for his letter indicates how he wished to “market” himself to the
fellowship committee and stands in some contrast with what he actually
did while in the German capital. His letter of application describes
Sartre’s intent to study “the relations of the psychic with the psycho-
logical in general,” especially in the works of Jaspers, Scheler and
Husserl.^22 There is no mention of Heidegger and the focus is on the
psychic. It is significant that Heidegger is not mentioned in this applica-
tion, nor does Sartre express his intention to devote a considerable
amount of time to the factum on contingency, later called “Melancho-
lia.” Of course, Sartre once admitted that in his early work he did not
distinguish psychology and philosophy very clearly: “Because, in my
mind, philosophy ultimately meant psychology. I got rid of that concep-
tion later” (Schilpp 8 ). And in fact, three of his Husserl-inspired studies
written during this highly productive decade, namelyThe Imagination
( 1936 ),Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions( 1939 ) andThe Imaginary
( 1940 ), were essays in philosophical psychology.The ImaginationandThe
Imaginarywere to have been published together in a work to be entitled
either “L’Image”or“Les Mondes imaginaires,” which never came to term.
Similarly, his study of the emotions was intended as part of a much larger
work to be called “The Psyche,” over four hundred pages of which he had
written by the late 1930 s but which he abandoned because it was “too
Husserlian and not original” (Ce ́r 230 – 231 ). By that time he claimed to
have freed himself from Husserl and been deeply involved with the
thought of Heidegger. But we should note that Sartre’s initial essays
written during his Berlin year, “A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phe-
nomenology” andThe Transcendence of the Ego, are also philosophical
studies in psychology and epistemology, as befits phenomenological
inquiries.^23
(^22) See “Liste des candidatures al’Institut Franc ̧ais de Berlin pour 1933 – 1934 ,”Arch. Nat. 61 , AJ 202 (cited in Jean-Franc ̧ois Sirinelli,Sartre et Aron, Deux Intellectuels dans le siecle(Paris:
23 Arthe`me Fayard,^1995 ),^117 ,n.^42.
In his Gifford Lectures, the first volume of which is devoted toThe Critique of Dialectical
Reason, Raymond Aron observes: “Sartre is scarcely troubled by epistemology and perhaps
would never have examined the methodology of the social sciences nor written a prolegom-
ena to every future anthropology [Search for a Method] had circumstances not forced him
into dialogue with Marxism-Leninism” (Raymond Aron,Histoire et dialectique de la violence
[Paris: Gallimard, 1973 ], 19 ; hereafterHDV. History and the Dialectic of Violence, trans. Barry
Cooper [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975 ], 5 ). Contat and Rybalka date both essays to Sartre’s
German period and de Coorebyter argues convincingly that the intentionality essay was
The Berlin vacation 59