Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis

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Western philosophical orthodoxy places many aspects of other people’s lives outside the scope of our knowledge. Demonstrating an alternative to this view, however, this book argues that Jean-Paul Sartre’s application of his unique psychoanalytic method to Gustave Flaubert is the culmination of his project to show that it is possible to know everything there is to know about another person. It examines how Sartre aims to revolutionize our way of thinking about others by presenting his existential psychoanalysis as the means to knowledge of both ourselves and others. By so doing, it highlights how his determination to solve the longstanding philosophical conundrum about other minds drives him not only to incorporate insights from Descartes, Hegel, Husserl, Freud, Marx, and Beauvoir into his philosophy, but also to supplement and enhance his philosophy through the development and application of a new form of psychoanalysis.
Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis integrates, for the first time, Sartre’s psychoanalysis into his overarching philosophical project. By offering a critical interrogation of the role his psychoanalytical studies played in the development of his existentialism, Mary Edwards uncovers the overlooked philosophical significance of his existential psychoanalysis and brings it into a new and productive dialogue with current research in the fields of philosophy, psychology, and psychotherapy.

Mary Edwards is a Teaching Fellow in Philosophy at Cardiff University, UK. She is on the Executive Committee of the UK Sartre Society and is training to qualify as a psychotherapist.

1. Sartre’s Ontology of the Self
2. Sartre’s Epistemology of the Self
3. Knowledge of Selves
4. Situated Selves: The Development of Sartre’s Psychoanalysis
5. The Family Idiot and the Construction of a Self
6. Communicating the ‘Essence’ of Flaubert’s Self
7. Imagining the Selves of Others
8. Conclusion

“This book is of great importance to both Sartre Studies and the wider question of how we can know and understand others. It shows, in an utterly compelling and innovative way, how Sartre’s engagement with psychoanalysis is interwoven with his philosophical work. The insights of the earlier discussions on existential psychoanalysis are interwoven with the discussion of dialectics in the Critique of Dialectical Reason and shown to be exemplified in the neglected late work on Flaubert, L’idiot de la famille. Consequently, the intersecting discussions throughout Sartre’s oeuvre on the possibility of understanding others, the relation between the subjective and the objective, the role of empathy, and the relation between the real and the imaginary, are made explicit. Focusing on the psychoanalytic thread in Sartre’s work, it is essential reading for those interested in Sartre, but also more widely for those engaged with the question of our relation to others.” —Kathleen Lennon, Professor Emerita of Philosophy, University of Hull, UK

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