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.