The hallucinatory experience: Sartre and the imaginary body

Abstract

This article aims to explore Sartre's conceptualization of the hallucinatory experience, based on the phenomenological psychology of the imaginary and the imagination that Sartre theorized before the publication of L'Être et le Néant (1943). In this sense, a revision of the place and function of the body in the imaginative production that, from these Sartrean texts, involves all hallucinated content is proposed. The body, consequently, is posed both as facticity, affectivity and as unrealizing field of the hallucinated. What is valuable in the Sartrean approach is that it highlights constitutive elements for a phenomenological approach to psychopathology, such as the passivity of subjective affection, the thesis of belief of the hallucinated and the conditions of possibility of an imaginative content.