A Taste of Facility a Sartrean Look At Psychiatry

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1979) was a French intellectual, philosopher and literateur who stood on a common platform of philosophy and psychology. His importance to us lies not only in his great impact on twentieth century thought, but also because he outlined a fairly elaborate system of descriptive psychology as a prelude to his ontological description of the world. His treatises on 'Imagination' and 'Emotions' are classics in the existential tradition. His novels and plays are based on the same themes as concern a psychiatrist in his daily clinic. His principal text of philosophy, 'Being and Nothingness', contains a whole chapter on 'Existential Psychoanalysis'. Not surprisingly, therefore, he has had a significant impact on our approach to mental patients. With the increasing emphasis on the scientific method, the philosophical moorings of medical science became more and more blurred. The result was an impersonal view of the diseased. Thus during this period it had become common practice to view human beings as objects worthy of study from the disease view point. As a result the disease and its causation became more important than the diseased person himself. It