Sartre

This book, based on the exceptionally wide reading of a scholar equally at home in several modern European languages, is the first to present the comparatively little known theories of existentialist psychoanalysis with the same thoroughness as the existentialist philosophy to which they are organically related. In the first part of the book, the author critically examines all the basic concepts of Sartre’s philosophy, endevouring to show to which extent these concepts are Sartre’s own original creations, formulated under the special conditions of the German occupation of France during World War II, and to what extent they are developments of earlier trends in Western thought extending from Parmenides and Plato to Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Sartre’s more immediate progenitors, Kierkegaard and Heidegger. In the second part Dr Stern analyzes the new type of psychoanalysis that has grown out of Sartre’s philosophy of value and explains the relationship of existentialist psychoanalysis to the doctrines of Freud, Adler and others.