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Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida
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Excerpt from Chapter 2: Jean Paul-Sartre: Psychoanalysis on the Shadowy Banks of the Danube
It was the film director John Huston who in 1958 gave Sartre the chance to break out of his own system. When Huston commissioned Sartre to write a screenplay on the life and work of Sigmund Freud, elements of psychoanalysis had already found their way into the movies. But Hollywood’s psychoanalysis was not that of the psychoanalytic community in the United States, even though, as emigrants from old Europe, many American film directors had a shared background with the psychoanalysts who were members of the International Psychoanalytical Association.
Exile had not, however, had the same effect on the two groups. Whereas the therapists had chosen to integrate into the American health system (which obliged them to pursue medical careers and become servants of a hygienist ideal), the filmmakers had adopted Freud’s doctrine and transformed it into a powerful tool for criticizing the ideals of the American way of life. So it came about that Freudianism was made to serve the interests of an ideal of society on one hand and was used to criticize its adaptive aberrations or to reconnect with the high tradition of European psychoanalysis on the other. Examples of the latter would include Elia Kazan, who drew a daunting portrait of the puritan America of the 1930s in Splendor in the Grass, and Charlie Chaplin, who in Limelight re-created the London of his childhood in telling the story of an amorous dancer who is cured of her paralysis by a clown with a middle European appearance.
Though he was American born, John Huston shared this dissenting and nostalgic ideal. His purpose in making a biography of Freud was to highlight the original moment of discovery. This is why, wishing to criticize the official psychoanalysis of American psychiatrists, he turned to Sartre, a man of the left and a philosopher of freedom not known for indulging in Freudian hagiography. Transformed into a Sartrean hero, Huston’s onscreen Freud thus had the potential to be a true adventurer of modern science, combined with a tragic hero of sorts straight from the pages of No Exit.
At the end of 1958 Sartre sent Huston a ninety-five-page synopsis, which led to a firm contract. A few months later he completed a new version, but alas, it was too long to be filmed. Then in October 1959 Sartre traveled with Arlette El Kaïm to Huston’s home in Ireland, so they could work together on a final shooting script. The encounter turned into a bout of intellectual pugilistics. Incapable of either mutual understanding or mutual respect, the two men, so alike and yet so different, kept trying to dominate each other, until the final misunderstanding was hatched: a superb but unfilmable screenplay, and a fascinating failure of a film.
Huston saw Sartre as a man completely unable to listen to anyone else, for whom the body did not exist:
"He made notes—of his own words—as he talked. There was no such thing as a conversation with him; he talked incessantly, and there was no interrupting him. You’d wait for him to catch his breath, but he wouldn’t. The words came out in an absolute torrent.... Sartre was a little barrel of a man, and as ugly as a human being can be. His face was both bloated and pitted, his teeth were yellowed and he was wall-eyed. He wore a gray suit, black shoes, white shirt, tie and vest. His appearance never changed. He’d come down in the morning in this suit, and he would still be wearing it the last thing at night. The suit always appeared to be clean, and his shirt was clean, but I never knew if he owned one gray suit or several identical gray suits.... One morning he came down and his cheek was swollen. He had a bad tooth. I said, “We’d best get you to Dublin with that.” “No, no. Let’s just go in to Galway.” I didn’t know any dentist in Galway, but that didn’t matter to him. So we made an appointment with a local dentist and took him in.
He was out in a few minutes, having had the tooth pulled. A tooth more or less made no difference in Sartre’s cosmos. The physical world he left to others; his was of the mind."
As for Sartre, the gaze he cast on Huston’s world in his letters to Simone de Beauvoir was the ferocious one of a body snatcher:
"Through a number of similar rooms wanders a tall romantic, sad and isolated: our friend Huston, perfectly vacant, literally incapable of speaking to those whom he has invited.... What a lot of babble there is here! Everyone has his own complex, ranging from masochism to animal fierceness. Don’t imagine, though, that we are in hell. It’s more like an enormous cemetery, full of corpses with their frozen complexes.... The inner landscape of my boss, the great Huston, is a lot like that: heaps of ruins, abandoned houses, plots of wasteland, swamps, a thousand traces of human presence. But the man himself has emigrated, I have no idea where. He isn’t even gloomy: he is empty, except in his moments of infantile vanity when he dons a red tuxedo, or goes horseback riding (not very well), or reviews his paintings and directs his workers. It is impossible to hold his attention for five minutes: he has lost the capacity for work, and he avoids reasoning."
