In 1958, John Huston asked Jean-Paul Sartre to write a script for a movie about Sigmund Freud. The Freud Scenario, found among Sartre's papers after his death, is the result. A fluent portrait of a man engaged in a personal and intellectual struggle that was to change the course of twentieth-century thought, the script was too challenging and - at a projected seven hours - too long for a Hollywood audience. The script remains an unrealized classic and a testament to two of the most influential minds in modern history.
In 1958, the US director John Huston asked Jean-Paul Sartre to write a scenario for a film about Sigmund Freud. Huston wanted Sartre to concentrate on the conflict-ridden period of Freud’s life when he abandoned hypnosis and invented psychoanalysis. The Freud Scenario, discovered in Sartre’s papers after his death, is the result—a deft portrait of a man engaged in a personal and intellectual struggle that would prove a turning point in twentieth-century thought. Sartre did not regard this script as a diversion from his larger intellectual project. Freud’s preoccupations with female hysteria and the father relationship touched on major themes in his own work, and Loser Wins, The Family Idiot and Words, some of Sartre’s most celebrated publications, are all in some way derived from his work for Huston. Written for a Hollywood audience, The Freud Scenario demonstrates that, in addition to a towering intellect, Sartre enjoyed a genuine popular touch. Already widely acclaimed in France, The Freud Scenario stands as a valuable testament to two of the most influential minds in modern history.
From Proust to Beckett, from Blanchot to Derrida from Freud to Lacan, and from Lévi-Strauss to René Girard, all of our theories of modernity have been predicated upon a nostalgia for the real. In this lively and perceptive diagnosis of the malaise of contemporary theorists, Josué Harari interprets the French Enlightenment in terms of the relationship between theory and the imaginary, and explores the paradox by which theories that purport to describe the real lack any dimension of reality. Through readings of texts by some of the progenitors of influential modem theories, Harari explores the working strategies of the imaginary. In particular, he illuminates the founding moment, an instant of personal crisis for the author, during which a theory is infused by a fictional scenario: Montesquieu's "phantasm" of the body, resulting in his theory of government; Rousseau's narcissistic delirium in Emile, resulting in his theory of education; the theory of psychoanalysis, resulting from Freud's unconscious motives for choosing the Oedipal theory over the seduction theory of neurosis; and the theory of structural anthropology, generated by a psychodrama in Tristes Tropiques which Harari reads as a symptom of Lévi-Strauss's anguish when he is confronted with reality. Two striking chapters on Sade at the center of the book reveal the operation of the theoretical imaginary in libertine discourse. Scenarios of the Imaginary will find a wide audience among students and scholars of French literature, particularly of the eighteenth century, and of contemporary French thought, and among comparativists, literary theorists, anthropologists, and historians.
In the famous conclusion to Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre announced that he would devote his next philosophical work to moral problems. Although he worked on this project in the late 1940s, Sartre never completed it to his satisfaction, and it remained unpublished until after his death in 1980. Presented here for the first time in English, Notebooks for an Ethics is Sartre's attempt to articulate a moral philosophy. In the Notebooks he addresses any number of themes and topics relevant to an effort to formulate a concrete and revolutionary socialist ethics, among them the differences between force and violence, the relationship of means and ends, and the relationship of oppression and alienation. Most important, he tries to show that there can be an authentic mutual recognition among free individuals where no one steals another's freedom. While remaining committed to the basic principles of Being and Nothingness, Sartre here seeks to locate the foundation for action in history and society. The Notebooks thus form an important bridge between the early existentialist Sartre and the later Marxist social thinker of the Critique of Dialectical Reason. Sartre grapples anew with such central issues as "authenticity" and the relation of alienation and freedom to moral values. In dealing with fundamental modes of relating to the Other, among them violence, entreaty, demand, appeal, refusal, and revolt, he highlights the notions of conversion and creation as they figure in the necessary transition from individualism to historical consciousness. The Notebooks themselves are complemented here by two appendixes, one on "the good and subjectivity", the other on the problem of blacks in theUnited States as a case study of oppression.
“A thrilling story of seduction, betrayal, and loss, Freud’s Mistress will titillate fans of Memoirs of a Geisha and The Other Boleyn Girl.”—Booklist In fin-de-siècle Vienna, it was not easy for a woman to find fulfillment both intellectually and sexually. But many believe that Minna Bernays was able to find both with one man—her brother-in-law, Sigmund Freud. At once a portrait of two sisters—the rebellious, independent Minna and her inhibited sister, Martha—and of the compelling and controversial doctor who would be revered as one of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers, Freud’s Mistress is a novel rich with passion and historical detail and “a portrait of forbidden desire [with] a thought-provoking central question: How far are you willing to go to be happy?”* *Publishers Weekly
In March of 1980, just a month before Sartre's death, Le Nouvel Observateur published a series of interviews, the last ever given, between the blind and debilitated philosopher and his young assistant, Benny Levy. Readers were scandalized and denounced the interviews as distorted, inauthentic, even fraudulent. They seemed to portray a Sartre who had abandoned his leftist convictions and rejected his most intimate friends, including Simone de Beauvoir. This man had cast aside his own fundamental beliefs in the primacy of individual consciousness, the inevitability of violence, and Marxism, embracing instead a messianic Judaism. No, Sartre's supporters argued, it was his interlocutor, the ex-radical, the orthodox, ultra-right-wing activist who had twisted the words and thought of an ailing Sartre to his own ends. Or had he? Shortly before his death, Sartre confirmed the authenticity of the interviews and their puzzling content. Over the past fifteen years, it has become the task of Sartre scholars to unravel and understand them. Presented in this fresh, meticulous translation, the interviews are framed by two provocative essays from Benny Levy himself, accompanied by a comprehensive introduction from noted Sartre authority Ronald Aronson. Placing the interviews in proper biographical and philosophical perspective, Aronson demonstrates that the thought of both Sartre and Levy reveals multiple intentions that taken together nevertheless confirm and add to Sartre's overall philosophy. This absorbing volume at last contextualizes and elucidates the final thoughts of a brilliant and influential mind. Jean-Paul Sartre (1906-1980) was offered, but declined, the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964. His many works of fiction, drama, and philosophy include the monumental study of Flaubert, The Family Idiot, and The Freud Scenario, both published in translation by the University of Chicago Press.
And he details the way Freud's myth corresponds to the unconscious fantasy structure of the obsessional personality - a style of personality dynamics Paul sees as essential to maintaining the bureaucratic institutions that comprise Western civilization's most distinctive features.
Sixteen-year-old Jacques Rebière is living a humble life in rural France, studying butterflies and frogs by candlelight in his bedroom. Across the Channel, in England, the playful Thomas Midwinter, also sixteen, is enjoying a life of ease-and is resigned to follow his father's wishes and pursue a career in medicine. A fateful seaside meeting four years later sets the two young men on a profound course of friendship and discovery; they will become pioneers in the burgeoning field of psychiatry. But when a female patient at the doctors' Austrian sanatorium becomes dangerously ill, the two men's conflicting diagnosis threatens to divide them--and to undermine all their professional achievements. From the bestselling author of Birdsong comes this masterful novel that ventures to answer challenging questions of consciousness and science, and what it means to be human.
