Lonergan and Freud: the Unconscious and Intersubjectivity

Every philosophical system requires a hermeneutic, a way of understanding and sharing premises and ideas. Lonergan’s system is no exception. Inter-communication requires a communicable language or system, a shared language of ideas and theorems. Lonergan’s dialectic allows for just such a sharing (or hermeneutic); a shared system of ideas that encourages a dialectic understanding. For Lonergan the notion of insight has a specific meaning and use; a normative (prescriptive) model couched not only in the concept of insight, but in intersubjectivity, a shared language of dialectic; a hermeneutic.

Freud’s model of the psyche (topography of inner-life) also has a hermeneutic, a hermeneutic of conflict and homogeneity (or stasis), a lessening of tension through abreaction and catharsis. Freud’s model stresses the importance of the unconscious as a constituent part of the tripartite model of the psyche: Ego, Id and Super-ego. Lonergan’s four-level dialectic and Freud’s unconscious both work within intersubjectivity. Lonergan’s use of the unconscious seems to differ from Freud’s, and if this is so, then Lonergan’s four-level system does not account for the unconscious in a true Freudian manner.

Lonergan uses the term scotosis to explain the blind spots in the transcendent insight experience.

Let us name such an aberration of understanding a scotosis, and let us call the resultant blind spot a scotoma. Fundamentally, the scotosis is an unconscious process. It arises, no in conscious acts, but in the censorship that governs the emergence of psychic contents. Nonetheless, the whole process is not hidden from us, for the mere spontaneous exclusion of unwanted insights is not equal to the total range of eventualities.[1]


He uses the term in conjunction with the notion of a censor or censorship; suggesting that scotosis creates an impasse or blockage where and when insights are concerned. He appears to appropriate the psychoanalytic concept of repression as a function of scotosis, a looking away from or censoring of unwanted thoughts that may or may not lead to an insight. In this manner the function of repression, or scotosis, is to censor or block access and or transcendence to insights, principally insights that are unwanted. It is unclear whether these scotosis’ are volitional or simply a function of the transcendent working-through experience. In the Freudian dynamic repression serves a similar but different function, it holds-back or prevents memories and thoughts from gaining access to conscious thought.


Now let us call ‘conscious’ the conception which is present to our consciousness and of which we are aware, and let this be the only meaning of the term ‘conscious’. As for latent conceptions, if we have any reason to suppose that they exist in the mind—as we had in the case of memory—let them be denoted by the term ‘unconscious’. Thus an unconscious conception is one of which we are not aware, but the existence of which we are nevertheless ready to admit on account of other proofs and signs.[2]


In Lonergan’s dynamic (or dialectic) they seem to act as diversions or blocks to the transcendent working-through process. In this manner they appear to be a function of consciousness not unconscious.

Repression and scotosis are functions of the censor, not unconscious mechanisms in the Freudian sense of repression and the unconscious. In the analytic setting the analysand expresses his or her unconscious in and through free-association and transference. Both the analysand and the analyst are operating at an unconscious level; it is the work of the analyst to allow for a safe therapeutic environment that allows for the transference of emotional energy onto the analyst as transferential object. The analyst uses his or her unconscious to interpret and translate the analysand’s unconscious, and in so doing develops what is referred to as a therapeutic alliance between analysand and analyst. This alliance allows for a shared intersubjectivity on an unconscious level, an unconscious alliance or therapeutic dialectic.

Lonergan does not seem to be referring to the Freudian dialectic when he uses the terms repression and censor, but rather to an epistemological function of the four-levels of insight. The scotosis serves to block or prevent insights, creating a blind spot in cognition. The Freudian unconscious is a storehouse of repressed and or censored memories and or thoughts that manifest themselves as symptomology. Lonergan’s blind spots create a negation or repression of the General Empirical Method (GEM). In this manner it might be suggested Lonergan sees the unconscious as a negative process as it interferes or blocks the transcendental method (or has little if anything to offer it). The Freudian model of the unconscious is timeless, meaning it has neither a past nor future but is always situated in the present moment, the moment of the analysis or interpretation. Lonergan’s GEM is a temporal process, requiring a systematic dialectic that moves in a vertical projection. In this manner there is an inherent teleology to Lonergan’s dialectic. Lonergan says the following about scotosis,


Contrary insights do emerge. But they may be accepted as correct, only to suffer the eclipse that the bias brings about by excluding the relevant further questions. Again, they may be rejected as incorrect, as mere bright ideas without a solid foundation in fact; and this reject tends to be connected with rationalization of the scotosis and with an effort to accumulate evidence in its favour. Again, consideration of the contrary insight may not reach the level of reflective and critical consciousness; it may occur only to be brushed aside in an emotional reaction of disgust, pride, dread, horror, revulsion. Again, there are the inverse phenomena. Insights that expand the scotosis can appear to lack plausibility; they will be subjected to scrutiny; and as the subject shifts to and from his sounder viewpoint, they will oscillate wildly between an appearance of nonsense and an appearance of truth. Thus, in a variety of manners, the scotosis can remain fundamentally unconscious yet suffer the attacks and crises that generate in the mind a mist of obscurity and bewilderment, of suspicion and reassurance, of doubt and rationalization, of insecurity and disquiet.[3]


What we see here is a suspicion of the unconscious, its content and the unconscious process. The scotosis, as Lonergan says, can remain fundamentally unconscious yet still have an effect or affect on consciousness. These crises, as Lonergan refers to them, are the troubling and repressed thoughts and memories (and in some sense insights) in the unconscious that are trying to obtain access to consciousness. In the Freudian dynamic these are manifested as symptoms and unwanted thoughts and feelings. Unlike Lonergan’s unconscious the Freudian dynamic sees the act of repression and censoring as clues or traces of greater unresolved conflict; and the interpretation and unravelling of these allow for an abreaction or catharsis of negative psychic tension. Freud works towards a stasis or lessening of tension, Lonergan towards a systematic dialectic that leads to insights. If these scotosis’ cause an impasse or block to the four-level dialectic, they are seen as impediments to insight not enhancements. The censor in the Freudian dynamic is used as a tool to further exploration, as are repression and symptomology. In Lonergan anything that has the propensity to impede or sully the insight process is to be discarded, as they are challenges to the dialectic of the GEM. Lonergan goes on to say that,


The scotosis is an aberration, not only of the understanding, but also of the censorship. Just as wanting an insight penetrates below the surface to bring forth schematic images that give rise to the insight, so not wanting an insight has the opposite effect of repressing from consciousness a scheme that would suggest the insight. Now this aberration of the censorship is inverse to it. Primarily, the censorship is constructive, it selects and arranges materials that emerge in consciousness in a perspective that gives rise to an insight; this positive activity has by implication a negative aspect, for other materials are left behind, and other perspectives are not brought to light; still, this negative aspect of positive activity does not introduce any arrangement or perspective into the unconscious demand functions of neural patterns and processes.[4]


It is difficult to pinpoint exactly what Lonergan is referring to here, whether he means that the unconscious enhances or provides for insights, or whether it impedes or muddles them. If it provides for them, then it has a positive non-aberrant effect on consciousness; if it impedes or muddles them, it has a negative effect on not only perspective, but how one gains and collects insights. He seems to be using censor as a selector, a systemic that weeds out unwanted or aberrant aspects, perspectives and thoughts that lead to insights.

