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The Psychology of the Imagination was originally published in France in 1940 under the title of L'Imaginaire. Designed specifically as an essay in phenomenology, it marks the first attempt to introduce Husserl's work into French culture and from there to the English-speaking world.
Published three years before Being and Nothingness, it contains Sartre's first extended examination of such concepts as nothingness and freedom: both are here derived from the ability of consciousness to imagine objects not only as they are but as they are not and from our capacity to imagine objects not in existence. According to Sartre, an object can be given to us in three ways: we can perceive it, we can have an idea of it, or we can imagine it (have an image of it). Although we may try to respond to the image in the same way as we would to the object itself, the fact remains that an image, however vivid, presents its object as not being.
It was in The Psychology of the Imagination that Sartre first brought his enthusiasm for phenomenology to the analysis of the preconditions for human freedom - an approach that was to figure prominently in his later philosophical works. The present edition includes Mary Warnock's perceptive introduction to this difficult and intriguing work.
