Avoiding Heidegger

I should confess an avoidance to Heidegger that is particularly defensive in nature. I actually want to protect Husserl from Heidegger in a really irrational kind of way, which is besides the point from a philosophical perspective. Nonetheless, I do believe that reading Husserl and Freud together should provide an interesting perspective from which to interpret Heidegger. This is the unfortunate reading that you might have found here in this blog, unfortunate because it is oh so long and tedious and incredibly self-gratifying. For that, I apologize.

I began closely reading Being and Time today (where all my reading of it before has been admittedly sophomoric) and noted that Heidegger's take on facticity is particularly compelling. Recall that Husserl had argued in Ideas II that the psycho-physical subjectivity is grounded in the body by the faculty "I can," this faculty I understand as a leading thread to the pure Ego in all its transcendental numbness. Heidegger understands such an attempt as positioning a metaphysical entity in corporeality in a factical relationship to the world that leaves the fundamental relationship between the metaphysical entity and the world mysterious. Heidegger's facticity is remarkably more intimate, grounded in "taking care" that he believes is fundamentally apprehensive in nature but that also presupposes that every subject-object relation is fundamentally a taking-care that we cannot parse down to a pure Ego as the final theoretical absolute substantial subjectivity which transcends somehow our finitude. For Heidegger then the common ontological mistake is a kind of natural attitude that misplaces the task of ontology in privileging knowledge rather than making this facticity as a kind taking care of oneself within the world explicit in its phenomenality.

This is a fascinating idea, but perhaps we should be careful before we fully accept it as such. If we are to question facticity, make it "wonderful" phenomenologically, and then make this the essentially of Dasein, then we must be very careful explicating the narrative under which we construct this factical essential nature of Dasein. Where Heidegger is compelling I also find him to be unnerving, and I have the sense that in trying to lay hold of some anthropological essentially proves to be a risky business at the ontical level.

These are just brief thoughts that probably seem obfuscatory, or perhaps still sophomoric in nature. Let's just say I am worried that we might level at Heidegger a vague accusation of essentiality that we could level at Freud in his worst moments (phallic stage, anyone?) or Lacan when he priveleges a certain socio-symbolic law of the father? With Heidegger, admittedly, this accusation is aimed at what? Finitude? Being? I have no idea.

C. Pierce 1

Freud, Husserl, and the Question of Agency

The Freudian ego and the Husserlian ego seem irreconcilable entities. Freud insisted after the development of the second topology that the ego was partly unconscious and undiscoverable in reflection; in The Ego and the Id, he writes that “we have come upon something in the ego itself which is also unconscious, which behaves exactly like the repressed – that is produces powerful effects without itself being conscious and which requires special work before it can be made conscious” (9). Alternatively in Ideas I, Husserl’s emphasis on the availability to reflection of an eidetic intuition would seem to demand that “by the reflectional experiencing acts alone we know something of the stream of mental processes and of the necessary relatedness of the <stream> to the pure Ego” (sec. 78, 150). One could argue that the Freudian ego is not available to reflection in any essential sense because no act of reflection could uncover the ego as an intentional structure of consciousness. However, Freud’s argument has another implication, namely that part of the ego’s structure is by necessity unconscious. What separates the Freudian ego then from the Husserlian ego is that the latter cannot be constituted without making metaphysical assumptions about the nature and ultimate identity of the self, and further, an assumption concerning the adequation of concept, memory, and perception with lived experience that would seem particularly reductive. However, as Tito notes, “In Husserl’s view intentionality (consciousness) is not restricted to the explicit cogito; it includes the implicit cogito” (110). What this means is that the psychic Ego, the Body, and any other subjective genetic constitution can be activated and made explicit by the intentionality of transcendental subjectivity. If this is the case, then the Freudian theory of the ego, resistance, and working through of resistance can be interpreted as an elucidation of this very same process, and thus the Freudian ego and the Husserlian ego would be in deeper communication with one another than it would seem. There remains a question concerning the possibility of explicating phenomenologically psychical agency. What one can do is make phenomenologically explicit the unconscious destabilization of psychical agency by paying sufficient attention to the particular somatic and psychical determinations of psychic life, thereby situating the very “reality” of the metapsycholgical within the complex concatenations of lived experience. I will try as well to address at the end of this reaction a way of articulating the results of my interpretation on the question of agency in general and the relationship of psychic life to agency.

What is this relationship between the somatic and the psychical? Indeed, one could as well ask, what is the somatic and what is the psychical for Freud. It is how he understands the relationship between these two determinations of psychical agency that allows Freud to conceive an unconscious essence of psychic life not bound to conscious processes and conscious temporality. This conception of the somatic and the psychical would not amount to psychologism in the way that Husserl would understand it since it would not ground the essence of conscious processes in psychological geneticism. When Freud writes that “even subtle and difficult intellectual operations which ordinarily require strenuous reflection can equally be carried out preconsciously and without coming into consciousness” (21), such as finding the solution to difficult mathematical problems while sleeping, he is not denying that their meaning is dependent upon the intentional acts which make it intelligible for the subject. Freud argues instead that psychical agency cannot be bound primarily to consciousness in any essential fashion. Where it is important to emphasize the meaningfulness of the unconscious, it is justifiable to conceive this meaningfulness as intentionality, but also one should take into account the full dynamic of Freud’s argument. The ego is, in either an active or a passive sense, in the here and now. It maintains its relationship to the external world. It has access to an internal world, a psyche, and it controls motility. Yet this status is beleaguered by the force of unconscious ideas, and the ego seems capable of exercising resistance to its own conscious activity: “When we put certain tasks before the patient, he gets into difficulties; his associations fail when they should be coming near the repressed. We can tell him that he is dominated by a resistance; but he is quite unaware of the fact, and, even if he guesses from his unpleasurable feelings that a resistance is now at work in him, he does not know what it is or how to describe it” (ibid. 8). This resistance leads Freud into the question of psychical agency. This question is at the source of understanding the relationship between the somatic and the psychical. Indeed, the problem of agency turns upon the question of what the somatic is and what the psychical is. This can be attended to by placing Freud and Husserlian phenomenology into a dialogue with one another concerning the role of agency in the authenticity of self-reflection.

