Podcast Summary

Episode Overview

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Stephen Dozman
Guest: Mary Edwards, Lecturer, Cardiff University
Book Discussed: Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis: Knowing Others (Bloomsbury, 2022)
Date: November 23, 2025

This episode explores Mary Edwards’ in-depth study of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis, focusing on his evolving views regarding selfhood, sociality, and the challenge of “knowing others.” Edwards unpacks Sartre's move from early conceptions of the self to his later, seldom examined biographical and psychoanalytical works, especially the monumental study of Gustave Flaubert. The conversation covers Sartre's engagement with psychoanalysis, his rethinking of dialectical method, the progressive-regressive method for understanding lives, and implications for philosophy, psychology, and therapeutic practices.

Guest Introduction & Research Focus

[03:13–04:54]

• Mary Edwards is a philosophy lecturer focusing on feminism, French existentialism, social imaginaries, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology of social emotions like shame.
• Her research especially illuminates Sartre’s later works, which she sees as synthesizing existentialism, historical materialism, psychoanalysis, and studies of oppression to generate an advanced theory of human freedom.
• Edwards is part of a recent resurgence of interest in Sartre's underappreciated late philosophy.

Quote:
"I'm glad about [the resurgence]. I also work on the phenomenology of social emotions... and published some work on exploring psychological oppression and how Beauvoir and Sartre can make contributions to that." (Mary Edwards, 03:26)

Existentialism and Psychoanalysis: Overlap and Tension

[04:54–08:54]

• Sartre’s existentialism and psychoanalysis share concerns but diverge: While Sartre rejects the Freudian dynamic unconscious, he seeks an existential psychoanalysis rooted in meaning and choice rather than biological causality.
• Sartre’s mature philosophy moves from an individualist to a “radically social core,” recognizing that freedom is inextricably shaped by social forces.
• For philosophical inquiry:
  • Existential psychoanalysis is possible and meaningful, rejecting the Freudian dynamic unconscious.
  • It offers a deeper ontology of selfhood and action.
  • By focusing on real relationships and oppression, it reveals how structures shape individuals.

Quote:
"Sartre comes to understand that individual experience and individual freedom is always already shaped by social forces." (Mary Edwards, 05:42)

Sartre on Selfhood: The Transcendence of the Ego & Bad Faith

[08:54–12:47]

• Sartre’s early view (Transcendence of the Ego): The self is a necessary fiction—adaptive but often existentially maladaptive.
• Example: The woman terrified she could act outside her self-image illustrates the paradox that the sense of self restrains, but also potentially entraps, us.
• Societal images of self, such as “virtuous wife,” can protect from existential anxiety while impeding authentic agency.

Quote:
"There is a sense in which having a sense of self is a healthy delusion for Sartre, right? But... many self-conceptions... are existentially maladaptive because they can prevent authentic self development." (Mary Edwards, 11:01)

The Look, Shame, and Being-for-Others

[12:47–18:04]

• Sartre’s “look” and his technical sense of shame: To feel shame is to experience oneself as object for another’s consciousness—a new, social structure of consciousness.
• Famous example: The jealous lover peeping through a keyhole, suddenly aware of how they appear to another.
• Shame is both an existential revelation and an uncomfortable emotion revealing the limits of our control over how we’re perceived.

Quote:
"In moments of shame, rather than being sort of non-positionally conscious of an object... I'm conscious of myself as seen by the other... I am that thing that the other sees me as." (Mary Edwards, 14:54)

Knowing Others vs. Knowing Oneself

[18:04–23:00]

• Sartre controversially claims we’re often better positioned to know others than ourselves—others can analyze us objectively, while we interpret ourselves via a self-maintaining ideal that can distort.
• Narrative devices help us maintain self-image even when real behavior conflicts (e.g., rationalizing a failed comeback).

Quote:
"...we are each better placed to know others than ourselves, because we can see others from the outside and analyze them objectively from a distance... my idea is the more distorting one." (Edwards paraphrasing Sartre, 18:53)

Sartre on the Problem of Other Minds

[23:00–30:27]

• Sartre reframes the traditional epistemological “problem of other minds” as an ontological one.
• Shame and being-for-others show that otherness is built into our being, not something deduced from knowledge.
• We can potentially know everything meaningful about another, though the felt separation (the impossibility of experiencing another’s subjectivity) remains.

