Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions by Sartre Jean-Paul;

Author:Sartre, Jean-Paul; [Jean-Paul Sartre]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4015210
Publisher: Routledge

II. The Psychoanalytic Theory

We cannot understand an emotion unless we look for its signification. And this, by its nature, is of a functional order. We are therefore led to speak of a finality of emotion. This finality we can grasp very concretely by the objective examination of emotional behaviour. Here there is no question at all of a more or less obscure theory about emotion-instinct based upon a priori principles or postulates. Simple consideration of the facts brings us to an empirical intuition of the finalist meaning of emotion. If we try on the other hand to fix, in a complete intuition, the essence of emotion as an interpsychological fact, we see that this finality is inherent in its structure. And all the psychologists who have reflected upon the peripheric pheric theory of James have been more or less aware of this finalistic signification — this is what Janet, for instance, decorates with the name of 'psychic'; it is this that psychologists or physiologists like Cannon and Sherrington try to reintroduce into their descriptions of the emotional facts with their hypothesis of a cerebral sensibility; it is this, again, that we find in Wallon or, more recently, among the Gestalt psychologists. This finality presupposes a synthetic organization of behaviour which could only be the 'unconscious' of psychoanalysis, or consciousness. And it would be easy enough, if need be, to produce a psychoanalytic theory of emotional finality. One could show, without great difficulty, that anger or fear are means employed by unconscious urges to achieve symbolic satisfaction, to break out of a state of unbearable tension. One could thus account for this essential characteristic of emotion — that it is 'suffered', that it surprises, develops of itself according to its own laws, and that conscious efforts cannot modify its course to any very appreciable extent. This dissociation between the organized character of emotion — the organizing theme being relegated to the unconscious — and its ineluctable character, which it would not have for the consciousness of the subject, would render something like the same service in the psychological domain as the Kantian distinction between the empirical and the noumenal does in the domain of metaphysic.

It is certainly true that psychoanalysis was the first to lay the emphasis upon the signification of psychic facts: that is, it was the first to insist upon the fact that every state of consciousness stands for something other than itself. For example: this clumsy theft perpetrated by a sexual-obsessive is not simply a clumsy theft. It refers to something else from the moment that we begin to consider it in the psychoanalyst's way as a phenomenon of self-punishment. Then it refers to the primary complex for which the patient is seeking to justify himself through self-punishment. We can see that a psychoanalytic theory of the emotions would be possible. Does it not already exist? There is that woman with a phobia for laurel. If she sees a clump of laurels, she faints. The psychoanalyst discovers that in her childhood there was a painful sexual incident associated with laurel bushes.

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