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Contributions To Phenomenology 88
Dorothée Legrand
Dylan Trigg Editors
Unconsciousness
Between
Phenomenology
and
Psychoanalysis
Contributions To Phenomenology
Volume 88
Series Editors
Nicolas de Warren, KU Leuven, Belgium
Dermot Moran, University College Dublin, Ireland
Editorial Board
Lilian Alweiss, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Elizabeth Behnke, Ferndale, WA, USA
Rudolf Bernet, Husserl Archive, KU Leuven, Belgium
David Carr, Emory University, GA, USA
Chan-Fai Cheung, Chinese University Hong Kong, China
James Dodd, New School University, NY, USA
Lester Embree, Florida Atlantic University, FL, USA
Alfredo Ferrarin, Università di Pisa, Italy
Burt Hopkins, Seattle University, WA, USA
José Huertas-Jourda, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada
Kwok-Ying Lau, Chinese University Hong Kong, China
Nam-In Lee, Seoul National University, Korea
Rosemary R.P. Lerner, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Peru
Dieter Lohmar, University of Cologne, Germany
William R. McKenna, Miami University, OH, USA
Algis Mickunas, Ohio University, OH, USA
J.N. Mohanty, Temple University, PA, USA
Junichi Murata, University of Tokyo, Japan
Thomas Nenon, The University of Memphis, TN, USA
Thomas M. Seebohm, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Germany
Gail Soffer, Rome, Italy
Anthony Steinbock, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, IL, USA
Shigeru Taguchi, Hokkaido University, Japan
Dan Zahavi, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Richard M. Zaner, Vanderbilt University, TN, USA
Scope
The purpose of the series is to serve as a vehicle for the pursuit of phenomenological
research across a broad spectrum, including cross-over developments with other
fields of inquiry such as the social sciences and cognitive science. Since its
establishment in 1987, Contributions to Phenomenology has published more than
80 titles on diverse themes of phenomenological philosophy. In addition to
welcoming monographs and collections of papers in established areas of scholarship,
the series encourages original work in phenomenology. The breadth and depth of
the Series reflects the rich and varied significance of phenomenological thinking for
seminal questions of human inquiry as well as the increasingly international reach
of phenomenological research.
The series is published in cooperation with The Center for Advanced Research in
Phenomenology.
Unconsciousness Between
Phenomenology and
Psychoanalysis
Editors
Dorothée Legrand Dylan Trigg
Archives Husserl, CNRS, Ecole Normale School of Philosophy
Supérieure University College Dublin
Paris Sciences et Lettres Research Dublin, Ireland
University
Paris, France
v
vi Contents
Index.................................................................................................................. 279
Introduction
Context
What you are reading now is the fruit of an encounter not only between phenomenol-
ogy and psychoanalysis but also between the editors. Out of our encounter grew
something else, progressively – a friendship and now the book you are holding. If you
hold it now, it is because we had too many questions, more than the two of us could
unfold, more than we could even think of. We thus invited others to embark with us.
We first organized a conference, titled Is there a phenomenology of unconscious-
ness? Sponsored by both French and Irish institutions, the event took place at University
College Dublin in February 2014. We are gratified that each of the nine speakers for
the event has agreed to include their contributions in this volume. Alongside these
chapters, we have solicited further contributions from leading figures in the field,
expanding and strengthening our original scope. In bringing together thinkers from
diverse backgrounds and with divergent interests, we have sought to preserve the dif-
ferences between phenomenology and psychoanalysis rather than to efface or resolve
those differences. Our task from the outset was neither to render phenomenology psy-
choanalytical nor to render psychoanalysis phenomenological, but instead to locate the
shifting terrain in which each discipline appears and disappears. As Merleau-Ponty
noted at the end of his life, the relation between phenomenology and psychoanalysis is
not simply predicated on a mutual resistance to positivism. Much more than this, their
rapport is grounded in a shared orientation, a mutual latency.
Our initial plan was to be fair, if not exhaustive – what a plan! As if (academic,
linguistic, practical, conceptual, and so forth) frontiers could be easily crossed, we
sought to invite both philosophers and psychoanalysts, to discuss both philosophy
and psychoanalysis, and to cross these “fields” both theoretically and clinically.
Here already, an asymmetry imposed itself: namely, if there is no psychoanalysis
without patients, inversely, what is philosophy’s clinical practice? By this question
alone, our plan collapsed, not because there would be no philosophical practice,
even less because philosophy would be clinically irrelevant, but because this ques-
tion – is there a philosophical clinical practice? – if not heretical, is comparative. It
vii
viii Introduction
soon leads, indeed, to question what a clinical practice would be, if philosophically
relevant, by comparison with a clinical practice that would not be so and what a
philosophy would be, if clinically relevant, by comparison with a philosophy that
would not be so. In our own research, both of us work with “this and that” (here is
not the place to detail this and that), but our approach has never been comparative;
in this collective work, the same approach remains intact.
