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Mary Edwards, "Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis: Knowing Others" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
01:47:46
An interview with Mary Edwards
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Mary Edwards
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Mary Edwards
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Mary Edwards
Hi, I'm here to pick up my son, Milo.
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Stephen Dozman
There's no Milo here.
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Mary Edwards
Who picked up my son from school?
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Mary Edwards
I'm going to need the name of everyone that could have a connection.
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Stephen Dozman
You don't understand. It was just so this was all planned.
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Mary Edwards
What are you gonna do? I will do whatever it takes to.
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Stephen Dozman
Get my son back.
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Mary Edwards
I honestly didn't see this coming. These nice people killing each other.
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Stephen Dozman
Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome back to the New Books Network. I am your host, Stephen Dozman. Thinking of the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, it is hard to think of him without imagining him in very particular context. One will likely imagine him in a Parisian cafe, working through a pack of cigarettes and some coffee, working on his latest play on a cocktail napkin while waiting for his friend Pierre to arrive. His theories of freedom against the temptations of bad faith are thought to be theories of writers and activists, resistors of occupation. But while this is no doubt a central part of his thinking, it misses another context. He was very much interested in the clinic. While he was not an orthodox Freudian or trained analyst, he was deeply interested in many of the questions that psychoanalysts are also interested in. And this intersection proved to be very productive, generating thousands of pages of lesser known works. This is what Mary Edwards, philosophy lecturer at Cardiff University, has written about in her new book, Sartre's Existential Psychoanalysis. Knowing Others. Working through Sartre's output from beginning to end, it first sets the stage with his early claims about the nature of the self and the possibility of knowing a person. From there it works to his later output, in particular his voluminous yet unfinished biography of Gustave Flaubert, where Edwards finds Sartre developing and applying a very particular method of understanding a person while nonetheless maintaining a respect for their free nature. While Sartre never completed his intended project, Edwards finds his attempts suggestive for rethinking life both in and beyond the clinic. Mary Edwards, welcome to the New Books Network.
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Mary Edwards
Thank you for having me.
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Stephen Dozman
Yeah, I always like to kick things off by having guests introduce themselves to listeners. So could you tell us a bit about who you are and maybe what your work and research tends to focus on?
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Mary Edwards
Sure, yes. I'm a lecturer at Cardiff University in Wales in the uk, and I am philosophy lecturer. I teach mainly philosophy of feminism and French existentialism, and I also do some courses which are rooted in my research, which is on other people and social imaginaries and a bit of psychoanalytical stuff as well. So my research has mainly focused on illuminating the philosophical significance of Sartre's later work, which has been somewhat neglected in the literature, although that situation is being remedied. There's a bit of a. A resurgence of interest in Sartre's work lately, which I'm glad about. And I also work on phenomenology of social emotions, and I focused on shame, and I focused on the meanings that are often projected onto women's bodies. And I have also published some work on kind of exploring psychological oppression and how Beauvoir and Sartre can make contributions to that.
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Stephen Dozman
Yeah, you've got a lot you're working with, kind of speaking of that kind of broad thematic overlap. So with this book, existentialism and psychoanalysis share a lot of thematic overlap, and yet the relationship between the two has rarely been perfectly neat or clean. Cut. In tracing Sartre's complicated relationship with psychoanalysis, what are you hoping for us to learn? Not just about Sartre, but about these two fields as well, as for philosophical inquiry more broadly.
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Mary Edwards
Okay, great question. I'm going to start with the easy bit, which is what I'd like us to learn about Sartre. Really. Primarily, what I like us to learn about Sartre is that he continued to develop his philosophy beyond Being in Nothingness. Right. Although Being in Nothingness is undoubtedly brilliant, Satter is still working on distinguishing his existentialism from Heidegger's philosophy of being in that work. It's not until the later works, I'm talking post 1952, that SATA really progresses away from the Heideggerian ways of thinking that don't fit with the radically social core of his existentialism. Now, I say radically social here because rather than commencing from the experience of an individual subject, Sartre comes to understand that individual experience and individual freedom is always already shaped by social forces. So he hints at this understanding in being, in Nothingness by situating his discussion of the look so early in that work. But he doesn't fully develop it until he starts working on his biographies and the critique of Dialectical reason during the 1950s. Sartre's later works, I believe, synthesize insights from existentialism, historical materialism, psychoanalysis, and studies of oppression, including Beauvoir's the Second Sex, to offer an incredibly sophisticated understanding of human freedom, which I don't believe has been fully appreciated yet, because, as I mentioned previously, his later works have been largely neglected. Now, the second part of your question. What am I hoping for us to learn about existentialism and psychoanalysis, and what's the takeaway for philosophical inquiry more broadly? So there's a few things, and I'll try and be succinct, and if you want to ask me more about them, you can. So the first is that it is possible to develop an existential psychoanalytic approach, and this is an approach that rejects the Freudian dynamic conception of the unconscious. Second thing I want us to learn is that such an approach is meaningful all the way down down to the deepest wishes and desires, precisely because it's rooted in an existential ontological meta theory rather than a Freudian biograph, sorry, biological one. And the third thing I'd like us to learn is that Sartre was enabled to enrich his philosophy through developing such an approach. So, in particular, I think that by focusing on concrete relationships, struggles and complexes, by examining individual lives in close detail, I think he gleaned new insights on how the structures of oppression work to shape individuals.
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Stephen Dozman
Yeah. So jumping off that, in the first chapter, you set down a lot of fundamental ideas of such sutras in starting with his early text, the Transcendence of the Ego, where he posits that the self or I are fictions, retroactive impositions produced by consciousness. However, while the constitution of the ego is deceptive, it is also necessary for life to be lived. Could you unpack Sartre's early view here?
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Mary Edwards
Yeah. So I think that probably the best way to do this is through considering an example of what happens when the delusion of the self isn't there. So I'm going to use Sartre's example, which he borrows from the psychologist Pierre Genet. This is of a young bride who suffers from the terror that if she's left in the house alone, she'll call out the window to passersby like a prostitute. So rather than describing this woman's condition as a kind of paranoid illness. Sartre contends that what this woman suffers from is a vertigo of possibility, a form of existential angst in which she apprehends her monstrous freedom all too clearly. So she is perfectly correct in her apprehension that if she is left in the house alone, there is nothing to stop her from doing precisely what she fears. No external force and no internal one either. So the difference between this woman and those of us who feel more secure in our sense of self, according to Sartre, is the belief that we possess internal qualities or personality traits that have some power over us, right? They have the power to constrain our actions and dispose us to behave in predictable ways. So Jung Pride, from this example, had a stronger sense of self. As a virtuous wife, for instance, she wouldn't have. She wouldn't suffer from the terror she does. So there is a sense in which having a sense of self is a healthy delusion for Satra, right? It's one that is adaptive for living in society. But Satra also aims to show us that many self conceptions that are encouraged by our society, perhaps like the one of the virtuous wife, are existentially maladaptive because they can prevent authentic self development. So it can shield us from angst, it can shield us from this really uncomfortable emotion that's unsettling and disturbing and paralyzes us, right? And we could do anything, right? This is not a nice thing to feel. So to protect ourselves from that, we can think, well, that's not like me. This is what I'm likely to do. However, if we have a sort of image of ourselves that's quite rigid, and if it's been imposed upon us by our society, then we're going to run into problems because we are going to refuse or at least ignore certain options that are available to us in a way that constrains our freedom and prevents us from becoming the person that we really want to be, to sort of be existentially fulfilled, to transcend what society makes of us.
