Tag: Psychoanalysis

Íngrid Vendrell Ferran (Ed.): Else Voigtländer: Self, Emotion, and Sociality, Springer, 2023

Else Voigtländer: Self, Emotion, and Sociality Book Cover Else Voigtländer: Self, Emotion, and Sociality
Íngrid Vendrell Ferran
Springer
2023
Hardback
IX, 245

Reviewed by: Konstantin Hokamp (Europa Universität Viadrina)

In many ways, the volume edited by Ingríd Vendrell Ferran is seemingly set up for failure. That is by no means due to the illustrious list of contributors or the importance of its subject matter, but rather due to the tasks it sets out to achieve – providing a building block towards a „new genealogy” of phenomenology by shining light on the life, philosophical and psychological work, and politics of a little-known figure in the history of phenomenology – Else Voigtländer. As Ferran states in the introduction to the volume, while scholarly efforts have been made to highlight the contribution of women to the history of phenomenology those efforts have been focused on Edith Stein and Hedwig Conrad-Martius. Fittingly, almost everyone who has worked on Voigtländer in recent years contributed to the volume.

Vendrell Ferran hypothesizes that this might very well be linked to two factors among others: Voigtländer did not pursue an academic career after her PhD and as a very early figure in the Phenomenological Movement is rarely cited in the work of other phenomenologists, despite being among the first to publish on the topic of Ressentiment inauthentic feelings. She was omitted from Herbert Spiegelbergs canon-building work History of the Phenomenological Movement and has thus received little attention, even though almost all her work is publicly available in a digital format. The caveat being that there are no English translations.

The volume aims to contribute to rewriting the phenomenological canon and give readers a good entryway into Voigtländer’s thought while dealing with the fact that as an NSDAP member and director of the women’s prison Waldheim, Voigtländer seems like a problematic political figure to say the least. All these goals by themselves are desiderata for the history of phenomenology and the history of Women in the history of Philosophy and Sciences (The Series the volume is published in). They might be too much to achieve in a single volume, but they do make for a good one with a broad range of topics and readings of Voigtländer.

The book is structured in four parts with expert contributions on key aspects of Voigtländers philosophy. The first part is made up of only two articles, while all the other comprise three contributions.The volume is  opened by an article-length introduction by Ingrid-Vendrell Ferran that highlights the themes I laid out and gives an outline of Else Voigtländer’s Life and key philosophical themes and concepts. Ferran stresses the importance of including the Munich School of Phenomenology in research on the history of Phenomenology and the current state of Voigtländer research and sources on Voigtländer. She does a brilliant job juxtaposing Voigtländers published articles with archival evidence, such as her PHD report and correspondence. Only the information on the latter could have been slightly more precise. While the article seems to indicate that there are numerous letters to be found, the known correspondence with Ludwig Klages is limited to a letter by Klages on an editorial issue [cf. DLA Marbach A:Klages, the contents of Letters in the Klages collection may not be publicized at this point], which is likely also the case for her correspondence with Kippenberg which I was not able to access.

Part I: Sources and Influences

The first of four parts engages with Voigtländer’s work by dealing with two „sources and influences”. In „Value in Existence: Lotze, Lipps and Voigtländer on Feelings of Self-Worth” Philipp Schmidt compares Voigtländer notion of Self-Feeling to that of Hermann Lotze and her PhD supervisor Theodor Lipps who both held the position that self-experience is grounded in a feeling of some sorts. He concludes that Voigtländer was largely able to develop her notion of self-feelings by drawing on ideas from the Romantic philosopher C.G. Carus and Friedrich Nietzsche and combining them with the insights of Lotze and Lipps. He reconstructs Lotze’s theory as highlighting the importance of feelings of pleasure and pain as motivators for self-interest, while Lipps broadened the range of what qualifies as a feeling with an emphasis on the fact, that feelings are differentiated from other psychic phenomena by emphasizing that feelings directly constitute the self. He introduces the term ‘Selbstgefühl’ but is unclear on whether they are the result of conscious deliberation or a form of pre-reflective self-appraisal. Schmidt then introduces and explains Voigtländer’s theory of self-feelings as a stratified pre-reflective form of consciousness, that is largely determined by a person’s biological constitution but also subject to intersubjective determining factors like the judgment of others. He then goes on to argue that Voigtländer would not have been able to arrive at this position without drawing on a Nietzschean value-relativism and a vitalistic notion of unconscious life force similar to the Lebensphilosophie of Ludwig Klages and Carl-Gustav Carus. He does so both to indicate the originality of Voigtländers proposal as well as a warning sign against integrating her theory into the canon of phenomenologically informed theories that stress the importance of the affective sphere for cognition all too quickly because the vitalist intuitions undergirding it are closely linked to the development of racial psychology.

