Summary: The Imaginary (page 6)

A feeling is never more than itself. [...] It now suffers from a profound poverty. [...] It is performed, it is mimed. The faint images we retain of Annie will become banal.¹ This love loses its distinctiveness; it dissolves into a generic love and is, in a sense, rationalised. It becomes that all-purpose feeling so often described by psychologists and novelists.

My love will have suffered a radical impoverishment, making it easier to bear. The loved one loses their independence. There is no longer any effort required. The feeling conforms to our desires more than ever before.

This is what differentiates real feelings from imaginary ones. A mere reappearance of the real is enough to dispel this degraded form of feeling: The return of the real invariably brings about the collapse of the imaginary.²

Feeling and behaviour constitute two irreducible types of object.³

Both the schizophrenic and the morbid dreamer favour the imaginary over the real. They adopt imaginary feelings and behaviours precisely because of their imaginary nature. One does not simply choose between images. Rather, one chooses the imaginary state itself, with all that it entails.⁴

Sartre describes this psychological state in striking terms:

Not only do we flee the content of reality (poverty, disappointed love, etc.), we flee the very form of reality, its character of presence, the kind of reaction it demands of us, the subordination of our conduct to the object, the inexhaustibility of perceptions, their independence... This factitious life—frozen, slowed down, scholastic—which for most people is no more than a stopgap, is precisely what a schizophrenic desires. The morbid dreamer who imagines himself to be king would not settle for actual kingship, nor even for a tyranny in which all his desires would be granted.

For never is a desire perfectly fulfilled, precisely because of the gap that separates the real from the imaginary.⁵

To sum up, reality is always new, always unpredictable. [...] On the contrary, the feelings of the morbid dreamer are solemn and fixed; they always return in the same form; nothing in them is left to chance.⁶

However, a problem arises: the dream world gives itself away as a real and perceived world.⁷

So it seems that there is at least one case where the image presents itself as perception: in the dream. Does this contradict the image/perception distinction proposed by Sartre at the beginning of the book?

In fact, any appearance of reflexive consciousness in the dream corresponds to a momentary awakening.⁸ Reflection destroys the dream but, in doing so, confirms consciousness in reality. Here we see the fragility of the dream, at the mercy of any reflection.

In the dream, consciousness cannot escape the image-forming attitude in which it has enclosed itself. [...] Everything is image to it. [...] The dream is a consciousness that cannot break free from the image-forming attitude.⁹

Nor should it be thought that this consciousness, isolated from the real world, mistakes the imaginary for the real. What characterises dreaming consciousness is that it has lost the very notion of reality.

The dream is the perfect realisation of a closed imaginary—that is, an imaginary from which there is absolutely no way out and upon which it is impossible to take the slightest external point of view.¹⁰

There is no possibility in the dream either, since consciousness cannot step back from its own imaginings to envision a possible continuation of the story it represents; that would be waking up.¹¹ The imaginary world is thus given as a world without freedom: it is fatal.

We can only emerge from a dream for three reasons:

- A reflexive awareness: the fear in a nightmare becomes so intense that I realise, by reflection, that I am afraid.

- A strong perception (a noise).

- Or finally: I stop dreaming the moment I am about to die, because what happens next—death—is inconceivable.

¹ ibid.
² ibid., p.280
³ ibid., p.282
⁴ ibid.
⁵ ibid.
⁶ ibid., p.283
⁷ I, 4, p.309
⁸ ibid., p.311
⁹ ibid., p.317
¹⁰ ibid., p.319
¹¹ ibid., p.327