In Freud the job of the censor is to prevent or displace unwanted thoughts and memories from gaining access to preconscious or conscious thought. It maintains a stasis of psychic energy and tension, and the lessening or enhancing of tension or energy should it find access to preconscious or conscious thought. In On Metapsychology Freud writes,

…we may say in general that a psychical act goes through two phases as regards its state, between which is interposed a kind of testing (censorship). 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’ and must remain unconscious. If, however, it passes this testing, it enters the second phase and thenceforth belongs to the second system, which we will call the system Cs.[5]

Freud’s unconscious functions at a different level and with a different process than Lonergan’s use of the term or function unconscious. Censorship for Lonergan is a conscious process that inhibits or rejects those thoughts or perspectives that would not lead to or add to insight; Freud’s censorship is less an epistemic tool than a psychical one; meaning, it functions to prevent anxiety and displeasure, not as a means to insight in the manner in which Lonergan uses the term insight in his General Epistemological Method (GEM).

Both Freud and Lonergan, however, have an intersubjectivity in mind, a sharing of inner-thoughts, and in Lonergan’s sense, the conception and sharing of insights. Freud’s system is topographical, it is a process that operates in psychical activity; Lonergan’s system is epistemic, operating at and on the four-levels of insight: (1) experience, (2) understanding, (3) judgment, and (4) decision. If we look back to the analytic process we see that both the analysand and the analyst are functioning or operating on an unconscious level; in Lonergan this type of intersubjectivity would be impossible, aberrant at best. Interpretation in Freudian psychoanalysis is all but missing in Lonergan’s method, as it creates a dissonance or an aberration in thinking. It is easy to underline the mathematical/economic influence in Lonergan’s method, a systematic, orderly functional dialectic.

So we have come to see how Lonergan’s scotosis and notions of repression and the unconscious differ from the traditional Freudian models. Lonergan is concerned with a methodological line of thinking, the four-levels of the GEM that lead one or draw one to insights; Freud is concerned with the lessening of psychical tension and the abreaction or catharsis of unwanted or conflicting tension. Both seek out a release, in Lonergan that release comes by way of insight, in Freud in the lessening or resolution of psychical conflict and tension. Lonergan seeks out knowledge, Freud psychical homeostasis. Lonergan’s intentionality, or intending to reality, is a basic human activity. His four-level method allows for an intentionality that works through (1) experience, (2) understanding, (3) judgment, and (4) decision. Freud’s tripartite model of the psyche, though not intentional in the way Lonergan’s is, has an intending as a functional element or process of its dialectic, the release of tension and conflict.

With unrepressed derivatives of the unconscious the fate of a particular idea is often decided by the degree of its activity or catharsis. It is an everyday occurrence that such a derivative remains unrepressed as long as it represents only a small amount of energy, although its content would be calculated to give rise to a conflict with what is dominant in consciousness. The qualitative factor proves decisive for this conflict: as soon as the basically obnoxious idea exceeds a certain degree of strength, the conflict becomes a real one, and it is precisely this activation that leads to repression. So that, where repression is concerned an increase of energic cathexis operates in the same sense as an approach to the unconscious, while a decrease of that cathexis operates in the same sense as remoteness from the unconscious or distortion. We see that the repressive trends may find a substitute for repression in a weakening of what is distasteful.[6]


Freud’s model of repression concerns conflict, and the resolution or discharge of tension and or distasteful psychical energy. Lonergan’s repression is epistemic, not psychical. In Understanding and Being Lonergan writes,

Human communication is a process that stands on a series of levels. Suppose you are seated in your room working and someone comes in. There is a change in you by the mere fact that someone has entered, and the change differs with the person who enters. There is an intersubjectivity that is basically on the sensitive level, and it is perhaps most intense in mother and child. There is a sensitive basis for communication by the mere fact of the presence of another, and still more so by the presence of another who is known and is the object of affection, and so on.[7]


The notion of intersubjectivity, or human communication, implies a series of standoffs to understanding and the communication of ideas, feelings and meaning. Lacan’s famous (or infamous) proclamation that we never say what we mean merits consideration. I will not go into a Lacanian exegesis here, as that would cause too much confusion and raise far too many questions, especially ones of authenticity, but suffice it to say that intersubjectivity has both a conscious and unconscious process and engagement. This also raises queries as to the level at which, and place, that intersubjectivity occurs. It would seem that Lonergan would not allow for or acknowledge an unconscious intersubjectivity like we find in Freud, as it would place impediments on his four-level dialectic. The Freudian dialect, however, allows for and encourages intersubjectivity at an unconscious level; in fact this is the basis on which psychoanalytic practice is founded. Insights at an unconscious level, of course, require a conscious interpretation and translation; however they begin they’re formation at the level of unconscious ideation where they go through a series of displacements, changes, attachments and reattachments. Laplanche and Pontalis, in The Language of Psychoanalysis, refer to interpretation as,

Procedure which, by means of analytic investigation, brings out the latent meaning in what the subject says or does. Interpretation reveals the modes of the defensive conflict and its ultimate aim is to identify the wish that is expressed by every product of the unconscious.[8]


I introduce this as a means to a better understand of the notion of an unconscious intersubjectivity. If we allow for interpretation, translation of thoughts, feelings, etc., we are in a better position to grasp the Freudian dynamic of unconscious intersubjectivity. This addresses the notion of a hermeneutic that each philosophical system has as a function of its dialectic. Lonergan’s systematic is no different, as it requires a hermeneutic that is present at each of the four-levels of insight. By the mere fact that intersubjectivity occurs between two subjects (as Lonergan points out in the aforementioned quote) each with they’re own history and subjectivity, a hermeneutic or translation is always part of or at work in intersubjective communication.

What I am suggestion is that much of what goes on intersubjectively between two subjects is carried out at the unconscious level, thereby pressing the issue of miscommunication and not saying what we mean. I think that had Lonergan paid more attention to this his four-level dialect would have included a Freudian notion of the unconscious. His inclusion of scotosis and repression are but hints of a far deeper Freudian dynamic. As it stands Lonergan uses the concepts unconscious, repression and scotosis epistemologically, not psychically. Lonergan’s method is epistemic, including a horizon and a purposeful dialect.

In concluding I would like to draw our attention to Lonergan’s understanding of the unconscious in Method In Theology. On page 34, endnote 6, Lonergan says the following,

This twilight of what is conscious but not objectified seems to be the meaning of what some psychiatrists call the unconscious.[9]


He is referring to feelings that remain hidden or concealed in the unconscious. Lonergan goes on to say that these feelings, or affects, are not cognizant, meaning they are in the twilight of consciousness. They only become conscious feelings and affectations when they are made cognizant or brought forth into consciousness; and in keeping with his transcendental method, as tools for deliberation, meaning inflections of the movement to insight. Lonergan sees these hidden or twilight feelings as obstacles to understanding and insight. They push one away from understanding and insight. Lonergan goes on to say,

On the other hand, not to take cognizance of them is to leave them in the twilight of what is conscious but not objectified. In the long run there results a conflict between the self as conscious and, on the other hand, the self as objectified. This alienation from oneself leads to the adoption of misguided remedies, and they in their turn still further mistakes until, in desperation, the neurotic turns to the analyst or counsellor.[10]


It is interesting to note that Lonergan is willing to concede the existence of the unconscious, even though he seems to be referring more to the preconscious than the unconscious, but in a way that discards the importance of it for insight, understanding and intersubjectivity. If Lonergan had been less inhibited to see the unconscious in a more psychoanalytic way, his method (GEM) would have and or offer far more reaching ends.

