Discussion

Abstract

I take it that our discussions are placed within the context of phenomenology and not of psychoanalysis, although whatever may touch upon psychoanalysis will be examined phenomenologically. The analysis we have been presented with in the previous lecture would be an analysis in terms of a ‘hyletic’ and not ‘pure’ phenomenology, to use Husserl’s distinction, because a ‘pure’ phenomenological analysis proceeds by the subject’s personal authentic experience. A psychoanalyst’s report is ‘hyletic’ phenomenology, reconstituting the experience of someone else. In psychoanalysis the most purely phenomenological activity was Freud’s self-analysis. That is the closest we come to phenomenology in psychoanalysis. Erikson at first departed from Freud’s theory in the direction of a broader notion of the transcendental subject, nearer to the life-world, by introducing his notion of the stages of life in which the various stages embody the development. Different stages were correlated with the development of various character qualities. Initially he developed the notion of the achievement of identity in adolescence, which meant the formation of a unified self concept out of the variety of self concepts that had emerged during the young person’s earlier development.