Nicolas Abraham describes in “The Shell and the Kernel: The Scope and Originality of Psychoanalysis” the anasemia of the term somatic in its relationship to the psychical:

How does it happen that fantasy has the power to move our bodies, be it sexually or by creating real diseases? […] This is nonsense, obviously, if we give to somatic and psychic the meanings of naïve empiricism. Nonsense again if we constitute them phenomenologically in the body proper and the habitudes of the Ego, respectively […] The somatic must be something quite different from the body proper, which derives from the psychic as one of its functions, the psychic having been described by Freud as an exterior layer, an envelope. The somatic is what I cannot touch directly, either as my ingument and its internal prolongations or as my psyche, the latter given to the consciousness of self; the somatic is that of which I would know nothing if its representative, my fantasy, were not there to send me back to it, its source as it were and ultimate justification. (87)¹

If we are to conceive the unconscious in wholly intentional terms, then we can direct our attention to the meanings of unconscious ideas which are at a certain temporalized remove from consciousness. In The Intepretation of Dreams, Freud models the psychic apparatus on an optical “lens” in which consciousness, the preconscious, and the unconscious are mediated by the traces of mnemic images each at some regulated distance from each other on this theoretical model. The unconscious, Freud argues, is thus a hallucinatory wish impulse asserting a demand upon the higher systems in certain pathological situations or normal states in which the relaxation of the influence of consciousness and perception is enforced, such as the ego’s own wish to sleep. Dreams will be said then to express manifest visual content indirectly giving voice to the latent dream thoughts of wish fulfillments. At this psychic level, an intentional description is incredibly useful in describing the relationship between unconscious idea, wish impulse, and conscious ideas. However, for Abraham, that symbols, signifiers, and conscious content can be designified in relation to unconscious processes is an example of the antisemantic affect of the psyche, an affect he names anasemia (ibid. 85). Yet, anasemia would not truly be anasemia if not for the complex relationship between psyche and soma he outlines above. The somatic constitutes the lack of any real ground on which to establish a transcendence of meaning, having been destabilized by the anasemantic effect of the psyche. Abraham writes, “The Somatic must therefore reign in a radical nonpresence behind the [psychical] Envelope where all phenomena accessible to us unfold” ( ibid. 87).

Freud writes in The Ego and the Id, “The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface” (20). This theory of the somatic as an anasemic affect of the psychical has significant consequences in relation to the authenticity of the ego as a psychic agency. As Abraham has shown, psychoanalysis attempts to situate its discourse in the “opaque indeterminacy of the distance that separates reflecting subjects, a distance endangering even patent notions found on an illusory proximity to self” (84). Abraham points to a nearly insolvable problem in psychoanalysis familiar to philosophical discourse, namely the question of the extent to which this proximity to self must be assumed in order to produce the cure. Kant in Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View pointed to the complexity of this issue:

The fact that the human being can have the “I” in his representation raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person, and by virtue of the unity of consciousness through all changes that happen to him, one and the same person – i.e., through rank and dignity an entirely different being from things, such as irrational animals, with which one can do as one likes. This holds even when he cannot yet say “I,” because he still has it in thoughts, just all languages must think it when they speak in the first person, even if they do not have a special word to express this concept of “I.” (15)

Kant’s claim here is important. By arguing that even at the most basic impersonality the human subject has the capacity to take herself as an “I,” Kant shows that this capacity is grounded upon the fact that the unity of consciousness gives the subject an abiding identity in time. The difference for Kant between the impersonal and the “I” is the difference between merely feeling the self and the capacity to think oneself as unified.² If Abraham’s assessment is correct then, for Freud this feeling of self and this capacity to have an abiding identity are at some remove from one another. This would be to say that in certain moments I could feel myself to be depressed without having an abiding sense of that depression for my concept of myself. My anxiety, so distinctly and “bodily” felt by me, seems groundless.