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Stephen Dozman
A few years later, in Being a Nothingness, Sartre would continue with many of these ideas, but add a social aspect in the look, in which one discovers oneself as a sort of spectacle for others, often in a moment of shame, a word he uses in a very particular way. Could you unpack what he's developing here?
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Mary Edwards
Yeah, sure. So Sattra uses shame in a technical sense to denote the apprehension of oneself as an object for another subject. So this represents an entirely new structure of consciousness for Sartre, because up until this point in being in Nothingness, he's only considered ways in which consciousness can be for itself. So that's pre reflective and reflective consciousness. So just briefly, pre reflective consciousness is where you're, you're just getting on with the task at hand, right? I'm talking to you and I'm focusing on the content of what I'm saying. But then, right, I might shift into reflective consciousness and think, oh, I am talking to Steven on a recording. So I'm thinking, I'm thinking about myself. But in, in, in both of these types of consciousness, consciousness is existing for itself, right? It is. It is not. It's not in any kind of social relation. It's. It's just getting on with the task. It's either thinking about itself or it's thinking about what it's doing. And. But then when Sattle comes to introduce the idea of shame, it's a structure of cons in which consciousness becomes a being for others. So that means consciousness in moments of shame exists as a recognition that I am an object for the other. I am that thing that the other sees me as. And this is kind of a triangular structure of consciousness. So the other is involved in that. So when in moments of shame, rather than being sort of non positionally conscious of an object, that's not me. So there's kind of two points in shame. I'm conscious of myself, so it's a kind of self consciousness, but it's myself as seen by the other. So the other's part of the structure of my consciousness. And Satoru uses the famous example of the jealous lover to illustrate this point. So he talks about jealous lover in a hotel corridor, peeping through a keyhole to see what his lover's doing on the other side. And he's totally, totally transfixed on what's going on on the other side of the door. He's not self aware at all until he hears footsteps. Right? Footsteps. And then he's forced to consider the spectacle he's making on this side of the door. So he previously his consciousness was on the other side of the door. What's happening with my lover now? It's been shifted. What is going on on this side of the door? I am. Oh horror. Oh shame. I'm this kind of peeping Tom figure for the person who potentially sees me. So even though Sattra is using shame in this technical sense, it still carries a lot of the connotations that we ordinarily associate with shame. So it, it is this uncomfortable self awareness, right? It is. It is this kind of negative emotion. But the. The reason, Satra, or at least one factor in why the emotion of shame tends to be sort of a negative emotion is because we have this kind of existential revelation. And that revelation is that we can't be what we want to be because the concrete aspects of our being, its object, objective aspect, if you like, is the being that we are in the world for others. And that's a being that we only have limited control over. And that's. And that's scary, right? I am that thing that the other sees me as. But, oh, no, they just caught me in this bad moment when I'm stooping over, looking through a keyhole, and, you know, they don't understand my motives, But. But that's what I am now. I'm sort of damned in their eyes as this person. So that's. That's kind of what, in a nutshell, Sartre is trying to communicate when he discusses shame early on in Being in Nothingness. So it's. It's, yes, negative emotion, but it also. It's also this unique structure of consciousness, and it's a triangular structure of consciousness, and it's also a revelation.
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Stephen Dozman
Yeah. The first chapter concludes with a rather contentious claim. You write, quote, there is an epistemological difference between my reflections on my own self and. And my reflections of the self of another person. In Sartre's view, the difference is that the former are less reliable than the latter. The Sartre and subject therefore, stands in an epistemically disadvantaged position with regards to their self. We are each base, better placed to know others than ourselves, because we can see others from the outside and we can analyze them objectively from a distance. And quite quote, given how central this idea is for the rest of the book, could you unpack how Sartre arrives at this conclusion?
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Mary Edwards
Yes. So we've just seen that shame is a revelation for Sartre. Right. And against the comforting delusion that we each have a self inside us which expresses itself through our actions, what shame shows us is that we exist outside ourselves, hence our hopes, our intentions, and our potential. All this is nothing if it's not realized in the world outside of us. In Sartre's view, and this is just a fact of the human condition, that we often fail to realize these things. We often fail to do the things we hope to do. And this is a major source of distress for us often. And here's a Saturn example that I think we can all relate to that helps illustrate this. This point about why. Why we might not might not know ourselves as well as we think we do. So, and it's to do with this sort of emotional issue or this kind of distressing issue. And so say I've been insulted and I want to reprimand the offending person. The problem for me is I cannot know in advance whether I'll be able to deliver a sharp reproach to that person or whether I'll just make timid stammerings, right? And I won't really, you know, get my revenge on the person who's offended me. If it turns out to be the latter, then that's a part of my real self that I have to accept. So I'm not the person I imagined I might be. I might have imagined that I issued this kind of witty response and, you know, I had my own back on the person who offended me and things were great, you know. So you see often in movies that people have these kind of fantasies. And then when it comes to the crunch, and here's my opportunity to respond to the person who's offended me, I just fail. And like these kind of situations might be very painful for the subject to accept. And so what Satchel thinks happens in these kind of cases, we have to come up with special narrative devices and schemes in order to incorporate these kind of aspects of my real self into my image of my real self. So I might, for example, note that, oh, I was just especially tired and that's why I was unable to give a witty reply at that moment. But the potential to do so is really there. It's inside me. I just haven't realized that potential yet. But there is something there, right? So here we can see how my idea of myself might be different from the idea others who've witnessed that scene have of me based on that incident. And for Sartre, my idea is the more distorting one. So others idea of who I am is based on their observations of their actions, whereas mine is based on interpretations of my actions that attempt to align my acts with the image I have of my ideal self. So unlike others, I have to constantly work on myself. I have to live with myself every day. And this gives me a strong motivation to like myself and to to make myself or make. Make an image of myself that's likable, even if that involves distortion.
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Stephen Dozman
In the second chapter, you pick up the problem of other minds, which you argue that Sartre does respond to, albeit in an unconventional way that doesn't directly answer the question, so much as tries to reframe it. Could you Explain his response to it.
