Daniel Lagache to follow the lectures of psychologist Georges Dumas at
the psychiatric hospital of Sainte-Anne. In fact, his graduation thesis for
the DES was written under the direction of a distinguished professor
of psychology, Henri Delacroix. His director later invited Sartre to submit
a version of the text for the series he was editing for the Presses
Universitaires de France. This short work,L’Imagination, became Sartre’s
first book-length publication ( 1936 ). Unlike the DES thesis, where the
lone reference to Hu ̈sserl (sic) is second-hand,The Imaginationawards
Husserl’s thought pride of place. He is reserved for the final chapter where
most, if not all, of the errors and inadequacies of the previously discussed
philosophers and psychologists are set aright. This is clearly a Husserlian
book, but one that bears the usual Sartrean qualifiers.
The Imagination
Between the DES thesis and the published book came the Berlin experi-
ence as well as nearly a decade of philosophical “novels” that, as we have
remarked, anticipated several of the distinguishing aspects ofBeing and
Nothingness. One can observe these and others presenting themselves in
the course of Sartre’s book – which, like the next two, would be a study
in philosophical psychology.
If Sartre’s initial book-length publication was the outgrowth of his
DES thesis, it was scarcely a reproduction of it. Though there is
considerable overlap in the citations from several psychologists, both
experimental and philosophical, in each work, either Sartre himself or
his editor, who had been his thesis director almost a decade earlier,
insisted that the published book be purged of the tables and graphs as
well as the numerous references to and surveys of then current literature
that gave the work its “thesis” style.
The Imaginationis the first part of a larger project that was to have
been entitled either “The Image”or“Imaginary Worlds” but that failed to
materialize. An even shorter work,Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions
( 1939 ), as we remarked earlier, was excerpted from another unpublished
project of some four hundred written pages, to be entitledThe Psyche.^3
(^3) Regarding translations of Sartre’sEsquisse d’une the ́orie des emotions(Paris: Gallimard / Poche,
2000 [ 1939 ]), I draw on the better-knownThe Emotions: Outline of a Theory, trans. Bernard
Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948 ) (hereafterEmotions) for titles of relevant
The Imagination 77