1930s

The 1930s appear in the book not as a self-contained chronology but as an intellectual setting in which inherited psychological theories, Henri Bergson’s continuing influence, and Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenological project meet. The decade matters because it places Sartre’s account of imagination amid active disputes about consciousness, perception, and freedom, while showing how those disputes extend from psychological method to the experience of art.

Intellectual setting

The book presents Sartre as turning away from theories he had learned and, in turn, taught. These included Condillac’s account of faculties assembled from elementary sensations, associationist theories associated with David Hume and others, and rationalist approaches that opposed associationism while retaining, in Sartre’s view, something of its spirit. The difficulty Sartre identified was that psychologists wanted to explain consciousness as synthetic activity while also accepting accounts that made psychic facts operate automatically.

Sartre’s alternative was not to reduce mental life to physical matter. The book stresses his conviction that even precise knowledge of cerebral localizations could specify conditions necessary for psychic functions without explaining how consciousness perceives, remembers, imagines, or projects itself toward the future. His ambition was to begin from concrete experience and construct a new philosophy rather than treat consciousness as an effect fully accounted for by psychological or physiological mechanisms.

Bergson and the psychological debate

Henri Bergson provides a significant point of comparison. His philosophy had first drawn Sartre toward philosophy, and its originality was still strongly felt in France during the 1930s, among psychologists as well as metaphysicians. A 1935 edition of Cuvillier’s manual registered the distinctiveness of Bergson’s ideas while also expressing reservations about them. Sartre cited the manual approvingly in his Ecrits de Jeunesse.

The comparison is substantive rather than merely historical. Like Sartre, Bergson opposed associationism and rejected the idea that a mental image was simply a weakened perception or an automatic revival of one. Both connected the nature of consciousness with questions of human freedom. Sartre could draw on Bergson’s account of duration in psychic life, but he also analyzed contradictions in Bergson’s philosophy. The 1930s setting thus marks an ongoing encounter with Bergson, not an uncomplicated inheritance.

From description to an account of images

Sartre’s method begins by separating what reflection can establish from what explanatory hypotheses propose. When a person forms an image of Pierre, Pierre is the object of the current consciousness; identifying the image as an image requires a further reflective act directed toward how the object is given. Sartre treats the reflective recognition as immediately certain, whereas claims about the image’s underlying nature remain open to the probabilities of scientific explanation. Psychology should therefore describe the image’s distinctive characteristics before advancing theories about its causes or inner constitution.

This method also clarifies why schematic drawings can shift between being perceived as marks and being seen as a figure. A face-like arrangement may first appear as separate lines, points, and a curve; under a changed intention, those marks can be read as forehead, eyebrow, nose, eye, and mouth. Eye movements help organize the visual field, and the viewer’s bodily activity supplies a connection between separated marks. The drawing does not simply dictate a single reading: knowledge directs movement and can produce a new synthesis of its lines.

Sartre distinguishes this process from perceptual illusions in which forms impose or habituate particular movements. In the Müller-Lyer illusion, the arrangement of closed and open angles organizes eye movement so that the lines acquire different apparent powers of extension. Such movement can be projected onto perceived segments as a quality or force. Schematic images work differently: their lines do not impose a rule of movement, and their representative force depends on movements freely projected onto them as imaged directions. The comparison shows how a decade’s psychological debates could be recast as a precise analysis of the relation between visual structure, bodily activity, and consciousness.

Perception and the imaginary

Sartre’s account does not explain the richness of perception by inserting images into it. A real object and an irreal image can alternate as correlates of distinct kinds of consciousness; the image does not simply supplement what perception fails to see. Drawing on the work of Köhler, Wertheimer, and Koffka, the book points to the persistence of formal structures through changes of position as one possible explanation of certain perceptual regularities. It also invokes Edmund Husserl’s account of perception as consciousness directed toward a spatiotemporal object. Unformulated intentions, such as the implicit grasp that an ashtray has an underside resting on a table, enrich perception without positing a separate image of that hidden aspect.

The argument reaches beyond psychology into aesthetics. Sartre treats the depicted Charles VIII not as identical with the real canvas and its paint, but as an irreal object constituted when the spectator adopts an imaging attitude. The material work serves as an analogon through which the aesthetic object appears; it does not turn that object into a real thing. In this account, the painter’s strokes remain material, while the represented whole belongs to an irreality apprehended through them.

The same distinction extends to other arts. In painting, real colours acquire aesthetic meaning as parts of an irreal whole: a red can be apprehended as the red of a rug, with its implied texture and place in the depicted scene, rather than as an isolated sensory stimulus. Fiction, poetry, and drama likewise present irreal objects through verbal analogons. An actor uses feelings, strength, and gestures to present Hamlet without literally becoming him; the actor is, in Sartre’s formulation, irrealized in the character rather than the character realized in the actor. These examples show the reach of the framework developed against the psychological assumptions of the period: imagination is not a defective copy of perception, but a distinct way consciousness apprehends objects and makes aesthetic experience possible.