[1] Lonergan, Bernard, Insight, Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1992, p.215
[2] Freud, Sigmund, On Metapsychology, London: Penguin, 1976, pp.50-51

[3]Lonergan, Bernard, Insight, Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1992, p.215
[4] Lonergan, Bernard, Insight, Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1992, pp.215-16

[5] Freud, Sigmund, On Metapsychology, London: Penguin, 1976, p.175
[5] Freud, Sigmund, On Metapsychology, London: Penguin, 1976, p.151-52

[7] Lonergan, Bernard, Understanding and Being, Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1990, p.89
[8] Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, New York: Norton, 1973, p.227
[9] Lonergan, Bernard, Method In Theology, Toronto: the University of Toronto Press, 1973, p.34
[10] Ibid, p.34


-References-


Freud, Sigmund, On Metapsychology, London: Penguin, 1976

Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, New York: Norton, 1973

Lonergan, Bernard, Insight, Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1992

Lonergan, Bernard, Method In Theology, Toronto: the University of Toronto Press, 1973

Lonergan, Bernard, Understanding and Being, Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1990

Oughtness

In this essay I look at Heinrich Rommen’s work on the concept of oughtness, principally his contention that ought to must be a metaphysical ought (in keeping with Aquinas) and Freud’s concept of the Super Ego, or moral/societal censor in human action and behaviour. Freud’s work on the tripartite division of the human psyche suggests some interesting arguments for and against the notion of a metaphysical ought. I will also be drawing on Vitoria’s political writings, principally the construction of societal authority.

The use of the term ought or ought to imply a call to action, or in some cases inaction. The concept of Natural Law as a binding principle upon human society requires an ought or oughtness as an underlying principle of social appeal among its members. To be ought is to be compelled by obligation or duty, or to be expected or likely to be so. Oughtness refers to the being of ought or being-ought. Natural Law is defined as a body of law or a specific principle held to be derived from nature and binding upon human society in the absence of or in addition to positive law. (Webster’s Dictionary).

When the terms ought and being is conjoined, ought or ought to become an act of being or being-ought. This necessarily occasions an act of being-ought, or oughtness. Ought can be used as ought-to or ought-not-to, as in you ought-to do this, but you ought-not do that. When conjoined with being, {the state or act of being} ought becomes an act-of-being or a being-ought. The implications of this being-ought, or oughtness are important for political philosophy, jurisprudence and theology.

Rommen’s approach to oughtness rests in his reading of Thomism against a rationalist empiricism. He sees the Thomist concept of form and being as essential to a non-reductionist application of Natural Law to moral/legal oughtness.

The idea of natural law obtains general acceptance only in the periods when metaphysics, queen of the sciences, is dominant. It receded or suffers an eclipse, on the other hand, when being (not taken here in Kelsen’s sense of mere existentiality or factuality) and oughtness, morality and law, are separated, when the essences of things and their ontological order are viewed as unknowable. [1]


Rommen contends that natural law depends on Thomism, principally Aquinas’ metaphysics (ontology) of being. As suggested above, when being and ought is conjoined, the result is a being-ought, or an esse of being as action and moral agency. Rommen also contends that if moral philosophy and legal philosophy are to have a solid foundation they must be based in metaphysics.

In this connection “being” does not denote simple existence, the imperfect form of being. It means essential being, the esse essentiae. [2]

What Rommen has in mind is essential being in an Aquinian sense, a reaching towards perfection. In this manner ought, or oughtness becomes an esse-ought with the supreme omnipotent will of God as the source of all norms. He uses Occam’s concept of a supreme will (God’s will) which necessarily conjoins existence and oughtness, thereby avoiding what he refers to as an extreme empiricism.

For being and oughtness must in the final analysis coincide. Or to express it differently, being and goodness, the ontological and deontological or moral orders must at bottom and ultimately be one. [3]

Rommen is concerned with the implications of a hollow rationalism that has no basis in metaphysics, allowing for a radical relativism. By using Thomistic philosophy as a foundation for natural law this relativism can be avoided. Rommen outlines Aquinas’ concept of sensible knowledge and its application to oughtness. Man understands by means of the senses and the intellect, and in this manner the things themselves are the cause of knowledge, not an epistemic rationalism or a purely intellect knowledge. Following a Thomistic epistemology or metaphysics, Rommen suggests,

At first, then, the intellect is passive. Reality exists prior to the intellect. The mental image is a copy whose original is the real. This real, moreover, presupposes for its actuality only God the Creator, the first creative intellect, who as the All-actual and All-operative gives things their measure. [4]


The intellect, or human mind, knows things in agreement with reality, or the things themselves. Natural Law theory allows for an adjustment of knowledge with reality, but with the omnipotence of God’s will as its essential referent. Rommen agrees with Aquinas that moral philosophy and the science of law require experience, both the sensible and the intellectual, a sort of reasonable empiricism or formal essence of being. Universality in this manner is a conjoining of form and substance.

But the nature becomes universal and hence representative of the essence, the quiddity of the thing, when it is abstracted, as St. Thomas says, ab utroque esse, when it is viewed apart from existence in things of the external world as well as from existence in the thought of some intellect. [5]

Universals are not substances as Plato suggests, but existence and essence, a quiddity of form and substance. In this way the essence of things allow us knowledge of them, a universality of form and substance. As man’s greatest desire is to attain perfection, an imperfection in the face of God’s perfection, natural law lays the foundation for this attainment. As the divine will brings things into existence either immediately as first cause or indirectly through secondary causes, nature law is essential, a prospect of God’s divine will. According to Rommen this forms the basis of natural law, allowing for or suggesting the concept of oughtness as essence and being, or being-ought.

Now the goodness of moral actions is contingent on the immutability of the natural law, its un-changeableness. In this manner essences are unchanging, and the action drawn from these immutable natural laws form the basis for moral action or oughtness.

…the essence (form) which constitutes the real thing in its being is also the end, the final cause, of the thing. The Aristotelian-Thomistic theory of knowledge starts essentially from the actual fact of motion, of self-change or of being changed, in short, from the attempt to comprehend becoming. Thence came the distinction between an inner, enduring core, the form, and the changeable element, the matter, that which is formed or molded in every material thing. [6]


This striving towards perfection implies a striving towards goodness, which is based in natural law; and the full realization of this end, or goal, is the realization of quiddity or existence, which is attainable only in a philosophy of morals and law that is founded in natural law. In this manner Rommen suggests a teleology of moral law, a striving towards goodness that implies an ought-to or an oughtness conjoined with being or essence.

The teleological conception, grounded in the metaphysics of being, is therefore the basis of the essential unity of being and oughtness, of being and goodness. [7]


If moral philosophy and the philosophy of law are founded on an esse-oughtness, they are inseparable from natural law; they’re very nature depends on a greater will, the unchangeable divine will of God. Ought and being are adjoined, they are as substance and form is to being and in this way one single act, esse-oughtness. One acts as an essential-being, not as a particular body separated and divisible from essence, form and substance. This conjoining of being and ought or essence and moral action shuns relativism, hollow or otherwise.