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Mary Edwards
Yeah, so traditionally the problem of or the minds is framed as epistemological. The problem is that we have no way of knowing that other people are experiencing beings like us. So since I cannot experience another person's experience, other people could be hollow zombies. And even though philosophers generally reject solipsism, they also tend to accept that the problem of other minds, at least the epistemological problem, is unsolvable in its own terms. So if I start from my own experience in which others appear as sort of objects, right? So, so they're objects in the sense that I don't have a sense of their subjective experience, right? Even, even if I see them as subjects. So from my own perspective, others appear as these kind of objects for me. And I must admit that I have no way of knowing that they're experiencing subjects. In the 20th century, Wittgenstein and his followers attempted to dissolve the problem by rejecting the Cartesian model of mind it presupposes. So they argued that the traditional problem, other minds, actually raises a more primary conceptual problem, which is that it doesn't even make sense to ask questions about other minds if the only mind I experience is my own, because then it would be impossible for me to arrive at a concept of mind that I could attribute to others in the first place. So what? How they attempt to sort of dissolve the problem is by swapping the, what we might call internal theater model of the mind for a neo behaviorist one. And this enables them to say that we only arrive at a concept of mind that's general and learn what it is to be minded through relating to others. Or put briefly, it's others who teach us first what it means to be minded. And so while this may be true, the neo behaviourist response for me doesn't speak to the concerns about human loneliness that really underpin the epistemological problem. It's still the case that I can go out into the street and wonder if those people are really experiencing, if they have experiences or whether they're just. They're just kind of automatic. I can still wonder about, you know, I still don't feel satisfied if I'm worrying about that by thinking, oh well, I've learned about what mind is through other people. So I think that Sartre does a better job of speaking to these concerns about human loneliness while also avoiding the conceptual problem. So Sartre believes that thinkers like Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger move in the right direction by thinking about human relationships in ontological terms. So in terms of being rather than knowledge. But he thinks that they ultimately still fall into the trap of positing that our most fundamental connection with others is via knowledge. So by focusing on the phenomenological structure of shame that I've just discussed, Sartre wants to show us that our most fundamental connection with others is through being. So through that being an essential intermediary between me as an experienced subject and myself. So this is self using that specifically, Sartre in way, right? Myself being that object that I am for others in shame consciousness, the other is there in my experience. They're kind of built in to my experience. Hence no conceptual problem. I already always have a sense of the other as subject. And I even have to have that sense of the other as a subject who sees me to have a concept of my own self. And so no conceptual problem. And this speaks to the problem of human loneliness insofar as it still acknowledges there's this ontological separation between me and the other. Because the thing that torments me in shame is that I can't know what they see when they see me. I can have no knowledge of the thing that I am for them. So to me, I think that this is another, more positive revelation that Sartre finds in shame. So while it shows me that I can't know how I appear to the Other, it shows me that I'm a being that exists on the. That exists on the outside, like my existence. What counts about me, what really matters is on the outside, in the world. That's for others. But this also means that the same is true for others. So everything that can be known about another is at least potentially an object of my knowledge. So even though it says, yeah, it can't. Can't answer the problem, the epistemological problem of other minds. In its own terms, it says, look, the epistemological problem is misleadingly giving us a problem about knowledge. Sartre was saying, there's no problem about knowledge of others because there's nothing mysterious about others. Everything that's potentially that we could know about another, we can find out if we do the work. The problem about others is an ontological problem. And that's a problem being like, we can't experience their experience because we have to exist as our own experience. So that's how Sartre sets it. He says, there's two problems about others that get merge into one, into the traditional problem. But here's a kind of salve or a balm for human loneliness is like, yes, you can never be with another person, right? In this ontological deep sense, you can never share in their experience, but you can, if you put the work in, you can know everything that really matters about them.
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Stephen Dozman
Yeah. So jumping off of that and turning to psychoanalysis, you look at the possibility of mixing Sartre's theories with psychoanalysis, which would appear to be difficult since Sartre posits that there is no object behind consciousness, that the eye or ego is this retroactive imposition which would seem to press against the Freudian idea that there must be an unconscious. However, this misses the point you raise of Sartre's actual critique of Freud, opening up the possibility that the two can be fused, although you conclude the chapter by noting the proper method is still absent. So before attending to the question of method, could you speak to the difficulty and possibility of fusing existentialism and psychoanalysis?
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Mary Edwards
Yeah. So at first glance, existential psychoanalysis seems like an impossible chimera, right? Precisely because the very idea of fusing together one discipline that completely rejects the notion that there is anything in consciousness that's driving its action with a therapeutic method that aims to cure precisely through revealing unconscious wishes in conscious driving its action, it seems to be just obvious that this, this enterprise, a fusion, is not going to work. However, when you examine the commitments of Sartre's existentialism, even his early existentialism, as outlined in Being in Nothingness, what you see is that the opposition between these two disciplines are more apparent than real. So, like Freud's concept of the unconscious, Sartre's concept of bad faith can explain plain, maladaptive, self sabotaging, seemingly irrational forms of behavior. Unlike Freud, though, Sartre does not trace these behaviors to an irrational source outside consciousness, but to one kind of. That's rational in its own way. So that one that's a choice that we can ultimately understand. And it's not outside consciousness, but I don't want to say in consciousness, but it's part of consciousness. It's a. The origin of this behavior is consciousness, not anything other than it. So I like using Satra's example of the stutterer for explaining how psychoanalysis and existentialism can be fused. So what Sartre argues is an advantage over his existentialism over Freud's meta theory, is that it can explain both the stutterer's stutter and his choice to seek help from a psychoanalyst in order to cure that stutter. So, and it can explain both these behaviors as choices. So the stutter, in a straightforward way, according to Sartre, realizes the choice to be inferior to Others. But while the choice to go to a psychoanalyst to cure that stutter seems to express a contradictory choice not to be inferior to others, Sartre believes that if we, if we push hard enough, we can reveal their unity or their harmony at a deeper level within a sort of a project. The same project underpins them. And it's a. It's an inferiority project, rather, perhaps, rather than inferiority complex. So, so what happens? Oh, like he's satro, so he's not like, looking at any particular stutter, but he's giving us an example. So he says, like, what might come up if we subject this subject to an existential psychoana, an existential analysis is that this subject is going to a psychoanalyst not to seek a cure, not to have his stutter cured, but actually to confirm that his stutter is incurable and hence that his inferiority is just an immutable fact of his life and his experience that he can't change. Right. So it's just another manifestation of the same inferiority project. And this also has the sort of neat result that it will explain the resistance encountered in psychotherapy, this kind of resistance to cure. So even though this example puts things in an overly simplistic manner, I think it highlights both Sartre's attraction to psychoanalysis analysis and his ambitions for it. So he recognizes it as a method for understanding kinds of behavior that defy ordinary interpretation. But he also believes that its potential to make all behavior comprehensible in terms of choices cannot be realized as long as it's tied to Freud's original matter theory, which instead of giving us reasons for behavioral motives for behavior, gives us causes in it in an irrational unconscious that's just outside of consciousness that, you know, that imposes desires on consciousness.
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Stephen Dozman
Yeah, so jumping off of that and turning to the question of method, which is one of the main themes throughout the rest of the book, you spend some time reframing dialectics. So in Sartre's view, the dialectic is not an abstract method, but the living logic of history. And as he writes in his later work, the Critique of Dialectical Reason, quote, it must be recognized where it is to be seen instead of being dreamed of in areas where we cannot yet grasp it. End quote. Could you unpack this rethinking of dialectics and its implications for what philosophers are doing?