It is around this “groundlessness” of psyhical agency that Freud’s hypothesis of the ego as a projection of the body becomes intelligible. My psychic ego is not merely my surface, my body, but also a feeling I have of myself projected, as it were, around me from my psyche. In a footnote, Freud remarks: “[The body] may thus be regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body, besides, as we have seen above, representing the superficies of the mental apparatus” (Ego 20, fn. 16). Laplanche and Pontalis argue that “endogenous excitation is successively described as coming from the inside of the body, from inside the psychical apparatus, and finally as stored in the ego: this presents a series of successive embeddings which […] gives rise to the idea of the ego as a kind of actualized metaphor for the organism” (466). Freud envisions the agency of the ego as torn not only between external reality/consciousness and unconsciousness, but also as torn between the id, the unconscious agency of the drives older in its history than the ego “given up” throughout development, and the super ego, an identification made at the loss of the first object-choice of the id. Freud describes how these agencies become set up within the ego:

When it happens that a person has to give up a sexual object, there quite often ensues an alteration of his ego which can only be described as a setting up of the object inside the ego, as it occurs in melancholia; the exact nature of this substitution is as yet unknown to us. It may be that by this introjection, which is a kind of regression to the mechanism of the oral phase, the ego makes it easier for the object to be given up or renders that process possible […] The process, especially in the early phases of development, is a very frequent one, and it makes it possible to suppose that the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and that it contains the history of those object-choices. It must, of course, be admitted from the outset that there are varying degrees of capacity for resistance, which decide the extent to which a person’s character fends off or accepts the influences of the history of his erotic object-choices.

The ego is an agency anasemically organized around the psychical displacement of the somatic. Insofar as there is a biological proper body there is also a psychogenesis of the subject which cannot be fully represented as one would represent the intentional acts of the ego in relation to the making explicit of transcendental objectivities and meanings. Abrarham writes, “Both of these alternative – the body with its anatomical and physiological objectivations and the phenomenological Ego’s habitudes, with its repeatable acquisitions – belong to the same set of representations which, according to Freud, defines merely part of the whole: the Ego” (87). The agency of the ego then, even insofar as it is connected meaningfully to consciousness and to bodily motility, is at a remove from the whole spectrum of psychic life; it is a structural dislocation, a groundless agency.

In Husserl’s Ideas II, the psycho-physical reality of ego and body are oriented toward the fulfillments of intentional activity made explicit by transcendental subjectivity. The direction of this orientation is important for considering exactly what is at stake in Freud’s theory of psychical agency.

[The Body] is an organ of the will, the one and only Object which, for the will of my pure Ego, is moveable immediately and spontaneously and is a means for producing a mediate spontaneous movement in other things, in, e.g., things struck by my immediately spontaneously moveable hand, grasped by it, lifted, etc. Sheer material things are only moveable mechanically and only partake of spontaneous movement in a mediate way. Only Bodies are immediately spontaneously (“freely”) moveable, and they are so specifically, by means of the free Ego and its will which belong to them […] The Ego has the “faculty” (the “I can”) to freely move this Body […] and to perceive an external world by means of it. (151-2)

Like Freud, Husserl sees the body standing in a unique relationship to the psyche. Above, Husserl determines that the body is foremost an “organ of the will,” that though it is a materiality, it is a unique materiality in that it is moveable in an immediate, spontaneous fashion. Husserl explicates three different modes of being of the materiality of the body: 1), the body is a center of orientation, a “zero point,” a “here” toward which everything else is constituted as “there” (Husserl notes that provisionally the ego cannot be placed in objective space and that it is for the ego that the body is here and all other spatial realities are there); 2), the body has both facticity in that the ego cannot separate itself from it and a limit in appearance being imperfectly constituted such that there are regions of the body that are invisible to it, such as the head and the back; 3), the body is part of the causal nexus of reality, and insofar as it is located materially in this nexus, we are both capable of apprehending it as real and we experience it passively as an entity that is acted upon, feels pain, pleasure, tension, etc. For Husserl, the body represents a turning point in the subjective constitution of nature in that it is both a sheer materiality found in the causal nexus of external reality and that interiorly the body is felt to be “immediately spontaneously moveable.” This “turning point” of the body is such that psycho-physical reality has a unique constitution, a psyche conditional to the materiality of the body, and a physicality primarily causal in nature, both of which are intertwined with one another. (ibid. 158-60) Above, Husserl designates an “I can” as a faculty of this psychical ego. It is this faculty that is the source for Husserl of the psycho-physical subject’s freedom in reflection, its agency. This would be an agency “grounded” in the body, an agency conditional to the materiality of the body.

“In the modes of behavior apprehended in reference to the circumstances which pertain phenomenologically, the psychic property in question manifests itself or primordially manifests itself in originary experience” (ibid. 125), Husserl writes. It is important for Husserl that through the change of psychic states that psychical properties of the ego can be delineated such that we can know ourselves, perhaps not in the sense that we know a material thing of nature for which we have adequate concepts and schemas, but in the sense in which our psychic life comes to be found for ourselves in reflection. These behaviors, insofar as they are understood as expressing the “I can” faculty of psychical subjectivity, are knowable insofar as we can assume the subject, or as the subject assumes of herself, to be an abiding identity in time: a pure Ego. “The [pure] Ego holds sway only in the performance, in the cogitations proper. Yet it can cast its gaze precisely into everything that can receive this ray of Ego-function” (ibid. 107) writes Husserl. To the “I can” of psychic agency, the pure Ego provides the thesis, the meaning of this agency:

My thesis, my position-taking, my deciding from memories […] is something I have a stake in […] I can […] become “unfaithful” to myself in my position-taking, can become “inconsistent,” only in this, that I have become precisely an other inasmuch as I have succumbed to other motivations. In truth, however, I am not unfaithful to myself, I am constantly the same, though in a changing stream of lived experience, in which new motives are often constituted. (ibid. 112)

The founding immanent time of inner time consciousness provides the now in which the ego can find itself as subject of all of its acts. This is not a mere accident of the succession of now points but follows from the fact that this succession of present moments is proper to the ego as the ego’s own thematic life. Reflection is within the total sphere of this freedom of the human subject to grasp it “adequately in the reflexive shift of focus that goes back to it as a center of functioning” (ibid. 105). Husserl writes, “As this identical, numerically one, Ego, it itself belongs to ‘its own’ stream of lived experience, which is constituted as a unity of endless immanent time” (ibid. 112).

