Psychology has moved on since Sartre wrote this in 1939. Nevertheless, it seems to we (U.S. culture) are still stuck in a rather primitive psychological view of human behavior and that individuals from our culture, even those who locate identity in the spiritual, may be likely to see feelings and emotional behavior in terms of the human sciences. While very few people would probably ascribe to the peripheric theory that physiological disturbances precede emotional responses, that trembling leads to fear or tears to melancholy, I bet many still follow what Sartre describes as the intellectualist theory that a mental state leads to emotional response or that emotionality is an inferior response that sets in when the superior, rational response fails.
The most profound aspect of Sartre's introduction for me is that the emotions are neither antecedent nor subsequent to rationality, that they are a part of consciousness and an autonomously structured means of apprehending reality.
For me, Sartre's view frees me from having to see myself as a candidate for therapy, from having to see emotional responses in terms of reason. It releases me from the obligation to make emotions fit into a pre-conceived psychic structure as facts and allows me to explore the emotional field and discover the semantics of emotive expression or emotional being as I would explore the physical experience of being in a room, distinguishing hearing from listening, visual impression from seeing, etc. and creating a sense of sense.
Emotional response is being, directing itself toward the world. Moments of emotive interaction differentiating themselves from a background of emotional potential. How is this emotional being organized? What creates perceptions of clash, touch, crossing over, return?
The word "drive" is a pejorative view of energy. Driven. The phenomenological term "directed" frees us from the breath of Original Sin still attached to the "driven," driven to disobey God, driven out of our emotional household.
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