Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is discussed by Jean-Paul Sartre as part of a phenomenological inquiry into imagination, reality, and the organization of consciousness. His account does not reduce the condition to mistaking an image for a perception: people may know that imagined objects are irreal, while the more difficult problem of hallucination concerns how belief and personal synthesis change. The distinction lets him examine not only what appears to consciousness, but how a person relates to what appears and how that relation can become unstable.

Imaginary life and preference

Sartre distinguishes an imaginary life from a real one by more than the beauty or attraction of its contents. A person who prefers the imaginary, in his analysis, may prefer its mode of existence: unlike real objects, imagined ones do not impose the same demands, resist a person’s wishes, or unfold with the unpredictability of perception. This is therefore not simply a choice of more pleasing images over disappointing circumstances. It can be a retreat from the presence, independence, and inexhaustibility of the real.

The contrast becomes clear in Sartre’s example of a dreamer who imagines being a king. Even a real monarchy in which the dreamer’s wishes were granted could not simply fulfill the imaginary desire. A real situation has consequences and requires adjustment; the desired figure must encounter it as something new rather than as the exact correlate of a wish. Sartre illustrates the gap with Annie: the imagined Annie corresponds to a desire, whereas the actual Annie exceeds that desire and requires a new process of accommodation. The imaginary can hold a feeling in a settled form; reality makes further response necessary.

In Sartre’s account, imagined feelings may accordingly return in the same form and with the same prescribed manner, while the imagined objects associated with them remain fixed. The dreamer can select among a store of roles and corresponding feelings, as an actor selects a costume, but this apparent freedom is constrained by the predictability of the imagined world. Its objects do not surprise or resist in the independent way real objects can. Sartre thus rejects the idea that such a world must compensate for ordinary life through exceptional richness: he characterizes it instead as poor and meticulous, with scenes repeated in detail and their course already settled. His example of repeated amorous imagining makes the point especially sharply: the recurrence is not only a response to disappointed love but, in his interpretation, may indicate an incapacity for love.

Image, knowledge, and comprehension

This account rests on Sartre’s wider distinction between knowledge and imaging consciousness. Pure knowledge can relate objects through rules or classifications without presenting their sensible qualities intuitively; the blue in a painting, for instance, can be thought of merely as the fourth primary colour. Sartre challenges the suggestion associated with Husserl that an image simply supplies intuitive fulfillment to an otherwise empty meaning. For Sartre, the image is itself a consciousness, not an additional object placed inside one.

Experimental reports complicate any easy boundary between abstract knowledge and imagery. Subjects described an indeterminate opening without a determinate form, or two objects as dissimilar despite having no specified spatial characteristics. Other reports described something visual or conceptual that could give rise to a visual impression. Sartre treats these as forms of knowledge already oriented toward the sensible, though not yet full images. This intermediate material supports his claim that knowledge can be modified as it enters the constitution of an image, rather than merely being supplemented by one.

His discussion of symbolic schemas makes a related distinction. In Flach’s account, schemas arise with acts of comprehension and can bring a problem’s solution or a proposition’s meaning with them; they cannot be summoned directly at will. Trying to produce one directly yields an illustration of thought instead. Schemas are absent when a task is too easy or solved through memory, while more demanding comprehension may take an imaged form. Sartre also draws on Messer’s experiments to distinguish pure comprehension from imaged comprehension: the same phrase can be understood with or without a schema, so the choice of mode depends on the antecedent structure of consciousness rather than on the object alone. This broader analysis clarifies why, in his treatment of Schizophrenia, the relevant question is the subject’s mode of consciousness, not simply the content of an image.

Irreality, belief, and hallucination

Sartre emphasizes that people with Schizophrenia may recognize the irreal character of the objects around them and produce those objects precisely as irreal. His account of Marie B describes a crisis in which she identified herself as the Queen of Spain while retaining a deeper awareness that this was not true. She participated in the imagined role without being wholly convinced of its reality. The example shows that an imaginary world need not result from complete ignorance of its status.

Hallucination poses a different problem. Sartre questions the familiar description of the hallucinator as someone who projects an image outward or simply takes an image for a perception. In his theory, the object of an image is already external to consciousness, but it is given as irreal and belongs to its own irreal space. A perceived object, by contrast, makes a claim to reality within a space shared by perceived things. The issue is therefore not how an inner image is physically placed outside, but how someone can believe in the reality of an object whose mode of appearance is essentially irreal.

Sartre proposes that hallucination can coincide with a provisional collapse of perceived reality. Once an attack has passed, the surrounding world reappears, and a person may locate the remembered scene in the room where it seemed to occur. On this account, such location can be secondary rather than proof that the two spaces were fused during the experience. He also cautions that reports of hallucination require care: a person’s later description of where something appeared does not by itself establish how perception and imaging consciousness operated at the time.

Hallucination and personal synthesis

Sartre describes hallucination as involving a change in the subject’s overall attitude, not necessarily a failure to recognize the physical source of an experience. In motor verbal hallucination, for example, a patient may know that speech comes through the patient’s own mouth while experiencing the speaker as someone else. Sartre extends this analysis to auditory, visual, and psychic hallucinations: the patient may not apprehend the content as an object of detached observation, but undergo a transformation in the way consciousness is organized. He suggests that intentional knowledge can precede the formation of an imaged object, while treating that sequence as part of his theoretical account rather than a universal clinical rule.

For genuine hallucinations, Sartre identifies a more thorough disintegration of personal synthesis. The unity that makes consciousness possible does not simply disappear; rather, the organized, concentrated connection of thoughts gives way to a diffuse and degraded connection. Perception becomes dim, and subject and object recede together. A partial, disjointed psychic system can then appear without a stable centre of consciousness or a thematic unity capable of holding it at a distance for examination.

This helps explain Sartre’s emphasis on the furtive quality of some hallucinations: the experience may be present without becoming available to sustained, attentive scrutiny. The images are not treated as ordinary perceptions that can be calmly inspected, nor as deliberate inventions fully governed by a coherent personal project. Across his discussion, Schizophrenia therefore belongs to a broader argument about the fragile organization of consciousness: imagined content, awareness of irreality, belief, perception, and personal synthesis must be distinguished before their disturbance can be described.