Nausea allegorizes Sartre’s repression of desire for self-abandon to his mother

Evidence

What is certain is that this repressed desire played a most important role in his relationships with women and in the way he chose to focus his intellectual endeavors throughout his life. Nausea can be read, for example, as the allegory of Sartre’s own struggle against his desire for self-abandon to his mother. For Roquentin, the sudden uncontrolled giving-in of his body to passivity or self-abandon is a completely negative experience, accompanied by strong nausea. Th e abandon of “all things” which “gently, tenderly, were letting themselves drift into existence like those relaxed women who burst out laughing and say ‘It is good to laugh,’ in a wet voice” is a lure and a veneer (N, 172). When this veneer melts, what remains are “soft , monstrous masses, all in disorder, naked in a frightful, obscene nakedness” (N, 172). Self-abandon is here defi nitely a “laisser-aller,” a letting-go, with its full negative connotation. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 133

Categorization

• SEED: Possible essay angle: how a canonical existentialist novel can double as a psychoanalytic allegory of its author’s early attachments.
• XREF: connects to: Sartre exemplifies the Lacanian masculine subject repressing attachment to the maternal body — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 131; Sartre’s intellectual hyperactivity compensated for a repressed incestuous desire toward his mother. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 130; Sartre’s asexual for-itself is covertly masculine in its transcendence — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 107 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Sartre’s intellectual hyperactivity compensated for a repressed incestuous desire toward his mother. #corroborates (0.90) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 130
• Sartre exemplifies the Lacanian masculine subject repressing attachment to the maternal body #corroborates (0.85) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 131
• Sartre’s asexual for-itself is covertly masculine in its transcendence #corroborates (0.80) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 107