physiological disturbance of whatever nature cannot account for the
“organized character of emotion.” We saw the famous “James-Lang”
theory that Sartre calls the “peripheric theory” of the emotions, which
insists that emotion is the felt awareness of reverberations of the “bodily
sounding-board.” This leads to the startling conclusion that emotions
are the effects rather than the causes of these bodily reactions: “we feel
sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we
tremble” and not the reverse.^34
If Janet makes implicit appeal to a finality in emotional behavior for
which his quasi-behaviorist position cannot account, then Sartre believes
that the psychologists of form (Gestalt) such as Kurt Lewin and Tamara
Dembo, though they correctly describe emotional reactions such as
anger, for example, as the “transformation” of one form for another, as
a kind of “weakening the barriers between the real and the unreal,” fail
to recognize the essential role of consciousness in this purposive break
and reconstitution of forms.^35 “As soon as it is a question of setting up a
connection from the world to the self, we can no longer be content with a
psychology of form. We must evidently have recourse to consciousness”
(STE 27 – 28 ). Or to the unconscious.
In view of Sartre’s ambiguous relation to the Freudian unconscious,
which we shall discuss at length later, it is curious that he devotes only a
few pages to the psychoanalytic theory of the emotions and that without
even a mention of Freud. He credits this theory with grasping the
signifying character of psychic facts, their nature as pointing beyond
themselves to another phenomenon that is being concealed. But Sartre
questions “the very principle of psychoanalytic explanation,” namely, that
the conscious phenomenon is “the symbolic realization of a desire
repressed by the censor” (STE 30 ;STE-F 61 ). For he sees this in effect
as reducing the nature of consciousness to that of a thing related externally
to another thing, the object signified, whereas theCogitohas revealed that
“consciousness is itself thefact, thesignificationand thething signified”
(STE 32 ). The bond among these features of consciousness leads Sartre to
argue that any remnant of positivism in psychoanalytic theory is
(^34) See William James, “What is an Emotion?,”Mind 9 ( 1884 ): 190.
(^35) In his careful study,Emotion in the Thought of Sartre(New York: Columbia University Press,
1965 ), Joseph Fell points out that Sartre’s “very large assumption” that the perceptual field is
eithera real Gestaltoran unreal Gestalt is decisive for the character of his theory ( 123 ).
Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions 99