The second entry by practising psychoanalyst Thomas Barth attempts to reconstruct Else Voigtländer’s relationship with and impact on psychoanalysis.

Voigtänder was the first German academic psychologist to publish a paper on Freud in 1911, received a letter in return and was a member of the Berlin Local group of the International Psychoanalytic Association from 1912 to 1915. After leaving the group she went on to publish a paper on the notion of unconsciousness in 1916 and dealt with psychoanalysis yet again in a 1928 paper on welfare education in which she highlighted the potential benefits of psychoanalysis. From a critical note regarding Freud‘s lacking appreciation of the importance of innate character to a dismissal of anything unconscious that cannot become unconscious to a recommendation of giving welfare education staff psychoanalytic training Barth reconstructs how Voigtländer „met psychoanalysis with appreciation, ambiguity, and sometimes harsh criticism.” (59) He then goes on to outline the reactions of psychoanalysts to Voigtländers articles as well as speculatively drawing parallels between Voigtländers thought and later developments in psychoanalysis, indicating a potential parallel between her notion of inauthentic mirror-self feelings likening them to notions of Winnicott, Lacan and Helene Deutsch. His final verdict is that Voigtländer mainly used Psychoanalysis to serve as a negative foil to assess her theories and outlines further opportunities for research. One aspect of Voigtländers relationship to Freud that might have been highlighted yet is missing is the analysis Willy Haas, a fellow student of Theodor Lipps who also potentially drew on psychoanalytic concepts yet never explicitly named psychoanalysis as a source in his disserting underwent with Freud. Barth refers to Ulrike May’s work on the subject but unfortunately does not draw a parallel. It is only a minor omission but one that could easily have been avoided.

Part II: Affectivity and Value

The second part focuses on a central theme of many early phenomenologists and works towards the goal of the new genealogy by contrasting Voigtländer’s theory of sentiments with that of Alexander Pfänder and Gerda Walther and her take on Ressentiment, a topic she was the first phenomenologist to publish on with those of Max Scheler and Adolf Reinach. In addition, an entire article is dedicated to the systematic importance of Voigtländer’s view on erotic love. It partially overlaps with the article on sentiments but delves deeper into its subject matter.

Genki Uemura attempts to reconstruct Voigtländer’s analysis of benevolence in her 1931 contribution to a Festschrift for Pfänder „Bemerkungen zur Psychologie der Gesinnungen” and compares it to the phenomenological analysis Alexander Pfänder provides in his 1913/1916 work on the subject. He reads Voigtländer as saying that contrary to Pfänder’s view positive sentiments – a term Pfänder uses rather unusually to talk about other-directed evaluative affective phenomena like love and hate or benevolence or malevolence – are made into a category of their own exclusively by features of their respective centrifugal streams of feeling, while their respective acts of unification (Vereinigung) and position-taking vary greatly. While love always entails an attraction to its object, an interest (Anteilnahme) in the affirmation, both are missing for benevolence. Uemura then goes on to argue, that this does not pose a problem for Pfänder’s analysis of actual sentiments but might well be problematic for his theory of non-actual sentiments. Uemura stresses that Voigtländer arrives at these conclusions while staying true to the methodological commitments of Pfänder. He then compares Voigtländer’s position to that of Gerda Walther who takes the unification found in positive sentiments as a fundamental building factor for social communities. He suggests that to most plausibly incorporate Voigtländer’s strong differentiation between love and positive sentiments Walther would have to contend that only love plays this foundational role while other positive sentiments do not. Thereby Uemura wants to show the originality of Voigtländers without claiming that it was intended as an intentional criticism of her contemporaries.

