Meaning and Myth in the Study of Lives: A Sartrean
Perspective
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984
Stuart Z. Charmé
Department of Philosophy and Religion
Rutgers University
CONTENTS
1. The Nature of Consciousness and the Story of the
Self 5
The Reflective
Construction of the Self 5
The Role of
Stories in Self-Understanding 9
Language and
the Self 15
The Image
of One's Life 17
2. Structures of Human Meaning and Their Interpretation
23
"Choosing"
the Meaning of One's Life 24
Conscious
versus Unconscious Meaning 25
Sartre and
Freud on the Nature of Memory 30
The Fundamental
Project and the Totality of the Self 34
The Original
Choice as Mythic Event 39
Changing One's
Fundamental Project 44
The Fundamental
Project as a Literary Work 46
3. Dialectic and Totalization: New Theoretical Developments
54
Sartre's Reevaluation
of Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious 55
"Lived Experience"
versus "The Unconscious" 58
The Dialectical
Development of the Self 60
The Nature
of "Totalization" 62
Working on
the Spiral of Life 65
Sartre and
Ego Psychology 67
Biological
and Biographical Instincts 70
4. Existential Psychoanalysis and "True Novels"
73
Transference
and the Clinical Situation 73
Living with
Style 76
The Nature
of Truth in Existential Psychoanalysis 78
Novelistic
Elements in Freud's Case Studies 82
A Myth to
Believe In 84
5. Two Early "True Novels" 87
Baudelaire's
Fall from Grace 87
The Sacred
World of Genet 92
6. Existential Psychoanalysis as Ideology and Myth
101
The Structure
of Sartre Autobiography 101
The "Singular
Universal" 107
Erik Erikson
and Religious Biography 109
Sartre as
Religious Autobiographer 113
Life Without
Father: The Protean Style 117
The Retrospective
Illusion 120
Sartre as
Religious Biographer 123
7. "What Can We Know About a Man?" 126
"For Example,
Gustave Flaubert" 126
The Myth of
Flaubert's Childhood 132
Flaubert's
Hysterical Conversion: The Crisis at Pont l'Evêque 143
8. Identity, Narrative, and Myth 149
The Fullness
of Time 151
Cosmogony
and the Self 152
Notes 159
Bibliography 177
Index 187