In particular, to work at once with philosophy and psychoanalysis does not impose
a comparison between – say – the concept of unconsciousness in philosophy and the
hypothesis of the unconscious in psychoanalysis. A comparison is rather sterile if it
offers only the detection of redundancies or incompatibilities. The power of a compari-
son comes notably from its ability to size the scope of a given thought within its own
field and in its primary context. In doing so, one ends up better understanding, for
example, the specificity of Freud’s unconscious, by comparing it with Merleau-Ponty’s.
But we aimed at something else: we proposed – to ourselves, to each other, to the con-
tributors of this book, and now to its reader – to work beyond borders, so to speak, or
between borders, rather. We didn’t aim at erasing borders nor to work without borders,
but proposed to displace borders, to displace a thought where it is not (yet) thought of
and to impregnate or contaminate a thought with what it does not (yet) think.
What does occur to philosophy, if it thinks the unconscious which psychoana-
lysts work with; what does happen to the psychoanalytic unconscious if it is thought
of by philosophy; what does occur to psychoanalysis if it is confronted with uncon-
sciousness as it is conceptualized philosophically; how is a philosophical uncon-
scious impacted if it is captured within a psychoanalytic frame? These are some of
the questions that arise, as soon as we started to put together in a single sentence the
words unconscious philosophy.
As we will not compare philosophy and psychoanalysis, so we will not launch
this non-comparative book by comparing comparative approaches. We will not, for
instance, list the manners in which, explicitly or not, philosophers may have dis-
cussed psychoanalysis, the manners in which philosophers may have made, toward
what would become or what was already named psychoanalysis, movements of
anticipation, foundation, integration, overshadowing, neglect, revelation, clarifica-
tion, plagiarism, diversion, deconstruction, differentiation, immersion, etc. Neither
“for” nor “against,” neither exactly “with” nor entirely “without,” neither “alike”
nor “dislike,” we here navigate “between” philosophy and psychoanalysis; for us,
this work is interstitial.
Even unpronounced, psychoanalysis is on every page of this book – as an explicit
or implicit reference to the split subject, to language, sex, others, dreams, symptoms,
and so forth. Philosophically, the explicit reference here is a method which has often
been abusively confused with a philosophy of consciousness, a philosophy which
has indeed championed the study of the structure of consciousness – phenomenol-
ogy. Within this background and because we hoped for a dialogue with philosophi-
cal thoughts which did not aim primarily to be practiced clinically, we do not do
here what should be done elsewhere: a dialogue between psychoanalysis and phe-
nomenological psychiatry, as clinical practices. For now, we just needed to pause a
moment and ask: what are we talking about when we talk about unconsciousness?
Introduction ix
confronted with, here, is the conception of an “undivided” being (see also J. Phillips,
T. Mooney).
In fact, this is a challenge for phenomenology itself, and for Merleau-Ponty’s phe-
nomenology of unconsciousness in particular, as Tim Mooney’s chapter problematizes
explicitly by revisiting Merleau-Ponty’s key ideas under the notion of unconscious-
ness. The notions of body schema and motor intentionality are critical here, insofar as
they allow us to consider how one’s past is sedimented into one’s habitual body, in turn
shaping one’s horizon of capacities toward future projects (see also L. Ingerslev).
Although anonymous, in that one doesn’t decide on them, one’s bodily habits are
meant to preserve one’s psychic order and free one’s consciousness of the burden of
overplanning: it effortlessly effectuates one’s adherence with one’s familiar world.
Moreover, one’s anonymous bodily dynamics does not only impose a lack of transpar-
ency upon oneself; it also allows one’s attunement with others, insofar as one shares
with others a common embodiment, an anonymous intercorporeality. Altogether,
one’s body is a locus of integration (see also E. de Saint Aubert, J. Phillips), integration
of one’s past, of others, of sexuality and vitality into the whole of human’s existence,
integration which occurs in an admirably enabling and untroubling manner. What
appears here, after such reading of Merleau-Ponty, is that unconsciousness could be
conceived of as a soothing process of integration, rather than disruption and tension.
