JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

246Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic WritingsFlaubert’s father’s judgement on his young son: ‘You will be the idiot of thefamily’. Sartre’s biography seeks to uncover Flaubert’s self-constitution asa writer within his lived historical situation. Although in Being andNothingness Sartre only claims to have shown the possibility of existentialpsychoanalysis and admits that the discipline has not yet found its Freud,Sartre thought that in the concrete case of his writing on Flaubert one personhad wholly explained another.Two extracts follow, one from Sketch For a Theory of the Emotions, theother from the chapter called ‘Existential Psychoanalysis’ from Being andNothingness. In Sketch For a Theory of the Emotions we see the Sartre of1939 distancing himself from classical psychoanalysis through the exampleof emotion. In Being and Nothingness Sartre argues the merits ofpsychoanalysis over empiricist and positivist psychology and then arguesthe merits of his own psychoanalysis over Freud’s.SKETCH FOR A THEORY OF THE EMOTIONSThe psychoanalytic theoryWe cannot understand an emotion unless we look for its signification. And this, by itsnature, is of a functional order. We are therefore led to speak of a finality of emotion.This finality we can grasp very concretely by the objective examination of emotionalbehaviour. Here there is no question at all of a more or less obscure theory aboutemotion and instinct based upon a priori principles or postulates. Simple considerationof the facts brings us to an empirical intuition of the finalist meaning of emotion. If wetry on the other hand to fix, in a complete intuition, the essence of emotion as aninterpsychological fact, we see that this finality is inherent in its structure. And all thepsychologists who have rejected upon the peripheric theory of James have been moreor less aware of this finalistic signification—this is what Janet, for instance, decorateswith the name of “psychic”; it is this that psychologists or physiologists like Cannonand Sherrington try to reintroduce into their descriptions of the emotional facts withtheir hypothesis of a cerebral sensibility; it is this, again, that we find in Wallon or,more recently, among the form psychologists. This finality presupposes a syntheticorganization of behaviours which could only be the “unconscious” of psychoanalysis,or consciousness. And it would be easy enough, if need be, to produce a psychoanalytictheory of emotional finality. One could show, without great difficulty, that anger or