Now I will look at Freud’s topographical outline of the psyche, Vitoria’s concept of authority and community and Rommen’s oughtness, a tripartite of metaphysical, political and psychological ought. These three conceptual edifices form an interesting conjoining of societal, onto-metaphysical and psychoanalytic oughtness. Rommen’s ought can be used to show how Freud’s topography of the psyche and Vitoria’s conception of authority and community share in a common notion of esse-being, a tripartite of the societal, metaphysical and psychological.

Freud’s topography of the psyche suggests an interesting, albeit competing notion of human behaviour and action. With its tripartite construction the psyche is a storehouse of memories, rebuses, a call-to action, motivation or intention. The Id or the libidinal aspect of the psyche, the ego, which perceives and engages with reality, and the super ego, which acts as a censor between the two, form the tripartite topography of the human psyche. In keeping with Rommen’s notion of a metaphysical ought, Freud’s super ego represents the authoritative or societal mediator between ought and ought not. Jones writes,

We have good grounds for supposing that to the activity of the super-ego we are mainly beholden for the imposing structure of morality, conscience, ethics, aesthetics, religion—in short, to the whole spiritual aspiration of man that sunders him most strikingly from the beasts.[8]


The ought that Rommen refers to has commonalities with the Freudian super-ego in that ought, or ought to has both metaphysical and psychological referents. Rommen’s ought is both an ontological and metaphysical ought, in that it requires an act of being, or esse oughtness. In the Freudian sense of ought, or ought to, the act of being, or ought esse is one where an authority, or censor, determines the act of ought or oughtness. This authority is first derived from familial authority, then a social-anthropological one that changes with life experience and societal norms. Jones writes,

The conscience is plainly the guardian of morality in the fully developed sense of that term: what is socially right (according to the mores) and ethically laudable. Now the super-ego is certainly not moral in that sense—in extreme cases, for example, it may even dictate an act of murder as both desirable and commendable—and yet it possesses an important attribute that closely mimics it. That is the sense of urgent ‘oughtness’, a categorical imperative. Actually this ‘oughtness’ in the super-ego may get attached to attitudes that are either moral or immoral as judged by our reason and conscience, although in both cases it is at least as strong and compelling as any corresponding dictate of the conscience.[9]


Both the metaphysical ought and the psychological ought have censors or authorities’ as part of the act or oughtness. In this manner a normative quality is included in, or mitigates the act of ought to. In the psychological case that norm can be either familial or societal, in the metaphysical case theological or societal.

According to Vitoria power is of two kinds, public and private. An authoritative power arises from or out of a society, and does not exist outside of the formation of society. Authority appears as a moment within the appearance or establishment of a society or community. In this manner authority and power are contingent, meaning, there would be no authority without a society over which or for which it rules and exercises power. As with Freudian psychodynamics the topography of the psyche is comprised of id, ego and super-ego, each with its own specific function and purpose as part of the whole. Each of its own would not, nor could it function or exist outside of the whole or tripartite nature of the psyche. The super-ego as discussed earlier mediates between the outside and the inside, the ego and the id, or libidinal drives. In this manner the super-ego acts as an authority or censor that appears as a moment within the topography of the psyche. As with Vitoria, the power or authority of a society exists as part of that society, not as something extraneous to it. Rommen’s metaphysical ought functions within or as part of a whole.

Vitoria sees society as a living organism, a function of parts. In order for these parts to coexist they must share the possession of power; and this power is vested in an authority, but a power and authority that works for and as part of the whole. Vitoria writes,

So it is that, in order to make up for these natural deficiencies, mankind was obliged to give up the solitary nomadic life of animals, and to live life in partnerships (societates), each supporting the other.[10]

Vitoria stresses the Aristotelian notion that for mankind to progress in both soul and understanding it must not live in isolation from its fellow man; and in this manner Justice can only be exercised in a multitude. As each man and woman seeks out his or her perfection, a partnership formed as a community bests serves this aim. Vitoria says,

Since, therefore, human partnerships arose for the purpose of helping to bear each other’s burdens, amongst all these partnerships a civil partnership (civilis societas) is the one which most aptly fulfils men’s needs. It follows that the city (civitas) is, if I may so put it, the most natural community, the one which is most comfortable to nature. The family provides its members with the mutual services which they need, but does not make it whole and self-sufficient (una sibi sufficiens), especially in defence against violent attack.[11]

This partnership requires an authority or governance that will serve the whole and its parts. The problem of who is to hold and exercise this authority is as long and varied as history itself.

In Rommen, Freud and Vitoria the age-old problem of authority and power, restraint or delimit of freedom, be that private (individual) or public (community) continue to challenge, often resisting change or amelioration. Vitoria’s proposition for a partnership or fellowship of mankind invariable encourages the problem of authority and power, as in Freud’s tripartite psyche and Rommen’s metaphysical ought.

Rommen’s reliance on a metaphysical or non-relativistic ought requires an agreement or partnership between members in a societal whole; and this in turn requires the ceding of authority to one authority or power vested with authority to rule over the members of a society. Vitoria writes,

Just as the human body cannot remain healthy unless some ordering force (uis ordinatrix) directs the single limbs to act in concert with the others to the greatest good of the whole, so it is with a city in which each individual strives against the other citizens for his own advantage to the neglect of the common good.[12]


No one part is given exception over the other, and in this manner the whole strives for a common good. The same may be said of the psyche, as the topography of id, ego and super-ego work in concert towards a common goal, even though the libidinal drives appear to strive towards narcissistic ends. In Rommen the authority rests with a metaphysical ought, an authority that is founded in a normative though non-relativistic common goal. In Vitoria this authority is derived out of the conception of society, in the moment of its beginning, as a part of the fabric of the societal whole. Although it is true that the super-ego is formed out of the id and ego, it has vestiges long before its final formation; it changes with maturation and societal change, but in many ways is static or unchanging.

The problem of authority is a common theme shared by all three authors, metaphysical, political and psychological. All three can be woven together as a whole, or found within the fabric of one another; authority of the individual, authority of the community and a tripartite of authority formed from societal, metaphysical and psychological.

Vitoria foreshadowed many of the problems and challenges facing contemporary political thinkers, Marx, Rawls and the Frankfurt School to name but three, so perhaps a further look at Vitoria is in order. As we have seen with Freud, the psyche can be understood as a topographical model of human behaviour, and Vitoria’s political writings in many ways precursory to the human psyche as a political topography. With Aristotle we have the body as a template for society, the harmony of disparate parts all striving for a common good. As with many thinkers of his time Vitoria drew heavily from Aristotle and Aquinas, building upon those extrapolations a societal theory of power and authority. Vitoria writes of authority as having a divine source and a social or civil one,

Divine and natural law require there to be some power to govern the commonwealth, and since in the absence of any divine law or human elective franchise (suffragium) there is no convincing reason why one man should have power more than another, it is necessary that this power be vested in the community, which must be able to provide for itself. If no one was superior to any other before the formation of cities (ciuitates), there is no reason why in a particular civil gathering or assembly anyone should claim power for himself over others.[13]

The power to govern arises out of the formation of the commonwealth, and is responsible and accountable to the commonwealth and its members. The ought or ought to that Rommen speaks of arises out of the commonwealth and is enacted and acted upon by its members as part of the common whole or good of the civil society. In Freud the super-ego plays the role of authority, though in a much less civil and organized manner; as it is at constant odds with the id, whose libidinal desires often challenge the ought or ought to that is first learned from familial then societal sources.