Exploring Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy in yet another manner, thereby demon-
strating its fertility, James Phillips elaborates upon the nonverbal unconscious. Here,
what is emphasized is the unconscious as a prereflective structure of one’s being in
the world, generating the unity of subject and world (see also E. de Saint Aubert,
T. Mooney). Such structure is a silent impulse toward meaning, the invisible armature
(membrure) that supports one’s visual acquaintance with the world, the reversibility
and blending of the seeing/touching with the seen/touched. Together with the motive
of integration or even undividedness, which is present in Merleau-Ponty’s work
throughout, one finds the idea that consciousness is never complete but presupposes
pre-reflectivity, vision is never total but presupposes invisibility, and expression is
never fully accomplished but presupposes silence. Pre-reflectivity, invisibility,
silence – these are other names for unconsciousness. Throughout these different nom-
inations, unconsciousness is structured as an unbridgeable “écart,” a non-represent-
able absence, an indefinite excess (see also E. de Saint Aubert). What surges here is
nothing like an unconscious as a container of representations hidden from conscious-
ness behind the thick wall of repression – no one really conceived of the unconscious
as such, phenomenologists even less than any others – rather, unconsciousness is “in
between,” as the glue tying together the subject and the world he is conscious of.
Dylan Trigg folds the study of unconsciousness into the experience that “I am not
me,” not fully me, not me in any unified manner, not a “me” which a linear narrative
could encompass neatly. He takes up this experience through the idea of hypnagogic
states – transitional states between wakefulness and sleep that are best characterized
as liminal states between consciousness and unconsciousness, between self and
nonself. On the one hand, hypnagogic states require from the subject a receptivity,
an openness toward an ambivalent state of consciousness where one is both at once
present and absent (see also J. Cohen). On the other hand, anxiety may emerge
when a sense of loosening the ego surges uncontrollably. As seen in this way, anxi-
ety imposes upon the subject the sense of an unbearable disjunction between one’s
subjective presence and one’s disappearance from the subjective field. Here, a series
of tensions form. Hypnagogia opens the subject to the marvels of ambiguous states
of consciousness that exist independently of the ego (see also D. Dalton). At the
same time, anxiety violates the subject’s sense of being one, through the passage of
time, and rises as a defense against any ambiguity between self and nonself. In both
cases, what is revealed is a possible de-centering of the ego – be it in a relaxing or
terrifying experience. Whereas anxiety would deploy an existential distrust and
intolerance toward what does not belong to the conscious ego, hypnagogia would
allow loosening the barriers of consciousness against unconsciousness.
Thamy Ayouch does not explore the phenomenological unconscious through a
frontal confrontation with the term “unconscious” as used in phenomenology.
Rather, he explores key phenomenological notions to bring forth a phenomenologi-
cal unconscious, the latter being then put to work beyond phenomenology, to dis-
cuss with psychoanalysis and feminism about gender. With the nonrepresentational
framework proper to phenomenology, which intermingles subject and object; the
notion of intercorporeality which bridges the gap between self and others (see also
T. Mooney); the notion of institution, blurring the boundaries of the present, carry-
ing the traces of a sedimented past and the call for a unachievable future; the
Merleau-Pontian conception of language, tying together repetition and subversion;
the circularity between nature and culture, what emerges is a notion of an uncon-
scious that is not exclusively verbal but also affective (see also J. Phillips, N. Depraz).
The unconscious is not the product of a culturally loaded repression of natural
drives, but an instituted affectivity in quest for figurability: just like an affect
detached from its primary objects may be secondarily attached to another figure, as
it often occurs in dreams, a given gender assignment may be the figuration found by
the affect disconnected from one’s originary gender multiplicity. This conception of
the unconscious, it is argued, avoids imposing categories stretching beyond history
and culture and that could be applied universally (see also A. Lingis); in particular,
it allows considering, in a non-pathologizing manner, processes of non-binary gen-
der configurations and polymorphous sexuality.
Dieter Lohmar argues in favor of a nonlinguistic mode of thinking which, inves-
tigated from a perspective that is rooted into Husserlian phenomenology, creates the
Introduction xv
Beyond Phenomenology
Needless to say, to all these questions, none of the authors writing in this book
provide any definitive answer, but we hope that, by posing them polyphonically, we
provide some material to better understand them and further work on them.
Acknowledgments
In closing, we wish to take this opportunity to thank all of the contributors to this
volume. It is only through their generosity that this volume exists in its current form,
as a collection of diverse but interconnected chapters. In addition, we wish to thank
those individuals and funding bodies that supported the conference, which led up to
this book. In particular, our thanks go to Dermot Moran for providing funding assis-
tance together with the usage of the Newman House, University College Dublin.