Nevertheless, Sartre and Huston were thinking along the same lines about what to feature in the life of Freud. Both wished to illustrate the groundbreaking moment when a scientist takes the step that will make him the founder of a new science. In Freud’s case this was the moment when he gave hysteria the status of a true neurosis by reintroducing into its etiology the question of sexuality, which Charcot had blanked out and detached from simulation, in order to make hysteria a functional illness. The foregrounding of sexual etiology guided Freud toward the discovery of an unconscious independent of consciousness and nonpsychological in nature, down a path opened up by the interpretation of dreams and the elaboration of the notions of fantasy and transference. This feat was not accomplished at one stroke, and Freud’s advance toward the truth was continuously disturbed by the shadows of error. As Sartre said: “To arrive at correct ideas, you have to begin by explaining false ideas, and that is a long process.... Which we tried to do—and that’s what interested Huston above all, not when Freud’s theories had already made him famous but the time when, at around age thirty, he had got things completely wrong and his ideas had led him to a desperate impasse.”
To flesh out his protagonist, Sartre put to work all the knowledge of psychoanalytic culture that he had acquired since writing Being and Nothingness. But he also added three new sources previously unknown to him: the letters of Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, published in French in 1956 under the title La naissance de la psychanalyse , the Studies on Hysteria that appeared in the same year (comprising Josef Breuer’s account of the case of Anna O.), and finally the first volume in English of the monumental Freud biography by Ernest Jones, from which Michèle Vian had read him a number of chapters while she was working on the French translation. Through these works he became acquainted with Freud’s complex relationships with three of the major figures in his intellectual formation: Theodor Meynert, Breuer, and Fliess. He also discovered two versions of the story of Anna O., Breuer’s and especially Jones’s, which assigned this female hysteric a role that became legendary in the history of the psychoanalytic movement. Additionally there was the episode of Freud’s meeting with Martin Charcot at la Salpêtrière....
Sartre wanted Marilyn Monroe to play Cecily [a fictionalized version of Anna O.] in the movie. She would indeed have been magni.cent starring opposite Montgomery Clift as Freud. Huston had already cast them together in The Misfts. In some respects the relation between Marilyn Monroe and psychoanalysis could itself have been made into a film focused on what Freudianism became in American society in the 1950s rather than on the nocturnal splendor of its origins. At the same time that John Huston was trying to bring to life a Freud divided between existential doubt and access to the truth, his heirs who had immigrated to the United States had turned into servants of a psychology of normality utterly unconnected to the great Viennese drama reinvented by Sartre.
Marilyn Monroe was first analyzed by Margaret Hohenberg beginning in 1954, at a time when she was using and abusing sedatives and sleeping pills freely provided by various doctors. Three years later Marilyn decided to try a different analyst’s couch. She had just married Arthur Miller, who was himself in analysis with the brilliant Rudolph Loewenstein, and she was advised by Anna Freud to enter analysis with Marianne Kris.
Personal history and family genealogy conspired to make Marianne Kris the daughter, so to speak, of psychoanalysis, and the direct heir of the saga of its origins that Huston wanted to film. Her father, Oskar Rie, had been Freud’s partner in the game of tarot in Vienna, and her mother was the sister of Ida Bondy, Breuer’s former patient and Fliess’s wife. Settling first in London and then in New York, Marianne Kris had become the guardian of the official historiography of Freudianism in the 1950s.
There is no doubt that her influence caused Marilyn to refuse to play the role of Cecily, although she said she was delighted to be offered the part by Huston. The fact is that Anna Freud disapproved of the project and had let her friend Kris know as much. Overwhelmed by the difficulty of Marilyn’s treatment, and evidently incapable of managing it correctly, Marianne Kris asked Ralph Greenson, who had settled in Santa Monica after his training on the couch of Otto Fenichel, to take charge of Marilyn during his visits to Hollywood. Greenson accepted and immediately sent her to one of his colleagues to receive prescription medicines by injection; nor did he hesitate to give her strong doses of psychoactive drugs of every kind himself. Characterizing her as “borderline, a paranoid drug addict, and a schizophrenic,” he tried to convince her to give up the acting profession and her love affairs. Worse, he convinced her to hire as her housekeeper a certain Eunice Murray, a woman with ties to the Jehovah’s Witnesses who soon began administering so called substitution treatments to Marilyn.
Drug-dependent and subjected to pressure from various psychoanalysts, themselves in difficulty and terrified at the thought that she might commit suicide, Marilyn drifted into a disastrous state of seclusion that led her to suicide. In August 1962, two months after the tragedy, Anna Freud consoled Greenson, who had sunk into depression: “I am horribly saddened about Marilyn Monroe. I know exactly what you are feeling.... One tries and tries in one’s head to think how one might have done better, and that leaves a terrible feeling of defeat. But you should know that in these cases I think that we really are defeated by something stronger than we are, compared to which analysis, with all its powers, is too feeble a weapon. When I read in the papers that she had lived with twelve foster families, it made me think of the children in the concentration camps whom we try to treat in our clinic.”
