Beauvoir functioned as both censor-father and giving-mother in Sartre’s late psychic triangulation

Evidence

It is diffi cult to assess how far Sartre had, at that point, become conscious of the essential role that le Castor (as he had always called Beauvoir) played in his self-transformation, or the “triangulation”—as psychoanalysis terms it— he had achieved by the time of the Hope Now dialogues. I view this triangulation as being at the heart of his notion of the “mother as totem.” And I see le Castor (on the bottom left corner of the triangle), in the place of the father who interdicts. (Had she not, from the late 1930s onward, played a masculine role, that of Sartre’s censor, of his “little judge”?) But she is also (on the bottom right corner of the triangle) in the place of the mother, along with Anne- Marie— who is not phallic anymore. Th ey both give fully of themselves: Anne-Marie to her Poulou, and le Castor to her “tout cher petit être” (as she calls Sartre most oft en in her Lettres à Sartre), without possessiveness. So Sartre has been “triangulated” in a most unorthodox yet viable manner. Th is has enabled him to move from the patriarchy, which had bred in him a fear of self-abandon to (a)(n) (m)other, a fear of the fl esh, and of the feminine. He has fulfi lled his Notebooks’ ideal of getting rid of his ego and has joined a universe without fears. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 154

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to psychoanalytic triangulation theory and the Beauvoir-Sartre influence debate central to this book. — connects to: Sartre initially confined flesh to mother-child love and cast it as female submission. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 149; Sartre’s decline embodied Beauvoir’s vision of life as ambiguous contingency — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 976; Beauvoir deliberately concealed cases where she led Sartre intellectually — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 42
• DEEPTHINKING: A dense, paradigm-shifting reading of Sartre’s final self-understanding as triangulated between Beauvoir-as-father and Anne-Marie-as-mother.

Broader Connections

• Beauvoir deliberately concealed cases where she led Sartre intellectually #corroborates (0.75) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 42
• Sartre’s decline embodied Beauvoir’s vision of life as ambiguous contingency #exemplifies (0.72) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 976