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Mary Edwards
Yeah, sure. So I guess when we think of the dialectic in philosophy, what might first come to mind is the dialectic as a philosophical method that's been used in the philosophical tradition since Socrates, Plato. And that method involves arguing for a proposition, then arguing for its contrary in order to arrive at a synthesis that kind of preserves the insights of both these arguments. But Sartre's dialectic is more in keeping with this Hegelian dialectic insofar as it's descriptive and phenomenological. But it's not completely removed from the traditional dialectic, because what it aims to do is comprehend human history by synthesizing the contradictions apparent in it. So this means that if we just return to Sartre's treatment of the stutterer, his treatment of the stutterer in being a nothingness resembles a dialectic, Right? Because what we have is a choice and a contradictory choice. And then Sartre synthesizes them and says, look, right? These are both manifestations of a deeper inferiority project, but it's not. This isn't a dialectical analysis in the later sense that Sartre uses the term dialectic, this Hegelian sense, insofar as it doesn't take into account the stutterer's history, including his developmental history. Right, That's. That's what you need to understand something is you can't take. You can't have this kind of synthetic understanding. You have to have a dialectical. Sorry, that's not the word I'm looking for. You need to have an understanding that approaches the state of affairs now as a result of a movement through time.
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Stephen Dozman
So.
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Mary Edwards
I talk about the difference between analytic objects and dialectical objects in the book. And Sartre thinks that histories and people. So again, Sartre's kind of talking about people as objects, but he thinks that they're dialectical objects, which doesn't kind of objectify people in this, like, degrading sense that we might ordinarily think of when we talk of, you know, treating people as objects. And so maybe to help illuminate this idea, I think it's worth exploring Sartre's kind of critique of positivist or analytical reason. And this is just one type of reason, according to Sartre, but it's the kind that we take as the only kind of reason. And he thinks that is a big mistake. And he gives this example in the. He has this really long footnote in the Critique of Dialectical Reason where he gives this example, and I think it's really illustrative. And it's of. If you take a picture of a line intersecting a circle, and he says, look, a child can look at this and see that if a line, a straight line intersects a circle at any one point, it has to intersect it at another. And he says there are many ways in which the child can come to that understanding. You know, they can trace their fingers along the line. They can draw other straight lines along the circle. They can run their fingers around the circle and pop their other fingers in the way. Or he also talks about, like, thinking of the circle as a movement or as, like an enclosing force and the line as something that insect that's kind of blocked by the circle and pierces through. So he thinks of, like, lots of ways in which we can kind of apprehend this picture. But he says, like, none of these will do, or no more correctly, only one of these ways in which we could apprehend the circle and the line and grasp the truth that any line intersecting at one point will always intersect at another. And for the mathematician, that's this kind of mathematical way. And in order to arrive at the proof or the mathematical truth of the circle, Sartre thinks you have to reduce the circle to just one of its properties, and that's of being radially oriented around a center point. And if you do that, if you grasp the circle just in that way, what you can do is you can express a relation of the line to the circle through simultaneous quadratic and linear equations. And lo and behold, you have the truth that, you know, any line intersecting the circle at one point will intersect at another as a mathematical proof. However, he thinks, like, when we do this, look at what. What's lost, all those intuitive ways of engaging with and seeing within. And these are, like, more primary ways of looking at the picture. There are different ways in which we can understand it, maybe we can tell a story about it, but all these are refused in the move that wants to subsume the relationship between the circle and the line under analytic or positivist logic. And Sartre's. I mean, he says some quite extreme stuff in the critique of dialectical reason, about dialectical reason. And he thinks like it's. It's a form of logic that we've just not recognized. And he says either in the east or the west, and we're missing out the most primary way of understanding history because of it. So, but particularly in terms of thinking about psychoanalysis, what Sartre thinks is that if the analyst approaches the subject or the patient or the client, analyse, and will say if the analyst approaches that analyse and as an analytical object, as he thinks traditional Freudian psychoanalysts do, then they block themselves off or they cut themselves off to understanding the full plurality of meanings that the analyse and brings to the analytical situation in advance. So they're not open to comprehending all the meanings that the analyzer, I'm sorry, makes because they've got these preconceived ideas about what makes sense and what doesn't, what's rational behavior and what's irrational behavior, what's behavior that makes sense and we don't need to consider and what's the kind of behavior that must be attributed to the unconscious because there's no way of making sense of it. Sartre's gonna say, no, no, no, there is a way of making sense of it.
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Stephen Dozman
Yeah. Jumping right off of that. You show how Sartre develops or starts to develop a new method for understanding both people in history, the progressive regressive method, which tries to take account of the ways in which people are caught between being subject and object, freedom and constraint. A first attempt to apply this method would be in his essay San Genet, where he wrote about his peer and friend, the writer Jean Genet, who himself found the work quite discomforting. Could you explain the method and in this early attempt at application by Sartre.
- [47:23]
Mary Edwards
Yeah. So the regressive aspect of the progressive regressive method is the aspect that bears the most resemblance to traditional psychoanalysis in that it uses the techniques associated with that discipline to uncover what SATRA views as the subjective significance of biographical facts. So the meaning that they have for the subject, then the progressive aspect of that method is concerned primarily with gaining an objective understanding of the analyse and socio. Material situation and the effects of their actions sort of in. In their world, in their society, through Marxist Techniques. Now, here, objective doesn't mean anything like a God's eye view or a neutral view. What Sartre is trying to get here is another human perspective. And if the subject is an historical subject, as in the case of Flaubert, who is the subject of Sartre's largest biographical study, the perspective he's aiming for is that which we might reasonably expect one of the subject's contemporaries to have. So Sartre documented his application of this method to his peer and friend in Saint Genet, as you observe. And he did it to prove a point. Right? He did it. And he said. He's quite explicit about this in the book. He says that I wanted to prove that freedom alone can account for a person in his totality. So Sartre at the time is engaging with Marxism and kind of these kind of structuralist ideas that it's all about structure. The individual has no power. And he wants to say, as you know, an existentialist, no, we can't explain everything through social structures alone, that the individual does have a choice in shaping their life. And I think that Sartre may well have succeeded in proving this point. Although this project also, I think, betrays Sartre's naivete at that point in his career about psychoanalysis as a psychotherapeutic and hence psychoactive apparatus. Right. It has this power, particularly over the analyzer's end. Right. So. But Sartre had no formal psychoanalytic training, but I think he seems to have arrived at a deeper appreciation of the power of psychoanalysis analysis through observing and witnessing Genet's response to the study. So in a later interview, Sartre reports that Genet had experienced such repulsion to the book, to the manuscript of Savage Genet, when he read it that he felt compelled to throw it in the fire. And he thinks he probably did, but throw a few pages in and then quickly put them out. And what's interesting is that Genet's not reported by the reports. He's not. He didn't feel that way because he felt he was misrepresented in those pages, but rather because he felt as though he was as he was described them. So it was uncomfortable. He's recognized himself there. But the problem seems to be that what Sartre did is he gave Genet the kind of insights into the self that should be provided within confidential, trusting, psychotherapeutic context that would also have supplied him with the support that he needed to work through them rather than just, you know, coming across them on his own in. In a theoretical text. Right. So even Though Sartre still has theoretical points to prove through the application of his method later in his study of Flaubert. And in that study, he chooses a writer from the previous century as his subject. He chooses someone who's dead, someone who's not going to have to experience reading about themselves in this way. And part of me thinks that there was an ethical motive for doing that. But, yeah, in terms of the earlier application of his method in Genet, I guess it's very close. It's very close to what he does with Flaubert. There is an earlier psychoanalytical study that's of Charles Baudelaire, which doesn't contain. It's not rigorous in its application. It doesn't have this objective aspect. I think it's harder for Sartre to be objective with a peer. But then he also had. He also had relationship with Genet, so maybe that was a kind of corrective to some of their projections he may have imposed on Genet. But I guess even though Saint Genet is a long book, it's a weighty tome. When Sartre comes to write the Family Idiot, what we see is that it's just much longer. He's so much more rigorous. He's just. He goes into so much detail, and then he will circle around the same point over and over. And I think that what Sartre probably comes to understand by the time he writes his study of Flaubert, and this is probably why it's unfinished, is that even if it is theoretically possible to sort of grasp another human being as a totality, or at least a totalization to a point in time, and to know everything, everything that matters about them in that very specific way, it might just be impossible in practice. Right. Because you've only got one lifetime. Maybe if you had an infinite amount of time to do it, you could. But in terms of, like this being a realistic human project, it might be impossible even. Even for Sartre.