Toru Yaegashi in his more systematic approach aims to develop Voigtländers views on erotic love that Voigtländer criticizing Simmel, strongly differentiates from sexual desire. She holds the sphere of the erotic to be fully distinct from that of the sexual and argues for a phenomenological separability of sexual love and erotic love even in heterosexual relationships. Yaegashi reconstructs Voigtländer’s view on the difference between love and benevolence much in the same way Uemura does but adds that love and hate are less reactive than benevolence and malevolence which tend to fade away once the situation that motivated them has passed. He then goes on to elaborate on the object side of love – the value of the loved object, aiming to work out Voigtländers position in the debate on value realism by comparing her view to that of Dietrich von Hildebrand and Max Scheler – the staunches value realists among the early phenomenologists whose position she reconstructs as being that „we sometimes love correctly and sometimes incorrectly the object whose value is independent of our love”. (94) Voigtländer on the other hand argues, that there are cases, where no value of the beloved is given in experience while love itself is experienced. She differentiates between the qualitative value an object has and three kinds of value bestowed on the object by love. By differentiating these kinds of values, Voigtländer can criticise a rationalization of the idealization involved in love as well as develop a concept of genuine love that acknowledges the flaws of the beloved. Yaegashi concludes that Voigtländer’s forgotten phenomenology of erotic love is both interesting in contrast to the late Husserl’s more ethicized view of love and that it may well prove productive in dialogue with Feminist Philosophy and queer theory because it goes against the grain of connecting love with its reproductive function.

[Both contributions are exquisitely structured and argued and reconstruct Voigtländer’s position quite well. Yet they both could have paid closer attention to Pfänder’s text and especially his position on the necessity of non-actual sentiments and of non-actual love for the continued existence of actual sentiments. This is especially true for Uemura who directly refers to Pfänder’s notion and would have been an interesting way to highlight the differences between Pfänder’s and Walther’s theory.]

Ingríd Vendrell Ferran contributes a text on the Phenomena of Ressentiment and Self-Deception in the works of Else Voigtländer, who was the first phenomenologist to publish on the subject in her 1910 dissertation, Max Scheler who published Über Ressentiment und moralisches Werturteil (unfortunately referred to by the title of a slightly reversed 1915 version „Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen”) in 1912 and Adolf Reinach who worked on the subject in his Grundzüge der Ethik (1913). She first reconstructs the individual positions and then compares them with a focus on the origins of Ressentiment, its ontology (105) the psychological mechanisms responsible for it. For Voigtländer, Ressentiment occurs due to a person experiencing a lack in her vital self-feeling (the part of the pre-reflective self-consciousness outlined above that is due to the biological constitution) by devaluing others to improve her conscious feeling of self-worth. She reconstructs this as Ressentiment being an „affective background orientation whose main target is the self and which aims at compensating a weakness with an exaggerated, modified and unrealistic self-assessment.” (107) In conceptualizing the process Voigtländer follows Nietzsche by understanding it as involving both a modification of perceived affective states and value experiences and changes in the attention towards the objects of Ressentiment. She also holds that some form of knowledge of the object of Ressentiment’s value remains present. Vendrell Ferran then reconstructs Scheler’s position on Ressentiment as a mental disposition that may turn into a character trait (and not an emotion) resulting from a process, more thoroughly described than in Voigtländer of repression of hostile affective attitudes. She then contrasts it with Reinach, who also viewed Ressentiment as a compensation mechanism for a felt diminishment of the self, that changes the way a subject apprehends values. She then goes on to put the key position of the three early phenomenologists in dialogue with the current literature on the subject. She finds similarities with the Schelerian view (or maybe just his longer elaboration on the ressentiment process) on the etiology of Ressentiment. Current literature usually conceptualizes Ressentiment as a sentiment, which Ferran, following the early phenomenologists, argues to be an inadequate description. Finally, she stresses the importance of the early phenomenologists work for adequately understanding Ressentiment as a non-intentional process leading to self-deception.

Part III: Social Self and Character

The first of three articles in this Salice on Social Self-Feelings gives a slightly different reconstruction of Voigtländer’s theory of self-feelings and criticizes her harsh verdict on inauthentic self-feeling. The second article goes back to evaluating Voigtländer’s notion of inauthentic self-feelings in the light of Voigtländer’s later work. The third article gives a historical overview of different conceptions of character.

