Living with Mother: Sartre and the Problem of Maternity

Michel Contat, Sartre’s bibliographer and the foremost authority on his work, has pointed out that ’Sartre’s mother’ was the most important woman in his life : it’s not Simone de Beauvoir, like people think - no, no, it was actually Mummy - he lived with Mummy, you know...’ In the same interview, citing Freud, Contat attributes Sartre’s ‘genius’ to the ‘love of a beautiful young mother’, the conviction that she ‘has a genius [...] and the very strong relationship between mother and child’. There are those who might object to this succinct psychoanalysis that it is rather Simone de Beauvoir who was the key female figure of Sartre’s adult life, becoming the mentor and guardian of his mature genius.