As with all three topographies, the source of authority and governance poses a threat to individual desires and freedom; however in a civil society the need for a common authority is paramount, as without a common good of disparate parts (members of the society) the commonwealth collapses. A collective or contractual ought, which arises out of the formation of a civil society, assures against this occurring, and when it does provides for laws to adjust such behaviours. Vitoria writes,

Therefore the commonwealth, in which ‘we, being many, are one body, and every one members one of another’ as the Apostle says (Rom. 12:5) ought not to lack the power and right which individual men assume or have over their bodies, to command the single limbs for the convenience and use of the whole. Individuals may even risk the loss a limb if this is necessary to the safety of the rest of the body; and there is no reason why the commonwealth should not have the same power to compel and coerce its members as if they were its limbs for the utility and safety of the common good.[14]


In this manner the commonwealth is likened to the body, or in the Freudian topography, the psyche. When the id or libidinal desires overtake or compete with the common good of the psyche as a whole, it is the authority of the super-ego to mediate and intervene between the id and the ego, thereby re-establishing stasis or psychical harmony. The ought lies in the function of the super-ego, as it does in the common good of the civil society or commonwealth through the formation of a governing principle or authority.

Rommen, Freud and Vitoria, as a threefold model of authority and civil society, allow for a functional whole of parts. When one member takes precedent over another, or the id tries to take control of the psyche disharmony occurs, one that requires a mediator or authority to re-establish a striving for the common good or a harmony of parts of the whole. Freud’s topography of the psyche and Vitoria’s conception of the civil society and Rommen’s notion of oughtness, share in a striving towards a stasis or common good, that of the human being or of the commonwealth.

1Heinrich A. Rommen, The Natural Law, A Study in Legal and Social History and Philosophy, Indianapolis, Liberty Fund.
[2] Ibid
[3] Ibid
[4] Ibid
[5] Ibid
[6] Ibid
[7] Ibid
[8] Jones, Ernest, Papers on Psycho-analysis, London: Bailliere, Tindall and Cox, 1948, p.145
[9] Jones, Ernest, Papers on Psycho-analysis, London: Bailliere, Tindall and Cox, 1948, p.146
[10] Vitoria, Francisco de, Political Writings, New York: Cambridge University Press, p.7
[11] Ibid
[12] Ibid
[13] Vitoria, Francisco de, Political Writings, New York: Cambridge University Press, p.11
[14] Vitoria, Francisco de, Political Writings, New York: Cambridge University Press, p.11

Husserl's Epoche and the Unconscious

By phenomenological epoche I reduce my natural human Ego and my psychic life—the realm of my psychological self-experience—to my transcendental-phenomenological Ego, the realm of transcendental-phenomenological self-experience.[1]

Is the unconscious compatible with Husserl’s phenomenological system? In asking this question we must first outline Freud’s notion of the unconscious, primary process, and Husserl’s epoche, cogitations, or middle-stream of self-reflective thought. At first glance it would seem that the two (Husserl’s epoche and the Freudian unconscious) are incompatible, the one not allowing for or recognizing the other. In this essay, or expose, I hope to reconcile these differences, drawing attention to the compatibility between the two. I will be working principally with Freud’s Metapsychology and Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, though I will be employing some secondary texts to help elaborate the arguments set forth.

I think it prudent that we start our meditations with the Freudian unconscious, then move on to Husserl’s transcendental-phenomenological ego. In so doing I hope to show that the unconscious is closer to the notion of the phenomenological ego than at first thought, and as a basis on which the arguments will hold forth, principally the similarities and dissimilarities between the two. If as Husserl maintains the epoche is the horizon or stream from which self-reflection is carried out by the transcendental-ego, and the unconscious is that area attainable only through translation or interpretation, a symptomology, both phenomena seem to have ubiquitous geographies, existing on a plane outside of conscious thought or perception.

They seem to have a reaching-back or away-from as characteristics of there systematic, to a plane or horizon not immediate or attainable from conscious mediation. Self-reflection would appear to involve a looking back-over or away from the immediateness of perception or conscious cogitation. Only by pulling away, or in Schopenhauerian terms, disinterestedness, can we be said to be truly self-reflecting. Husserl’s self-reflective transcendental-ego does just this, a Cartesian self-reflection that does not do away with the world, but accepts it as given, in existence always. But first let us go to the Freudian unconscious, the source of much perplexity and conjecture.

In an address to the Society for Psychical Research of London in 1912 entitled A note On The Unconscious in Psychoanalysis Freud says,

Now let us call ‘conscious’ the conception which is present to our consciousness and of which we are aware, and this be the only meaning of the term ‘conscious’. As for latent conceptions, if we have any reason to suppose that they exist in the mind—as we had in the case of memory—let them be denoted by the term ‘unconscious’. Thus an unconscious conception is one of which we are not aware, but the existence of which we are nevertheless ready to admit on account of other
proofs or signs.[2]

The unconscious is there if we look for and acknowledge these proofs and signs, which are to be found in symptoms, forgetfulness, i.e. repression, slips of the tongue, repetitions and so forth. The unconscious, or primary process, is that part of the psyche that is hidden, or concealed, until drawn out, be that through interpretation, translation or free-association. Ricoeur[3], for example, conceived of the unconscious as a hermeneutics, a language of symbols and representations.

Lacan[4] defined the unconscious as a language, a structural assemblage of meaning found in the interpretation of unconscious patios. Whether the unconscious is a language or a hermeneutics, it still lies unaccounted for in work being done on consciousness and modes of conscious thought, or intentionality as in Daniel Dennett’s[5] work. Unconscious acts may seem to be lacking intentionality, but as Freud showed this is not the case: they represent the ongoing stream of thought that goes on beneath consciousness, the Lacanian patios that drives conscious activity. In this mode, or manner, they exist below the surface as an ongoing stream of activity that affects how one thinks, acts, reacts and feels. Freud writes in his 1915 essay entitled The Unconscious that,

We can go further and argue, in support of there being unconscious psychical state, that at any given moment consciousness includes only a small content, so that the greater part of what we call conscious knowledge must in any case be for very considerable periods of time in a state of latency, that is to say, of being psychically unconscious. When all our latent memories are taken into consideration it becomes totally incomprehensible how the existence of the unconscious can be denied. But here we encounter the objection that these latent recollections can no longer be described as psychical, but that they correspond to residues of somatic processes from which what is psychical can once more arise. The obvious answer to this is that a latent memory is, on the contrary, an unquestionable residuum of a psychical process.[6]

Freud goes on to argue that we are mistaken to believe that all psychical activity is conscious, and that when we take a less bias approach we discover that the very opposite is the case. The interesting line here is the last, where Freud refers to latent memory as ‘unquestionable residuum’. If memories leave traces, or residuum, behind in psychical processes, then it seems reasonable to suggest that they are part of psychical modes of thought. Of course, as Freud says, we can only get at the unconscious consciously, through interpretation and the translation of imagery and symbols.