- [55:04]
Stephen Dozman
Yeah. So turning to. To the Flaubert biography, the Family Idiot, you outline several stages Sartre works through to understand Flaubert's life. So to break it down, we could start with a look at Flaubert's childhood and the way he responded to it. With the decision to eventually become a writer, this involves both understanding a situation imposed on the young Flaubert, as well as trying to understand how he internalized it and responded to it. Could you explain how Sartre works through Flaubert's life to understand this decision?
- [55:42]
Mary Edwards
Yeah. So I think that what Sartre does, and I guess I'LL just rephrase. The way I put it in my book. Book is that I think that Sartre tries to come to this understanding of Flaubert's choice in terms of its context and the potential for his freedom to act in that very restrictive, oppressive context. I think he. This isn't the way it's presented in the book, by the way, because of what I said a while ago about circling around the same point again and again, progressing on through Flaubert's life and then returning to a very important, or what Sartre regards as a very important scene in childhood again and again. But I think that we can divide the study into three phases because I think that this helps us capture in the most succinct way the kind of progression that takes place in the family idea, even though it's not linear in that work. But the phases I give are first, being understanding Flaubert's being how he was constituted. Then the second is comprehension, comprehension of how he responds to that, and then knowing, which involves going beyond this kind of subjective comprehension. So I'll just expand on that. So let's think about being. So this deals with. This phase, I think is the phase that's dealing with Flaubert's infancy. And what Sartre does in this phase is he pays close attention to the biographies of Flaubert's parents, as well as reports of Flaubert's infancy scenes from his early childhood that are provided by other family members in order to understand how Flaubert was constituted. Right. So this is a really non. Existential term, but this is the first time Sartre has really looked at how an infant is nursed and, and how this might shape the person they become. Right. In ways that are clearly beyond the individual's control. So after arrive, after he's. So he's born after the eldest son and two dead sons and. And before another son who will also die very soon after birth. So from this Sartre concludes that in all likelihood little Gustav, as he calls him, was probably immersed with a kind of anxious diligence, right. That the mother would really not wanted this child to survive, but also without much affection. You can understand how a mother who's just. Just grieved two sons might treat this. This third, oh well, fourth son, but with. With this kind of distance, a distance because she. The fear that. That this child might follow the same path as the previous two. So from this. And he builds a really strong case for this because through looking at other letters, it might seem like an alarming kind of claim to make. He believes that the way in which Flaubert was nursed gave him a passive constitution. And what he means by this is that Flaubert is disposed to experience himself less as an agent than an object that others act upon. So in the second phase, what SAP tries to do is to comprehend so in that sense of understand subjectively the process of Flauberts cells formation. And he does this primarily through analyzing his Juvenalia. And in this phase he contends that little Gustav could have overcome the passive constitution that he believes his mother gave to him had he had the support of a loving father. But because he interprets little Gustave, or Gustave's father, would call him Dr. Flaubert because he was a medic, he interprets him as an old fashioned pater familias whose intellectual brilliance enabled him to ascend into the middle class. He believes that Dr. Flaubert experienced little Gustave's early difficulties with language as an offence to his pride. And he responded to this by making a brutal intervention into his son's education. And by all accounts, this intervention was effective insofar as little Gustav learned to read and write very soon afterwards. But it came at a very high cost. And this was basically humiliating his son for the rest of his life. So little like Flaubert, Sartre argues, experienced, was haunted by the humiliations he endured at his father's hands at this time for the rest of his life. And this had the effect of a curse upon him. He refers to it as the paternal curse because it prevented him from overcoming his passive constitution, but it also intensified the suffering he caused him. And it did this for numerous reasons. One is that it instilled in him this kind of scientific or positivist mindset that his father had that prevented him from becoming religious. And he thinks that finding faith might have helped Flaubert cope with his passive constitution, but he was denied that. So in order to live in that kind of situation, Sartre's Flaubert comes to accept himself as the loser who wins. This is the story he tells himself about himself in order to live with who he is. He believes he's like the loser who wins because he recognizes that the imagination is superior to reality. And it's this that ultimately gives him the drive that. So first he wants to. He dreams of becoming an actor, and then, then he changes. He wants. The second phase is that he wants to become a writer. But when he becomes an adolescent, it becomes clear to him that there's just no way you can pursue his dream of becoming a writer, it's not. He comes from this bourgeois family. The father's a renowned medic. The eldest son is following in the father's footsteps. The fate of Flaubert is already decided by the family. He's going to pursue a career in law. But at the age of 14, when he's preparing for a career in law, Flaubert has this nervous attack that renders him incapable of continuing on this path of becoming a lawyer. Now, most of Flaubert's biographers have attributed this attack and the subsequent attacks to epilepsy, in spite of its atypical presentation. Sartre, however, argues that Flaubert's illness is hysterical and, unsurprisingly, that it originates in a choice. And it's a choice that Flaubert needed to make in order to go on living in his situation. So because Flaubert is a passively constituted person who's learned to live in the imagination, he can neither disobey his parents nor pursue a career in law. And Sartre builds this really strong case, and he comes up with a lot of evidence from Flaubert's work and from his correspondence to suggest that what Flaubert required in order to go on living was an irreversible transformation that excused him from his duty as a bourgeois boy to take up a profession that his parents accepted. And he does appear to have toyed with the idea of suicide, even just in his fictions. But Sartre argues that he realizes that a social death would do. He could go on living if he became a chronic patient. And so then the story of Flaubert's illness and how it eventually enabled him to become the author, the great author of Madame Bovary, is what completes like the second comprehension phase. And finally, I'll be a bit briefer about this one. The third phase, knowing, is the one that applies Marxist tools to understand Flaubert's contribution to history. And it's a phase that completes this synthesis of regressive and progressive analyses in order to deliver what Sartre believes is knowledge of Flaubert's self, that being the being that Flaubert made himself through, among other things, making himself ill and incapable of becoming a lawyer and writing Madame Bovary.
- [66:29]
Stephen Dozman
Yeah. So expanding outwards from this, Sartre looks at Flaubert's literary work in its historical context. So he finds Flaubert's context to have something of an awkward relationship to literature, with conflicting ideas about literature, art, transcendence, class and morality all mixing to create what Sartre describes as a sort of neurotic attitude towards literature, a position that held for a time, only to collapse with the Second Empire, exposing the hypocrisies of the position and returning Flaubert to his position as the family idiot. Could you explain this contextualist reading Sartre gives here?