Our thanks also go to Hadrien Laroche, the cultural attaché at the French Embassy
in Dublin for providing financial support for the conference. Our thanks also go to
Dominique Pradelle, director of the Husserl Archives, Ecole Normale Supérieure,
Paris, for participating to the founding of the conference. Additional thanks to Helen
Kennedy (UCD), Margaret Brady (UCD), and Karima Argentin (ENS) for the
administrative support leading up to and beyond the conference. Thanks also to
Audrey Petit-Trigg for her translation work, both during the conference and for the
present volume. Dylan Trigg’s work on this collection was supported by a Marie
Curie grant (FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IOF 624968), which is herein gratefully acknowl-
edged. Dylan Trigg would like to also thank Dorothée Legrand for her friendship
and intellectual camaraderie, both during the preparation of this volume and beyond,
and Dorothée Legrand would like to flip this sentence around to thank Dylan Trigg.
Dermot Moran
D. Moran (*)
School of Philosophy, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
e-mail: [email protected]
Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) were almost exact
contemporaries, both attended Franz Brentano’s lectures in Vienna,1 and both were
involved in the understanding of subjective life and its meaning. As a result, various
efforts have been made over the years to explore the relations between Husserlian
phenomenology and Freudian psychoanalysis, between the descriptive phenomeno-
logical exploration of experienced, conscious life, in all its modalities (including
memory, fantasy, emotion, habitual action), and the analytic uncovering of uncon-
scious processes (repression, sublimation) and their effects.2
For many years, the standard view has been that Husserl’s phenomenology deals
only with the conscious self-reflective ego (what Husserl calls, following Descartes,
cogito) and its ‘lived experiences’ (Erlebnisse) that can be accessed in conscious
reflection (or at best through some kind of reflective reconstruction), whereas
Freudian psychoanalysis identifies unconscious processes, forces and energies, acts
of repression and recurrences, that are not immediately (and may never become)
available to the conscious subject, but rather must be identified through the media-
tion of the psychoanalytic engagement with an analyst working through hints,
traces, slips, ruptures, resistances, and absences, that point to these underlying
forces at work.3 For Freud, the psychology of the unconscious was a ‘depth psychol-
ogy’ that entails a whole vision of human nature that portrayed humans as strug-
gling to balance instinctual drives (the pleasure principle, the death instinct) as ways
of coping with sex and aggression, albeit that Freud also had a generally
Enlightenment view of humans as capable of rationality, freedom and love.4
1
Freud attended Brentano’s lectures in Vienna as a young student from 1874 to 1876, whereas
Husserl attended Brentano’s lectures 10 years later from 1884 to 1886. See Philip Merlan,
‘Brentano and Freud’, Journal of the History of Ideas vol. 6, no. 3 (Jun., 1945), pp. 375–377. The
lectures appeared to have no lasting impression on the founder of psychoanalysis, but see Raymond
E. Fancher, ‘Brentano’s Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint and Freud’s Early
Metapsychology’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, vol. 13 no. 3 (July 1977),
pp. 207–227, who discusses some comparisons in their approaches.
2
For a thorough, recent discussion of the literature on the relations between phenomenology and
psychoanalysis, see Nicholas Smith, Towards a Phenomenology of Repression – A Husserlian
Reply to the Freudian Challenge, Stockholm Studies in Philosophy 34 (Stockholm: Stockholm
University, 2010), especially pp. 10–38. See also Gunnar Karlsson, ‘Phenomenology and
Psychoanalysis’, in his Psychoanalysis in a New Light (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2010), pp. 1–20. See also Evelyne Grossmann, ‘Inconscient freudien, inconsient phénomé-
nologique’, Rue Descartes vol. 4 no. 4 (2010), pp. 106–112.
3
For an important discussion of psychoanalysis in relation to phenomenology, see Herbert
Spiegelberg, Phenomenology in Psychology and Psychiatry. A Historical Introduction (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1972), especially pp. 127ff. See also the work of Alphonse de
Waelhens, especially his, ‘Sur l’inconscient et la pensée philosophique’, in L’ Inconscient (Paris,
Desclée de Brouwer, 1966) and his ‘Réflections sur une problématique husserlienne de
l’inconscient, Husserl et Hegel’, in H. L. Van Breda and J. Taminiaux, eds, Edmund Husserl 1859–
1959. Recueil commemoratif publié à l’occasion de centenaire de la naissance du philosophe (The
Hague: Nijhoff, 1959). See also Herman Drüe, ‘Psychoanalysis’, in Lester Embree, ed.,
Encyclopedia of Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), pp. 568–572.
4
See Philip Rieff, Freud. The Mind of a Moralist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977),
p. 187.
1 Husserl’s Layered Concept of the Human Person: Conscious and Unconscious 5
5
See Hannah S. Decker, “The Reception of Psychoanalysis in Germany,” Comparative Studies in
Society and History 24 no. 4 (1982), pp. 589–602; and her Freud in Germany: Revolution and
Reaction in Science 1893–1907 (New York: International Universities Press, 1977).
