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The thought of Jean Paul Sartre (1905 - 1980) is defined in this famous phrase: "My freedom ends where that of others begins." Writer, novelist and playwright. He educated at the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Paris. He earned a doctorate in Philosophy.
He openly sympathized with the French May 1968. He dedicated himself to teaching philosophy. He was captured by the Germans during World War II. He studied the philosopher Heidegger during this period.
He spent the first years of his life in Paris, on rue Siam in the 16th arrondissement. The premature death of his father, a sailor, caused him to be raised by his maternal grandparents. They lived in Paris between Panthéon and Luxembourg, on rue Le Goff.
Sartre talks about his maternal grandfather's library where his imagination was triggered by reading. His mother Anne Marie Schweitzer was related to the famous doctor Albert Schweitzer.
Some hotels where Sartre lived in Paris were Hotel Royal Bretagne on rue de la Gaîté, Hotel Mistral on rue Cels and Hotel de la Louisianne on rue de Seine. Also on rue Bonaparte 42, near the well-known restaurant Deux Magots. It was his mother's apartment.
Sartre's fellow students were Jean Hippolyte, Raymon Aron, Daniel Lagache, Paul Nizan, and Simone de Beauvoir, who had great importance in the feminist movement with her book The Second Sex. She was a friend of Sastre and they were surrounded by a small family of students and admirers, artists like Wols, Violette Leduc, Gilles Deleuze.
Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) spoke of His teacher like this: "Yes, everything happened through Sartre, it was not only because as a philosopher he had a brilliant sense of totalization, but because he knew how to invent the new. The first performances of The Flies, the appearance of Being and Nothingness, The Conference, Existentialism is a Humanism were events: in them we learned, after a long night, the identity between thought and freedom. (Arts Magazine, 11-28-1964)
He created the magazine Temps modernes with Maurice Merleau Ponty. He became one of the most important theorists of the French left. He threw himself into all kinds of leftist and communist revolutionary movements. He considered himself a historical materialist. He sought to reconcile existentialism and Marxism in his Critique of Dialectical Reason. Heidegger, Husserl and Hegel were very important in his philosophical career.
His philosophy marked the postwar period and was the archetype of the intellectual of the time. The heart of his philosophy was the precious notion of freedom and its concomitant sense of personal responsibility. He insisted, in an interview a few years before his death, that he had never stopped believing that "man makes himself." He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946, which he declined. He is the best-known philosopher of French existentialism and humanist Marxism.
"I have never scratched the ground or looked for nests, I have not made herbaria or thrown stones at the birds. But the books were my birds and my nests, my domestic animals, my stable and my field; the library was the world trapped in my mirror , had infinite thickness, variety, unpredictability".
Existentialism is neither a theory of personality nor a system of psychotherapy, but a philosophical movement represented by an important group of philosophers such as Jean Paul Sartre, Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel, Martin Heidegger.
However, it is a movement with implications in personality theory and psychotherapy that cannot be ignored. Authors such as Adler, Golstein, Maslow, Fromm, Allport and Rogers have attempted to develop psychotherapeutic systems based on the fundamental concepts of existentialist philosophy.
Existential psychology sought a humanization of psychology, combating in some way scientism and behaviorism that had contributed little to the knowledge of man.
Existential psychology asks about man who exists in the world, who is unique and cannot be explained by physical, chemical or neurophysiological reasons.
His method addresses consciousness, feelings, and personal and environmental experiences. focused on interpersonal relationships, freedom, responsibility, individual scale of values, meaning of life, pain, anxiety and death.
