Reflections on the phenomenological unconscious in generative phenomenology

Alexander Schnell

Bergische Universität Wuppertal

pp. 25-37

in: Dorothée Legrand, Dylan Trigg (eds), Unconsciousness between phenomenology and psychoanalysis, Berlin, Springer, 2017

Abstract

In the present contribution, the phenomenological unconscious is approached not in the sense of the psychoanalytic unconscious but on an "infra-conscious" level, below the "given," as it were. I outline a threefold account of the "pre-conscious." The three fundamental types of the phenomenological unconscious (in the narrow sense of the word) are: the genetic phenomenological unconscious, the hypostatic phenomenological unconscious, and the reflexive phenomenological unconscious. I explore how the phenomenological unconscious intervenes in the articulation between consciousness and self-consciousness. It is the Husserlian model of an "omni-intentionality" with its "nuclei" that makes it possible to clarify the status of self-consciousness (at the level of the phenomenological unconscious). I end by highlighting the plurality of fields corresponding to different "spheres" of the phenomenological unconscious.

Cited authors

Husserl Edmund