The unconscious can be likened to a stream of psychical activity that goes on behind the scenes, so to speak; a storehouse of images, rebuses, memories and past experiences. As the unconscious is timeless, meaning neither in the now or the past, but a non-temporal process, it cannot be said to be have intentionality until the meaning is interpreted or drawn out into consciousness. This reinforces Freud’s notion of the repressed, which is the cornerstone on which the unconscious is founded. A repressed memory was first a conscious memory, an experience or happening; and as with many repressed memories, of a traumatic or unthinkable nature. These repressed memories often manifest themselves as unwanted or troubling behaviours or thoughts, which can be traced back to the original experience. The cathartic process in psychoanalysis allows for the release of these repressed memories, in turn allowing for a lessening of unwanted or troubling behaviours and thoughts. It is for this very reason that Freud believed that the unconscious existed, and was a predominant factor in psychical life, affecting our behaviours, thoughts and conscious processes. In Freud’s 1915 work called Repression he says the following,

One of the vicissitudes an instinctual impulse may undergo is to meet with resistances which seek to make it imperative. Under certain conditions, which we shall presently investigate more closely, the impulse then passes into the state of ‘repression’ [‘Verdrangung’]. If what was in question was the operation of an external stimulus, the appropriate method to adopt would be flight; with an instinct, flight is of no avail, for the ego cannot escape from itself. At some later period, rejection based on judgement (condemnation) will be found to be a good method to adopt against an instinctual impulse. Repression is a preliminary stage of condemnation, something between flight and condemnation; it is a concept which could not have been formulated before the time of psychoanalytic studies.[7]

The notion that the ego cannot escaping itself is of interest, as it implies the ego is in constant tension with the repressed, guarding against unwanted memories or thoughts gaining access to consciousness. Symptoms are signposts to repressed memories, and the repressed lies deep in the vicissitudes of the unconscious.

Husserl envisioned a philosophy that would make the disputes and petitions between philosophical systems vanish, allowing for a unified phenomenological philosophy based in the transcendental ego, a self-reflective mode of philosophical analysis. His reflective or phenomenological transcendental ego, which works as a mode of consciousness within or on the plane of the epoche, allows for a non-psychological self-reflection, a disinterested apprehension of the existent or world. Following the Cartesian self-reflective ego, Husserl suggests,

But perhaps with the Cartesian discovery of the transcendental ego, a new idea of the grounding of knowledge also becomes disclosed: the idea of it as a transcendental grounding. And indeed, instead of attempting to use ego cogito as an apodictically evident premise for arguments supposedly implying a transcendental subjectivity, we shall direct our attention to the fact that phenomenological epoche lays open (to me, the meditating philosopher) an infinite realm of being of a new kind, as the sphere of a new kind of experience: transcendental experience.[8]

And thus begins Husserl’s meditation on the phenomenological transcendental ego. As the term implies, a transcendental subjectivity is a mode of consciousness that reflects on itself, as the transcendental ego is the source of all knowledge, and for Husserl, apodictic evidence of the world, evidence based in the transcendental ego. The epoche, much like the Freudian unconscious, is mode of cogitation that goes on at a level in between, or on a psychical plane removed from everyday consciousness; it is here that self-reflection is carried out. Though not a psychological process or mode of cognition, it does carry traces and vestiges of sensual or sensate phenomena gathered from perceptual and sensate apprehension, otherwise the transcendent ego would have nothing to reflect upon. Much like Schopenhauer’s will-less-ness, the transcendental ego reflects upon the world from a disinterested position, whereby it can experience the phenomena of experience from the horizon or plane of the epoche. As Husserl explains in the Cartesian Meditations,

If I keep purely what comes into view—for me, the one who is meditating—by virtue of my free epoche with respect to the being of the experienced world, the momentous fact is that I, with my life, remain untouched in my existential status, regardless of whether or not the world exists and regardless of what my eventual decision concerning its being or non-being might be. This Ego, with his Ego-life, who necessarily remains for me, by virtue of such epoche, is not a piece of the world; and if he says, “I exist, ego cogito”, that no longer signifies, “I, this man, exist”. No longer am I the man who, in natural self-experience, finds himself as a man and who, with the abstractive restriction to the pure contents of “internal” or purely psychological self-experience, finds his pure “mens sive animus sive intellectus”; nor am I the separately considered psyche itself.[9]

The transcendental ego, by virtue of the fact that it is not a purely psychological ego, attains a level or meditation or self-reflection that is non-relational, independent of the existing world, but accepting the world as given just the same. If it were a psychological ego in the sense that we understand the ego as such, it would be impinged upon and affected by sensual and emotive phenomena, and therefore not phenomenological self-reflection. Husserl goes on the say that,

Consequently for me, the meditating Ego who, standing / and remaining in the attitude of epoche, posits exclusively himself as the acceptance-basis of all Objective acceptances and bases [als Geltungsgrund aller objektiven Geltungen und Grunde], there is no psychological Ego and there are no psychic phenomena in the sense proper to psychology, i.e. as components of psychophysical men.[10]

According to Husserl the natural attitude of the mind is not concerned with the critique of knowledge per say, but with things that are given to us through perception, thought and intuition.[11] It is by this means that we engage in the world, both as psychological-beings and sensate or perceptual-beings. Much of what we do in the day-to-day is intuitive, meaning we attend to behaviours, attitudes, judgments and so forth without giving them much critical thought. Husserl’s transcendental ego, however, pulls away from this world, and in doing so reflects on the ego reflecting on the world. It is in this reflective-mode that the phenomenological transcendental ego uncovers, or un-conceals apodictic evidence, evidence found solely in the ego-self. Husserl contends that what we take for granted in natural thinking is the possibility of knowledge, apodictic evidence of the world and ourselves as being in the world. Apodictic evidence is my evidence of the world; and as such a subjective experience, though one that is shared through inter-subjectivity with others. Husserl makes this point clear in the Fifth Meditation where he says,

In any case then, within myself, within the limits of my transcendentally reduced pure conscious life, I experience the world (including others)—and, according to its experiential sense, not as (so to speak) my private synthetic formation but as other than mine alone [mir fremde], as an intersubjective world, actually there for everyone, accessible in respect of its Objects to everyone. And yet each has his experiences, his appearances and appearance-unities, his world-phenomenon; whereas the experienced world exists in itself, over against all experiencing subjects and their world-phenomena.[12]

Without the argument for inter-subjectivity, Husserl’s phenomenological system could be accused of idealism, a purely mental or solipsistic consciousness. The Sanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines the phenomenological epoche as such,

Husserl developed the method of epoché or “bracketing” around 1906. It may be regarded as a radicalization of the methodological constraint, already to be found in Logical Investigations, that any phenomenological description proper is to be performed from a first person point of view, so as to ensure that the respective item is described exactly as is experienced, or intended, by the subject.[13]

The epoche does not preclude inter-subjectivity, but is a “bracketing” that allows for a so called first person point of view. Epoche, from the Greek (εποχη), is the term Husserl employs to describe that moment where all belief in the existence of the real world is suspended, whereby a more critical grounding of the world is founded. As suggested previously, this shares similarities with Schopenhauer’s suspension of the will, or a cessation of desire-driven activity.

