and Freud, 7 - 8 , 1 0 , 1 4 , 1 6 , 314. See also II4, Il8,122,147,148,150,155,156,158,
Metatheory, Freudian; Metatheory, 159, l6l, 174, 227, 2 4 4 , 254, 316, 323,
Sartrean 329, 349
and Hegel, 227-28, 229-30, 231, 236 definitions of, 120-22,134-35, 364(111)
and imagination, 2 4 7 - 4 9 , 250, 251, 252-53, false, 130,131,132,139,144, 317, 350
301, 352 fixed, 161
and language, 14-15, 47, 224, 256, 259, 270, formation of, 109,120,122,123,124,136,156,
272, 273-83, 284-85, 286, 287, 301, 303, 223
304, 306, 312, 315 imaginary, 352
and metaphysics, 4 as object, 120,121,122,123,124,137,140,141,
psychobiographies, 8,12, 351. See also Baude­ 144,145,148,152,155,157,158, 224, 236,
laire, Charles; Flaubert, Gustave; Genet, 307, 317, 359
Jean pseudo, 121
 Index 395

Self (continued) 292, 294, 297, 298-99, 300, 303, 304,

psychology, 34 3n, 312
real, 352 Sartrean, 276, 277
reflective experience of, 121-22,158 See also Phallus, as signifier
sense of, 50, 59, 67, 0,1, 3, 4, 5, 97,108, HI, Simont, Juliet, 366(n8)
123,128,144,148,158,189,190, 242, 315, Skinner, B. E, 81
316, 319, 336, 342 Slime, 40-41
true, 130,131,132,134,139,149, 317, 350 Smiling response, 2
as value, 121,122,124,139,140,145-47,158, Smoking, 175
161,174, 317, 349 Social disadvantage, 357
/world, 42, 43,121,140,141,145,150, Social imaginary, 242
160-61, 229, 244, 315, 352, 354, 355 Socialist society, 220
See also under Post-Freudian psychoanalysis; Socialization, 174,198, 207
Sartre, Jean-Paul Social psychology, 357
Self-aggrandizement, 8 Social relations, 31, 80, 212, 314, 358
Self-assertion, 34 Social scientists, 164,165-66,167,173, 258
Self-awareness, reflexive, 155 Sociocultural determination, 272
Self-centered person, 330, 342 Sociocultural origins of disorders, 123
Self-certainty, 228 Sociomaterial world, 303, 323-24
Self-comprehension crisis, HO constraints, IO, II, 200, 222
Self-consciousness, 228, 229 dialectical relationship with, 163-65,166-67,
Self-continuity, 138 169, 222, 318, 359
Self-deception, 29, 31, 35, 38, 41-42, 55, 315 group and serial relations, 163,164,170,174,
Self-directedness, 169 185-88,189,190,197, 205-22, 315, 318,
Self-esteem, 61, 64, 66,1, 5, 7, 8, 9, 80, HO, 323, 324
124,135, 307, 337, 341 and individual, 164,168,170,171-81, 202,
Selfishness, 330, 331, 332, 333 203-4, 2°5» 2 °7, 221, 315, 323, 324
Self-knowledge, 229 reality, 13,15,165
Selfobject, 135-38 Solipsism, 80, 82,100,108, 229, 238, 240, 254,
Self-preservation. See Ego 286
Self-reflection, 99,112,158, 316 Sovereignty, 210-11, 213
Self-representation, 120,121,125, 364(112) Spatial relationships, 54-55, 354-55
Self-respect, 108 Specular ego. See Ego, Lacanian
Self-system, 125-29,130,135,138,157 Speech, 266, 283, 296, 297, 298, 305, 312.
Self-understanding, 100 See also under Praxis
Separateness, 3, 4, 9,108,129, 243 Spirit of play, 47,147
Separation-individuation. See Separateness Spirit of seriousness, 47,147
Serial alterity, 207, 218, 356, 357, 358 Spitz, Rene, 65, 67
Serial impotence, 205, 208, 209, 210, 212, 213, "Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defense"
221, 323 (Freud), 64
Seriality, 185-87,188,189, 204, 205, 208 ; Spontaneity, 342, 345, 349, 350
2IO-II, 214, 215, 308 Stasis. See Hexis
and scarcity, 190-91 Status quo. See Hexis
Sexism, 357 Statutory group, 208, 209
Sexual differentiation, 260, 262, 263, 266, 270 Stern, Daniel R , HO
Sexual instinct, 25, 27, 31, 67,194. See also Stone, Robert, 174, 366(n8)
Libido Stranger anxiety, no, 336
Sexuality, 43, 66, 92-93, 94,112,131,176, Structural hypothesis (Freud), 25, 29, 30, 36,
234-35, 262, 351 60, 63, 65, 223
Shame, 82, 83,144, 237 Structuralism, 13,14,15, 25, 255, 256-57, 258,
She Came to Stay (Beauvoir), 369^9) 260, 269-70, 274, 276, 303, 311, 315, 317
Sherry (patient), 188-90,199, 203 analytico-synchronic, 226
Short sessions, 293-94, 370(n3) Structuralist psychoanalysis (Lacan), I, 5,10,
Sibling rivalry, 193-94, 234 14,15,165, 222, 225, 269, 272-73, 289,
Sign, 266, 267 290-301, 303, 304, 305, 309, 311, 315, 316,
Signifier/signified, 166-67, 268, 284, 286, 289, 37Q-7i(nn5,6)
396 Index