Allesandro Sallice first reconstructs Voigtländers theory of self-feelings in general, slightly diverging from other readings by stressing that there is only one ever-shifting vital-self feeling and proposing that her taxonomy is merely a taxonomy of different manifestations of the same vital self-feeling in different situations. He does agree that there are different kinds of conscious self-feelings, which are purely episodic. He differentiates the two types of self-feeling on the phenomenological level by indicating that Voigtländer seems to hold that there is an emphasis on the affective side for the vital self-feeling(s) while there is an emphasis on the side of value judgement for the conscious self-feelings. There is also a difference in intentionality: The object of vital self-feeling is the not truly objectifiable self, while the object of conscious self-feelings is the objectified self.

This leads Salice to criticise Voigtländers notion of inauthentic self-feelings, which he takes to be both morally and epistemically negatively connotated. Against this, he argues that there are indeed cases where the judgement of others is more (or at least not less) reliable than our self-feelings. Yet he holds, that Voigtländer’s theory anticipated contemporary debates on self-knowledge and, given proper scrutiny on the points he criticizes, is highly relevant for modern-day research.

Hilge Landweer’s contribution touches on similar points as Salice’s and is both slightly more critical towards and more favourable to Voigtländer. Landweer praises Voigtländers rich descriptions and agrees with Salice on the fact that Voigtländer seems to negatively evaluate mirror self-feelings (a term Landweer prefers to authentic self-feelings) but problematizes a different aspect – Voigtländer’s notion of an authentic self. Her main point of interest is however the 11-page 1923 text Über die Art eines Menschen und das Erlebnis der Maske in which Voigtländer remains true to her notion of the core of persons but increases the complexity of her understanding of ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ by turning towards the subject of how the manner of a person – namely the way she appears to others and how this feels to her – while never explicitly rejecting the view held in the dissertation. According to Landweer Voigtländer implicitly holds a topological understanding of personhood, according to which authentic self-feelings are „anchored in the ‘core’  of the person with inauthenticity increasing the further one moves away from this core” with the opinions of others forming the outermost strata. The manner of a person is comprised of both authentic and inauthentic as well as genuine (in the sense of true) and non-genuine actions which others hold to be characteristic of that person. Landweer concludes that the two sets of terms are not mutually interchangeable. Non-genuine self-feelings and actions are always the effects of conscious or unconscious dissimulation while non-authentic self-feelings rely on the impressions of others. Landweer considers the distinction between genuine and non-genuine self-feelings to be systematically interesting albeit needing conceptual clarification. She goes on to problematize the metaphor of the core, suggests a relational reading for it and finally proposes an updated, less normative and fluid reading of Voigtländers concept informed by Heidegger’s notion of inauthenticity. In her view, Heidegger clearly stated what manifests as an implicit tension in Voigtländers theory and rich phenomenological descriptions: The fact that the authentic and inauthentic are never fully separable.

Guillaume Frechette approaches Voigtländers’s theory of self-feelings more historically by situating it within the sub-discipline of characterology, the systematic study of personality. A field to which Voigtländer considered herself to be contributing. He contrasts what he calls the „Austrian Account” (e.g. 168) of character traits originating in the work of Franz Brentano and later developed by Emil Utitz and Kraus. He reconstructs it as conceptualizing character traits as mental dispositions to act in specific ways in certain situations and take pleasure in acting that way, which entails that character traits can only ever be hypothesized about. [Critique because of the failure to capture enduring states] He contrasts with the view prevalent of phenomenology, which he considers Voigtländer to be exemplary for. Frechett stresses Voigtländer’s method is based on the thesis that the essence of a person’s personality can be intuited from her realistic mask, a view he attributes to Alexander Pfänder based on lecture notes by Voigtländer fellow student Johannes Daubert. He tries to reconstruct Voigtländers epistemology of self-feelings based on a Lippsian notion of Einfühlung [„courageousness is simply expressed in corresponding gestures, and you get to feel courageousness by perceiving these gestures”] (173) and the thesis that individuals have privileged access to themselves. Frechette finds merit in both theories, holding that the Austrian Account is more economical while failing to accommodate character traits like being anxious which are closer to emotional phenomena. Frechette pleads for furthering the phenomenological analysis and not reducing character traits to either of the two accounts. In a longer piece on the issue, it could have proven very fruitful to look at the work of Alexander Pfänder on characterology (scattered through notes in the Pfänder Nachlass) and address Voigtländer’s thesis of the stratification of self-feelings in relation to her characterology.