Now I will look at the similarities and dissimilarities between Freud’s unconscious and Husserl’s transcendental ego, or epoche. The most unambiguous way of doing this, I suggest, is to approach the unconscious as something interpretable, as a language in the Lacanian sense. By taking this line of inquiry we will not get bogged down with terminology and queries as to whether the unconscious exist at all, and save ourselves the trouble of defending Freud. If we acknowledge the unconscious as a topographical rather than a descriptive mechanism, we will be able to move quicker and with fewer impasses. Laplanche and Pontalis in

The Language of Psychoanalysis say the following about the unconscious,

The Freudian unconscious is primarily—and indissolubly—a topographical and dynamic notion formed on the basis of the experience of treatment. This experience showed that the psyche cannot be reduced to the conscious domain and that certain ‘contents’ only become accessible to consciousness once resistances have been overcome; it revealed that mental life is ‘full of active yet unconscious ideas’ and that ‘symptoms proceed from such ideas’ (1); and it led to the postulation of the existence of ’separate psychical groups’, and more generally to the recognition of the unconscious as a peculiar ‘psychical locality’ that must be pictured not as a second consciousness but as a system with its own contents, mechanisms and—perhaps—a specific ‘energy’.[14]

Husserl’s phenomenological transcendental ego, that mode of consciousness which is self-reflective, a purely philosophical cogitation rather than a psychological one, works on a plane or horizon referred to as the epoche. In Lecture 1 of The Idea of Phenomenology Husserl writes,

Phenomenology: this term designates a science, a complex of scientific disciplines; but it also designates at the same time and above all a method and an attitude of thought: the specifically philosophical attitude of thought, the specifically philosophical method.[15]

So what we have before us as philosophers, or phenomenologist’s as Husserl would say, is a philosophical discipline that seeks to secure apodictic evidence for and of the world, but evidence that is found in me as the transcendental ego. Freud’s discipline was one that wanted to explore, and subsequently identify, unconscious psychical activity through the psychoanalytic method of treatment and epistemology. Both theorists, appearing as they do to be at divergent poles of the epistemological scale, share in a common goal: the science of psychical activity. In Husserl’s case the transcendental ego allows for a purely philosophical reflection on the world, in turn allowing for epistemic evidence based in the self, the transcendental ego. In Freud’s case symptoms and there cathartic release allow for a better understanding of the self in relation to the world, be that ideas or phenomena.

The source of these symptoms, which are manifested in overt behaviours and undesirable thoughts, are stored in the unconscious, where repressed memories, thoughts and images remain inaccessible to consciousness. Husserl’s method requires a pulling-away from the world to a self-reflective mode of consciousness; Freud’s a seeking beyond or behind conscious phenomena to the source of repressed thoughts, images and memories. In both methods the end result is similar: evidence of behaviours or the world as phenomena.

Husserl’s epoche, which is an ongoing process, or systematic, running behind or between psychological consciousness and the world, or what exists as the world as given, is a stream, or horizon if you like, where self-reflectivity is carried out allowing for apodictic evidence based in the transcendental ego or self. Freud’s unconscious, which is interpretable from symptomology, thinking and behaviours, is also an ongoing process or systematic, but one that is accessible only through interpretation or translation. Both Freud and Husserl’s methods are linguistically-restrained, meaning bound by language and the expression of language. This hermeneutics of evidentiary consciousness carries with it the problem of interpretation and a shared language of experience. Even though Husserl’s concept of intersubjectivity serves to make this point moot, the problem still remains. It seems inconceivable, insurmountable at best, that a purely philosophical critique of knowledge is possible without taking into consideration the psychological ego, or at least the acceptances of psychological traces or vestiges in the phenomenological transcendental ego. Schopenhauer, it is true, envisioned a will-less state of apprehension that is both pure and desire-less, allowing for an annexing of things as they are in themselves’. But this sort of apprehension, though appealing, is one lacking in affect and emotional attachment, and as such a cold dispassionate experience of the world. If we accept, at least acknowledge that the unconscious exists, is there, like Husserl’s epoche, running behind or in between consciousness, perhaps we can conjoin the epoche and the unconscious, making them into one systematic with differently directed objectives: both methods seek evidence for the world, each from within a reflective stance or posture. In this manner the transcendental ego reflects upon the unconscious, which is then interpreted by the transcendental reflection. Of course there would be no sure way of knowing this other than through a changed or enhanced engagement with the unreflective world through the psychological ego. To reflect seems to also imply to interpret or translate, and if this is the case, then reflection is an interpretable method of consciousness, not one removed from psychological/anthropological extrapolations.

Now we will turn our attention to Ricoeur whose work, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, is an inestimable contribution to Freudian scholarship. In the chapter, The Phenomenological Approach to the Psychoanalytic Field, Ricoeur says the following,

We are going to confront Freud’s concepts with the resources of Husserl’s phenomenology. No reflective philosophy has come as close to the Freudian unconscious as the phenomenology of Husserl and certain of his followers, especially Merleau-Ponty and De Waelhens. It is well to mention at the very start that this attempt is also bound to fail. But this failure does not have the same pattern as the proceeding one. [*Psychoanalysis is Not an Observational Science] It is not a question of a mistake or a misunderstanding, but rather of a true approximation, one that comes very close to the Freudian unconscious but misses it in the end, affording only an approximate understanding of it.[16]

Ricouer sees the phenomenological turn towards psychoanalysis with Husserl’s transcendental reduction, what he calls the off-centering or displacement of meaning with respect to consciousness.

The reduction, indeed, has some relation to the dispossession of immediate consciousness as an origin and place of meaning; the phenomenological bracketing or suspension is not concerned simply with the “self-evidence” (Selbstverstandlichkeit) of the appearance of things, which suddenly cease to appear as a brute presence, to be there, to be at hand, with a fixed meaning that one has only to find. To the extent that consciousness thinks it knows the being-there of the world, it also thinks it knows itself. Furthermore, to the so-called knowledge on the part of immediate consciousness there belongs a pseudo-knowledge on the part of the unconscious, a knowledge that Freud points to at the beginning of the paper ‘The Unconscious” and which we ordinarily connect with the experience of sleep or the state of unconsciousness, with the disappearance and reappearance of memories, or with the sudden violence of the passions. This immediate consciousness is deposed along with the natural attitude. Thus phenomenology begins with a humiliation or wounding of the knowledge belonging to immediate consciousness. Further, the arduous self-knowledge that phenomenology goes on to articulate clearly shows that the first truth is also the last truth known; through the Cogito is the starting point, there is no end to it; the whole of phenomenology is a movement toward the starting point. By thus dissociating the true beginning from the real beginning or natural attitude, phenomenology reveals the self-misunderstanding inherent in immediate consciousness.[17]

This misunderstanding, Ricouer says, was alluded to by Husserl in the Cartesian Meditations when he says that “Adequacy and apodicticity of evidence need not go hand in hand.” [18] Ricouer goes on to say that a so-called nucleus of primordial experience is presupposed by phenomenology, which makes it a reflective discipline. “The ego’s living self-presence” (die lebendige Selbstgegenwart) is what differentiates phenomenology from psychoanalysis.[19]

Ricouer suggests that beyond this nucleus extends a horizon which he refers to as the “properly nonexperienced” (eigentlich nicht erfahren), a horizon of the “necessarily co-intended” (notwendigmitgemeint).

This implicit factor is what allows one to apply to the Cogito itself the critique of evidence previously applied to things: The Cogito, too, is a presumed certitude; it too can be deceived about itself; and no one knows to what extent. The resolute certitude of the I am involves the unresolved question of the possible extent of self-deception. Into this fissure, into this noncoincidence between the certitude of the I am and the possibility of self-deception, a certain problematic of the unconscious can be introduced.[20]

Ricouer then suggests that the first unconscious (unawareness) that phenomenology reveals has to do with the implicit or co-implicit. By its very nature the phenomenological position must take into consideration the possibility of self-deception, whereby the cogito deceives itself. In the Freudian dynamic this deception comes by way of symptomology and unconscious desires, both of which are concealed by conscious thought.

