A Taste of Facility a Sartrean Look At Psychiatry
Authors: Sachdev P.S. 
Published: January 2008

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1979) was a French intellectual, philosopher and literateur who stood on a common platform of philosophy and psychology. His importance to us lies not only in his great impact on twentieth century thought, but also because he outlined a fairly elaborate system of descriptive psychology as a prelude to his ontological description of the world. His treatises on 'Imagination' and 'Emotions' are classics in the existential tradition. His novels and plays are based on the same themes as concern a psychiatrist in his daily clinic. His principal text of philosophy, 'Being and Nothingness', contains a whole chapter on 'Existential Psychoanalysis'. Not surprisingly, therefore, he has had a significant impact on our approach to mental patients.

With the increasing emphasis on the scientific method, the philosophical moorings of medical science became more and more blurred. The result was an impersonal view of the diseased. Thus during this period it had become common practice to view human beings as objects worthy of study from the disease view point. As a result the disease and its causation became more important than the diseased person himself. It must be granted that progress in medicine often results from this passion with causation. However, a causal view of phenomena presupposes that clarity about the phenomena exists among us. Prior to the problem of establishing the etiological basis of a disease entity, there is the problem of uncovering the phenomenal character of the disease in question. This task may not be formidable in most branches of medicine, but in the case of psychiatry the disease entities are human realities themselves expressed in the life activities of fellow-men.

This is where empirical psychology breaks down and why some psychiatrists tend to resort to the existential-ontological departure. The point is to liberate man from the speculative subject-object relationship and to stress his uniqueness and individuality. This movement started with Binswanger (1881-1966) who was the first psychoanalyst to use Heidegger's principles to criticize Freud (4,5). He was in the quest of a genuine psychology (7). There have been other psychiatrists of repute who emulated his example. Some prominent psychologists who have been influenced to varying degrees by existentialism are Allport, Angyal, Fromm, Goldstein, Maslow and Rogers (10). At the same time, existential philosophers have themselves been keenly interested in psychology and psychiatry. Karl Jaspers began life as a psychiatrist and his first major work was his General Psychopathology' (12). Jean-Paul Sartre has been keenly interested in psychology and has written a lot on the subject (17). Admittedly, Sartre's impact on psychiatry and psychotherapy has not been as significant as on literature and politics (7). But he has, along with Heidegger, provided a unification which has helped in the understanding of the normal human mind as well as the abnormal one.

The series of steps Sartre took towards his totalization of human experience are of great interest to a psychologist because of his investigation of psychic phenomena in the process. This detailed evaluation of individual phenomena is, he says, the only way we can make psychology progress. His insistence on the unambiguous description of such phenomena is in the great Husserlian tradition (28).

Here, we shall take a look at the series of steps Sartre took towards his composite view of human psychology.