THE CASE OF JULIA: A SARTREAN EXISTENTIAL-

PHENOMENOLOGICAL MODEL OF PSYCHOTHERAPY1.

Fernanda Alt

(UERJ-Capes)

ABSTRACT

In this presentation I apply a Sartrean existential-phenomenological approach in

psychology to the clinical case to the case of Julia2, whose main complaint is the "lack
of meaning in life”. I also show the way therapeutic intervention can take into account
the comprehensive attitude and demonstrate the need to assume responsibility and
freedom.

Presentation

The Case Of Julia: A Sartrean Existential-Phenomenological Model Of Psychotherapy

is based on my clinical practice as well as my research into Jean-Paul Sartre’s
philosophy.

I will begin with one of Sartre’s most famous quotes: “a man can always make
something of what was made of him” 3. I believe that this is a powerful idea for
psychotherapy and I would like to explore some aspects of its meaning in such a
context.

The drama of existence

For Sartre, a psychologist should always begin by thinking about man’s way of being.
According to his philosophy, we should think of man as existence and of existence as
freedom. That is because we are not determined by a previous identity, but instead, we

1 This work was presented at : II Congresso della Società Italiana di Psicoterapia: La Psicoterapia in
Evoluzione, modelli Storici e Nuove Sfide. L'Evoluzione dei Modelli Esistenziali. Paestum - Italia - 2013.
2 Fictitious name

3 Sartre, J-P. (1973) Situations IX: mélanges. Paris: Gallimard, p.101

are in pursuit of an identity. This is a dramatic condition of being incomplete with the
result that everything we are, we are not at the same time. Because we cannot be
identical to ourselves, our drama is not the same as Hamlet’s, to be OR not to be, but it
is the drama to be AND not to be at the same time4, which means existing as this
tension of always being “in question” for yourself, which is the same as being freedom.
We do not possess freedom, we are freedom.

Project

The pursuit of an identity is the pursuit of fullness, so that, if I could be complete, I

would solve this dramatic condition of being “in question.” This way of existing is a
temporal movement that Sartre called the project. It means I am a movement of
escaping from everything I have been until today in the direction of what I will be in the
future. The future is a field of possibilities of being. It means I am not a static being
with interior determinations, but I am this movement toward the outside, in the world,
and the world itself is how things appears to me illuminated by my projection of myself
ahead.

Nausea

On the other hand, although we are not determined in our existence and we are the
drama of choosing ourselves within our possibilities, we do not choose our factual
conditions. This is a nauseous and anguish condition that Sartre calls “freedom in
situation.” First of all, we are thrown into a world, a family, with a body and a historical
time that we do not choose, but since we exist we are responsible for the meanings of
how we live our factual condition. Contingency means that existence has no meaning in
itself, but since I exist as freedom I constantly produce meaning during my existential
journey.

Bad faith

4 Based on the idea of Denis Hollier mentioned by John Ireland: “[…] modifying Hamlet’s determinant
dilemma’s. Not to be or not to be anymore, but to be and not to be”. In: Contat, Michel (ed.). (2005)
Sartre: théâtre complet. Paris: Gallimard. p.1448
Thinking of freedom in this nauseous conditions is a way of thinking freedom as
condemnation, not that “light” or “commercial” freedom, but a heavy condition of not
getting rid of this drama of choosing all the time our own meaning to existence,
although we do not choose our factual conditions. Anguish appears whenever we
apprehend this gratuitousness and our most common attitude before that is to escape
from it in an act that Sartre called BAD FAITH. In Bad Faith I pretend my existence is
determined and I apprehend myself as a nature which would solve the drama of being
this tension. Bad faith is a spontaneous lie to myself so that I can attribute an identity to
myself. Even the worst identity can be better than this anguish atmosphere of being “in
question.” In this context, Sartre will say that the Ego is a “tranquilizing fiction,”5 like a
fictional object that we keep building to give ourselves a unity, qualities and properties.

The look of others

Finally, I am not alone in my existence; the other is part of me and I capture that every
time someone looks at me. For Sartre, the look of others is very powerful because it
gives me a perspective that I cannot reach for myself, which is an outside point of view
that transforms me into an object. To the other I can appear as an object, not as a
temporal and free movement. The “petrifying look” is based on the myth of Medusa,
who was capable of turning someone into stone with her look. It is a look that does not
see someone as a freedom, but it happens whenever we label or classifies someone. I
can desire this power of the look of other, but I want him or her to turn me into a good
statue, but since the other is freedom too I cannot preview his or her look so I am
always “in danger”. The conflict begins when, to defend myself, I try to petrify the
other and the other does the same to me.

The case of Julia

After this short review of Sartre’s main ideas, I can present the case of Julia as an
example of my clinical practice based on his philosophy.

Julia

5 Sartre, Jean-Paul. (2012). L’être et le néant. Paris: Gallimard.

Julia is a 30 year old woman, who came into therapy very anguished and suffering from
not having dreams and desires, and for seeing no meaning in existence. She graduated
in engineering, and belongs to a well-to-do family from the upper class of Rio de
Janeiro. She works only to “have a job” , and because it is “close to her house.” At the
same time she disapproves of herself for not aspiring to advance professionally, as well
as for not having plans to start a family of her own like everybody else. She does not
feel like doing anything.

At a quick glance we could say that Julia was depressed, but instead of taking our point
of departure from an abstract and universal concept, I would like to propose as the more
comprehensive way to get close to her situation a meaningful and singular idea. For that
I select a passage from one of my favorite writers, Mia Couto. One of his characters
says something about dreams and I think it could have been Julia’s own thought, if she
had taken a comprehensive look of herself: “My dreams have never learned how to
travel. Whoever has lived stuck to only one ground does not know how to dream of
other places”6. So, how can we understand this “one only ground”, and what does it
means to “dream of other places”? Let us take a look at Julia.