We are in a position now to characterize, by means of situating a dialogue between Freud and Husserl, of psychical agency, both phenomenologically and psychoanalytically. An authentic agency for Husserl would stem from knowledge we have of ourselves through reflection; the challenge is making this knowledge explicit through reference to our lived experience in which the body and the ego are found in intimate sense-bestowing relations to the evidence of what is given for consciousness. For Freud, authentic agency is an awareness, which is not the same as knowledge, of ourselves. Contrary to Husserl, Freud asserts that this can only be achieved by working through our resistance to analysis, wherein our reflective life cannot knowledgeably grasp the ego. As a psychical agency, the ego is always other to itself, where for Husserl, the ego’s agency is dependent upon the thematizing of its conscious life in the intentional acts of the pure Ego. As our brief allusion to the Kantian distinction between feeling oneself passively and actively thinking oneself as an identity points toward the question of how a psycho-physical subject can be said to reflect upon itself, then one can argue that Freud inserts the otherness of psychical agency into Husserl’s phenomenological understanding of the difference between “I” and “me.” I am the unity of my acts insofar as I take myself to be this subject within the material physical world, but insofar as I am a personality, a sexual subject, a person with a certain history, etc. I am necessarily an other to myself. Where Husserl would refer to an inconsistency in my motivations that makes me other, Freud refers instead to part of my history which is radically other than what the ego can realize of itself reflectively since its own development is rooted in this otherness. “To have heard something and to have experienced something are in their psychological nature two quite different things, even though the content of both is the same” (176), writes Freud in “The Unconscious.” This problem is at the heart of resistance as metapsychological phenomenon and why mere interpretation will not resolve resistance; a working through of resistance facilitates this communication between “hearing” and “experiencing.” For Husserl, there is a similar adherence to a kind of working through. As Husserl writes, “Simply to look at a thing, i.e., to bring to givenness its extension and the concomitant sensuous fullness (thus the momentary schema of it) is not yet the same as actually experiencing the thing as a material thing” (Ideas II, 122). Where Husserl acknowledges the legitimating role of the “I” in knowledge, Freud shows that this legitimation is undermined by an opacity of the “I” in regards to itself. We can understand how a pleasure can be lived as unpleasure, a self can be other, and so on by situating psychical agency within lived experience. Acknowledging this shared commitment to lived experience, one would need to register its role as evidence for Husserl and as extra-phenomenal meaning for Freud. From this perspective, psychical life would be more than mere dreams and fantasies but would have unique significance in respect to an agency that cannot adequately discover itself in constituting its experience. Yet it is shared “lived experience” accesed by the strenuousness of phenomenological reflection and the work of analysis that provides both a profitable communication between phenomenology and psychoanalysis and also the greatest challenge in determining what constitutes experience, remembering, and intelligible identity

Works Cited

Abraham, Nicolas. “The Shell and the Kernel.” The Shell and the Kernel. (with Maria Torok). Ed and

trans. Nicholas T. Rand. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1994. v. 1. 79-98.

Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id. Trans. Joan Riviere. Ed. James Strachey. New York: W.W.

Norton, 1989.

- -.“The Unconscious.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of

Sigmund Freud. Trans. and ed. by James Strachey. v XIV. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. 161-205.

Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book. Trans. F. Kersten. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1983.

--. Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book, Studies

in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Trans. Richard Rojcewicz et André Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer Publishers, 1989.

Kant, Immanuel. Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View. Trans. and Ed. Robert B. Louden.

Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.

Laplanche, Jean. The Language of Psychoanalysis. (with J.B. Pontalis). Trans. Donald Nicholson-

Smith. New York: W.W. Norton, 1973.

Tito, Johanna Maria. Logic in the Husserlian Context. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1990.

1 I have skipped a sentence about instinct and drive: “What is the sense of the nonsensical ‘organic sources of Instinct or Drive,’ or of the deployment of either one ‘on the limits of the somatic and psychic’”(Abraham 87). Freud’s theory of the drives is intimately bound up with his theory of sexuality and self-preservation and of death and destructive tendencies, representing what he often would call the mythology of psychoanalysis. The existence of drives, on the limits of the somatic and the psychic, Freud would claim in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, are older than dreams.

2 On the child’s acquisition of language, Kant writes: “Before he merely felt himself; now he thinks himself” (15).

Husserl Postscripts

A man is what he is as a a being who maintains homself in his commerce with the things of his thingly, and with the persons of his personal, surrounding world and who, in doing so, maintains his individuality throughout. And furthermore, he maintains himself over against the powers of the Objective spirit, which like legal institutions, morals, and religious prescriptions, stand over against him precisely as objectivities.
- Husserl, Ideas II, 141.