Quote:
"Our most fundamental connection with others is through being... in shame consciousness, the other is in my experience... Hence no conceptual problem." (Mary Edwards, 27:18)

Sartrean Existential Psychoanalysis vs. Freudian Analysis

[30:27–36:56]

• Despite appearances, Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis can interpret irrational behaviors (like stuttering) as meaningful choices, not products of a biological unconscious.
• Sartre’s “inferiority project” example: Both the stutterer’s impediment and their seeking analysis express the same underlying existential choice.

Quote:
"Like Freud's concept of the unconscious, Sartre's concept of bad faith can explain maladaptive... behavior. Unlike Freud, though, Sartre does not trace these behaviors to an irrational source outside consciousness..." (Mary Edwards, 32:04)

The Dialectic as Living Logic

[37:54–46:45]

• Sartre’s dialectic is not a formal method but a “living logic of history” (see Critique of Dialectical Reason).
• Analytic approaches reduce plural meanings. Sartre argues dialectical reason better grasps full human and historical complexity.
• In psychoanalysis, treating individuals as dialectical objects (rather than analytic ones) opens analysts to deeper meaning in history and subjectivity.

Quote:
"He [Sartre] thinks that histories and people... are dialectical objects, which doesn't objectify people in this degrading sense... but there's a richness lost if reason is reduced to analytic logic." (Mary Edwards, 41:03)

The Progressive-Regressive Method and Its Application

[46:45–55:04]

• Sartre’s “progressive-regressive” method in biography:
  • Regressive: Uncovering the subjective significance of biographical facts through psychoanalysis.
  • Progressive: Objectively understanding the subject’s situation and actions using Marxist techniques.
• His study of Jean Genet was discomforting for Genet, revealing psychoanalysis’ power to make someone confront themselves without therapeutic support.
• Ethical motives may have led Sartre to apply the method later to a long-dead subject, Flaubert.

Quote:
"What Sartre did is he gave Genet... insights into the self that should be provided within confidential, trusting, psychotherapeutic context." (Mary Edwards, 49:21)

Sartre’s Study of Flaubert: Case Study in Existential Psychoanalysis

[55:04–67:13]

• Sartre divides understanding Flaubert into three phases:
  1. Being: How Flaubert’s early familial experiences formed his sense of self, focusing on passivity conditioned by maternal anxiety and paternal humiliation.
  2. Comprehension: Flaubert’s internalization and creative response (e.g., literary ambition emerging from a sense of himself as the “loser who wins”).
  3. Knowing: Using Marxist tools to assess Flaubert’s objective contribution and societal position.
• Flaubert’s “hysterical” illness is understood as an existential solution rather than neurological destiny—a means of escaping imposed life paths.

Quote:
"Sartre builds a really strong case... that what Flaubert required in order to go on living was an irreversible transformation that excused him from his duty as a bourgeois boy..." (Mary Edwards, 58:49)

Flaubert, Literature, and Class: Neurotic Art and Historical Context

[67:13–73:57]

• Sartre reads Flaubert and his cohort (“post-romantics”) as aspiring to transcend class via art, but trapped in their class realities, producing “neurotic” literature with mass appeal.
• The “God’s-eye view” in Flaubert’s style expresses both personal and class neuroses, resonating with a public complicit in societal hypocrisy and self-hatred.
• After the Second Empire’s fall, Flaubert and his contemporaries were forced to reintegrate with their class and lose their “imaginary” aristocratic status, exposing existential wounds.

Quote:
"Flaubert and his whole class are neurotic... He attempts to give this kind of... God's eye view, but it's from a very specific kind of evil God perspective." (Mary Edwards, 70:52)

The Incomplete Project: Madame Bovary & Sartre’s Method

[73:57–80:23]

• Sartre's unfinished Family Idiot was to culminate in a literary critique of Madame Bovary as a verification of his psychoanalytical method.
• The fourth volume would contrast psychoanalytical interpretation with literary structure, letting the text itself “speak back” to the biographical account—testing the objectivity Sartre sought.

