This dissertation reassesses the complex philosophical relationship between Sartre and psychoanalysis. Most scholarship on this topic focuses on Sartre’s criticisms of the unconscious as anathema both to his conception of the human psyche as devoid of any hidden depths or mental compartments and, correlatively, his account of human freedom. Many philosophers conclude that there is little common ground between Sartrean existentialism and psychoanalytic theory. I argue, on the contrary, that by shifting the emphasis from concerns about the nature of the (...) unconscious to questions about the role of imagination in psychical life, we can see that Sartre and Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalytic theory develop strikingly similar accounts of human subjectivity. After establishing the historical background of Sartre’s career-long engagement with psychoanalysis, I demonstrate the proximity of Sartre and Lacan on the nature of unconscious thought. I proceed to develop the claim that there is a homology between the concept of unconscious fantasy in psychoanalysis and the concept of the imaginary in Sartre’s philosophical corpus. Despite the concept of fantasy being one of the more structuralist-inspired aspects of Lacan’s metapsychology, I show that Sartre’s concept of the imaginary is likewise a structural feature of the psyche, one which establishes the coordinates within which the subject engages with the world. For Sartre, Freud, and Lacan fantasies form the core of subjectivity, giving form to the basic patterns of one’s character. Taken together, these three thinkers furnish a nuanced view of fantasy/the imaginary. On the one hand it is determining insofar as it is responsible for many of the psychopathologies met with in psychoanalysis. On the other hand, it is liberating insofar as the agency of the subject is implicated in the formation of fantasy. I thereby show that Sartre does not fit the caricatured picture of a radical voluntarist that is often attributed to him and that psychoanalysis can accommodate a conception of human freedom. (shrink)

This paper is inspired by one of Freud’s last notes, which is famous for its astonishing conclusion: “Psyche is extended; knows nothing about it,” which describes the perception of space as a product of the extension of the psychic apparatus, and compares it with Kant’s a priori categorie s. The Author reconstructs the historical background of this idea as part of a long discussion between Freud and his pupil Marie Bonaparte in the second half of 1938, and shows how the (...) relationship between body and psychic functions in Freud’s thought was influenced by his intellectual debt to Kant. Through an outline of the influence of Kantian philosophy on the emerging Naturphilosophie in fin de siècle Vienna, the Author aims to show the profound influence of Kantian philosophy on the development of Freu d’s thought. By committing to a modern and non -dualistic conception of the relationship between body and mind, Freud conceives an indissoluble bond between the mind and, not only the brain, but the whole body and its spatial extension. The Author concludes by identifying a close link between the aphorism of 1938 and Kantian pre-Critique thought, and, more generally, highlighting the influence of the Königsberg philosopher on the relationship between mind and body and on the perception of time and space in Freudian thought. (shrink)

An autobiographical account is offered of how the medical study of self (immunology) became a chapter in the philosophical study of human agency (from Nietzsche and Thoreau to Freud by way of Wittgenstein). Whether viewed scientifically or philosophically, several themes converge on the intractable instability of any notion of selfhood—epistemological or moral. How this problematic motivated an extended analysis of selfhood refracts the psychology of the author and his pursuit of philosophy as self‐knowledge.