Julia’s demand

Her first demand of psychotherapy was for me to “find her problem and remove it”. She
wanted to know why she suffered all the time, the causes and the explanation. She
believed that if I could understand her “engineering” I could apply a technique and fix
the bad function. For me this mechanical approach to existence was the first
apprehension of bad faith: it amounts to seeing the problems as something bad that
should be eliminated from the outside instead of taking responsibility and assuming
your own feelings, including even suffering. By contrast, I believe that, before arriving
confronting it we should go through a long path in which we accept bad faith as part of
existence.

“Nothing new”

6 Couto, Mia. (2009) Antes do nascer do mundo. São Paulo: Companhia das letras.
Julia’s favorite phrase was the same as that of Antoine Roquentin, the main character in
Sartre’s Nausea’s7 - “Nothing new.” Her life is a story in which nothing happens. She
justifies her idea that it is "useless" to think of making changes on the grounds that she
will not perform them because she already knows that she will impede herself in the
process, even though, she is very sensitive and unhappy in her current condition.

Some of the difficulties of working with Julia were:

the paradoxical demand: “I really need help but it is useless to help me”;

the psychotherapist’s anguish of facing the “nothingness” of someone who desires

nothing;

the temptation of giving her possibilities through my act of bad faith so as to escape
from anguish but with the result of reinforcing her bad faith of always waiting for others
to do something for her, as well as her belief that “meanings comes always from the
others and never from me;”

the fact that she was very imprisoned in a solid identity: “I’m like that”.

A clinical approach

To avoid slipping into bad faith, I think of clinical work as a space that should be able to
reveal the human condition. That means seeing the person as freedom in situation, the
ego as a creation, like a fictional identity that we can put into question. For that, the
therapist cannot have a petrifying look, one that reinforces the theories of the self, the
self-justifications of this imprisoned identity, but, instead, should have an anti-natural
look, one that is able to interrogate the nature of the beliefs and values, and enable
strangeness to appear. For that we must have a comprehensive attitude, one which
negotiates a compromise between our own experience and other experience, one which
assumes the other as freedom and searches for the chain of meanings, instead of
confining him/her within explanatory laws that attempt to explain behavior through the
law of cause and effect. Comprehension happens in an empathic relation where you
take the other as a freedom in a situation and at the same time assume your position as a

7 Sartre, J-P. La Nausée. Paris: Gallimard, 2012.

freedom in a situation. This establishes a reciprocal and authentic relationship that
should be a basis for trust inside the clinical space.

Julia’s situation

Trying to understand Julia in her situation, I notice that she seems to live in a world
pervaded by what Sartre called the spirit of seriousness. Sartre identifies such a
relationship of someone with his/her world, where the values and truths are already
made and unquestionable, as a most amplified form of bad faith. Most of us apprehend
our values and ways of being first through our family group. For Julia it was very
oppressive because she did not find space within her environment to express her
difference in a legitimate way. By not feeling identified and by not finding other ways
of being, she felt continually ill-adapted and guilty. To her family it was not intelligible
that someone who had everything could be always so unhappy. The pressure to “fit in”
was constantly present.

For Julia, her singular way of living this situation was to be always making an empty
protest. Always resisting fitting in, she lived her difference as guilt, because there was
no space for her to experience difference as a form of legitimacy.

Comprehending the drama

One of the keys to comprehension that I have been developing is to identify the personal
drama, the identity as a character in the sense of this “fictional ego” that expresses our
fidelity to how we appear to others. In the case of Julia it was basically the “problematic
girl,” “the strange girl”, so that she started to believe that this was her nature.

The situation can appear as a scenario. When we start to look at the tragedy of the
relationships through a different point of view, some scenes can appear as comedy, like
a funny choreography. We all have scripts to follow, and we also live repetitive
situations where each one of us knows our place in the relationship and what to say.

Julia started to find it very funny whenever a situation was taken from its naturalized
view. It was very easy and enjoyable to use humor to show the dynamics of her
relationships. The theatrical aspects of our existence appear whenever we can take a
distance and see from the outside our fidelity of keeping the same character inside of a
destiny.

Problems and changes

When she stopped looking inside searching for her “problematic nature” and began to
“look outside”, she created the space for change her way of living her situations within
her relationships and abandon her fidelity to the character. Existential problems are not
a product of a person’s individual interiority and not a passive product of environmental
conditions. But we are responsible for doing something of what was made of us. To live
stuck to “only one ground” meant to Julia that the world “is like that” and her only two
possibilities were either to “fit in” or to suffer as an eternal and lonely protester. But to
be able to “dream of other places” it is necessary to break from the natural, serious,
world so that another world can arise as a field of possibilities. That is why changes are
here comprehended as a metamorphosis, in the sense that it is not one aspect of the
person that changes but the whole way of choosing the meaning of existence inside a
world.

“Rooms by the sea”8

Finally, I believe that the metamorphosis involves visiting new worlds as a foreigner,
apprehending ourselves as a freedom, as this non-solvable tension; it means assuming
the responsibility of being in question as a decision to take responsibility for the
strangeness that is part of us as well as our illusions. Adopting this perspective, Julia
began to assume the risk of acting differently, because she was not that guilty anymore.
When difference had a space to appear and to be accepted, there was no longer any
“problematic nature” impeding her, just the difficulties that every human being has in
his/her own existence. She said: “I know have to decide if I go outside this world and
start to feel experience as mine, but I’m scared because I don´t know what’s ahead and I
haven´t learned how to navigate”. This is where we are in our work together, and I
believe that she started to step aside, but that is her fundamental decision, and I have to
welcome and respect that

8 “Rooms by the sea” is a title of a painting of E. Hopper.