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Betty Cannon-Sartre and Psychoanalysis - An Existentialist Challenge To Clinical Metatheory (1991) PDF
Betty Cannon-Sartre and Psychoanalysis - An Existentialist Challenge To Clinical Metatheory (1991) PDF
Psychoanalysis
An Existentialist Challenge
to Clinical Metatheory
Betty Cannon
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
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
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
1 Introduction I
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
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
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
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
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
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
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)
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
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
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
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
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
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
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)
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
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
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,
human attitude and because they can exist only by means of and for
knowledge. (BN, pp. 570-71)
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
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
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
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
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
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
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?
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
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
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.
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
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:
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
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
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
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
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
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
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:
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
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
[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
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
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
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
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
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
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)
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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:
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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":
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
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
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
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
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)
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
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
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
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
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
Conclusion
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
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.
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
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
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.
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,
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
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
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
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
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,
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 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
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.
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
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
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)
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:
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
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
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
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
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:
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
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
"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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
Conclusion
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
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
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
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
the introduction, is that this book will provoke further inquiries into the
usefulness of Sartre's ideas for clinical theory and practice.
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
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).
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
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
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.
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).
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)-
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
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
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