Here, I take Husserl to be arguing that there is a certain lawful meaningfulness of psycho-physical reality. We can know our psychological subjectivity and can know others as well, if not in the same schematic fashion we would know material reality. If one has read the lengthy post previous to this one, where I describe Husserl's temporalizing consciousness of inner time in relation to the unconscious deprivation of self-relation in immanent time, this should be understood as a brief follow up to the question of the sense of this psycho-physico subjectivity temporally constituted in relation to immanent time. There are a number of difficult questions concerning the status and the "substance" of this subjectivity in Husserl's work from this period. Here, it should be noted, that the self-relation of the subject in immanent time is primordially giving both of the self and of material perceptual reality. Typically, one of Husserl's argument's on the side of the self in empirical reality is from the natural-scientific psychology. He writes of "visual acuity," and the way this is manifested to the subject in lived experience and gains its sense over time, becomes evident to the subject that his perception is "true."

And here it is important to keep in mind the distinctions Husserl is beginning to make above. Other than the pure Ego's self relation in immanent time (a question I am ignoring - however, one notes that for Husserl, no meaning is possible without this essential possibility of taking oneself as pure Ego living through the immanence of time, neither for the psycho-physical subjectivity nor for material reality), he produces the distinction between attitudes toward the self one can take: natural scientific and human-scientific. Here, the difference between schematism and human scientific self relation is perhaps at its sharpest. We approach natural scientific reality as if its levels of causal change covered a nonmutable reality that is determinable through our schematic understanding of causality. I take it that to a degree that this would be true of natural-scientific self-relation, where everything comes back to physical, biological dependence. My eyes see because of their organic composition and relation to nerve fibers, etc. But my knowledge of myself can only come from a kind of infinite change affecting my entire being.

Husserl's assertion is that we know ourselves in this latter sense through a history we make of ourselves that can only be apprehended in reference to the immanence of time. At this level, what I've said in the previous post about intentional remembering in Husserl and the possibility of apprehending my relationship to the immanence of time as one which apprehends as well the passing of time as a series of now points to which my life, indivisibly and indissolubly, refers.
However, we can only understand Husserl's point if we take into account his theoretical perspective. This latter is the realm of pure consciousness associated with undermining the naive normativity of naturalistic thought. For Husserl, we need to see the radicalized nature of the necessity of our constitution of all realities manifest to us, and this can only be achieved by accessing this realm of, one would almost have to say, pure mind, pure theoretical insight into the meaning-giving acts of transcendental subjectivity, which for him, give us world, and in this case, self.

I am endlessly fascinated however with the tightrope in Husserl's philosophy. In my quote above, the human subject is balanced on a precipice between determinations whose only sense is this "freedom" of the self in immanent time, to which all these Objectivities over against the subject must refer. The compellingness of this thinking is that no matter our determinations, theoretically, descriptively speaking, we are meaning-giving subjects, and as such, this freedom is our source of self-realization. But to see the world is to see the world in determinations, to know ourselves is to know ourselves as determined. Kant wrote, for the self to know the self, it must relate to itself passively, and for him this "freedom" was oddly paradoxical.

As a sidenote, Freud's challenge here is that this insight into the self is improbable. We can never grasp this immanent self-relation in an intentional insight. This is the importance of the interpretative technique. However, Husserl's insight somehow rings truer to me despite its metaphysical suppositions. When we make our memorial experience explicit, when it is a loss which has habitualized our temporalization in some fundamental way, what we indeed make explicit is this obscurity in our memory. This is what it means for time to pass and to know ourselves historically. And the meaninfulness of immanent time takes on here a certain status for the psycho-physcial subject perhaps underappreciated. To know the passing of time and to know our essential experience is to know it in its adumbrative flux, its manner of givenness.

And this applies to ourseves as well. The metaphysical supposition is not, as many would argue, so much the pure mind of the Cartesian cogito, but rather an experience whose status as metaphysical should be examined in the sense that Husserl intends it. It is experience of acts, of the temporalization of intentional activity, and our relations to the fulfilment of these acts. It is an activity and not a mind, not an I think, but an I can.

Reaction Paper: Time and the Unconscious

“Setting up the problematic of the 'unconscious' as intentional is a questionable methodical prejudice right from the start, representing [...] the attempt to interpret the 'unconscious' according to the methodical means for understanding consciousness” (385), writes Eugene Fink in his "Appendix on the Unconscious." Since Husserl certainly could expound an “after image” in a phenomenological description of the inner consciousness of immanent time, there would seem to be little reason to acknowledge a special exception to the intentional form of consciousness Husserl values. Yet Fink’s accusation misses an important challenge Freud brings to the Husserlian conception of consciousness as the intentionality of the living presence of transcendental subjectivity. Admittedly, Freud’s comments on the time of the unconscious are at best cryptic. In this response paper, I will attempt to interpret the temporality of the unconscious by means of the metapsychological understanding of unconscious economy. One of the “Papers on Metapsychology” helps to clarify exactly what Freud thought of the idea that the unconscious is an “after image.” In “The Unconscious,” Freud elaborates in some detail an economic theory of the unconscious with certain implications for “the temporal ordering of consciousness,” one of which is a failure of ever realizing “phenomenologically” an unconscious idea other than in the topographic regression and dynamic affectivity of the analysand. Certainly one could speak descriptively of an unconscious after image but not economically. It will be necessary to engage with some of the more fundamental aspects of Husserl’s theory of the consciousness of inner time, a theory to which I will return in order to elaborate a possible response Husserl could make. I will then attempt to integrate the Husserlian and Freudian understanding of subjective temporality with some implications for Freud’s theory of the preconscious.

