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Dr Hanly has written far and away the best analysis and evaluation currently available of the work of Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre had an enormous impact upon the intellectual life of the past forty years. His ideas offer a systematic understanding of human experience that flatly rejects the one presented by Freud, yet any number of thinkers and clinicians have sought to wed the two. 'Existential psychotherapy' has been named as an enterprise in its own right; but, perhaps even more important, Sartre's carefully articulated essays place before us in explicit form principles which implicitly guide the thinking of Lacan, Kohut and other influential psychoanalytic revisionists. For all these reasons, Existentialism and Psychoanalysis is a book that psychoanalysts should read.
Hanly's prose is simple and clear. Even readers whose acquaintance with post-war philosophy is limited will be able to follow easily. At the same time, Hanly's exposition is detailed and comprehensive enough to satisfy the most philosophically sophisticated audience. The work of Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Camus et al. is brought in where appropriate, so that not only a picture of Sartre's thought, but of important variations within an existentialist movement, is given—in so far as that is possible; and background is provided by reference to Plato, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Pascal, Mill, Husserl and Hegel, among others. All in all, it is a tour de force, jam packed without being dense in feeling.
In a first chapter on 'Method', Hanly identifies Sartre's objective, which is to transcend both inductive and deductive reasoning, using them, as Wittgenstein put it, like a ladder which, once climbed, must be thrown away. Existentialism aims at a privileged experience of the irreducibles of the human situation that can only be known through a positive exercise of intuition. Sartre's fundamental postulates are also exposed and discussed, most specifically the assumption that consciousness is a