Part IV – Gender and Politics

The last part of the volume is devoted to Voigtländer as a theorist of gender, politics and as a political actor and the contributions do justice to the complexity of the subject by the variety of their approaches, ranging from a focus on her views on gender, her applied philosophy, and her life as a political actor.

Ute Gahlings opts for rewriting the history of phenomenological approaches to gender, replacing Edith Stein with Else Voigtländer as the pioneer of the field, drawing on texts written by Voigtländer after she had completed her dissertation and – not being permitted to pursue an academic career as a woman – moving towards psychology as her specific field. She reconstructs the points on gender made in an experimental study that Voigtländer conducted with Fritz Giese and three texts co-authored by Voigtländer and Adalbert Gregor, the latter of which contain both strong statements confirming sexual differentiation as well as a few subtle observations on the female experience. Gahlings indicates that the relationship between Voigtländer and Gregor still needs to be researched further and points towards Voigtländers contributions to a dictionary and journal of sexual science as the best source for Voigtländers views on gender, painting a picture of Voigtländers statements as „the awakening of a gender theory which is differentiating between sex and gender” (187), dealing with epistemological issues regarding how gender difference may be addressed, rejecting metaphysical constructions as the base of sexual difference and opting instead for a culture-based approach. Gahlinger then goes on to reconstruct the views of Edith Stein, which according to here were founded not in psychology but philosophical anthropology and with a more ethically driven impetus and leaning slightly more towards essentialism than Voigtländer’s. She pleads for including Voigtländer in „the canon of classical writings” (195) while calling into question how Voigtländers’s critical mind could have served under the Nazis.

Sophie Loidoldt and Petra Gehring find less inconsistency here than Gahling.  They evaluate  Voigtländer’s application of her psychology of character in a study on mass psychology, a text written together with Adalbert Gregor on the relation between gender and neglect as well as a talk on the problem of gender difference based on her contributions to the Dictionary of Sexual Studies. The article is polemical in tone, stating that the text on mass psychology is „a miserable failure” (205) judging by Voigtländer’s self-proclaimed standard of value-neutrality. They instead diagnose a vulgar Nietzschean preference for vital values and authoritarian politics, while being unable to clearly explain how the political views she criticizes connect to the character of those she judges and resorting to cliché-laden racial psychology in the end. (208) They have much the same verdict on the article written with Gregor, criticizing that her value-neutral approach is perfectly compatible with sterilization practices. Additionally, they take Voigtländer to be, essentializing gendered traits despite arguing against metaphysical essentialism. The evaluation leads to the conclusion that „not every theory of difference that is not immediately and obviously sexist, is therefore already emancipatory” (219), concluding that there is at the very least no logical discontinuity between Voigtländers theoretical work and her position in the NSDAP regime.

George Heffernan bookends the section reader with a more positivistic approach to Else Voigtländers politics starting with textual evidence from her dissertation and giving more context to her work on mass hysteria written in 1920 from the standpoint of a member of the German National Party, her nationalist family background as well as her work with racial-hygienicist Adalbert Grego. He then fills out a missing link in the evaluation of Voigtländer by carefully compiling reports on her performance as director at the women’s prison of Waldheim as well as the official documents regarding her NSDAP membership and contributions to party organizations.  Based on his sources, which cannot be given justice to within the scope of this review, he arrices at the preliminary verdict that „Voigtländer was, if not an enthusiastic or a fanatical Nazi, a reliable Mitläuferin and Unterstützerin of the National Socialist Regime.” (237)

Heffernan’s text makes for a fitting ending to a volume that shows that Voigtländer merits scholarly attention as an original contributor to the philosophy of emotions and personality and a historical figure that may be seen as exemplary for her time. For readers not familiar with Voigtländer’s work a differently structured approach to the compilation of texts might have been beneficial, seeing as especially the section on sources and influences already lays the groundwork for some of the more critical approaches in the latter sections, yet there is no indication that that is the case. The structure of the individual parts leaves little to be desired, providing the reader with a plurality of perspectives on Voigtländer’s philosophy, juxtaposing more historically oriented and more systematic approaches. The contriubutions touch on all key aspects, with the rather unfortunate but understandable exception of her work on the aesthetics of nature in the short text Zur Phänomenologie und Psychologie des alpinen Erlebnisses. I have outlined a few interesting points for further inquiry in my summary of the individual articles, but there are numerous more to be found.