In The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, Husserl describes the flow and the duration of time relative to the intentionality of consciousness. Elaborating a primary form of memory, Husserl discovers that retentional withholding of temporal content in its immediate passing and protentional anticipation of the outcome of temporal content are necessary modifications of inner time consciousness. For example, retention would be the sort of immediate “knowledge” of the tones of a melody I have heard necessary for me to apprehend the current tone as part of a melody, while protention would correlate to my anticipation of the next tone and of the melody as a whole as a completed work. These modifications are necessary in order for my experience of the present to have a meaningful reference for me. Their immediacy is intuitive, but also open to frustration, negation, simultaneity, etc. These modifications are part of what Husserl considers the longitudinal temporality of the consciousness of inner time. For Husserl, there is also another “flow” in respect to time that is foundational for the consciousness of inner time, and this is the flow of immanent time, the infinite series of “Now” points “horizontal” to the consciousness of inner time.

A now-phase is thinkable only as the boundary of a continuity of retentions, just as every retentional phase is itself thinkable only as a point of such a continuum, that is, for every now of the consciousness of time […] This implies that the series of retentions which pertains to a now is itself a limit and is necessarily modified. What is remembered “sinks ever further into the past;” moreover, what is remembered is necessarily something sunken, something that of necessity permits an evident recollection which traces it back to a now reproduced. (55)

Husserl elaborates a theory of time by means of the intentionality of memory so that an “after image” could receive a certain modificational index in relation to the founding time of the immanent succession of now points. Husserl further describes this in his discussion of phenomenological time in Ideas I, “There belongs to the essence of the situation the possibility that the [pure] Ego directs its regard to the temporal modes of givenness and knows with evidence (as we all in fact acquire this evidence by reliving what is described in intuition) that no enduring mental process is possible unless it is constituted in a continuous flow of modes of givennness as something unitary pertaining to the event and to the duration” (164). The importance for Husserl in delineating the manner of self-evidence of memory would be this indexical intentional relationship of a memory to a founding intuition of the living presence of transcendental subjectivity, and the possibility of making the difference between the two relative to the intentionality of the consciousness of the passing of time.

Freud’s metapsychological papers attempt to integrate a theory of mind with a theory of psychoanalytic technique and interpretation. They represent as much a continuous concern for developing a psychoanalytic theory of the psychic apparatus, an effort whose roots reach as far back as the 1895 essay Project for a Scientific Psychology, as to the development of psychoanalysis away from an undue emphasis on conscious thought activity. In “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through,” Freud reminds us of these developments in psychoanalysis, referencing the earlier work with Breur and the use of hypnosis where the operative assumption was the theory of catharsis and abreaction. Freud describes this as “bringing directly into focus the moment at which the symptom was formed, and in persistently endeavouring to reproduce the mental processes involved in that situation, in order to direct their discharge along the lines of conscious activity” (147). Freud notes that this theory of “abreaction and remembering” has receded into the background as interpretation and the phenomenon of resistance have more and more emerged into the foreground of psychoanalysis. However, he writes, the goal has remained the same: “Descriptively speaking, it is to fill gaps in memory; dynamically speaking, it is to overcome resistances due to repression” (148). Freud develops this theory in response to the idea that the mere availability of an interpretation to a patient’s consciousness is sufficient to induce conscious activity that would undo the influence of repression. Freud describes the phenomena of repetition and acting out as a kind of resistance in juxtaposition to remembering and working through. The complex conceptual itinerary he draws in this essay suggests that in addition to a mere bringing to consciousness of an unconscious idea there is required a working through of the resistances to analysis.

This working-through of the resistances may in practice turn out to be an arduous task for the subject of the analysis and a trial of patience for the analyst. Nevertheless it is a part of the work which effects the greatest changes in the patient and which distinguishes analytic treatment from any kind of treatment by suggestion. From a theoretical point of view one may correlate it with the 'abreacting' of the quotas of affect strangulated by repression - an abreaction without which hypnotic treatment remained ineffective. (155-6)

This remembering and working through is necessitated by repetition and acting out, both of which come to represent a kind of unconscious memory for Freud, or rather the persistence of unconscious ideas affecting the consciousness of memory. The complicated conceptual map between these four terms is not successfully delineated in this essay. We are indeed led to wonder what the relationship between working through and remembering is if it is not coincident with a catharsis and abreaction predominant of “treatment by suggestion.” We should wonder then what the metapsychological value of working through is which would distinguish it from the kind of treatment that would merely switch the registers of conscious activity, as it would in hypnosis.