It is important to note that for Husserl all acts of consciousness are intentional acts regardless of the object. Intentional acts or intentional experiences always represent something as something. However there are non-intentional acts, such as pain, but they lack intentionality in Husserl’s sense of the term. Even objectless intentional experiences have content, an “as if of” content. Even if a proposition has no corresponding object it is still considered an intentional act or experience. This will prove crucial for the phenomenological experience of the Freudian unconscious.

Both Husserl and Freud were students of Franz Brentano, which in and of itself raises some interesting questions about the similarities between the two. Brentano defined intentionality as follows,

Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself...[21]

If all mental activity is directed towards an object, or thing, then the phenomenological transcendental ego, though in a mode of self-reflection, has some object to which and for which it reflects. In the Freudian sense this object can be a missing object, as in the Fort-da game, where the child learns that a missing or unavailable object, such as the mother, will again appear allowing for a lessening of anxiety and detachment from the object. In both the phenomenological mode of consciousness and the Freudian unconscious there exists an element of desire, or as Ricouer puts it the conditions of possibility of a semantics of desire.[22] In the unconscious this desire can be represented as a competing desire for an object or person, which is the very systematic of the Oedipal Complex: the child’s desire for the mother and the competition for that desire with the father, and the triangulation of desire, competition and loss of object which that entails. Even in the epoche a desire is present, be that towards an object that is not immediate or an objectless “as if of” content.

We are confronted with the impossibility of total reflection, or as Ricouer says: Hegelian absolute knowledge. E. Fink[23] and De Waelhens[24] propose that the finitude of reflection are written into the primacy of the unreflected over the reflected, the operative over the uttered, the actual over the thematic. Ricouer says,

This unawareness [inscience] proper to the unreflected marks a new step toward the Freudian unconscious; it means that the co-implicit or co-intended cannot completely attain to the transparency of consciousness precisely because of the texture of the act of consciousness, i.e. because of the invincible unawareness of the self that characterizes intentionality in act.[25]

Ricouer says that it is possible to give a direct definition of so-called psychism (the mere intending of something) as meaning without appealing to self-consciousness. In Freud this meaning is defined as dynamic and historical. Ricouer goes on to say that it is possible to dissociate the actual lived relation from its refraction in representation.

In a philosophy of immediate consciousness the subject is first of all a knowing subject, that is to say, ultimately, a look directed to a spectacle; in such a philosophy, the spectacle is at the same time the mirage of self in the mirror of things; the primacy of self-consciousness and the primacy of representation are interconnected; by becoming representation the relation to the world becomes self-knowing.[26]

In this manner the possibility that man is primarily “concerned for things”, “appetition”, desire and the satisfaction of desire raises issues for Husserl’s phenomenological approach to conscious self-reflection. Or as Ricouer puts is, “as soon as the psychical is no longer defined as consciousness, or the actual lived relation as representation”.[27] This brings us back to the notion of symptomology, or the “goal-form” (Zielform) that is an essential element of the Freudian dynamic.

Ricouer sees this as a return to its genesis or founding, everything points back to an original becoming acquainted, or as Husserl puts it,

With good reason it is said that in infancy we had to learn to see physical things, and that such modes of consciousness of them had to precede all others genetically. In “early infancy”, then, the field of perception that gives beforehand does not as yet contain anything that, in a mere look, might be explicated as a physical thing. Yet, without putting ourselves back into the realm of passivity, to say nothing of using the external psychophysical point of view of psychology, / we can, the meditating ego can, penetrate into the intentional constituents of experiential phenomena themselves—thing-experiencing phenomena and all others—and thus find intentional references leading back to a “history” and accordingly making these phenomena knowable as formations subsequent to other, essentially antecedent formations (even if the latter cannot be related to precisely the same constituted object).[28]

If in thinking, reflecting and remembering we are making referential checks back to an original source or genesis, then the Freudian dynamic seems plausible; and to leave out a psychological element to reflection seems suspect. Ricouer sees a clear affinity between Husserl and Freud on this very point, as both systems require a regressive orientation. In both Husserl and Freud this regressive orientation has a behavioural element to it, one that requires a philosophical or psychological stance. In this sense what Ricouer refers to as a semantics of desire comes into play, a reaching towards or seeking, be that an object in Freudian terms, or an “as if of” in Husserl’s terms. This lived experience, or relationship with the world, is carried out on a plane of language, or as Ricouer says,

It must be rediscovered with Hegel that language is the being-there of the mind; for phenomenology, as for psychoanalysis, this “reality of language” is nothing other than meaning achieved by a behaviour.[29]

The difference between active and passive genesis is important here, as it allows for an associative link in consciousness. Active genesis forms cultural products and ideal objects, and passive genesis works by association, which is the principle for the formation of unified perceptual objects. In this way we are pre-given objects by unconscious passive synthesis, each with a history to them. In many ways this represents a storehouse, if you may, of pre-given objects to which I, the reflecting ego, can refer to.

If we accept the Freudian dynamic of the unconscious, then this passivity of reflection seems to have a historical or pre-given nature to it; and if this is the case, then perhaps the phenomenological-ego accesses the unconscious, or referential points enclosed in the epoche. If we in turn acknowledge the timelessness of the unconscious and the plane or horizon of the epoche, the stream, as would have it, that flows beneath, behind or in between consciousness per say, the notion of experiencing something anew, or for the first time seems plausible. Husserl’s pure-experience and Freud’s unconscious (repression) allow for this very activity; in Husserl as a reflecting upon the ego as it reflects, and in Freud in the timelessness of the unconscious. And if we accept the linguistic character of the unconscious, the Lacanian patios, and Husserl’s transcendental ego as a language-based phenomena, one that is expressible and reflected up in and through language, then phenomenology and psychoanalysis are limited by language, or what is expressible.

[1] Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967, p.26
[2] Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology, London: Penguin Books, 1991, pp.50-51
[3] Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay On Interpretation, London: Yale University Press, 1970
[4] Jacques lacan, Ecrits, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1977
[5] Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, Boston: Little Brown, 1991
[6] Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology, London: Penguin Books, 1991, pp.168-69
[7] Ibid. p.145
[8] Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967, p.27
[9] Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967, p.25
[10] Ibid. pp.25-26
[11] Edmund Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, Husserliana II, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999, p.15
[12] Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967, p.91
[13] Christian Beyer, The Sanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, 2007
[14] J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, New York: W.W. Norton, 1973, p.475
[15] Edmund Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, Husserliana II, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999, p.19
[16] Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay On Interpretation, London: Yale University , 1970, p.376
[17] Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay On Interpretation, London: Yale University , 1970, p.377
[18] Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967, p.22
[19] Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay On Interpretation, London: Yale University, 1970,
[20] Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay On Interpretation, London: Yale University, 1970, pp.377-78
[21] Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, transl. by A.C. Rancurello, D.B. Terrell, and L. McAlister, London: Routledge, 1973. (2nd ed., intr. by Peter Simons, 1995). P.88
[22] Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay On Interpretation, London: Yale University , 1970, p.375
[23] E. Fink, Husserliana, 6, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1954 (473-75)
[24] A. de Waelhens, Edmund Husserl, 1859-1959, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1959 (221-38)
[25] Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay On Interpretation, London: Yale University , 1970, p.379
[26] Ibid. p.379
[27] Ibid. p.380
[28] Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967, p.79
[29] Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay On Interpretation, London: Yale University , 1970, p.384