The volume’s biggest problem is due to the state of Voigtländer research. There are no standard translations for essential terms in Voigtländer’s philosophy. That makes it somewhat harder to put some of the contributions in dialogue. That is hardly the fault of the contributors and only serves to underline Vendrell-Ferrran’s plea for an English translation of Voigtländer’s works in the introduction. The volume is invaluable for anybody who wants to engage with the history of phenomenology in general or Else Voigtländer in particular.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Artur R. Boelderl and Barbara Neymeyr (Eds.): Robert Musil im Spannungsfeld zwischen Psychologie und Phänomenologie, De Gruyter, 2024






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Volume 170 in the series Untersuchungen zur deutschen Literaturgeschichte





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Federico Dal Bo: Judaism, Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis in Heidegger’s Ontology, Palgrave Macmillan, 2023






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Françoise Dastur: Analyse(s) de la présence. Phénoménologie et thérapie, Le cercle hermeneutique, 2022






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Maria Gyemant: Husserl et Freud, un héritage commun






Husserl et Freud, un héritage commun Book Cover




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Philosophies contemporaines, n° 14





Maria Gyemant




Classiques Garnier




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Paperback 29,00 €




160

Reviewed by: Rayyan Dabbous (University of Toronto)

Psychoanalysis and phenomenology are the two fruits of the same seed – except different gardeners cared for their roots. That image encapsulates Maria Gyemant’s objective in Husserl and Freud: a common heritage, a book with historical and philosophical relevance.

In this review, I walk you through the author’s main discussions: the psychological theories of 19th century philosophers, the status of the unconscious prior to Freud, the relevance of truth before Husserl, the notion of trauma between psychoanalysis and phenomenology, and whether either two thinkers can fairly be called philosophers.

It is a history of philosophy that is at stake in Maria Gyemant’s account – a history intimately related to the origins of psychoanalysis and phenomenology. In 1900, Europe was simultaneously discussing the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams and that of Logical Investigations. Thanks to Maria Gyemant, we now have a proper explanation as to how the rival creeds that divided the 20th century – psychoanalysts and phenomenologists – have common origins.

I. Freud and Husserl, a question of generation

Maria Gyemant first immerses us in the post-Kantian world to which Freud and Husserl belong. “Since all human thoughts unfold in the psyche of subjects,” she notes of the intellectual rationale of the time, “and since the sciences cannot produce except within mental activity, it is the laws of psychology that govern all other human activities,” (15). The Kantian revolution, at the turn of the nineteenth century, severed the bond between objectivity and subjectivity, and Gyemant populates that century of the fractured ego with a set of characters who wished to pick up the pieces; to re-stitch the link between pure mental life and pure reality.

For example, in the post-Kantian response of Wilhelm Wundt, a predecessor to Freud and Husserl, his objective is not to “be dragged into the excess of its opposite and deal with nothing but the will and emotions, but rather to consider that voluntary and intentional action is the paradigm of all psychical processes,” (23). It is a “dynamic vision of psychic life” that Wundt is promoting, as though the presuppositions of his own processors did not allow that dynamism to occur. We notice a similarly-withdrawn intellectual position in Frantz Brentano who “advocated prioritizing description over explanation,” (24) which is also a way to let the psyche speak for itself; rather than repeat what we wish it to speak. These intellectual positions are fertile from a gender studies angle. Were these two thinkers unwittingly responding to the masculine posture of psychology at the time? Or is it rather against the individualistic ethos of Kant’s philosophy – masculinity and individualism belonging together – that the Wundt-Brentano backlash targets in the field of 19th century psychology?

