Gregory A. Trotter

Throughout his career, Jean-Paul Sartre had a contentious theoretical relationship with psychoanalysis. Nowhere is this more evident than in his criticisms of the concept of the unconscious. For him, the unconscious represents a hidden psychological depth that is anathema to the notion of human freedom. In this paper, I argue that Lacan’s conception of the unconscious-structured-like-a-language overcomes many of Sartre’s most damning objections. I demonstrate that Lacan shares with Sartre a concern to rid the psyche of hidden depths. Both thinkers therefore reject the depth psychological conception of the unconscious and arrive at strikingly similar positions on the nature of the unconscious. In this way, I show that the conceptual analogues that Sartre develops in order to avoid the psychoanalytic unconscious lead him to a position on the unconscious with which Lacan could be in agreement. This indicates that Sartre’s philosophical position is not as at odds with Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis as is typically thought.

This paper examines the status of naturalism in the philosophies of Edmund Husserl and John Dewey. Despite the many points of overlap and agreement between Husserl’s and Dewey’s philosophical projects, there remains one glaring difference, namely, the place and status of naturalism in their approaches. For Husserl, naturalism is an enemy to be vanquished. For Dewey, naturalism is the only method that can put philosophy back in touch with the concerns of human beings. This paper will demonstrate the remarkable similarities between Husserl’s and Dewey’s thought before contending that Dewey’s “naturalistic humanism” offers a conception of naturalism which is compatible with Husserlian phenomenology. Furthermore, reading these two philosophers together, this paper argues, can point the way forward to a naturalism which avoids the dismissal of the contributions made by knowing subjects carried out by dominant contemporary strains of reductive naturalism.

Paul Ricœur’s hermeneutic approach to psychoanalysis stresses the interpretation of meanings revealed via the narratives woven through the discursive exchanges between analyst and analysand. Despite the tremendous influence Ricœur’s interpretation enjoyed both in philosophy and in psychoanalysis, his approach has been subject to severe criticism by Adolf Grünbaum who argues that Freud modeled psychoanalysis on the natural sciences, and therefore it should be judged according to natural scientific standards. I argue that Grünbaum incorrectly downplays the importance of speech and language in psychoanalytic theory and practice, and moreover, that Ricœur’s approach offers important insights that deserve to be redeployed today.

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.