Existential Psychoanalysis and Sociogeny

This article explores Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis as a phenomenological method for apprehending the fundamental project of the existent through an examination of the anonymous features of human desire. In grasping the anonymity underlying the “I want,” existential psychoanalysis seeks the meaning of freedom from a standpoint of alterity. I then analyze Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks as a work of existential psychoanalysis which hinges on his use of “sociogeny” to diagnose the alienation of Black existents. Finally, I conclude by examining the implications of a Fanonian existential psychoanalysis for anti-racism through a discussion of Michael Monahan’s critical reflections on the notion of being nonracist.

“Children’s questions” and “adult answers”: existential psychoanalysis (reflection on the book: Epstein M.N. Children’s questions: dialogues. Moscow, ArsisBooks Publishing House, 2020. 176 p.)

The article is a philosophical reflection of the author, caused by M.N. Epstein’s book “Children’s Questions: Dialogues” (Moscow, 2020). The book presents more than 300 children’s questions, covering the most diverse facets of being: from the universe as a whole to psychological, moral, social, aesthetic problems. The idea of the book is to engage children and adults in a general conversation about the most important phenomena of the universe. The author of the article weaves the material of the book into the outline of existential comprehension of truth.

«Highlighting» of the Нuman Being: an Existential Psychoanalysis of Medard Boss

The article gives a detailed view of the existential psychoanalysis of Swiss philosopher and psychologist Medard Boss. Based on the fundamental ontology of M. Heidegger, M. Boss criticizes the psychodynamic theories of the human psyche and turns to the analysis of the problem of human nature. A person, from the Boss's point of view, can only be understood as a person in the world (being-in-the-world). Through human existence, being can manifest itself as such. This is the destination of man. The basic existential category of M. Boss is the concept of "openness". The openness of existence allows us to get to know other people and respond to their own call to us. Existence is characterized by the Boss as joint, complicit, endowed with "presence", which is an ensemble of possibilities. M. Boss defines human existence through the existentials of spatiality, temporality, corporeality, eventfulness in the shared world, mood, historicity, and mortality. The realization of existence, according to the Boss, is possible only in the free choice that a person is initially endowed with, but which he may lose in the process of socialization. Blocking openness and freedom leads a person to neuroticism and illness. The article also analyzes the essence of the psychotherapeutic approach of M. Boss, which is based on the desire to understand a person through "highlighting" and openness. The article shows the opposition of existential analysis of the classical psychoanalytic tradition.

The Later Sartre

Toward the midpoint of his career, Sartre famously announced the separation from his previous work which he described as a rationalist philosophy of consciousness. Henceforth, he implied, his focus would be on free organic praxis. It would be dialectical and historical not just analytical and psychological. It seemed that he was distancing himself from classical (constitutive) Husserlian phenomenology in favor of something more fluid, more concrete like the hermeneutic phenomenology that he discovered in the Heidegger of Being and Time and was recommending as an ingredient in his Existential psychoanalysis. But classical phenomenology was not so much passed over as it was placed in abeyance to return in Sartre’s study of Gustave Flaubert, his life and times. The author proposes to chart and critique this methodological circle of applied phenomenology.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Sartre articulated a phenomenological conception the “human being-in-situation,” which forms the ontological background of a therapeutic method that he called “existential psychoanalysis.” The overall principle of existential psychoanalysis is that each agent is a totality and not a collection, and thus she expresses herself even in the most insignificant or superficial of her behaviors; its goal is to decode and interpret the behavioral patterns, so as to articulate them conceptually; its point of departure is the pre-reflective awareness of lived experience; and its overall goal is to reach not some past psychic complex, but the choice that renders meaningful how one lives—so that the analysand achieves authenticity, owning up to the projects through which she, as a situated freedom, is making herself into the person she is.

"Pierre Loves Horranges": Sartre and Malabou on the Fantastic in Philosophy

In "Pierre Loves Horranges ", a little noticed essay on Sartre's existential psychoanalysis, emerging French philosopher Catherine Malabou offers a new reading of "Doing and Having", in Sartre's Being and Nothingness for her philosophy of the fantastic. We compare Sartre and Malabou on the fantastic, focusing on their analyses of quality, viscosity and ontological difference. We argue that Malabou's reinterpretation of Sartre's symbolic schema, which serves to make visible the change and exchange in the ontological difference, is valuable for a psychoanalysis of the future, one that comes after metaphysics and deconstruction.Â