Structuralist psychoanalysis (continued) Totality, 173, 285

aim of, 290, 297, 301 Totalization, 171,173,174, 207, 209, 257, 275,
analyst/therapist, 290, 292, 293, 294, 295, 285-86
298, 303, 322 Totem and Taboo (Freud), 69, 261
and change, 289-90, 310, 312, 315, 317-18 Tbtemism, 28
Studies on Hysteria (Freud), 7 Touching, I-72, 3, 4, 80,102,104,105,109,113,
Stutterer, 48 328,336-37
Subject/object, 8, 9,12, 43, 47, 48-49* 57, 59, Traitor, 208
66, 85, 86, 98,108,116,120,137,154, Transcendence, 172,174, 248, 272, 284, 297,
206, 227,239, 240, 261-62, 319, 320, 353
340-41 Transcendence of the Ego, The (Sartre), 141,144,
body as, $7 151, 226, 244
differentiation, 4 Transference, 18, 31, 32, 51, 81,114, Il6, 202, 251,
Sublimation, 30, 31, 34, 43,131,134, 202 262, 269, 292, 293, 294, 295-96, 318,
Substitute gratification, 26 319-20, 346, 352, 356
Sullivan, Harry Stack, 65,119,120,123, counter-, 167, 319
124-29,130,135,136,137-38,148,149, Transitional object, 134, 291
153,156,157, 364(nn4>5) Transitivism, 231, 233, 234, 235
Sulloway, Frank J., 23, 28, 29, 35 definition of, 233
Superego, 2,19, 25, 30, 31, 36, 48, 50, 51, 63, 9, Transmuting internalization, 135,137, 347
126 Transparency, 99, IOO
formation, 68, 81, 361(112) Transvestite, 263
and girls, 30 Twinship, 135,136,137,138
Superfluous man, 192-93
Symbiosis, I, 2, 4, 84,108,109 Unconscious, 2, 3, 8, 9,10,14,15,17,18,19, 25,
Symbolic order, 239-40, 242, 245, 246, 251, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 34, 35-36, 47, 51, 55,
254, 255, 260, 261, 262, 263, 266, 270, 56,126-27,146, 225, 260, 284, 292, 293,
272, 277, 292, 298, 301, 304, 308, 309- 294
10, 311,318 complexes, 26-27
Symbolism, 58,161 deep, 30, 37
Symbolization, 268 denial of, 35
Symbols, 301 dynamic, 30
Symptom formation, 29, 34 fantasy, 23, 27
Synthesis, 21, 226, 257, 280 linguistic, 15, 224, 236, 238, 239, 240, 241,
Synthetico-progressive moment, 22 255, 256, 259, 260, 263, 265, 266, 272,
273, 283-84, 287, 289, 290, 291, 292,
Television, 187 293, 295, 296, 297, 299, 300, 301, 305,
Temporalizing, 354-56, 372(n7) 309, 311, 312, 322. See also Structuralist
Temps Modernes, Les (journal), 8, 225, 319, psychoanalysis
368(n3) Undifferentiated matrix, 63, 9
Tenderness theorem, 119,125,129 Unification moment, 169-70, 205-22
Tension reduction, 34, 43, 61, 64, 2,119 United States, 201
Ternary relation, 170, 206, 207, 212, 308, Universal, 168,199, 258, 323
356-57 Universalization, 235
Tertiary relations, 170 University of Vienna, 28
Thanatos. See Death, instinct Unreflected acts, 37
Therapeutic time, 356 Urges, 17, 81
Things, 266, 356
Thirst, 27, 44,145-46 Vagina, 68
Thomist philosophy, 43 Valery, Paul, 198
Thompson, Clara, 123 Valorization, 102,103,176, 304, 336, 341, 348,
Thompson, M. Guy, 5 350
Three Faces of Being: Toward an Existential Value, 20, 23-24, 39, 42, 47, 49, 83, 88, 97,
Clinical Psychology (Keen), 5 121,184, 304, 348
Tools, 183-84 anti-, 40
Topographical hypothesis (Freud), 25, 29, 30, 3 creation, 46, 57,103,147,174, 316
 Index 397

Value (continued) imaginary, 233, 263

society, 184 Will, 35, 47, H6
See also under Self Winnicott, D. W, 65, 69,1,108,119,120,123,
Van den Berg, J. H., 5 124,125,129-35,136,144,147,148,149,
Van Kaam, Adrian, 5 156,157,291,317,347
Vecu, le. See Lived experience "Witch Metapsychology," 2
Verdichtung, 268 Women, 263, 270, 272
Vergote, Antoine, 298 Word, 102,104,105,106-7, in, 113, 279, 280
Verschietung, 268 Words, The (Sartre), 107
Vian, Michelle, 7 Work, 202-4, 2I9» 357
Violence, 191,193, 230 World Historical Spirit, 164, 229, 236
Wunsch, 224, 368(nl)
Wallerstein, Judith S., 2I4> 367(nl8)
Weltanschauung, 18,162 Yalom, Irvin D., 6, 367(1119)
Wholeness, 232, 240 Yeats, W B., 88