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10 An Intelligible yet Enigmatic Mutual Silence
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165 In truth, this is a whole world—and if we could equate this subjectivity with the yuchv [soul] of Heraclitus, his saying would doubtless be true of it: “You will never find the boundaries of the soul, even if you follow every road; so deep is its ground.” Indeed, every “ground” that is reached points to further grounds, every horizon opened up awakens new horizons, and yet the endless whole, in its infinity of flowing movement, is oriented toward that unity of one meaning [italics added]. —Husserl [The philosopher] knows that, in the process, historical tradition, as he understood it and used it, entered into him in a motivating way and as a spiritual sediment. —Husserl Sigmund Freud lived from 1856 to 1939, and Edmund Husserl from 1859 to 1938. They spoke and worked in the same language, lived in relative proximity to one another,1 shared common religious roots, and had mutual associates2 and students (for example, Binswanger). Most important, they held in common certain specific philosophical-psychological concerns : the emergence of meaning in the psyche, its structure and operations , its relationship to the body, the functioning of memory in consciousness , unconscious operations in mental life, repression, and so on. Both men were, in their own ways, trying to apprehend those inaccessible dimensions of human existence which exert an impact upon the formation of meaning in consciousness, and thereby make the latter more comprehensible . And yet these two celebrated intellectuals not only failed to An Intelligible yet Enigmatic Mutual Silence: Freud and Husserl 10 take substantial interest in one another’s work but even neglected to acknowledge the importance of one another’s work. There were clearly significant differences between their paradigms, and, at times, their analyses operated at different levels; it is nevertheless remarkable that both shared many common features.3 In general, both Husserl and Freud (1) undertook a regressive, archaeological inquiry into the affective histories of individuals and into the hidden recesses of the psyche; (2) acknowledged the existence and importance of “unconscious” intentionalities; (3) affirmed that entire associative chains of ideas can run their course without ever emerging into consciousness, and that they can help us to recover unconscious memories; (4) claimed that consciousness and the unconscious mutually modified one another; and (5) asserted that the ego is at the mercy (at least at times) of the underlying processes of the unconscious. In addition, both held that the unconscious (6) is rooted in instinctual life; (7) involves dynamic forces that continually conflict, and affect consciousness; (8) retains ideas interminably; (9) involves processes/ideas that are atemporal; and (10) is also a dimension of the ego. Furthermore, Freud and Husserl held that ideas require a certain force to reach the threshold of consciousness and when they do, they may only be fragmentary or confused in nature. Given these commonalities it is—again, at the very least—prima facie enigmatic why neither held significant interest in nor even acknowledged the importance of the work of the other. Certainly they must have been aware on some level of one another’s work. On the surface, it would seem that since Husserl, as a phenomenologist , focused his attention primarily on the structures and acts of consciousness , while Freud, who took himself to be a natural scientist, devoted his primary attention to the nature and function of the unconscious, there could be no commonalities of philosophical-psychological concerns. We shall see that this explanation simply does not suffice, given the philosophical details of the historical context involved: hence, the puzzle of their silence remains. Husserl and Freud: A Mutual Disregard Paul Ricoeur once noted that no other philosophy has come so close to making room for the Freudian conception of the unconscious as the phenomenology of Husserl.4 Given the historical influences by Herbart and Brentano this should come as no surprise. Yet if Ricoeur’s remark is even remotely correct—and we shall show that it is—the natural question 166 A P P R E H E N D I N G T H E I N A C C E S S I B L E [44.221.43.208] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 13:07 GMT) emerges as to why Husserl and Freud exhibited an ostensibly stubborn mutual disregard for one another. There are no references to Husserl or his phenomenological project throughout Freud’s writings.5 In the reciprocal direction, in his earlier work, according to Husserl, any concern with an unconscious—presumably...