Psychotherapy as a Human Science

Recognition and the Limits of Reciprocity: Sartre, Lacan, and Laing

191 Recognition and the Limits of Reciprocity Sartre,Lacan,and Laing JEAN-PAUL SARTRE Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris in 1905. His father, a naval officer, died when he was a few months old, and he grew up in the home of his maternal grandfather, Carl Schweitzer, a professor of German at the Sorbonne. Carl Schweitzer was a native German speaker from the Alsace region who had shifted his personal loyalties to France. But his love of France was seldom reciprocated. Despite his lifelong efforts to assimilate in Parisian circles, Carl Schweitzer was snubbed as a perpetual outsider. The grandfather’s outsider status rubbed off on his studious, self-centered grandson, who retreated into books and fantasies. And in later life, the protagonists of Sartre’s novels, though French speaking, had mostly German names, while Sartre’s fame as a philosopher derived from his ability to interpret and synthesize German thinkers like Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, and Freud into a distinctively French idiom. After his secondary school education, Sartre attended the École Normale Superieure, where he met his future companion, Simone de Beauvoir, and many other people destined to become famous in their own right: Jean Hippolyte, Raymond Aron, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone Weil, Emmanuel Mounier, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Though he taught in Le Havre, Leon, and Paris after graduating from the École Normale in 1928, his studies continued apace. In 1933, Sartre studied phenomenology in Berlin, where he read Husserl, Scheler, Heidegger, 192 Recognition and the Limits of Reciprocity Jaspers, and Freud for one year. Sartre’s first article, “The Transcendence of the Ego,” published in 1936, attempted a rigorous synthesis of Husserl and Hegel, and was followed by a book called L’imagination — his first foray into phenomenological psychology. In 1938, Sartre published his first novel, Nausea, which brought him to world attention. In 1939, he published Equisse d’une theorie des emotions, and was drafted into the French army. In 1940, he became a prisoner of war and was released in 1941. His first play, “The Flies,” was performed during the German occupation in 1943, the same year in which his magnum opus, Being and Nothingness, was published. In 1945 Sartre founded an influential Parisian journal, Les Temps Modernes, with Merleau-Ponty, Aron, and de Beavoir. In 1946, Sartre published L’Existentialism est une humanisme, (which antagonized Heidegger deeply), and an intriguing analysis of French anti-Semitism entitled Reflexions sur la questione Juive. In 1947, he published an indepth psychological portrait of the French poet Baudelaire, followed by another of novelist and playwright Jean Genet in 1952. In 1948, Sartre helped to found an independent Socialist party in France, but this soon collapsed under the pressures of the cold war. Though never a member of the Communist Party, Sartre was critical of the American agenda in Europe and was often sympathetic to the Soviet perspective. Indeed, Sartre did not distance himself from the Soviets until they crushed the Hungarian insurrection in 1956. Now thoroughly disenchanted with Soviet Communism, Sartre still opposed American imperialism, and during the late fifties and early sixties was preoccupied with revising Marxist theory. Indeed, Critique de la raison dialectique and Questions de methode, both published in 1960, were attempts to articulate a kind of Marxist existentialism. Long before they appeared in English translation, Saint Genet, Critique de la raison dialectique, and Questions de methode were summarized succinctly for English-speaking audiences by R. D. Laing and David Cooper in a book entitled Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartre’s Philosophy (1964). Sartre commended Laing and Cooper, saying theirs was “a very clear, very faithful account of my thought.” Moreover , in a letter dated November 9, 1963, he said, Like you, I believe that one cannot understand psychological disturbances from the outside, on the basis of a positivistic determinism, or reconstruct them with a combination of concepts that remain outside the illness as lived and experienced. I also believe that one cannot study, let alone cure, a neurosis without a fundamental respect for the person of the patient, without a constant effort to grasp the basic situation and to relive it, without an attempt to rediscover the response of the person to that situation , and — like you, I think — I regard mental illness as the “way out” that the free organism, in its total unity, invents in order to live through an intolerable situation. (Laing...