Pondering now the impression of strangeness that would have resulted from the onscreen interaction of the two “sacred monsters” of the Hollywood star system, Montgomery Clift and Marilyn Monroe—both haunted by the meanderings of a deadly destiny—one can’t help but think that, if the actress’s psychoanalysts were unable to forestall her desire for death, they might at least have avoided getting so far lost in the arcana of official history as to be blind to the importance of Huston’s project.
As for Sartre, he did not lack boldness, since he dared to situate the scene during which Freud renounced his seduction theory partly in a bordello and partly on a bank of the Danube. In the screenplay, Cecily wanders through Vienna after having made accusations of rape against her father. She goes into a bordello, where Freud comes looking for her in order to take her home in a carriage. It is then that she tells him of the true memory she had repressed since childhood. One day, she relates, she surprised her father embracing her governess and fell downstairs. But when Freud, still believing in the validity of his own theory, shows his incredulity, she threatens to throw herself into the river. Only then does Freud, in a dramatic volte-face, confess his own error to her in turn. Here is the scene:
Freud: Cecily, you never wanted to slander your father. It was I who forced you to it. You resisted me for as long as you could.
Cecily: Why did you force me? freud: Because I had deceived myself.
The veritable history of this true “scene” of renunciation is found in the correspondence of the real Freud with the real Fliess. It took place in written form, did not occur between a bordello and the Danube, and did not bring in the challenge of the female condition in so direct a manner. Yet the violence of the theoretical gesture, with the avowal made by one man to another in the privacy of written communication, is analogous to the violence of the nocturnal banquet imagined by Sartre, in which the confession is extracted by a woman from a man, who in this way frees her from her fetters by inventing transference.
Here, in the translation of Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, are some portions of the letter of 21 September 1897—called the “equinox letter”—so often commented upon by historians of Freudianism:
"I no longer believe in my neurotica [theory of the neuroses]. This is probably not intelligible without an explanation; after all, you yourself found credible what I was able to tell you. So I will begin historically [and tell you] where the reasons for disbelief came from. The continual disappointment in my efforts to bring a single analysis to a real conclusion; the running away of people who for a period of time had been most gripped [by analysis]; the absence of the complete successes on which I had counted; the possibility of explaining to myself the partial successes in other ways, in the usual fashion—this was the first group. Then the surprise that in all cases, the father, not excluding my own, had to be accused of being perverse—the realization of the unexpected frequency of hysteria, with precisely the same conditions prevailing in each, whereas surely such widespread perversions against children are not very probable.... Then, third, the certain insight that there are no indications of reality in the unconscious, so that one cannot distinguish between truth and fiction that has been cathected with affect.... Fourth, the consideration that in the most deep-reaching psychosis the unconscious memory does not break through, so that the secret of childhood experiences is not disclosed even in the most confused delirium.... [T]o be cheerful is everything! I could indeed feel quite discontent. The expectation of eternal fame was so beautiful, as was that of certain wealth, complete independence, travels, and lifting the children above the severe worries that robbed me of my youth. Everything depended upon whether or not hysteria would come out right. Now I can once again remain quiet and modest, go on worrying and saving. A little story from my collection occurs to me: 'Rebecca, take off your gown; you are no longer a bride.'"
The version of this letter available to Sartre in 1958 is as incomplete as the account of it given by Jones. For one thing, it omits the passage in which Freud incriminates his father, who had died eleven months previously, and the whole concluding part in which he details, not without humor, the glorious situation that would have been his had his false theory been proven accurate. Now, Sartre reestablishes the truth in an almost excessive fashion. Making wonderful use of chronology—the death of Jakob precedes Freud’s abandonment of the seduction theory—he shows that Freud renounced his error too late to have had time to make peace with his father, upon whom the famous suspicion of seduction still weighs. So the only solution remaining for him is a “Freudian” one: posthumous reconciliation with the symbolic figure of paternity, which will lead him to elaborate the idea of the superego.
In other words, in the screenplay Sartre was playing the card of a Freudian Freud against himself, the better to demonstrate that in Sartrean terms the acceptance of such a figure and such a notion is impossible. Doubtless it was because he had invented this Freud, conforming rigorously to the reality of the history of Freudianism, that he freed himself from the doctrinal superego of his own existential Freudo-Marxism, which was hampering his writing, his autobiography, and the completion of his great work on Flaubert.