- [67:13]
Mary Edwards
Yes. So Sartre describes Flaubert as a post romantic writer. And this group of writers also includes Baudelaire, the Goncourt brothers and Mallarme. And he believes that these are all writers who are writing round the mill, the 19th century. And they're all seeking to transcend their class through choosing art for art's sake. And what he says is that they feel that they have this imperative, all of them. What unites all of them is that they have this imperative to transcend their class. They must become aristocrats in order to become great writers. However, they have this awareness that they absolutely cannot transcend their class, that they're absolutely not aristocrats. So they have these. They have this impossible imperative, transcend your class so that you might write great works, but this full awareness that you can't do that. So Sartre thinks that this group of writers all have the same kind of neurotic response to this problem. And it involves becoming what he calls knights of nothingness in the imaginary. So how they refuse their class is refusing this principle of being useful, of being practical, practical of taking up a career that has. Has this makes a real contribution to society and will give you a reliable income. So, and, and Sartre, this is where we get to a really interesting idea about Flaubert's relation to his reading public. So Sartre argues that the writings of Flaubert and the other post Romantics were often mistaken by the reading public as realist works. And this is because he believes that the reading public shared the same class ideology as them. And he describes this as a kind of black humanism, like a dark humanism. And they wanted to perceive the world as objectively evil so as to relieve themselves from their own guilt and self hatred. So during the Second Empire. So no, I won't go into that. What I should say is that this, this leads Sartre to this really interesting conclusion. He suggests that because of the way Flaubert internalized his class consciousness, it made him an oracular individual. And what he means by this is that his internalization of his class ideology, black humanism, led him to a personal crisis. So this is his nervous attack in 1844 that anticipated the crisis of his class at large, following the massacres of the lower classes. During the June days uprising of 1848. So what? While. So after this point, after this crisis. And this explains why Flaubert's audience misread his work. So he produced, Sartre thinks, neurotic art, but it became popular art. So usually, like neurotic artwork would have a kind of minority appeal. It might appeal to sort of psychologically interested readers. But Sartre's saying, hey, isn't it really interesting that Flaubert and the other post Romantics were producing neurotic art that had a broad popular appeal? And he thinks that this is because Flaubert and his whole class are neurotic. And what. What Flaubert does in his literature is that he attempts to give this kind of. It's kind of like a God's eye view, but it's like as if God was evil and like laughing at his subjects. And this view appeals, Sartre believes, to the reading public, the reading public of the sackled empire, because they despise themselves and they want to push their guilt onto the world. They want to say, look, the world is just this evil, you know, it's objectively evil place. But Satra says, look, he. Frober doesn't write with a view from nowhere. He has this kind of God's eye view, but it's from a very specific kind of evil God perspective. So this is what makes Flaubert this celebrated author of his time, and this is how he can produce neurotic artwork that has this major appeal. But following the fall of the Second Empire, Flaubert and the other post Romantics really had to become realists, like realists in the sense we might ordinaries, not literary realists, because they had to reintegrate the themselves into the class that they strove to transcend in the imaginary. So they had to recognize that they shared the fears of the rest of their class. Fears of occupation, fears of physical violence, that very bourgeois fear of loss of property. And Sartre finds confirmation of this in Flaubert's sort of expressions of depression and self discourse and physical sickness and inability to write after, after the occupation of France. And he realizes that his imaginary cover, the COVID he'd drawn over himself so that he could live with himself, had been blown. And he discovers that he never stopped being the idiot he learned he was before he could read.
- [73:58]
Stephen Dozman
In the next chapter, you take on the claim many have have made that Sartre's method and his reading of Flaubert do not deliver the objectivity he claims, regardless of how compelling or internally coherent his claims may be in response, you write, quote, a critique of Madame Bovary would have provided Sartre with a means of confirming the results of his dialectical analysis in the three published volumes of the Family Idiot against something external to the dialectic in them. End quote. Could you explain how the three published volumes provide the foundation for filling in the missing fourth volume and how that would then provide the verification of the first three? What's the overarching method or project supposed to look like had Sartre completed the work?
- [74:52]
Mary Edwards
Okay, yeah, sure. So what that the first volumes build up to and touch upon man and Bovary, but they do not offer a full literary critique of it. That's. That's what he intended to do in the fourth volume and in his notes and his plans, Sartre states that he would. He wanted to even apply structuralist methods of criticism to interpret the text. So he really wanted to let this text speak for itself. And what's interesting, and I think it helps understand why we might see a literary critique of Madame Bovary as sort of the test, if you like, of Sartre's method, is because Sartre's study of Flaubert's life runs from 1821 to 1857, right? Says that on the COVID So that's not from Flaubert's birth to his death. It's from Flaubert's birth to the publication of Madame Bovary. And this strongly suggests, and it kind of almost explicitly states that what. What Sartre is doing, his project to give us knowledge of Flaubert's self, is he's going to give us knowledge of Flaubert, the author of Madame Bovary. And that's where he stops. That's nothing beyond that point. But up until that point, the being or the self that Flaubert made, because Sartre sees Madame Bovaryus as the pinnacle of Flaubert's self formation, right? This is. This is the work. This is the masterpiece that made Flaubert, you know, a celebrated great, great, you know, the big writer of his time. So. But also what. What you see, if you track Flaubert's progress up until that point, you see at least. At least it. What you see is progress from a passively constituted infant to a family idiot who takes very long time to learn to read and write, to a ham actor, right? That's what he's acting all the time and joking around with his schoolboy friends and his siblings to a chronic patient, then to becoming the celebrated author of Madame Bovary. So it's the story of the Triumph of freedom against all odds, and even one that's deeply aware of the structures of power and domination that shape us all. So if it had been completed, if Sartre had been able to write the fourth volume, the study of Madame Bovary was going to be objective to, insofar as it was going to let the ultimate project of Flaubert's self formation speak for itself as much as possible. So it's just going to be taken alone, and Sartre's going to approach it from many different angles. And I give some kind of specifics about how he's going to do that in the book, but another important aspect of that. So you've got this kind of literary criticism that's relatively self contained, but the reason why Sartre thinks that this kind of literary analysis that's kind of separate to the psychoanalytical project in the previous volumes is going to be the test of his method, because. So you've got this kind of more objective analysis that's going to study this objective product. But what about the aggressive stuff? What about the. The subjective understanding that Sartre is trying to give us in the. In the previous volumes? Well, Sartre thinks that the literary criticism of Madame Bovary is going to give you that too, because Sartre believes that Flauber couldn't authentically be himself in his relations with others, but he. He is able to be himself through the avatars, avatars he creates, or his literary characters. And he believes that he. That Flaubert arrives at an incredibly rich comprehension of himself through writing his literary works. And so he, Sartre reads Flaubert's characters, many of them, as avatars for himself. And Emma Bovary is one of these. So it would have been really interesting. I'm sad that the fourth volume wasn't published because there are some hints about how Emma Bovary expresses Flaubert, particularly his sexuality in the earlier volumes, but it's not fully developed there.
