Sartre’s intellectual hyperactivity compensated for a repressed incestuous desire toward his mother.

Evidence

From various clues, I have become convinced that, in his own sensibility, “mother” and “self-abandon” were also linked in another way— as a repressed fantasmatic desire to abandon himself to his mother—that is, to commit incest with her. Th us, his Pardaillan games stressing activity and his prodigious intellectual activity throughout much of his life were both ways for him to become an autonomous subject, fi rst by staving off , then by coming to terms with, his desire for self-abandon to his mother. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 130

Categorization

• QUESTION: A psychobiographical speculation grounded in clues rather than direct evidence — worth flagging as interpretive conjecture in the historiography debate.
• XREF: connects to: Nausea allegorizes Sartre’s repression of desire for self-abandon to his mother — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 133; Sartre’s ideal mother figure prefigures his later doctrine of self-abandon to the other. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 148; Sartre exemplifies the Lacanian masculine subject repressing attachment to the maternal body — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 131