Normative and Religious Elements in Sartre's Existential Psychoanalysis

Abstract

Although Jean-Paul Sartre is probably best known for his plays, novels, and philosophical essays, an area to which he devoted considerable effort the latter part of his life was the practice of psychoanalysis. Sartre was interested developing a method to interpret the central theme or project which unifies a specific person's life as a whole. The major theoretical foundations for existential psychoanalysis were laid Being and Nothingness (1956) and Search for a Method (1968.) The principal examples which Sartre offered of this method include his studies of Baudelaire (1950), Jean Genet (1963), Flaubert (1971), and his autobiography (1964). The reader of these studies immediately senses that Sartre's intentions are different from ordinary biographies. Sartre is less interested so-called objective history than establishing normative ideals. Existential psychoanalysis provides Sartre with the opportunity to criticize various cultural models and values, and to offer his own image of authentic human existence. In short, Sartre's existential psychoanalyses perform a role traditionally associated with religious biography. They are concerned with the evolution of cultural models of the self. For this reason, Sartre's work may be of particular interest to students of religion. Surely, it must seem odd that hidden within the preeminent spokesman for atheistic, secular humanism the twentieth century is a religious biographer. Nevertheless, this genre is the most appropriate for Sartre's ideological purposes. It is necessary to keep mind Donald Capps's observation that in the long tradition of historical scholarship, religious biography will continue to have its place. The problem our own era is that religious biography is not easy to identify as such (1977:168).