The Sartrean act of liberation could then be expanded in The Words, in the course of a vehement diatribe by the narrator against his father literally marked by Freud’s action in renouncing the seduction theory. But instead of a reconciliation with the symbolic figure of the dead father, this act leads the narrator to a radical anti-Freudianism that, in the form of a refusal of the superego and its theory, expresses the major thesis of Sartre’s philosophy with complete coherence: the access to liberty lies in refusal of the moral law and the annihilation of oneself in the other.
"The death of Jean-Baptiste was the central moment of my life. It put my mother back in fetters and gave me liberty. There is no good father, that is the rule; we ought not to reproach human beings, but rather the bond of parenthood, which is rotten. There is nothing better than making children; having them is a great iniquity. Had he lived, my father would have lain upon me at his full length, and would have crushed me. By chance he died young. Amid all the Aeneases bearing Anchises on their backs I pass from one bank to the other, alone and hating these invisible progenitors who sit astride their sons throughout their lifetimes. I left behind me a man who died young, who did not have time to be my father, and who today might be my child. Was this a good or an evil? I do not know; but I willingly accept the verdict of an eminent psychoanalyst: I have no superego."
A reading of Nausea first, then The Words, and finally the Freud screenplay shows clearly that, if Sartre found a way to link the philosophy of concepts and the philosophy of the subject, he also found a way to embody in fiction a conceptuality that would never have attained such incandescence if it had only been conveyed in works of pure philosophy. But doubtless Sartre also had to be a philosopher to be capable in this way of making intimate obsessions that are never the pure illustration of a system of thought leap forth in his works of fiction. In The Words he wrote: “I was Roquentin, I depicted the warp of my own life in him, with no softening. At the same time I was myself, the chosen one, the analyst of hell. . . . Phony to the core, and mystified, I joyfully wrote about our unhappy condition. Dogmatic, I doubted all save that I was the chosen one of doubt. I restored with one hand what I destroyed with the other, and I regarded uneasiness as the guarantee of my security. I was happy.”
In this respect, this paradoxical and uneasy autobiography is one of the high points of twentieth-century literature. It pulverizes the rhetoric of intimate recital and of what is today called by the flat term “autofiction.“ With its purified and almost mystical style, this text, written entirely in the passé simple verb tense, as if the narrator were regarding his own birth, life, and death from the vantage point of the hell in which he has sunk his pen, or from that childhood which he exposes to public ridicule—this text impresses itself on the reader’s unconscious, causing a symphony of signifiers to vibrate inside him, penetrating him in a strange and almost vampiresque fashion.
Sartre’s Words is somehow fragments of memory, or portions of books, that direct every subject back to whatever consciousness she may have of her relation to herself and the world. And in this sense, in its quest for a ceaselessly interrupted subjectivity, this Sartrean autobiography, stripped clean of any tincture of the novelistic, bears a striking resemblance to a Freudian odyssey, with its origins in dreaming, its destiny in language, and its narrative support in nothingness. It is also the prototype of every first-person recital. This is why no one can read it without immediately yielding to the desire for a writing of the self repeated to infinity.
An astonishing reversal of “the childhood of a leader” and a fantastic exorcism!Like many of Sartre’s projects, the Freud screenplay remained unfinished, primarily because Sartre and Huston were unable to produce a collaborative work. Moreover, there exist several versions of the text, and many still-unpublished drafts. The main reason, though, is that, once he withdrew his name from the film credits, Sartre tended to regard this interminable work as something of a castoff, good for nothing but a boost to his bank balance. When he was asked “were there works that you wrote primarily to earn money?” Sartre replied: “There were. I can think of one in any case. It was the Freud screenplay I wrote for Huston. I had just found out that I had no more money. I think it was when my mother had given me twelve million old francs to pay my taxes. They were paid, and I had no more debts, but I didn’t have a sou either. Just then I was told that Huston wished to see me. He came round one morning and said, ‘I am offering you 25 million to collaborate on a film about Freud.’ I said yes and I got 25 million.”
From the point of view of the history of psychoanalysis, the Sartrean exorcism had the effect of desacralizing the body of Freud. Reading this screenplay twenty years after it was written (unfortunately it was published posthumously) and a century after the birth of Sartre, one is struck by the way it manages to free the real Freud from the rigid repetition of official history. If examples are needed, I could cite the admirable scenes in which Sartre makes the protagonist confront the hysterical woman’s desire and then the Sartrean demon of transgression, or his portrayal of the moment at which Freud renounces sexual desire in order to gratify one stronger still: the desire to elucidate the sexual causes of desire. Never had any commentator on the Viennese saga succeeded so well in eroticizing the gesture with which Freud advances from error toward truth.
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