6
See Karl Jaspers, General Psychopathology, trans. J. Hoenig and Marian W. Hamilton (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); and his Die geistige Situation der Zeit (1931), trans.
as Man in the Modern Age (New York: Anchor Books, 1957). Jaspers is increasingly critical of
psychoanalysis, see Matthias Bormuth, Life Conduct in Modern Times: Karl Jaspers and
Psychoanalysis (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), and his “Karl Jaspers as a Critic of Psychoanalysis A
Short Sketch of a Long Story,” Existenz. International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics,
and the Arts, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Fall 2015), pp. 1–10.
7
See Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute
of Social Research, 1923–50 m(Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1973) and Rolf Wiggershaus, The
Frankfurt School. Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (London and Cambridge: Polity/
The MIT Press, 1994). See also Joel Whitebook, Joel, “Fantasy and critique: some thoughts on
Freud and the Frankfurt School,” in David M. Rasmussen (ed.), Handbook of Critical Theory.
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), pp. 287–304.
6 D. Moran
8
This was indeed the view of Elmar Holenstein in his Husserls Phänomenologie der Assoziation.
Zu Struktur und Funktion eines Grundprinzips der passive Genesis bei Edmund Husserl (The
Hague: Nijhoff, 1972), see especially p. 322.
9
See Paul Ricoeur, De l’interprétation. Essai sur Sigmund Freud (Paris: LeSeuil, 1965), trans.
D. Savage Freud and Philosophy. An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University, 1970),
especially pp. 380 ff.
10
Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, op. cit., p. 376. Ricoeur is particular is referring to Freud’s 1915
paper on ‘The Unconscious’.
11
See Hao Wang, A Logical Journey: From Gödel to Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1996), p. 167.
12
See Edmund Husserl, Analysen zur passiven Synthesis. Aus Vorlesungs- und
Forschungsmanuskripten, 1918–1926, Husserliana (hereafter ‘Hua’) XI, ed. M. Fleischer ( (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962); trans. Anthony J. Steinbock, as Analyses Concerning Passive and
Active Synthesis (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001).
13
For a reading of Husserl’s phenomenology in relation to Freud, see Rudolf Bernet, ‘Le freudisme
de Husserl: une phénoménologie de la pulsion et des émotions’, in Jocelyt Benoist, ed., Husserl
(Paris: Cerf « Les cahiers d’histoire de la philosophie », 2008), pp. 125–147. See also Natalie
Depraz, ‘Pulsion, instinct, désir. Que. signifie Trieb cehz Husserl? À l’épreuve des perspectives de
Freud, Merleau-Ponty, Jonas et Scheler’, Alter 9 (2001), pp. 113–125; and Francesco S. Trincia,
1 Husserl’s Layered Concept of the Human Person: Conscious and Unconscious 7
‘Some Observations on Husserl and Freud’, in D. Lohmar and J. Brudzínska, eds, Founding
Psychoanalysis Phenomenologically, Phaenomenologica 199 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012),
pp. 235–242.
14
See E. Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness and Memory (1895–1925), trans. John Brough,
Husserl Collected Works vol. XI (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), pp. 251–52.
15
Rudolf Bernet, ‘Unconscious Consciousness in Husserl and Freud’, Phenomenology and the
Cognitive Sciences (2002), pp. 327–351; reprinted in Donn Welton, ed., The New Husserl. A
Critical Reader (Bloomington, IN: Indiana U. P. 2003), pp. 199–222, especially, p. 201.
16
Bernet, ‘Unconscious Consciousness in Husserl and Freud’, The New Husserl. A Critical Reader,
op. cit., p. 204.
17
See also Nicolas de Warren, ‘Time and the Double-Life of Subjectivity’, Journal of the British
Society for Phenomenology vol. 40 no. 2 (2009), pp. 155–169. De Warren sees Husserl as recog-
nizing the complex ways that consciousness can be split and doubled.
18
E. Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie.
Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution. Hrsg. Marly Biemel,
Husserliana IV (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1952); trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer, Ideas pertaining
to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book. Husserl Collected
Works III (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989). Hereafter “Ideas II’.
