John Paul Sartre and his crabs

Jean Paul Sartre’s fame was still several years ahead of him; he was then in his late twenties and employed as an unpublished and unknown philosophy teacher. At the time Sartre was writing a book on the imagination and he hoped that [mescaline] would induce hallucinations that would give him a new insight into his research. However, his lifelong companion and fellow philosopher Simone de Beauvoir reported later that the plan may have succeeded all too well…
 
During the midst of his trip Sartre had received a phone call from de Beauvoir; a phone call that had apparently rescued him from a desperate battle with scrambled lobsters, octopuses and other grimacing sea-life. To Sartre ordinary objects had begun to change their shape grotesquely: umbrellas were deforming into vultures, shoes were turning into skeletons, and faces looked absolutely ‘monstrous’. All the while, behind him, just past the corner of his eye was the constant threat of the terrifying deep water dwellers. Yet, despite these horrible hallucinations (that seem rather uncharacteristic of the mescaline experience), by the following day Sartre had apparently recovered completely, referring to the experience with ‘cheerful detachment.’

However, in a later interview with John Gerassi, Sartre noted that in the days following his Mescaline trip he ended up having a nervous breakdown:

after I took mescaline, I started seeing crabs around me all the time. They followed me in the streets, into class. I got used to them. I would wake up in the morning and say, “Good morning, my little ones, how did you sleep?” I would talk to them all the time. I would say, “O.K., guys, we’re going into class now, so we have to be still and quiet,” and they would be there, around my desk, absolutely still, until the bell rang. 

The funny thing about Sartre’s crabs and lobsters was that there were generally only 3 or 4 of them, and he was always totally aware that they were merely figments of his imagination.

The rest of the story is at Blue Labyrinths.  With a tip of the hat to Anna and the other QI elves at No Such Thing As A Fish.

Image credit.