Psychic Temporality
ELI5
When you try to observe yourself from the outside — as if you were a thing with a past and a future — you turn your living, flowing experience into a kind of mental object frozen in a timeline. "Psychic temporality" is the name for that frozen, objectified timeline, as opposed to the original, lived flow of being yourself.
Definition
Psychic temporality, as Sartre deploys it in Being and Nothingness, names the derived, objectified temporal order that is constituted when impure (constituent) reflection takes the for-itself as its object and projects behind the reflected-on consciousness a quasi-substantial psyche. Whereas the for-itself's original, "authentic" temporality is ekstatic—the for-itself is its temporalization, living time as a perpetual self-surpassing toward its own possibilities—psychic temporality is a secondary product, a succession of discrete psychic facts (emotions, states, desires) arranged in a before-and-after sequence that mimics the in-itself's mode of being. The ontological operation that produces this derived temporality is the shift from pure reflection (which grasps consciousness in its translucency and nihilating movement) to impure reflection (which freezes that movement into thinglike psychic objects). The "psyche" thus constituted is neither fully consciousness nor fully world: it is an inter-subjective, quasi-in-itself entity that becomes the proper object of psychological science.
The key tension Sartre names is that psychic temporality is simultaneously incompatible with the for-itself's being and yet the form in which the for-itself appears to itself and to others as a stable, knowable subject. Psychic temporality is therefore structurally alien: it belongs to the order of the objectified ego rather than to the living first-person temporalization. This places the concept in direct dialogue with the Lacanian distinction between the subject of the unconscious (split, barred, always already displaced in time) and the ego as imaginary precipitate—a comparison that is inferential but strongly supported by the shared structural logic of a primary temporal movement being covered over by a secondary, reified order.
Place in the corpus
Within the source jean-paul-sartre-hazel-barnes-being-and-nothingness, psychic temporality appears at the moment Sartre distinguishes the for-itself's original historicity (the ekstatic, living self-temporalization that constitutes authentic existence) from the derived temporal order of the psyche. It is an extension of Sartre's broader ontology of reflection: pure reflection sees consciousness as it is (nihilating, translucent), while impure reflection generates the ego and its temporal stream as an objectified quasi-in-itself. Psychic temporality is thus a specification of the wider concept of the psyche as a construct of impure reflection, and it directly opposes what Sartre calls "original temporality" or historicity — one of the cross-referenced canonicals here — by showing how historicity gets degraded into a linear succession of psychic facts.
In relation to the other cross-referenced canonical concepts: the Gap is illuminated negatively by psychic temporality — where the gap names the constitutive opening that keeps subjectivity alive and desiring, psychic temporality is precisely what threatens to close that gap by treating the subject as a continuous, self-identical series of psychic states. The concept also resonates with Consciousness as theorized in the corpus: both Sartre and Lacan insist that the primary mode of consciousness or the subject is not transparent self-presence but a movement that is systematically misrepresented when reflected upon impurely. The cross-reference to Anxiety is suggestive: it is in the register of psychic temporality — where the subject mistakes itself for a stable psychic object — that anxiety (as the eruption of the Real or the gap of the for-itself's nothingness) becomes most destabilizing, threatening the very temporal coherence the ego constructs. Psychic temporality thus functions as the ontological condition of possibility for the illusions that anxiety, negation, and impure reflection together sustain.
Key formulations
Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (p.159)
Here we are then in the presence of two temporalities: the original temporality of which we are the temporalization, and psychic temporality which simultaneously appears as incompatible with the mode of being of our being and as an inter-subjective reality, the object of science
The quote is theoretically loaded because it articulates a fundamental ontological bifurcation: "the original temporality of which we are the temporalization" establishes that the for-itself does not have time but is its own temporal movement, while "psychic temporality" is immediately marked by a double paradox — it is "incompatible with the mode of being of our being" (alien to what we fundamentally are) and yet it is "an inter-subjective reality, the object of science" (the very basis on which psychology and others know us). This double characterization — ontologically illegitimate yet socially and scientifically operative — captures the core Sartrean critique of the reification of subjectivity into a manageable, observable psyche.