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| Jean-Paul Sartre |
Existential Pioneers
14. Jean-Paul Sartre
Being and Nothingness
70 years on – a reappraisal
(21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980)
70 years on – a reappraisal
Anthony Stadlen
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 192
16 June 2013
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 192
16 June 2013
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Jean-Paul Sartre’s book Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology was published in June 1943 during the Nazi occupation of Paris
Moreover, many of them suppose that ‘existential’
thinking is not concerned with ‘the past’. But, in the book’s crucial section, Existential
Psychoanalysis, Sartre criticises Freud for not being interested enough
in childhood. Sartre demands that each so-called ‘psychotherapy’ shall be a
piece of original, unrepeatable research to reveal the unique ‘original project’
by which the person defines himself in response to his unique familial and
social situation.
Also of fundamental importance for
psychotherapists of every school is, or should be, Sartre’s account of what he
calls ‘bad faith’: self-deception. It includes a radical critique of Freud’s
division of ‘the mind’ into ‘agencies’, including the so-called ‘censorship’,
and of psychoanalysis for envisaging ‘a lie without a liar’. As Laing pointed
out, there is some phenomenological validity in the psychoanalytic idea of ‘mental
mechanisms’, since some people do experience themselves as ‘patients’, whose ‘minds’
have a ‘mechanical’ quality. But Sartre shows therapists how not to stop there
and settle for this, but to facilitate the person’s discovering the so-called ‘mechanism’
as his own action in bad faith on his own experience, so that, as Laing said, the ‘patient’
becomes an agent: the profound meaning of Freud’s ‘Where It was, shall I come
to be.’
Therapists should also know of Sartre’s
concept of ‘pure reflection’, where consciousness transcends its habitual, ‘impure’
reflection on itself as a kind of thing, a ‘psyche’ or ‘congealed’
consciousness, and becomes aware of itself as utter translucidity, the primal
source of freedom and responsibility. This gives a philosophical foundation for
certain transcendental experiences (described in the literature as the Inner
Light, the Clear Light of the Void, etc.), which Sartre himself was, according
to David Cooper, who knew him personally, inhibited about exploring, but
psychotherapists should not be.
Thus, Sartre’s in places (but by no means all the way through) difficult, apparently
abstruse book can be enormously helpful to the working psychotherapist in his
or her daily practice. However, very few therapists have read it, even though they call themselves ‘existential’. The leading Daseinsanalyst Alice Holzhey considers that those who limit their ‘existential’ reading to Heidegger and
ignore Sartre are missing something of great importance for psychotherapists.
Thomas Szasz, while deploring the shabby (personal and political) side of
Sartre, greatly admired his insistence on personal freedom and responsibility (not to mention his refusal of the Nobel Prize).
In 2014, we shall explore the
applications of Sartre’s thinking by Laing, Esterson and Cooper in Sanity, Madness and the
Family (1964) and Reason and Violence (1964), both published 50 years ago.
Carole Seymour-Jones will conduct a seminar based on her book A Dangerous Liaison:
Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (2008). We shall also start
a new subseries of eleven Inner
Circle
The present seminar, while self-contained, will lay the foundations for these subsequent seminars. You are invited to contribute to the discussion.
The present seminar, while self-contained, will lay the foundations for these subsequent seminars. You are invited to contribute to the discussion.
Venue: Durrants Hotel, 26–32 George Street, Marylebone, London W1H 5BJ (http://www.durrantshotel.co.uk/)
Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £116, others £145, some bursaries; coffee, tea, biscuits, mineral water and liquorice allsorts included; payable in advance; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled
Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £116, others £145, some bursaries; coffee, tea, biscuits, mineral water and liquorice allsorts included; payable in advance; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857 E-mail: stadlen@aol.com
For further information on seminars, visit:
http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/
For further information on seminars, visit:
http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/
The Inner Circle Seminars were founded by Anthony Stadlen in 1996 as an ethical, existential, phenomenological search for truth in psychotherapy. They have been kindly described by Thomas Szasz as ‘Institute for Advanced Studies in the Moral Foundations of Human Decency and Helpfulness’. But they are independent of all institutes, schools and colleges.
2 comments:
I would like simply to draw attention, in advance, to the fact that, denied the benefits of then future historical scholarship, Sartre bought completely uncritically into Freud's version of the origins of psa as reported, in real time, in the STUDIES ON HYSTERIA -- this as attested by Sartre's collaboration in the writing of a film-script on the early Freud which featured a dramatized version of his treatment of the patient designated Frau Caecilie M.. For example, had Sartre's script featured her morphine-dependency, omitted by Freud in his published fragments of case history, then everything about the woman would have remained up-for-grabs. Also perhaps her suitably mannered compliance with the Breuer/Freud/Zeitgeist concept of "catharsis". It is not to Sartre's credit that he ever pandered to Hollywood -- but that's just my opinion.-/- Peter J. Swales
After nearly a decade, I should point out in response to Peter, which I did not while he was still alive (he died this year), that the patient Caecilie in Sartre's screenplay and Huston's film was hardly a dramatised version of Freud's Frau Caecilie M. She was, rather, a fictional patient intended to illustrate Freud's advocacy and subsequent retraction of his "seduction theory". Sartre had to invent such a patient, because, though Freud loved giving detailed case histories when he had them, he did not publish a single case study to illustrate his claim to have discovered to his initial chagrin but subsequent triumph that some patients, who had alleged or acknowledged having been sexually abused in chilhdood, were in due course proved, "in definitely ascertainable circumstances" (unspecified), not to have been. Sartre was indeed naive in accepting Freud's self-serving and self-excusing account which contradicts not just his interpretation of his earlier "data" but the "data" themselves, as Frank Cioffi first pointed out in his BBC radio talk "Was Freud a Liar?" (1973) - see Inner Circle Seminar No. 196 (http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/2012/01/frank-cioffis-was-freud-liar-inner.html).
Anthony Stadlen
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