1934

1934 marks the beginning of Jean-Paul Sartre’s sustained work on imagination: while teaching in Le Havre, he undertook to write a book on the subject. The year is significant as the starting point of a philosophical project that produced two related works, first framed as psychology and ultimately reaching conclusions that exceeded the discipline’s conventional limits.

Teaching and the Initial Project

Sartre was a young schoolteacher in Le Havre in 1934, teaching pupils preparing for the baccalaureate. Imagination belonged to the psychology he taught alongside perception, memory, attention, association of ideas, and emotion. In this setting, he began a work on imagination within a field officially defined as the positive science of psychic facts and their laws, excluding practical, aesthetic, ontological, and normative concerns.

From 1934 to the Published Works

The project took shape in two books. The Imagination appeared in 1936 as a short work; The Imaginary was written at the same time but published four years later, in 1940. The historical introduction notes that The Imaginary could have served as Sartre’s doctoral thesis. The chronology thus distinguishes the year of undertaking from the later publication dates: 1934 identifies the work’s beginning, not the appearance of either book.

Intellectual Significance

Although the books formally remained close to the aims of psychology as then defined, the conclusions of The Imaginary departed from the handbook conception of the discipline. The significance of 1934 therefore lies not in a single published event, but in the beginning of an inquiry that reconsidered what psychological facts and laws mean. The year anchors the transition from Sartre’s teaching of imagination as one psychological topic to a broader examination of consciousness and the imaginary.