8 D. Moran
experiences where the ego simply finds itself and does not quite know how it got
there. Thus, in Ideas II § 56 (b), he speaks about the domain of unnoticed or
unacknowledged motivations that ‘psychoanalysis’ (Psychoanalyse, Ideas II, p. 235:
Hua IV 222) might investigate further. Despite its focus on the unconscious, there
are just two brief references to Freud and psychoanalysis in the recently published
Husserliana volume of notes that the editors have entitled Limit Problems of
Phenomenology. Analyses of the Unconscious and of Instincts (2014).19
In Walter Biemel’s critical Husserliana edition of Husserl’s Crisis of the European
Sciences (1954),20 there is a reference to ‘depth psychology’ (Tiefenpsychologie,
Crisis p. 386; VI 473), by which presumably is meant Freudian psychoanalysis
(although possibly including Freud and Adler). This reference occurs in an
Appendix Husserl’s then assistant Eugen Fink, added to Husserl’s Crisis in 1936.21
This Appendix stresses that the exploration of the unconscious must begin from a
thorough study of ‘being conscious’ (Bewusstheit). Furthermore, Fink acknowledges
that one should not automatically assume that the ‘unconscious’ is equivalent to all
sorts of obscure awareness, after-effects of conscious states that can subsequently
be re-awakened, since the practitioners of depth psychology actually claim the
reverse, namely, that all conscious life is founded on the unconscious which is prior.
Fink claims that depth psychology itself takes unconscious phenomena as self-
evident in their own way:
For the unconscious, too, as well as for consciousness, there exists the illusion of everyday,
given immediacy: we are all familiar, after all, with the phenomena of sleep, of fainting, of
being overtaken by obscure driving forces, creative states, and the like. (Crisis, p. 387; VI 474)
Fink rejects as “naïve” and “dogmatic” certain theoretical constructions (he means
Freud) that have been built on the recognition of the unconscious, e.g. those that
invoke the ‘naturalistic mechanism of the “libido”’ (Crisis, p. 386; VI 474) or some
kind of “dynamics” of instincts and drives. Fink claims that these discussions begin
from the naïve assumption that conscious life is immediately given and, as it were,
transparent, whereas in fact Husserlian intentional analysis has shown that con-
scious life is a very complex and multilayered structure. Only when ‘wakeful’ con-
sciousness as such is clarified can a proper discussion of the unconscious as such be
undertaken.22 Presumably Husserl and Fink discussed the problem of the Freudian
19
See E. Husserl, Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie, Analysen des Unbewusstseins und der
Instinkte. Metaphysik. Späte Ethik. Texte aus dem Nachlass 1908–1937, ed. Rochus Sowa and
Thomas Vongehr, Husserliana XLII (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014), especially pp. 113 and 126.
20
E. Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie.
Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, ed.Walter Biemel, Husserliana Vol. VI
(The Hague: Nijhoff, 1954), substantially translated by David Carr as The Crisis of European
Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern U.P., 1970), with some supplements omitted. Hereafter Crisis, fol-
lowed by page number of English translation and Husserliana volume and page number.
21
Eugen Fink’s discussion of the unconscious was included by Walter Biemel as an Appendix in
his edition of the Crisis, pp. 385–87; Hua VI 473–75.
22
Husserl sometimes comment on the fact that the wakeful ego is punctuated by periods of sleep
and has to actively join itself to earlier states through acts of synthesis. Husserl leaves it an open
question as to whether there is ever pure ‘unconsciousness’ in the sense of there being no flicker of
1 Husserl’s Layered Concept of the Human Person: Conscious and Unconscious 9
unconscious on one or more of their daily walks in the hills above Freiburg and it is
undoubtedly the case that some of Husserl’s own students were interested in psy-
choanalysis. The mature Husserl regularly distinguishes between the ‘awake’ or
‘wakeful ego’ (das wache Ich) and the ego sunk in sleep or dream or other altered
states (e.g. intoxication). In Ideas II, for instance, he speaks of the ‘sleeping ego’
(das schlafende Ich) as sunk in what he calls ‘ego-matter’ (Ichmaterie, Ideas II § 58,
p. 264 IV 253) or hyle. In this state the ego is undifferentiated, it is ‘ego sunkenness’
(Ichversunkenheit). But Husserl was not clear on the best way of approaching these
‘dull’ (dumpf) conscious states (Ideas II § 26).
Aside from Eugen Fink’s remarks, it is accurate to state that Husserl’s phenom-
enology in Freiburg continued to develop more or less in parallel to Freudian psy-
choanalysis, without direct contact between the two disciplines (Freud himself
never refers by name to Husserl and indeed there are only a couple of generic refer-
ences to ‘psychological phenomenology’ in Freud’s works). In Husserl’s circle in
Göttingen, Max Scheler, who came to deliver public lectures, had a deep interest in
and critical understanding of Freud23 and discussed him in his The Essence of
Sympathy24 and elsewhere. Generally, speaking Scheler is critical of Freud’s natu-
ralism and his lack of appreciation that human beings can discriminate and choose
between values.25 But Scheler does find that Freud’s (albeit mistaken) views must
be discussed in any serious phenomenological exploration of the emotions, and
especially the nature of sexual love and shame (where Scheler is critical of Freud’s
postulations).26
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (especially in his unfinished Working Notes written in
1959 and 1960 and published posthumously in The Visible and the Invisible, 1964),27
does take Freudian psychoanalysis more seriously and indeed thinks that Freud’s
suspicion towards the lived experience as it presents itself is pre-eminently ‘philo-
sophical’ (VI, p. 181; 233). In fact, Merleau-Ponty is explicating a phenomenological
conception of the unconscious that is, I believe, close to that which Husserl would
have developed and which we can piece together from his scattered remarks.