What we do have above is a significant challenge posed to the intentional structure of memory in Husserl in that Freud has shown that an unconscious idea can disrupt the possibility of intentional remembering, making such memory now an unconscious “acting out” resisting interpretation. Still, Fink’s response would seem to hold, if it were the case psychoanalysis treats an “after image” of consciousness as unconscious. In “The Unconscious,” Freud further develops this dilemma:

If we communicate to a patient some idea which he has at one time repressed but which we have discovered in him, our telling him makes at first no change in his mental condition. Above all, it does not remove the repression or undo its effects, as might perhaps be expected from the fact that the previously unconscious idea has now become conscious. On the contrary, all that we shall achieve will be a fresh rejection of the repressed idea […] There is no lifting of repression until the conscious idea, after the resistances have been overcome, has entered into connection with the unconscious memory trace. It is only through the making conscious of the latter itself that success is achieved. On superficial consideration this would seem to show that conscious and unconscious ideas are distinct registrations, topographically separated, of the same content. But a moment’s reflection shows that the identity of the information given to the patient with his repressed memory is only apparent. To have heard something and to have experienced something are in their psychological nature two quite different things, even though the content of both is the same. (176, italics mine)

What Freud is attempting to tie together is not conscious and unconscious ideas, but rather a specific theory of mind which would deny the possibility of conscious reproduction of unconscious ideas while providing an interpretative framework in which the efficacy of interpretative technique can be achieved. The topographic and dynamic perspectives would necessarily be incomplete because they presuppose a translation of the unconscious into conscious intentionality; a topographic theory crudely suggests that there are two distinct registrations of ideas, one conscious and one unconscious, while a dynamic theory would suggest that there is a functional difference between a conscious idea and an unconscious idea with nonetheless the same intentional content. “To have heard something and to have experienced something are in their psychological nature two quite different things,” Freud writes above. It is this disparity which Freud will argue necessitates an economic perspective in the interpretative technique of the analysis.

“The unconscious comprises, on the one hand, acts which are merely latent, temporarily unconscious, but which differ in no other respect from conscious ones and, on the other hand, processes such as repressed ones, which if they were to become conscious would be bound to stand out in the crudest contrast to the rest of the conscious processes” (172), writes Freud. The temporal latency of an idea Freud connects dynamically and topographically to a preconsciousness where this idea is capable of becoming conscious without any resistance. Repression would occur topographically between the preconscious and the unconscious, but it is important to note that this “communication between the systems Pcs. and Ucs.” cannot be described satisfactorily either topographically or dynamically. Freud relies on a distinction he makes between idea and instinct such that we can never know an unconscious idea except through its affect, however distorted by the repressing censorship of the preconscious.¹ There would then be no affect in the unconscious but rather a co-ordination of instinctual impulses, which “exist side by side without being influenced by one another, and are exempt from mutual contradiction” (ibid. 187). In a sense, what is available to analysis is a regression to preconscious states of mind due to the economic affect of unconscious ideas on conscious thought activity. This economic characterization of the unconscious is undertaken most notably upon temporal grounds: “The processes of the system Ucs. are timeless; i.e. they are not ordered temporally, are not altered by the passage of time; they have no reference to time at all. Reference to time is bound up, once again, with the work of the system Cs.” (ibid. 187). Freud however does conclude that since the unconscious has no direct reality the preconscious makes “communication possible between the different ideational contents so that they can influence one another, to give them an order in time, and to set up a censorship or several censorships; “reality-testing” too, and the reality principle, are in its province. Conscious memory, moreover, seems to depend wholly upon the Pcs.” (ibid. 188). ²

The difference between unconscious and conscious ideas is articulated at the level of the economic theory we can conceive temporally. This is quite significant for the interpretability of unconscious content. On this topic, Freud writes:

Unconscious processes only become cognizable by us under the conditions of dreaming and of neurosis – that is to say, when processes of the higher, Pcs., system are set back to an earlier stage by being lowered (by regression). In themselves they cannot be cognized, indeed are even incapable of carrying on their existence; for the system Ucs. is at a very early moment overlaid by the Pcs. which has taken over access to consciousness and to motility. (ibid. 187, italics mine)

However, this is not to say the unconscious does not have intentional content, but only that it cannot be known intentionally in the same sense that conscious/preconscious content can. For Freud, the difference is largely economical, i.e. the cathexes of the unconscious are understood as quantities, while those which are consciously cathected are those which have gained qualitative access to Pcs. “paths of discharge” (ibid. 188). On this point, Derrida has perhaps best elucidated the connections between temporality and the quantitative factors of the economic theory by drawing upon Freud’s work on the Project and the periodicity of consciousness Freud elaborated therein. Consciousness is defined, as Derrida asserts in “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” as a temporal period which “proceeds and conditions the opposition between quantity and quality” (205). The ideas of the unconscious then have a specific temporal difference to the quality and intentionality of conscious processes. Otherwise, an analyst really would be interpreting the unconscious along the methodological means for understanding consciousness, when in fact the analyst seeks preconscious intentional content seemingly distorting, or disconnected from, preconscious temporality that suggests the influence of this quantitative force of the unconscious.

