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The brief narrative in which Jean-Jacques Rousseau describes his noted psychological crisis of Spring 1776 has never been translated into English. The following translation makes available a text of considerable psychological interest by the man of whom Jean Starobinski, one of the foremost scholar/ critics in French studies, states: “It took Freud to think through what Rousseau had sensed.”—The original French text is that of the authoritative Gallimard edition, Œuvres complètes, vol. I.
The “work” to which Rousseau refers in the title and throughout his narrative is the Dialogues, or Rousseau as Judge of Jean-Jacques. For the four preceding years (1772-1776), he had labored on this piece in a last frenzied attempt to prove his total innocence and goodness to a supposedly hostile, sceptical world. The History of the Preceding Work, appended to the Dialogues, describes Rousseau's attempts to place his finished manuscript in trustworthy hands, thereby insuring its eventual publication in unadulterated form. (The author had been obsessed for at least fifteen years with the possible theft and falsification of his manuscripts.) This tragi-comedy is surely one of the strangest episodes in the life of one of the strangest of men. But Rousseau is, as usual, strange in a useful and meaningful way. Here, for example, he provides one of the first careful descriptions of a “crisis of relationship” leading to the tentative relinquishment of his dream of perfect identification of Self with Other, and ultimately to the acceptance of separate-ness and autonomy. In a striking anticipation of modern existential writing on the subject of human identity, he recognizes as applicable to himself a truth that, curiously enough, he had been attempting to teach mankind for twenty-five years: that the essence of one's being does not reside in others' eyes.