Reason & Violence

From the Foreword written by Sartre

I have read with great attention the book that you were kind
enough to send me. It is, I am happy to say, a very clear, very
faithful account of my thought. In addition to your perfect
understanding of my La Critique de la Raison Dialectique, what
attracted me in this and your earlier works was your constant
concern to find an 'existential' approach to the mentally sick.
Like you, I believe that one cannot understand psychological
disturbances from the outside, on the basis of a positivistic
determinism, or reconstruct them with a combination of concepts
that remain outside the illness as lived and experienced. I also
believe that one cannot study, let alone cure, a neurosis without
a fundamental respect for the person of the patient, without a
constant effort to grasp the basic situation and to relive it,
without an attempt to rediscover the response of the person to that
situation, and-like you, I think-I regard mental illness as the
'way out' that the free organism, in its total unity, invents in
order to be able to live through an intolerable situation. For this
reason, I place the highest value on your researches, in particular
on the study that you are making of the family as a group and as
a series-and I am convinced that your efforts will bring closer
the day when psychiatry will, at last, become a truly human
psychiatry. 

9 November 1963 

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
(translated into English
by A. M. Sheridan Smith)