Sartre, Developmental Psychology and Burgeoning Self-Awareness: Ricocheting from Being to Nothingness

Abstract

While the genesis of self-awareness at approximately 18 months old is a dramatic landmark in human development, there is at this stage no explicit awareness on the toddler's part of his/her truly standing apart from others. Only much later does a distinct sense of self shift into focus, and here Sartre provides us with a compelling theory of a first reflective experience of self-awareness. He explains this phenomenon by emphasizing a violent shift in ontological status, one in which the pre-adolescent child is precipitated from functional unity with a primary caregiver to an individuated state involving self-awareness as privative, i.e. where the child becomes aware of existing only in the form of not-being-the-adult. For Sartre this new experience of self is not therefore positive but rather formal or empty; there has in fact been a psychic transition, from being to nothingness. In addition, Sartre also states that all children first explicitly experience themselves in this fashion. These claims find support in the work of developmental psychologist Margaret Mahler. In fact, in spite of the vast developmental discrepancies between toddler and pre-adolescent child, given the appropriate environmental triggers privative subjectivity will be shown to involve a regression to the much earlier rapprochement stage of development described by Mahler.

Notes

1 See Jean Piaget, The Child's Conception of Physical Causality. For the topic of self-awareness in the child that makes very comprehensive use of the literature see P. Rochat, “Five Levels of Self-Awareness”.

2 It is important not to confuse this initial, explicit sense of self with the ego, a hypostatized psychic construct that Sartre so roundly criticizes in both The Transcendence of the Ego and in Being and Nothingness. See H. Barnes, “Sartre's Ontology”. Also A. Mirvish, “Sartre on the Ego”.

3 In addition to the material mentioned in note 1, see also E. Bates, “Language about Me and You”. For a view of self-awareness and the baby involving the body, see Arlette Streri, “La Connaissance de Soi Chez le Bébé”.

4 Sartre, Baudelaire; Sartre, Saint Genet, comédien et martyr; Sartre, Les mots. I have kept to the original translations except for some small changes. References are to the English texts in what follows.

5 When it comes to both Baudelaire and St. Genet, Sartre certainly has his share of detractors. For instance, Blood claims that although the historical details of Baudelaire's life are adequately stated, Sartre fundamentally ignores him as a major, creative literary figure. Blood,  Baudelaire and the Aesthetics of Bad Faith, 57 ff. Jackson contends that while Sartre emphasizes bad faith as crucial for understanding Baudelaire's behaviour, he does not adequately explain this phenomenon. Jackson, “Charles Baudelaire, a Life in Writing”. Stewart and McGregor set out to show that Sartre's history of Genet is inaccurate. Stewart and McGregor, Genet: A Biography of Deceit. Ringer claims that Sartre knew that the details provided by Genet about his own childhood were false but that he proceeded to use them since “the story … [fitted] the bill for a perfect existentialist example of an author who, through writing, was to obtain his own freedom” (Ringer, St. Genet Decanonized, 28). As my interest with the two biographies centres on what Sartre has to say about the genesis of self-awareness, the concern is not with historical interpretation but rather with whether Sartre's theory holds consistently as a philosophical and psychological theory.

6 André Gide, Si le grain ne meurt. References are to the English edition.

7 Reference here is to the middle-class projection of evil onto the older Genet, the homosexual. However, Sartre's point stands mutatis mutandis for middle-class hatred of the supposedly degenerate qualities found in all the lower classes, the child Genet included.

8 See A. Mirvish, “Freud Contra Sartre”; “Gestalt Mechanisms and Believing Beliefs”; “Sartre on Constitution”. Also Katharine Morris, “Sartre on Consciousness”.

9 See Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 182, 283, 317, 319. These Gestalt principles, initially used to describe perceptual experience, were later put to clinical use by psychologists like Fritz Perls. See his The Gestalt Approach and Eye Witness to Therapy.

10 Sartre writes: “Children played in the Luxembourg Gardens … They would brush against me without seeing me … I had met my true judges, my contemporaries, my peers, and their indifference condemned me … Just a little shrimp in whom no one was interested” (The Words, 84–85).

11 Here we see the beginning of Sartre's emphasis on how the individual becomes shaped by an interiorization of the environment and culture, subsequently to be exteriorized idiosyncratically. This dialectical interplay involving psychic and social forces finds full expression later in The Family Idiot, Sartre's monumental study of Flaubert (1971–1972).

12 Sartre, Cahiers pour une morale. Henceforth NE. References are the English edition with some small changes in the translation.

13 In NE, references are to children in the age bracket of the three characters discussed above. With Lissa Rechtin, I have discussed Sartre's analyses of parent–child relationships, using the material from the Notebooks, in “Positive Conflict and the Incipient Self” and “Sartre and Kohut”.

14 See the articles mentioned in the previous note.

15 For positive conflict, note the articles in note 13, plus A. Mirvish, “Sartre and the Problem of Other (Embodied) Minds”.

16 For Sartre on neurosis, see B. Cannon, Sartre and Psychoanalysis, Chapters 3 and 4. Also H. Barnes, Sartre and Flaubert, Part I, Chapter 4. See also A. Mirvish, “Sartre, Existential Psychoanalysis and the Nature of Neurosis”.

17 See A. Mirvish, “Death, Contingency and the Genesis of Subjectivity”.

18 Mahler's views have been criticized by a subgroup of Attachment Theorists. See: I. Blom and A. Bergman, “Observing Development”, and Karlen Lyons-Ruth, “Rapprochement or Approchement”. Here see also Susan Coates, “Bowlby and Mahler: Their Lives and Theories”. In this debate, when it comes to self-awareness and the toddler, it seems to me that Mahler wins although the topic goes beyond the scope of this article.

19 Margaret S. Mahler, Separation–Individuation, 67. Henceforth SPM.

20 Margaret Mahler, Fred Pine and Anne Bergman, The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant, 95. Henceforth TBI.

21 Peter Zachar, “Child Development and the Regulation of Affect”, 213.

22 For non-thetic consciousness in Sartre see A. Mirvish, “Sartre and the Lived Body”.

23 Post successful rapprochement stage development, Mahler talks about an emotional object constancy the child develops between two and a half and three years, crucially important because it allows the child to “ … explore the world with the greatest sense of safety and cohesiveness, even in the face of threats. Having internalized the good mother, the child's ability to function without her immediate availability is optimized … ”. The successful development of emotional object constancy allows the child successfully to experience “ … greater curiosity, frustration, tolerance, and flexibility” (The Cauldron of Consciousness, 213). Hence, for example, “ … children in Mahler's study who had successfully internalized emotional object constancy chose to spend more time in the toddler room with other children, rather than being in the infant room where they knew their mothers were watching.” (213)

24 See K. Watkins, Parent–Child Attachment, 105–07. As noted, there are sharp theoretical differences between Mahler and some Attachment Theorists on childhood development. However, what is significant here are empirical observations showing how the adult, post rapprochement stage, still plays a vital role by helping the child to cope with the world. For Sartre's view of the adult as vital intermediary for the growing child, see K. Anderson, “The Future in the Child”.

25 For analyses of Sartre's neurotic behaviour as an adult, see B. O'Donohoe, “Living with Mother” and Jean-Pierre Boulé, “Sartre and Women”.

26 See the last entry, note 16.

27 See the articles mentioned in note 13 and A. Mirvish, “Sartre: The Ontology of Interpersonal Relations”.

28 For the adult case see A. Mirvish “Sartre on Friendship.

29 See A. Mirvish, “Sartre, Fraternity and Jewish Messianism”.