- [80:24]
Stephen Dozman
In the sixth chapter, you take up Sartre's claim that the Family Idiot is the Imaginary, his much earlier text, but at 30, that his later work is a mature expression of his earlier ideas on imagination. Could you unpack the continuity as well as the changes in its more mature form?
- [80:45]
Mary Edwards
Yeah. So the Imaginary is a phenomenological study of the role of the imagination in human experience. It's scholarly, rigorous, and it's broad in its scope. So it looks closely at the relationship between perception and imagination, but it also considers the role of the imagination in emotions, creative work, dreams, mental illness, and human misery. So there's a lot going on. It's a really comprehensive study of the imagination in life. But it's scholarly, it's theoretical. There are, of course, examples, and Sartre looks at the work of psychiatrists and treatments, particularly of schizophrenic patients in there for sort of real life examples to support his work. But it's a kind of straightforward academic, theoretical, theoretical, philosophical text. Right. But what I think happens as Sartre progresses as a philosopher is that he finds the way that the richness of human experience is reduced unnecessarily so through the kinds of generalizations that take place in philosophical practice. He finds these kind of reductive generalizations frustrating. And he therefore, like, gravitates away from traditional philosophical forms of writing towards more concrete studies. So he spends more time, and he devotes more pages and more hours to his bio, biographies, and even the Critique of Dialectical reason published in 1960, it's a philosophical work, but even that work, it's combining a philosophical theses with analyses of specific historical moments. So little concrete analyses in there? Well, they're not little, they're quite long times. It's another one of Sartre's really long works. But I think the. The Family Idiot is really the. The culmination of this movement away from the traditional philosophical text insofar as it does. It's definitely trying to do philosophy. And I think it is trying to show us that we can know everything there is to know about another person up to a point in time. Right. We can know everything about the self that they've made themselves, themselves in the world up into, you know, across, over a finite period of time. So he wants to do philosophy through this, a rigorous study of a universal, singular. Right. So there's a. You know, you've got universal. It's the human experience, it's everything we all understand, but it's a singular instance of that experience. What we're studying is a product of both, to borrow Beauvoir's term, the force of circumstance and freedom. So to go back to the imaginary. So why. What's this connection between the straightforward philosophical work that this, that the study of Flaubert is the sort of second installation of. I have a quote from. You told me you wanted to ask me about this. I have a quote from the imaginary. I can summarize it or do you want me to read it? I think it's. Yeah, I think it's helpful. So in the imaginary, Sartre says that individuals will have to be arranged into two great categories according to Whether they prefer to lead an imaginary life or a real life. But we must understand what a preference for the imaginary signifies. It is not at all just a case of preferring one sort of object to another. It must not believe, sorry, must not be believed, for example, that the schizophrenic and morbid dreamers in general try to substitute a brighter and more seductive aerial content for the real content of their life. And that they may seek to forget the aerial character of their images by reacting to them as if they were objects currently and really present. To prefer the imaginary is not only to prefer a richness, a beauty, a luxury as imaged to the present mediocrity. Despite their aerial character, it is also to adopt imaginary feelings and conduct. Because of their imaginary character, one does not only choose this or that image. One chooses the imaginary state with all that it brings with it. One not only flees the content of the real. Poverty, disappointed love, business, failure, and so on. One flees the very form of the real, its character of presence, the type of reaction it demands of us, the subordination of our conduct to the object, the inexhaustibility of perceptions, their independence, the very way that our feelings have of developing. Right. So I think that quote captures a lot about what Sartre thinks is the role of the imaginary in our life and as well as like. Like the danger of the imaginary. So in in the Imagination, he theorizes the imagination and perception as. As mutually exclusive modes of consciousness. You can't perceive and imagine at. At the same time. And that what that gives you is the opportunity to escape from reality in the imagination. And of course, we all do that. But Sartre thinks that humanity. We can divide humanity into two kinds. People that choose to live in the real world, and that people who choose to live an imaginary life choose to escape. And what's really interesting, when he studies Flaubert and also Genet is also in the critique, he says some things about women and people who are oppressed in reality are more inclined to want to live imaginary lives. Obviously, right? You want to escape if you have a bad life, if you don't have many choices in reality, you're going to want to flee into the imaginary. So, but he thinks the problem is, you know, when we think, oh, this person lives an imaginary life, you know, that they're. So there's the choice to live an imaginary life. He thinks it's not just a choice to have, you know, sort of substitutes for real pleasures or real victories. He thinks that if you choose to live an imaginary life, you're choosing to live an impoverished life, it's not. You're all also relieving yourself of the responsibilities that reality imposes on you. So the prop. If you choose to live an imaginary life, you're not going to be able to transcend your current situation. And that's what happens with Flaubert. Even. Even though he became this great, renowned, celebrated author in his time. Flaubert thinks that after the fall of the. Sorry. Sartre thinks that after the fall of the Second Empire in 1870, Flaubert became depressed and ill and wasn't able to carry on writing because he realized he never stopped being the family idiot. This is the story about why. Because he'd chosen to escape his situation and not to address his situation in reality, chosen to live an imaginary life. And he. He never progressed from being the family idiot, despite writing these great works of literature, which is a really sort of counterintuitive conclusion, right? He became great. He became great celebrated figure.
- [89:42]
Stephen Dozman
Why.
- [89:43]
Mary Edwards
Why does he come to this revelation that he never stopped being the family idiot, despite all this? Well, the idea is that he never kind of came to that he never sort of addressed his relationship. So the most powerful individuals in our self formation, right, are the people we really care about, people we love. And in Flaubert's case, it's his immediate family. They always disapproved of what he was doing and what he did. The great works he produced were sort of a byproduct of him not dealing with that, not grappling with that, not being able to choose against, you know, to disown the sort of the values that he'd inherited from his family, to make a conscious choice and an action to do that and become something else. So if he'd like left the family and gone off and become a writer, he would never have had this problem. The problem is that he let himself be a failure in the eyes of his family, became, you know, let himself be this chronic patient within the household and dream of being something else. But when. When that he had to accept his class reality, he never. He never gained this superior status. He thought when he came to that point, then I guess he also comes to realize through his lived experience. So not just through like. So. So in the imaginary, you give this. We have theoretical reasons and a sort of conception of what the imaginary is that means. So Sartre describes it as having this essential poverty when compared to reality. What Flaubert does is he lives that essential poverty, and he comes to realize it through the sort of devastation he experiences. When the second Empire falls and the court, the. The COVID that. That allowed him to live with himself is just blown to pieces. He can't. He can't keep that imaginary cover over himself anymore.
- [91:55]
Stephen Dozman
Yeah. So in the final chapter of the book, you have a number of reflections on the implications for this new theory. Everything you've put on the table, not just as a new ontology, but a new theory of self, self knowledge and therapeutic possibilities. In closing, what are the implications of what you've put on the table for healing, growth and authentic expression both in and beyond the clinic?
