Abstract

Informed by Hazel Barnes's interpretation of Sartre's thought, as well as her own sympathetic construction of a Sartrean psychoanalysis, Cannon undertakes the ambitious project of defending Sartre's existential psychology. She distinguishes it from Freud's psychoanalytical theory, indicates previously unseen associations between Sartre's psychology and post-Freudian object-relations theories, and discusses and criticizes Lacan's elaborate structural psychology. This innovative study breaks through the artificial barrier separating philosophical conceptions of the self and its development from the rich theoretical and practical field of post-Freudian interpretations of the complexity of the self. Despite the sophistication of philosophical analyses of the self that have appeared recently, many of them disappoint because of their physicalist reductionism and their distance from concrete, living human beings seeking to cope with the multiple factors that impinge upon their actual existence. Cannon shows us not only how much Sartre has contributed to an understanding of the dynamics of the becoming of the self, but--in her discussions of anticipations of "object-relations" theory in H. S. Sullivan, as well as the concepts of Winnicott, Masterson, Kernberg, Kohut, and other post-Freudian psychotherapists--she also shows us how much psychotherapists have contributed to the conception of the full-blooded, concrete self.