the lobsters

Although it has long been known that Sartre experienced visions of lobsters — which he sometimes referred to as crabs — Gerassi’s account offers startling new details of the philosopher’s descent into near-madness as he battled to make sense of what he had come to regard as the intellectual absurdity of his life.

“Yeah, after I took mescaline I started seeing crabs around me all the time,” he says in Gerassi’s new book, Talking With Sartre. “They followed me in the streets, into class ... I would wake up in the morning and say, ‘Good morning, my little ones, how did you sleep?’ I would say, ‘Okay guys, we’re going into class now . . . ’ and they would be there, around my desk, absolutely still, until the bell rang.”

Sartre was intrigued by the mind-expanding properties of the peyote cactus. His mescaline experiments started in 1935 and affected his thinking for more than a year. They proved a big influence in the writing of his 1938 novel, Nausea — now regarded as a manifesto of existentialism. Shellfish visions also featured in his 1959 play, The Condemned of Altona, in which a race of crabs sits in judgment on humanity.

In between, Sartre told Gerassi, “I began to think I was going crazy.”

He consulted a young psychiatrist named Jacques Lacan — who later became another of France’s foremost intellectuals — and they attributed Sartre’s crab-infested depression to his fear that he was being pigeon-holed as a teacher.

“That was the worst part, to have to be serious about life,” said Sartre. “The crabs stayed with me until the day I simply decided that they bored me and I wouldn’t pay attention to them.” By then it was the 1940s, France was occupied and Sartre had other things to worry about.

- "Mescaline left Jean-Paul Sartre in the grip of lobster madness" [The Sunday Times]

"where does addiction begin?"

"Edward Glover showed that anything could serve as a drug, and moreover Lacan was very explicit when he excluded drug addicts from the psychoanalytic scene, perhaps wrongly, given Freud's impressive though officially discarded texts on cocaine. But Glover showed that anything could serve as a drug, including, we could add, work, the "workaholic" syndrome, or athletic training, or piano practice, and anything that involves repetition, need, lack. I don't mean that a new characteristic of drugs as drugs is emerging - on the contrary, drugs respond to an internal appeal that is probably already present in all of us. One of my questions is: why are we equipped with receptors, as if built for drugs? In other words, we are all potentially subject to addiction, constructed as we are according to addictive qualities of attachment and need. What I find interesting are not only the abyssal nuances of desires, urges, or destructive jouissance, but also those of the seductiveness of technology and the often crushing ethos of work."