It would seem then that where Husserl’s theory of the consciousness of inner time hinges upon the self-evidence of the modes of givenness of the successions of immanent time, Freud’s theory of the unconscious approaches temporality through a lack of such a foundational immanent time. However, Husserl’s own theory of recollection as an intentional presentification expounds a theory of the “after image” which is not necessarily present as such in perception. Importantly, for Husserl, memory implies a making present of past “absence” in the intuitively fulfilled givenness of the now. In Internal Time-Consciousness, Husserl writes:

The [memory of] the theater hovers before me in the representation as something actually present. I mean this, but at the same time I apprehend this present as lying back in reference to the actual present of perceptions now extant. Naturally, it is now evident that the perception of the theater was; I have perceived the theater. What is remembered appears as having been present, that is, immediately and intuitively. And it appears in such a way that a present intuitively appears which is at an interval from the present of the actual now. The latter present is constituted in the actual perception. The intuitively appearing present, the intuitive representation of the not-now, is constituted in a counter-image of perception, in a “presentification of the earlier perception” in which the theater comes to be given “as if now.” This presentification of the perception of the theater is therefore not to be understood as if it were a re-living of the perception. (82-3)

Significantly, Husserl’s understanding of recollection suggests that memory is marked by absence in the founding immanence of the succession of now points. It cannot be relived but only to a certain degree “repeated.” Yet, in principle, there is the possibility of phenomenological description rigorously adhering to the intuitive insight of the transcendental subject whose regard can take in this past absence in the intentional fulfillment of the now moment of immanent time. Thus, this description would demand that the subject take the past as if it were her own, as if it were part of the temporal succession of now points which is her only source of evidence. “Every temporal point which has been shoved back can, by means of reproductive memory, be made the null-point of an intuition of time and be repeated,” Husserl writes, concluding: “In such an order every temporal interval, no matter which – even the external continuity with the actual temporal field reproduced – must be a part of a unique chain, continuing to the point of the actual now” (ibid, 94-5). The consciousness of inner time can then be conceived relative to immanent time, such that any significant difference in the intentional structure of memory could be reduced to the consciousness of the passing of time. We can apprehend our memory with the knowledge we have lived through this past by making our intentional memorial experience explicit in the present.

Husserl’s response here is important if we take note of some of the difficulties in Freud’s analysis of the unconscious and memory above. Particularly in respect to “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through,” Freud’s analysis of what it means to work through a resistance was not clearly expounded; the difference between a technique demanding an interpretative analysis in addition to the working through of the patient’s resistances and treatment by suggestion attempting to switch the registers between unconscious and conscious ideas remained unclear. Freud claims that the interpretation of resistance and the patient’s recognition of these resistances lead “the patient to relate the forgotten situations and connections without any difficulty” (147). I have attempted to show however that the problem facing Freud is not merely the problem of an “after image” of conscious, but an idea, divested of a relation to a temporal order, which thereby asserts an influence on the subject’s intentional remembering of events, indeed of the patient’s relationship to the present. In fact, it seems that the unconscious divesting of this temporality is such that there is not a self-sufficient relationship between memory and the succession of now points, of consciousness and immanent time. However, as Husserl argues, if the very act of memory is a making present of an absence of the past, then the past forever sinks into the temporal horizons of subjectivity and can never be known as such except by a peculiar turning of our regard to the consciousness of the passing of time. Perhaps it is this turning of regard that has the deepest similarity between a phenomenological and psychoanalytic conception of time. On this point of a turning of regard, Freud writes in “The Unconscious,” “Observation has shown that much that shares the characteristics of the system Pcs. does not become conscious; and we learn in addition that the act of becoming conscious is dependent on the attention of the Pcs. being turned in certain directions” (ibid. 192). Significantly, this turning of the regard, however necessary for the philosopher and the psychoanalyst, are conceived differently. Where with Husserl this turning of regard of our consciousness of the passing of time depends upon our ability to take this time as immanent, for Freud, the turning of the regard is toward our own resistances such that we can see in them what orients us toward our conscious life. Locating in the preconscious the seat of memories, emotions, thoughts unnoticed by consciousness, and a certain temporality, Freud finds contrary to Husserl a kind of reproductive memory necessary for us to have a meaningful relationship to the world that as such is at a distance from itself and often must be worked through, not because it is not clear or it has some distance from the past but because memory often possesses an intentionality at odds with any possible way we can take this sort of regard to ourselves and our history. Indeed, this might be a precondition for any conscious memory at all.

Works Cited

Derrida, Jacques. “Freud and the Scene of Writing.” Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass.

Chicago: Chicago UP, 1978. 196-131.

Freud, Sigmund. “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through.” The Standard Edition of the

Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. and ed. by James Strachey. v XIV. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. 147-156.

- -.“The Unconscious.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of

Sigmund Freud. Trans. and ed. by James Strachey. v XIV. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. 161-205.

Husserl, Edmund. The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness. Ed. Martin Heidegger. Trans.

James S. Churchill. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1973.

1 “In the first phase the psychical act is unconscious and belongs to the system Ucs.; if, on testing, it is rejected by the censorship, it is not allowed to pass into the second phase; it is then said to be repressed” (ibid. 173). It is necessarily how this repression occurs and how it produces its “affect” on the preconscious that is the subject of the economic theory. Here, the different energies involved, the unconscious unbound energies and the binding energies of the preconscious, are responsible for the creation and the sustaining of the unconscious.

2 “The Ucs. processes pay just as little regard to reality. They are subject to the pleasure principle; their fate depends only on how strong they are and on whether they fulfill the demands of the pleasure-unpleasure regulation” (ibid. 187). The status of unconscious processes depends upon the relative strength of the pleasure principle. This significance of this is that they can only be known through an interpretation of the affect such processes would have on the preconscious/conscious processes, which could only be seen through the disturbance of these processes.