JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Psychoanalysis245project. Existential psychoanalysis entails the disclosure of a person’sfundamental or original project. Sartre knows that each of us has manyempirical aims, hopes and fears. Indeed, the possible projects of anindividual form an infinite set. By the fundamental or original project Sartremeans the unity of my deeds that fuses them into my biography. My originalproject does not predate my biography. Sartre denies that my actions areinwardly or mentally rehearsed before I perform them. Indeed, there is nounconscious mind or noumenal realm where this could be executed. Myoriginal project is who I am making myself through living. Sartre says theoriginal project is the project of being. It is the desire to be. What is thedesire to be?Sartre partly means the desire to live rather than die. He also means thedesire of being-for-itself to be someone, to be something. Ultimately, theoriginal project is the inevitably frustrated desire of being-for-itself to be asynthesis of being-for-itself and being-in-itself; the desire, in fact, to be God.Existentially, it is the pattern of the uncomfortable exercise of free selfdefinition.If there is an a priori (but not chronologically prior) tenet of existentialpsychoanalysis it is the original project.Because the being of being-for itself is not distinguishable from choice,existential psychoanalysis must uncover what Sartre calls ‘the originalchoice’. In a fashion reminiscent of Hindu and Buddhist doctrines of karma(kama) Sartre holds that who I am here and now is a direct consequence ofmy previous subjective choices. Existential psychoanalysis explains why Iam who I am through bringing to knowledge the choice original to my presentcondition. As in classical psychoanalysis, I can in principle psychoanalysemyself but this is difficult because it requires the detachment involved intreating oneself as another. Whether self-administered or not, existentialpsychoanalysis like classical analysis aims at a therapeutic self-knowledge.Sartre deploys the techniques of existential psychoanalysis withincreasing sophistication in his biographies of Baudelaire (1947), JeanGenet (1952) and Flaubert (1972). His ambition in writing the Flaubert is tototally explain another human being. The Idiot of the Family is amethodological culmination of Sartre’s work, drawing on the phenomenologyof The Psychology of the Imagination, the Marxist existentialism of Searchfor a Method and Critique of Dialectical Reason as well as the existentialpsychoanalysis of Being and Nothingness. The title is taken from Gustave