Quote:
"In his notes and his plans, Sartre states that he wanted to even apply structuralist methods of criticism to interpret the text." (Mary Edwards, 75:06)

Sartre’s Later Philosophy and The Imaginary

[80:23–89:41]

• Sartre’s early work The Imaginary theorized the imagination as a mode of escaping reality, mutual exclusivity with perception.
• In The Family Idiot, Sartre’s mature philosophy plays out his theory: choosing the imaginary (as Flaubert did) is a flight from real-world responsibility and transformation.
• The existential cost is that one “never stops being the family idiot” if one never faces, and chooses against, inherited roles and realities.

Notable Quote (from The Imaginary): "To prefer the imaginary is not only to prefer a richness, a beauty, a luxury as imaged to the present mediocrity... One not only flees the content of the real... One flees the very form of the real..." (Sartre, as read by Edwards, 81:26)

Implications for Therapy and Self-Knowledge

[91:54–104:53]

• Sartre advocates reading human action as meaningful “all the way down,” rejecting biological reductionism.
• The dialectical approach offers a theoretical justification for integrative psychotherapy, accommodating varied, even contradictory methods, if oriented by client’s perspective and needs.
• Therapist-client power dynamics must be addressed—Sartre prefigures critiques of classical psychoanalysis’ hierarchy and supports new, more egalitarian, approaches (such as e-therapy).
• More research is needed into the family as a site of psychological oppression and into the imagination's role in psychological disturbance and healing.

Quote:
"It's empowering... shows us that self analysis is incredibly difficult and... you definitely need the help of... another human perspective." (Mary Edwards, 98:04)

Mary Edwards’ Upcoming Work

[104:53–106:51]

• Next project: existential psychoanalysis and psychological oppression, especially families as sites of internalized oppression.
• Interest in intersectionality—how unique intersections of oppression generate distinctive experiences and possibly pathologies.
• Researching online selves and existential ethics in virtual spaces.

Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• "Sartre comes to understand that individual experience and individual freedom is always already shaped by social forces." (Mary Edwards, 05:42)
• "There is a sense in which having a sense of self is a healthy delusion for Sartre... But many self-conceptions... are existentially maladaptive because they can prevent authentic self development." (Mary Edwards, 11:01)
• "In moments of shame, rather than being sort of non-positionally conscious of an object... I'm conscious of myself as seen by the other... I am that thing that the other sees me as." (Mary Edwards, 14:54)
• "...we are each better placed to know others than ourselves, because we can see others from the outside..." (Edwards paraphrasing Sartre, 18:53)
• "Like Freud's concept of the unconscious, Sartre's concept of bad faith can explain maladaptive... behavior. Unlike Freud, though, Sartre does not trace these behaviors to an irrational source outside consciousness..." (Mary Edwards, 32:04)
• "He [Sartre] thinks that histories and people... are dialectical objects, which doesn't objectify people in this degrading sense... but there's a richness lost if reason is reduced to analytic logic." (Mary Edwards, 41:03)
• "What Sartre did is he gave Genet... insights into the self that should be provided within confidential, trusting, psychotherapeutic context." (Mary Edwards, 49:21)
• "Sartre builds a really strong case... that what Flaubert required in order to go on living was an irreversible transformation that excused him from his duty as a bourgeois boy..." (Mary Edwards, 58:49)
• "Flaubert and his whole class are neurotic... He attempts to give this kind of... God's eye view, but it's from a very specific kind of evil God perspective." (Mary Edwards, 70:52)
• "To prefer the imaginary is not only to prefer a richness, a beauty, a luxury as imaged to the present mediocrity... One flees the very form of the real..." (Sartre, as quoted by Mary Edwards, 81:26)
• "It's empowering... shows us that self analysis is incredibly difficult and... you definitely need the help of... another human perspective." (Mary Edwards, 98:04)

Conclusion

Mary Edwards articulates both the complexity and the contemporary relevance of Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis—illustrating its value for philosophy, literature, psychotherapy, and understanding oppression. She highlights philosophical, literary, and clinical implications, as well as potential for future interdisciplinary research bridging existentialism, therapy, and social critique.

This episode gives listeners a robust grasp of Sartre’s mature thought, the nuances of knowing the self and others, and the radical potential of existential psychoanalysis for both theory and practice.