“Pensée sans images” (Imageless thought) and “Images de pensée” (Thought-Images): Jean-Paul Sartre, reader of Karl Bühler and Auguste Flach

The edition of the graduation thesis that Sartre presented in 1927 invites us to plunge back into the documentary sources of the psychology of the time for which, in the wake of Bergson and with the arrival of psychoanalysis in France, the problem of symbolic thought had become crucial. In L’Image dans la vie psychologique: rôle et nature (The Image in the Psychological Life: Role and Nature), the young Sartre develops a first theory of imagination that fits in an original way into the debate on “pure thought”. The matrix of Sartre’s psychology of imagination will be presented through his criticism of the work of the Würzburg School and the investment of the experimental research of Auguste Flach, a Karl Bühler’s pupil in Vienna. From the philosophical psychology of the thesis to the phenomenological psychology of The Imagination (1936) and The Imaginary (1940), we will study the role of Flach’s “symbolic schema” in the description of the imaging consciousness in Sartre’s theory.