Sartre and Mental Health (pt. 1): Freedom, Responsibility, and Taking a Grumpy Old Philosopher With a Grain of Salt

Jean-Paul Sartre would have been a terrible therapist. If you know anything at all about the man, you know that he was not trying to make anyone feel better about anything. Despite this, his philosophical works have proved paradoxically therapeutic for many people, including people in my own practice as well as myself personally. In his challenge that we take radical responsibility for seeing our lives as they are, stripped of self- and socially created illusions, many of us find an authenticity that both frees and grounds us.

The theme of freedom and responsibility runs through the work of Sartre and his cohort of French existentialists who rose to fame after World War II. It is one of his most unforgiving constructs: that it is always up to us as to what we make of our lives, and that our action or inaction always has meaning. Because of this we are never completely at the mercy of fate. We always have some choice, even if it is not a choice we like. This is Sartre’s reminder and call to action to never forget our own agency.

We can imagine this principle’s relevance to Sartre with the German occupation of France during World War II. Throughout the occupation Sartre witnessed with contempt how many of his compatriots treated the occupying Nazis with politeness and even solicitude, and excused their complicity as naturally “just what needed to be done.” With the act of joining the French resistance to the Nazi occupiers, Sartre declared that we always have a choice. The intellectual ferocity he wielded during this time against both the Germans and the cooperative French would eventually be used to attack complacency in all its forms, full stop, no excuses.

The idea of “ultimate freedom” raises a reflexive eyebrow. All the time? For everyone? To clarify, Sartre explains that while we do not have ultimate power over our circumstances, we remain free to choose our response. Sartre’s contemporary Viktor Frankl, a survivor of the concentration camps best known for authoring the book Man’s Search For Meaning, argued a similar viewpoint: that even if one is deprived of all liberty in a concentration camp, there is still the basic freedom of one’s attitude and dignity. Perhaps in the fog of war there was something crucial for both these men in being able to take some territory back, even if only within their own inner world.

Viktor Frankl, an Austrian neurologist and psychologist, who developed his theory of healing through meaning while a prisoner of Auschwitz.

The benefit of a perspective that emphasizes ultimate responsibility is that we are never completely powerless. We may feel helpless for a while and I believe (since I’m a helping professional and not a grumpy philosopher) that we should give those feelings the space, kindness, and attention to help them process through. And then we should look for the levers that we can still pull.

A corollary to this belief in ultimate freedom is that we are also ultimately responsible for our choices. There is no cosmic rulebook and nobody we can truly blame apart from ourselves. We are, as Sartre famously says in a way true to his intense nature, “condemned to be free” and to figure out for ourselves what our values are and how to act on them. Sartre spends a good part of his magnum opus Being and Nothingness exploring the various ways people in fact try to avoid this responsibility through self-delusion or as he calls it “bad faith.”

However, even as Sartre developed the concept of responsibility he acknowledged that our internal freedom does have external limits, which he deems our “facticity.” Facticity refers to the parts of our lives that we are thrown into without consent or control. If I am a 5’0 tall fully grown woman, I will never be 6’5”. If I am born French, I will never be a native Australian. While facticity is rarely our stark destiny, it does make some courses of action easier and more appealing, sometimes to the point of making it highly improbable that one would choose or persevere towards the alternative.

I am no Sartre purist. His ethic of freedom and responsibility is one that I prefer to modify with a mental health worker’s lens of what constitutes facticity, as well as one I choose to hold in tension with its opposite polarity: a humble and bemused agnosticism about how much we really control even the things we think we do in this crazy world! My experience as a social worker has made me appreciate the role that context and lifelong environment play if not to the point of destiny, than at least to the point of extending a deep and broad benefit of the doubt for other human realities I have not lived.

Working in the psychotherapy field has brought me to believe that our reflexive emotional responses themselves are a form of facticity that we do not directly control. At least, not without a lot of work. Despite this, I do believe that an attitude of freedom and responsibility play a significant role in the impact of our emotions, especially for those of us with a great deal of privilege. We have numerous intervention points: in our ability to alter our environment, our receptivity to them, and our response.

The biopsychosocial model, which is frequently used in social work practice and education, also nods to the varied and overlapping influences on a person choices and coping abilities.

For example, I may not be able to change a trauma I experienced in a past relationship and the fact that my family history predisposes me to anxiety and depression as a result. But I can alter my environment by choosing what triggers feel worth exposing myself to and when I’m ready for them, and I can alter my biochemical environment with exercise, sufficient sleep and nourishment, and perhaps with medication. I can learn how to question my thoughts and my triggers when a new partner reminds me of that past relationship, and I can learn how to respond to my thoughts with both compassion and a dollop of healthy skepticism. And I can choose to take space to protect myself or to tell my new partner what I need.

Within this facticity I also have the freedom to crumple up in my bed, to spend my time drunk or high, to endlessly seek activity that distracts me from my feelings, to compulsively seek the validation of others, and a multitude of other possibilities. Some of these pathways might be more likely than others based on personal history and the supports that I have, but I remain responsible for my choice.

It is very practical to remember that I am always making choices. When I wake up in the morning and some part of me wishes I didn’t have to deal with mundane obligations, I still choose to change my son’s diaper or respond to an inbox full of email. I do it gladly because being reliable as a parent, a care worker, and a person is important to me. To acknowledge these as choices rather than unavoidable obligations not only seems to me more honest, it also affirms my commitment to the choices I’ve made, and comforts me with the possibility in all the choices still ahead.