Dreams and other phenomena must be scrutinized critically in their apparent given-
ness, but, the late Merleau-Ponty thinks, the ambiguous existential structures and
processes in which we live in the world are not somehow ‘behind’ the phenomena
(as in Freud) but between them (VI, p. 232; 281). The flow of experiences that
Husserl described does not unfold solely in the present but in a landscape that is a
‘field of being’ (champ d’être, VI, p. 240; 289). As Merleau-Ponty puts it: ‘The
“associations” of psychoanalysis are in reality “rays” of time and of the world’
(VI, p. 240; 289). In his view the phenomenon of temporality – and the peculiar
indefinite pastness of the time of the unconscious – needs to be revisited (VI, p. 243;
291–92).
Following Merleau-Ponty, the phenomenologist and psychiatrist Thomas Fuchs
suggests that, if the unconscious is considered more as a horizon of conscious life
rather than as a depth below it, then the concept of the unconscious can be success-
fully accommodated within Husserlian phenomenology. In fact, Fuchs speaks of the
unconscious as a ‘horizontal dimension of the lived body, lived space and
intercorporeality’.28 This seems to be consistent with Husserl’s own approach. In
fact, Husserl considers his discovery of ‘horizon-intentionality’ to be one of his
most original contributions to consciousness studies.
In contrast to the writings of Husserl, Martin Heidegger’s work did directly stim-
ulate a vigorous encounter between hermeneutical phenomenology and psychoanal-
ysis, both in terms of the existential phenomenological psychology as well as in
terms of the Lacanian approach which is heavily dependent on Heidegger’s concep-
tion of language. Inspired by Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time in 1927, a new
existential phenomenological analysis – Daseinsanalyse – was developed by
Ludwig Binswanger (a life-long friend of Freud),29 Medard Boss,30 and others,
which emphasised human spatial and temporal locatedness, mood and attunement
(Stimmung) as part of an overall structure of ‘being-in-the-world’ (In-der-Welt-
Sein). This form of analysis involved detailed exploration of phenomena such as
dream, anxiety, depression (melancholia), trauma, and so on, but within the context
of the person’s overall modality of existing in the world (including, crucially, the
manner in which the person experienced temporality).31 Ironically, Heidegger him-
self, much later, in his Zollikon seminars with Boss, criticized this Daseinsanalyse
28
Thomas Fuchs, ‘Body Memory and the Unconscious’, in Dieter Lohmar and Jagna Brudzínska,
eds, Founding Psychoanalysis Phenomenologically, Phaenomenologica 199 (Dordrecht: Springer,
2012), pp. 69–82.
29
See Ludwig Binswanger, Die Bedeutung der Daseinsanalytik Martin Heideggers für das
Selbstverständnis der Psychiatrie, in Carlos Estrada et al., eds, Martin Heideggers Einfluss auf die
Wissenschaften (Berne, 1949), pp. 58–72.
30
See Medard Boss, Psychoanalysis and Daseinsanalysis, trans. Ludwig Lefebre (New York:
Basic Books, 1982).
31
See Ludwig Binswanger, Melancholie und Manie: Phänomenologische Studien (Pfullingen:
Neske, 1960). See also Stefano Micali, Überschüsse der Erfahrung, Grenzdimensionen des Ich
nach Husserl (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008).
1 Husserl’s Layered Concept of the Human Person: Conscious and Unconscious 11
for focusing solely on being-in-the-world and ignoring the larger issue of the
‘understanding of Being’ (Seinsverständnis).32
In these seminars, Heidegger maintained a distance from the Freudian concept of
the unconscious and maintained that human concealment (the parallel of Freud’s
repression) is actually a form of manifestation and dwelling in the ‘clearing’ (die
Lichtung).33 In this regard, Heidegger’s position is not that different from Husserl’s
(and Fink’s). Heidegger, for instance, points out that although a child and an old
person may both live in the same present, their ‘presencing’ of that temporal present
is not the same. The child is more forward-facing and futural, whereas the old per-
son dwells in ‘having-been-ness’.34 These temporal differences are not immediately
obvious but can be disclosed. As Merleau-Ponty had also pointed out, the designa-
tion of events in the unconscious as somehow in a ‘past’ that was never present is
exceptionally problematic and needs careful reframing in terms of the ‘ecstatic’
character of human existence.