- [92:24]
Mary Edwards
Yeah. So in the clinic, I think Sartre is a big advocate for approaching human action as, to use that term I've used previously, meaningful all the way down. So it's meaningful all the way down to some choice. And that means that self knowledge and self understanding cannot come from looking for some kind of biological cause. And. And I think that this has important implications for particularly the treatment of schizophrenia. So in the book, I look at RD Lang and I consider how Sartre would find much to recommend in the approach Lang takes in his treatment of his schizophrenic patient, Julie. But I argue that Sartre's use of dialectical reason could potentially go further in making aspects of what Lange calls Julie's completely psychotic beliefs and expressions of her views comprehensible. So Lange dismisses sort of Julie's logic as having no reason. And what Satoru would do would look further to say, no, that there is a reason there, we just have to. It's just not, you know, analytic reason, but there is a logic to it. And he would go further to discover more and more dimensions of meaning. Then, I think, again with an implication for the clinic, I think that Sartre's existentialism provides a robust theoretical basis for integrative psychotherapy. So before I went on maternity leave, I was also in weekend training to become a psychotherapist. And that's going on pause for now. But what I learned about psychotherapy in this current moment is that there's this big movement towards psychotherapeutic integration and there are different pathways you can take. But the problem is that you want to be evidence based in your therapeutic practice. You want to treat. You have a duty to treat your patients well, and therefore you have a duty to look at what methods work best, are proven to be most effective for the specific condition you want to treat. However, you have different methods, different sort of techniques for different conditions often come from different disciplines or different schools of philosophy that have different theoretical commitments. So what do you do with that? So what do you want to do if you have a patient with. Some sort of, let's say, sort of not paranoid, a patient with some kind of fear that, like cognitive behavioral therapy, this kind of exposure therapy works well for us. Right. But maybe they also have deep issues with their parents. So maybe psychoanalysis would be best for that. But then you've got two contradictory sort of meta theories, right? Or at least theories that don't fit well together. So one is that what happens is the here and now and focus on planning on the future. And then the psychoanalytic. So that's the CBT stuff. Then the psychoanalytic stuff wants to look into the subject's deep history and work through stuff. How do you unite those two things? And, you know, how do you just that. Well, I think that what Satra's existentialism can do, because it gives you a theory that is. It's kind of gives you this. It tells us that, look, we're all individual freedoms in a world that shapes us, but it gives us this progressive regressive method it recommends. So I think it's a bit of a misnomer. It recommends a method. Right. But it's really not a method in the way that we understand it. I think it can. It's incredibly flexible as long as you can justify the method in terms of how the subject sees the world and what will work for them and what fears they have. Essentially, I think you could use Sartre's existentialism as a sort of theoretical justification for many different therapeutic techniques that come from different fields. So that, I think is a pretty, pretty big point. And finally, I cite evidence in the book that. To suggest that. That psychotherapists are generally pessimistic about etherapy or electronic therapy, but clients tend to be quite optimistic about it. And I suggest that this is partly because what electronic therapy does. So in a similar situation, which I'm talking to you in an environment that I have control over, rather than so traditional therapy, I would come to the therapist's room and they would have control. It kind of redresses the power imbalance between therapist and client. And that's something that Sartre is a big advocate for. So he doesn't talk much about sort of applications of his method, but he does offer a critique of a very traditional psychoanalytic encounter. In his essay, the man with the Tape Recorder, he looks at this, a recorded script of really classical psychoanalyst session with his client, and he. And he critiques it. And one of his big points is that, you know, the power imbalance, the fact that one person isn't sitting face to face with the other person as a subject, it doesn't create the right kind of situation for helping another person come to self knowledge. Right. It's just going to sort of, in Satra's terms, give them sort of other complexes and exacerbate. Their suffering. It's not going to help them. What you need is another human perspective. And I think in this sort of real life you need to work together. So then beyond the clinic, I think it's empowering, but it shows, I guess, like if you're thinking about how can I use so a lot of books about sort of therapy, about like self help. And I don't think that Sartre's book, I feel like it does philosophical therapy. So I think that it might relieve us of like some aspects of our existential loneliness. So it might help us, you know, if we feel like our loved ones are mysterious to us and we want to give up, then it might encourage us to know them better. But maybe what it tells us is that we really need others to learn about ourselves. So it shows us that self analysis is incredibly difficult and you're probably not going to succeed in that on your own. You definitely need the help of. You need another human perspective. I also think that the, the, the Satcha's existential psychoanalysis and the consideration of its potential applications and, and particularly it's, it's sort of focus in the family idea on the imagination highlights need for more investigation into the role of the imagination in the precipitation of psychological illnesses and especially schizophrenia, which recent literature in the field of phenomenological psychiatry has construed as a pathology of the self. So I think that. And so even though Sartre's work is often cited in that literature, it's usually the earlier work and it's really the later work, the existential psychoanalytical work that I think that has more insights into that. I think it also highlights the role of the family in psychological oppression, which I think is underappreciated. So we tend to look at society, we tend to look at, you know, intersections between different structures of oppression and how they're experienced. But we don't look at like how, how these oppressive structures, societal oppressive structures are reproduced in the context of the family for understandable reasons. But I still think, you know, you can't look at people, it's going to be difficult to do. But I think more needs to be said and I think More investigation would be useful into that question, the question of the role of the family. And at the very end, I offer a really tentative suggestion. But I think that the inspiration. I think there's inspiration that could be drawn from Sartre's approach to reading things like. Like people's bodies in therapy. But I know that's we don't want to call them things, but objects in the world, like bodies and books, as analoga for selves. So what I mean by analoga is like a thing that stands for, but also calls us to imagine an imaginary object. I feel like this strategy of reading these things could be extended to any object that a subject uses to make themselves in the world, to make their mark on the world. And I think that I was reading a lot of, like, real crime at the time, so maybe this is an influence. But what I notice is that. I think what I noticed is that great criminal profilers kind of think like an existential psychoanalyst would, in the sense that when they approach the corpus delicti or the body of the crime, they don't look for personality types, but they look for evidence about specific goals and especially goals concerning how the perpetrator would like to be regarded as others. So like they. John Douglas says, you know, it's not an MO that I'm interested in. It's the signature of the perpetrator. So I think that existential psychoanalysis perhaps has this untapped potential to have very many implications so we can read about how individuals exist, express themselves on. On any object in the world potentially. And. And that can be illuminating. So. But that's my most tentative suggestion.
- [104:54]
Stephen Dozman
Yeah, the book leaves a lot for people to jump off of. So as a final question, I always like to ask, what, if anything, are you working on now? Do you have any new research directions, any new projects you're working on?
- [105:08]
Mary Edwards
Yes, yes. So my new project is on existential psychoanalysis and psychological oppression. I want to do a bit more work about understanding how psychological oppression takes place in the family. I also want to think about existential psychoanalysis as helping to understand intersectional forms of oppression, so how different structures of oppression are experienced by individuals. Like how exactly those intersections work so between two different kinds of oppression to create a completely unique form of oppression in its own right. So maybe existential psychoanalysis can help, if not remedy these forms of psychological oppression, at least understand them a bit better than we do currently. And I'm also finishing off a paper that talks about being outside ourselves and about. What it. What it means to have a self that's not inside the self. And I also, I'm looking at, like, how we create profiles online and how this is a legitimate part of ourselves and what implications that has for an existential ethics for sociality in virtual spaces and online.
- [106:52]
Stephen Dozman
Yeah, that sounds fascinating. So, in the meantime, Mary Edwards, thank you so much for coming on.
- [106:59]
Mary Edwards
Thank you very much for having me. It's been great talking to you.
- [107:14]
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