Sartre And Psychoanalysis

Betty Cannon is the first to explore the implications of Sartrean philosophy for the Freudian psychoanalytic tradition. Drawing upon Sartre's work as well as her own experiences as a practicing therapist, she shows that Sartre was a "fellow traveler" who appreciated Freud's psychoanalytic achievements but rebelled against the determinism of his metatheory. The mind, Sartre argued, cannot be reduced to a collection of drives and structures, nor is it enslaved to its past as Freud's work suggested. Sartre advocated an existentialist psychoanalysis based on human freedom and the self's ability to reshape its own meaning and value. Through the Sartrean approach Cannon offers a resolution to the crisis in psychoanalytic metatheory created by the current emphasis on relational needs. By comparing Sartre with Freud and influential post-Freudians like Melanie Klein, Otto Kernber, Margaret Mahler, D.W. Winnicott, Heinz Kohut, Harry Stack Sullivan, and Jacques Lacan, she demonstrates why the Sartrean model transcends the limitations of traditional Freudian metatheory. In the process, she adds a new dimension to our understanding of Sartre and his place in twentieth-century philosophy.

In Existential Psychoanalysis, Sartre criticizes modern psychology in general, and Freud's determinism in particular. His often brilliant analysis of these areas and his proposals for their correction indicate in what direction an existential psychoanalysis might be developed. Sartre does all this on the basis of his existential understanding of man, and his unshakeable conviction that the human being simply cannot be understood at all if we see in him only what our study of subhuman forms of life permits us to see, or if we reduce him to naturalistic or mechanical determinism, or in any other way take away from the man we try to study his ultimate freedom and individual responsibility. An incisive introduction by noted existential psychologist Rollo May guides readers through these challenging yet enlightening passages.

In 1958, the US director John Huston asked Jean-Paul Sartre to write a scenario for a film about Sigmund Freud. Huston wanted Sartre to concentrate on the conflict-ridden period of Freud’s life when he abandoned hypnosis and invented psychoanalysis. The Freud Scenario, discovered in Sartre’s papers after his death, is the result—a deft portrait of a man engaged in a personal and intellectual struggle that would prove a turning point in twentieth-century thought. Sartre did not regard this script as a diversion from his larger intellectual project. Freud’s preoccupations with female hysteria and the father relationship touched on major themes in his own work, and Loser Wins, The Family Idiot and Words, some of Sartre’s most celebrated publications, are all in some way derived from his work for Huston. Written for a Hollywood audience, The Freud Scenario demonstrates that, in addition to a towering intellect, Sartre enjoyed a genuine popular touch. Already widely acclaimed in France, The Freud Scenario stands as a valuable testament to two of the most influential minds in modern history.

Using a European style of analysis Frie examines the complex relationship between the theories of intersubjectivity, subjectivity, language and love in the work of a diverse body of philosophers and psychoanalysts.

Most readers of Sartre focus only on the works written at the peak of his influence as a public intellectual in the 1940s, notably "Being and Nothingness". "Jean-Paul Sartre: Key Concepts" aims to reassess Sartre and to introduce readers to the full breadth of his philosophy. Bringing together leading international scholars, the book examines concepts from across Sartre's career, from his initial views on the "inner life" of conscious experience, to his later conceptions of hope as the binding agent for a common humanity. The book will be invaluable to readers looking for a comprehensive assessment of Sartre's thinking - from his early influences to the development of his key concepts, to his legacy.

Although largely sympathetic to Freud's clinical achievement, the existentialists criticized Freudian metapsychology as inappropriate to a truly humanistic psychology. Gerald Izenberg evaluates the critique of Freud in the work of two existential philosophers, Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, and two existential psychiatrists, Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss. His book interprets the relationship of psychoanalysis and existentialism and traces the history of a crisis in the European rationalist tradition. The author unveils the positivist foundations of Freud's theory of meaning and discusses the reactions it provoked in the work of Binswanger, Boss, and Sartre. Probing beneath the methodological dispute, he shows that the argument involved a challenge to the conception of the self that had dominated European thought since the Enlightenment. Existentialism, reflecting the turmoil of the inter-war and post-war years, furnished a theory of motivation better able to account for Freud's clinical data than his own rationalist metapsychology. This theory made problematic the existentialist idea of authenticity and freedom, however, and so the attempt to provide a substitute ethic and concept of mental health ended in failure, although in the process the basic questions were posed that must be answered in any modern social theory. Originally published in 1976. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

"Why is my pain perpetual, and my wound incurable, which refuseth to be healed?" -Jeremiah "Existentialism" today refers to faddism, decadentism, morbidity, the "philosophy of the graveyard"; to words like fear, dread, anxiety, anguish, suffering, aloneness, death; to novelists such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Dostoievski, Camus, Kafka; to philosophers like Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Marcel, Jaspers, and Sartre-and because it refers to, and is concerned with, all of these ideas and persons, existentialism has lost any clearer meaning it may have originally possessed. Because it has so many definitions, it can no longer be defined. As Sartre writes: "Most people who use the word existentialism would be em barrased if they had to explain it, since, now that the word is all the rage, even the work of a musician or painter is being called existentialist. A gossip columnist . . . signs himself The Exis tentialist, so that by this time the word has been so stretched and has taken on so broad a meaning, that it no longer means anything at all. " 2 This state of definitional confusion is not an accidental or negligible matter. An attempt will be made in this introduction to account for the confustion and to show why any definition of existentialism in volves us in a tangle. First, however, it is necessary to state in a tenta tive and very general manner what points of view are here intended when reference is made to existentialism.