Sartre's Category of "the Magical", between Philosophical Psycology and Existencial Fenomenology

Abstract

Between controversial uses and heuristic uses, the notion of the magical, elab­orated in dialogue with classical psychology and anthropology, is key to the interpretation of Sartrean existentialism. It appears as a lever in the elaboration of a phenomenology of af­fectivity from which Sartre wants to avoid the traps of idealism and to reach “the concrete”. We investigate how Sartre entered the discipline of phenomenology from the specific theoretical field of the French philosophical psychology of the 1920s. An examination of Sartre’s final dissertation in 1927 on the image in psycho­logical life offers us privileged resources to establish a prehistory of existentialism based on the debate of the philosopher with traditional psychology. This retrospective reading doc­uments the sources of the original concepts of Sartrean phenomenology and follows the problem of symbolism from Henri Delacroix and Émile Bréhier towards the theory of universal symbolism in Being and Nothingness (1943). The problem of possession besieges Sartrean thought as a consequence of the debate about the relationship between subject and world. The phenomenology of possession is successful in the psychoanalysis of things, where ultimately lies the Sartrean understanding of the magical.