Depth Phenomenology of the Emotive Dynamic and the Psychoanalytic Experience

Abstract

Phenomenological epistemology presents itself as a theory of experience oriented towards the phenomena and achievements of intentional consciousness. At the same time, the phenomenological interrogation of experience signifies a return to the concreteness of human experience, a return to human individuality and ­specific tangibility. We can understand it as a basic and fundamental theory of subjective experience, as a deepened and complex philosophy of subjective genesis, profound and exceptionally differentiated. In genetic ­phenomenology we are confronted with a new understanding of transcendental subjectivity. From the phenomenological point of view, transcendental subjectivity is not interpreted as a pure ego, as a metaphysical or purely logical or epistemological principle. Rather, it is understood as an infinite stream of consciousness, as a constantly concrete field of experience that is realized passively and actively, in temporal, historical and bodily as well as instinctive-affective and phantasmatic ways. As such, phenomenology shows a particularly intimacy to the psychology as theory of a subjective experience. It especially concerns its relation to the psychoanalysis. Then, in my view, psychoanalysis gains the deepest and most fine-grained psychological insights into the dynamic of psychic-subjective genesis, and these could prove very useful for the phenomenological analysis of subjective genesis. The Freudian theory of unconsciousness is here interpreted as an area of subjective genesis that is given as a consciousness of the imaginary, of original re-presentation, as a particular form of subjective experience that cannot be immediately perceived, but that can originally be re-presented phantasmatically in intentional and pre-intentional achievements. It appears as a particular kind of phenomenon (emotive, phantasmatic, kinaesthetic) and not as a mere lack of experience. As such it can be systematically observed in psychoanalytic contexts, in experiences of dreams, resistance, transference as well as counter-transference. Phenomenological analysis of this kind of experience makes it possible to give psychoanalysis as inner psychology an epistemological foundation within the framework of a genuine theory of subjectivity and its experience. At the same time phenomenology gains new insights, which concern deep subjective dynamics of processes of individuation as processes of personal and interpersonal genesis. As such it will be defined as depth phenomenology of the emotive dynamic. ‘-- End of Abstract’

My sincere gratitude to Francis Bottenberg for the translation of this essay into English, and to Saulius Geniusas and to Jacob Rump for their further careful corrections for the final version.