Meaning and Myth in the Study of Lives: A Sartrean Perspective
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984
Stuart Z. Charmé
Department of Philosophy and Religion
Rutgers University
CONTENTS
1. The Nature of Consciousness and the Story of the Self 5
The Reflective Construction of the Self 5
The Role of Stories in Self-Understanding 9
Language and the Self 15
The Image of One’s Life 17
2. Structures of Human Meaning and Their Interpretation 23
“Choosing” the Meaning of One’s Life 24
Conscious versus Unconscious Meaning 25
Sartre and Freud on the Nature of Memory 30
The Fundamental Project and the Totality of the Self 34
The Original Choice as Mythic Event 39
Changing One’s Fundamental Project 44
The Fundamental Project as a Literary Work 46
3. Dialectic and Totalization: New Theoretical Developments 54
Sartre’s Reevaluation of Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious 55
“Lived Experience” versus “The Unconscious” 58
The Dialectical Development of the Self 60
The Nature of “Totalization” 62
Working on the Spiral of Life 65
Sartre and Ego Psychology 67
Biological and Biographical Instincts 70
4. Existential Psychoanalysis and “True Novels” 73
Transference and the Clinical Situation 73
Living with Style 76
The Nature of Truth in Existential Psychoanalysis 78
Novelistic Elements in Freud’s Case Studies 82
A Myth to Believe In 84
5. Two Early “True Novels” 87
Baudelaire’s Fall from Grace 87
The Sacred World of Genet 92
6. Existential Psychoanalysis as Ideology and Myth 101
The Structure of Sartre Autobiography 101
The “Singular Universal” 107
Erik Erikson and Religious Biography 109
Sartre as Religious Autobiographer 113
Life Without Father: The Protean Style 117
The Retrospective Illusion 120
Sartre as Religious Biographer 123
7. “What Can We Know About a Man?” 126
“For Example, Gustave Flaubert” 126
The Myth of Flaubert’s Childhood 132
Flaubert’s Hysterical Conversion: The Crisis at Pont l’Evêque 143
8. Identity, Narrative, and Myth 149
The Fullness of Time 151
Cosmogony and the Self 152
Notes 159
Bibliography 177
Index 187