One would assume, at this point, that the responses of Wundt and Brentano suffice to deliver psychology from its Kantian shackles. Yet it is hard to see where the smoke is coming when   one stands too close to the fire – and indeed Gyemant succinctly shows the reasons that psychoanalysis or phenomenology could come not from the generation born in the 1830s but the one quarter of a century later. Gyemant indeed notes how “according to an idea traced back to Kant, the psychic cannot be the object of science because it is not measurable,” (39). The objective of Wilhelm Wundt would be to “show that psychology can be an exact science.” With this goal, “the objective of Wundt, like Brentano’s, was to banish all forms of metaphysics that postulated the existence of a soul,” (40). Of course the problem arising from this banishment is not the taboo against the soul, but the taboo to discuss metaphysics at all; talking about an invisible unconscious or an all-encompassing phenomenological method included. One could argue that such a taboo remains alive nowadays after the usefulness of exact science triumphed post-Einstein.

Gyemant’s book is insightful because it sees Freud and Husserl not as our contemporaries, us who still dabble in psychoanalysis or phenomenology, but as standalone figures who were part of a lost generation. This generation, more or less, is stuck between the philosophically-informed scientific ambitions of the 1830s generation (Wundt, Brentano, but also Ernst Mach, who thought the ego could not be ‘saved’) and the mathematical geniuses born after the mid 1870s, Einstein among them; the generation that abolished metaphysics (and philosophy) for good when physics became the most exact way to measure the world.

We also notice in Gyemant a marriage between these two generations. A student of Wilhelm Wundt, Moritz Geiger (b. 1880), wrote how “it is impossible to describe emotions when they are lived out,” (48). It would take an astute historian to analyse the use of the word ‘impossible’ around the time of Einstein’s revolution. Yet Husserl’s critique against Geiger meant to focus rather on the possible: he “shows that it is not emotions, but reflection in general, that causes the problem,” (49). This inversion – from the im/possibility of quantifying human emotions to the im/possibility of counting on our human intellect – is not only typical of Husserl and Freud, but also their contemporary Henri Bergson, whose critique of the intellect, and quarrel with Einstein, are well known. In any case, whether with Husserl, Freud, or Bergson, we are facing the limits not of ungraspable nature of human emotions (or the human soul) but the limits of the human intellect.

The subject of time, so central in Bergson’s controversy with Einstein, is also what distinguishes Husserl or Freud from the generations that preceded and followed them. For Gyemant notes how “for Husserl as much for Brentano it is time that creates the necessary distance for introspection, but unlike Brentano’s view, it is not because emotion has passed that it is over,” (52). Bergson held a similar view of time, and though Freud will not go as far in words, the continued liveliness of memories is central to his psychoanalysis.

II. Freud, defending the unconscious

After situating Freud and Husserl in their common intellectual context, Gyemant moves to isolate the psychoanalyst and explore the novelty of his theory of the unconscious. The idea that Freud’s unconscious is not new is an attractive topic for all philosophically-minded students of history, who will find parallels with Nietzsche or Schopenhauer. Freud’s snobbery is well known about this subject – he does not read philosophers, he often repeated. Gyemant’s account, in some way, justifies Freud’s claim of uniqueness. She keenly focuses on Brentano’s rejection of the unconscious, manifest in the following claim: “on the question of whether there exists an unconscious consciousness […] we can therefore respond with a categorical no,” (55). For Brentano, “psychical phenomena are all conscious,” (68).

Between a categorical no and the use of all, we begin to understand the animosity against the underground level of our mind which would vindicate Freud’s snobbery against the philosophers. Wundt, him, would also dismiss the unconscious by “relegating it to the rank of physiological processes,” (79). Or there is worse – Gustav Fechner’s view, that “the unconscious is another name for psychical phenomena that are too weak in intensity to cross the threshold of consciousness.” (80). This dismissal should strike us in the same way philosophers since Freud have downplayed his psychoanalysis. Clearly it is a chief concern of philosophy, to ban the unconscious. Perhaps philosophy itself, to preserve its legitimacy, requires its banishment.

It is one thing to be deemed a heretical philosophy – but a hysterical philosopher! Of course Gyemant rightly shows that it is not the philosophers who are heretics – a kind of philosophical establishment rises in her account, one keen on the motto, ‘all is conscious!’ Here we have strayed from the anti-masculine posture of contenting oneself with the description of phenomena rather than its explanation. Even a concession to masculinity remains masculine! Perhaps the queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was right, that it is masculinity itself, diluted or not, that is epistemologically restrictive.