In post-war France, furthermore, the existential phenomenological descriptions
of human existence found in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre35 brought phenomenol-
ogy into dialogical confrontation with classical Freudian psychoanalysis Sartre
rejected the Freudian conception of the ‘id’, the ‘censor’ and what he regarded as
the mechanistic languages of hidden drives and affirmed human capacity for free-
dom. Sartre thought, however, that a new kind of existential psychoanalysis could
be developed that was based not on early sexual experiences and traumas but on
original choices (‘project’) made by individuals.36
Soon after, Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) integrated phenomenological insights
concerning the nature of language from the late Heidegger (and also Merleau-
Ponty) into his revision of Freudian psychoanalysis (his retour à Freud) with his
famous pronouncement that the unconscious is structured like a language.37 In these
32
M. Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars. Protocols–Conversations–Letters, ed. Medard Boss, trans.
Fritz Mayr and Richard Askay (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001),
pp. 188–195.
33
M. Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars, op. cit., pp. 182–83.
34
Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars, op. cit., p. 183.
35
Jean-Paul Sartre criticizes Freud’s conception of the censor and his mechanistic way of treating
self-deception or ‘bad faith’ (mauvaise foi) in L’être et le néant. Essai d’ontologie phénomé-
nologique (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), trans. Hazel Barnes, Being and Nothingness. An Essay on
Phenomenological Ontology (London: Routledge, 1995), see especially, p. 53. For Sartre, the
Freudian accounts involving the unconscious masks the genuine double-sidedness of conscious-
ness in bad faith. See Jerome Neu, ‘Divided Minds: Sartre’s “Bad Faith” Critique of Freud’, The
Review of Metaphysics Vol. 42, No. 1 (Sept., 1988), pp. 79–101 and Ivan Soll, ‘Sartre’s Rejection
of the Freudian Unconscious’, in The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (La
Salle, IL: Open Court, The Library of Living Philosophers, 1981), and Jonathan Webber, ‘Bad
Faith and the Unconscious’, The International Encyclopaedia of Ethics, ed. Hugh LaFolette, John
Diegh, and Sarah Stroud (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
36
See Jean-Paul Sartre, Existential Psychoanalysis, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical
Library, 1953).
37
For Merleau-Ponty’s relation to Jacques Lacan, see James Phillips, ‘Lacan and Merleau-Ponty:
The Confrontation of Psychoanalysis and Phenomenology’, in David Pettigrew and François
Raffoul, eds, Disseminating Lacan (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996), pp. 69–106. For the
12 D. Moran
rich post-war explorations, the work of Edmund Husserl (apart from the scattered
musings in the late Merleau-Ponty’s unfinished Notes de cours that we have already
discussed), as opposed to Heidegger, was largely ignored.38
Of course, in classical Freudian psychoanalysis, as Eugen Fink had recognized,
the unconscious as such is not accessible in itself through conscious reflection, it is
‘latent’ in Freud’s term,39 and it is detected only as it manifests itself in its irruptions
in consciousness, in dreams, obsessions, repetitive actions, fixed attitudes, associa-
tions, neuroses, and so on. This led Freud to focus on phenomena in conscious life,
such as slips of the tongue, dreams, delusions, random associations, and regressive
phenomena, that somehow are revelatory of deeply buried suppressed trauma and
drives.40 It is true that the concept of anxiety (Angst) as explored in Heidegger’s
phenomenology – and the developments by Binswanger, Boss, and others – are
more usually associated with psychoanalytic explorations than with Husserlian phe-
nomenology. But there is plenty of scope within Husserl also for exploring the
region of the ‘unconscious’ (das Unbewusste) understood in part as encompassing
the horizons around the waking, conscious ego, as we shall now explore.
Consistent with Freud, Husserl sees life as involving a more or less unconscious,
instinctive ‘striving’ (Leben ist Streben is a familiar Husserlian refrain, cf. Hua XV
408)41 towards goals and the fulfilment of intentions. Both have a conception of
human life as the harmonization or balancing of conflicting forces. In agreement
with nineteenth-century biology, Husserl thinks that the most basic drive of
consciousness is towards living itself: ‘being is self-preservation’ (Sein ist
Lähteitä:
Paras lauluaeg
Ema haual
Suisa suud
Kolm vaest
Kun itki emoton impi, siihen lähde läikähteli. Kun itki isoton
poika, siihen kaivo kumpueli, kun valitti leskivaimo, siihen
lammikko levisi, kasosi kalainen järvi.