Elisabeth Roudinesco’s multiple gifts as an intellectual historian are all on magnificent display in this enlightening and entertaining study of six French philosophers who came into prominence during the Second World War, the Algerian War, or the Vietnam War: Georges Canguilhem, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida. Roudinesco not only presents the essence of their thinking with remarkable clarity, she also relates their ideas to key events in their lives and to the historical circumstances in which they wrote. Since Roudinesco had previously written a comprehensive history of French psychoanalysis and a biography of Jacques Lacan, she lets that earlier work serve as background to her assessment of these six philosophers, all of whom, as she puts it, “confronted, in a critical fashion, not just the question of political engagement (meaning a philosophy of freedom) but also the Freudian concept of the unconscious (meaning a philosophy of structure.)”

Her remarkable ability as a storyteller is accentuated not only by her personal acquaintance with them but also by her readiness to write about them from the perspective of books of theirs that have been more or less neglected. Thus, for example, in the chapter on Sartre she deals at length with his screenplay on the life of Freud:

“It was the film director John Huston who in 1958 gave Sartre the chance to break out of his own system. When Huston commissioned Sartre to write a screenplay on the life and work of Sigmund Freud, elements of psychoanalysis had already found their way into the movies. But Hollywood’s psychoanalysis was not that of the psychoanalytic community in the United States, even though, as emigrants from old Europe, many American film directors had a shared background with the psychoanalysts who were members of the International Psychoanalytical Association. Exile had not, however, had the same effect on the two groups. Whereas the therapists had chosen to integrate into the American health system…, the filmmakers had adopted Freud’s doctrine and transformed it into a powerful tool for criticizing the ideals of the American way of life.”

Sartre had intended Marilyn Monroe to play Anna O. (called Cecily in his screenplay) and Montgomery Clift to play Freud. Sartre knew that both actors had extensive experience with psychoanalysis. Marilyn Monroe began analysis with Margaret Hohenberg in 1954, and at the time Sartre began working on this project she had just married Arthur Miller, who was in analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein. About the same time Monroe was advised by Anna Freud to enter analysis with Marianne Kris. (Nevertheless, Anna Freud disapproved of Sartre’s project, foreseeing how critical he would be of Freud’s work.) Unfortunately, Kris soon found herself overwhelmed by Monroe’s case, which then passed from one Hollywood quack to another before ending up with Eunice Murray, who had ties with the Jehovah’s Witnesses. As the lives of Monroe and Clift spun out of control, overcome by what Roudinesco calls the “deadly destiny” of the Hollywood star system, Huston’s project proved impossible to realize, and his meetings was Sartre more and more mutually incomprehensible. Monroe, of course, committed suicide in the summer of 1962.

Roudinesco puts all of this in the larger context of the emigration of European psychoanalysts and entertainers to America. She even makes the important point that the Soviet hostility to psychoanalysis in the 1950s was the result of their thinking of it as an American project, “a reactionary ideology in the service of American imperialism.”

Roudinesco’s five other chapters are no less illuminating of the philosophers she discusses and the turbulent times they lived through.

-- Michael Payne writes and lectures on literature and critical theory. He lives in Lewisburg and can be reached at payne@bucknell.edu.