But Gyemant points to one predecessor to Freud who accepted the unconscious: Theodor Lipps. Lipps is not too older than Freud, so he does belong to relatively the same generation, but Gyemant makes sure to note that “before Freud, Lipps said in his conference that the unconscious ‘does not appear as an occasional fact but rather as the general base of psychical life,” (77). This is an important claim to locate because within Freud’s originality lies his insistence that the unconscious is constantly working, namely through how “repression does not happen once and for all but it is must be permanently maintained,” (83).

Gyemant very well pins down the important facet of Freud’s psychoanalysis, whose emphasis on the unconscious, ironically, will be downplayed by future psychoanalysts as Elizabeth Young-Bruehl analyzed in her own works. But Gyemant interestingly shows that Freud still has claim for originality over Lipps, for whom “it is essential to preserve a continuity between the conscious phases and the unconscious phases of psychical processes,” (85). Meaning, there cannot be for Lipps an independent unconscious operating on its own. Freud himself would not be opposed to the idea of continuity between conscious and unconscious, but it is true that there cannot be any psychoanalytic methodology if the unconscious is not given its rightful throne through which it could exercise its powers. In some way, with Freud, there must be an impasse in the psyche, there must remain one road or channel of communication completely blocked between the conscious and the unconscious (otherwise, the unconscious itself would be overthrown).

It may be in Freud’s acquiescence to the unconscious, in giving it a throne of its own, that lies philosophy’s aversion to psychoanalysis, for it is philosophy who ought to be the queen of thinking. In some sense, what Freud was claiming for the unconscious was the right for its own empire. The journey of his unconscious, so long persecuted by philosophy, is therefore not unlike the story of prince Abd al-Rahman, whose family, the ruling Umayyads, were overthrown in Damascus by the Abbasid Revolution. Alone this disinherited prince would flee to the extremity of the rising Abbasid Empire, Spain, to establish his own caliphate. Does psychoanalysis not continue to live in a similar way today, it ruling discretely from Cordoba, whereas philosophy rules the lands and the seas comfortably from Damascus?

III. Husserl, defending truth

After sketching the reasons that lead Freud to assiduously defend his theory of the unconscious, Gyemant moves onto tracing the path that led Husserl to defend truth. That truth needed to be defended at all in the nineteenth century is a complex landscape draw out. Reasons for confusion surely arose when the search for objective facts under the emerging scientism of the time collided with the prevailing individualism of the century. How could we assert that truth existed if everyone – poets, philosophers, peoples – claimed their own? Hannah Arendt, herself affiliated to Husserl through Heidegger, was right when she characterized the nineteenth century as a clash between individualism and collectivism, ego mentality and class mentality.

Husserl, according to Gyemant, is cognizant of that clash between subjectivity and objectivity. She interestingly reminds us his interest in the work of his predecessor Bernard Bolzano, who “concludes that truths must have an existence in themselves, whether they were thought or not,” (91). This is a great quote, because it points us to the those few voices in the early-to-mid nineteenth century (Bolzano was born in 1781) who had to insist against both the prevailing subjectivism and idealism of the time that truth did exist. But would Husserl, through Bolzano, be ushering a return to Platonic Ideas, which have an existence of their own? According to Gyemant, it would be the work of another predecessor, Hermann Lotze (b. 1817), which helped Husserl understand that “while Ideas are not, since only things are, they are also not nothing, they have their own ontological status: a validity,” (93). Thus Husserl synthesized his readings of Bolzano and Lotze to reach the conclusion that “it is not the subjective character of acts that are primary when it comes to knowledge, but the objective character of its truths,” (94).

It is not surprising that philosophically-minded mathematicians at the time wondered whether a square existed. Following another student of Brentano, Alexius Meinong, “some philosophers wished to attribute a certain form of minimal existence to inexistent objects,” (94). We learn thanks to Gyemant that Husserl solves this debate in a very cheeky way: “an “inexistent object is not an object at all,” (98) which might be another way of saying that existence is not necessarily the imperative of objects alone. For sometimes “this projection does not meet its target in the real world,” meaning that for Husserl, “even when there is nothing to refer itself to, there is always, in all acts, an objective content,” (99). All acts have an objective content – that is a provocative thought, because it denies the futility of any action, but also of any thought; and hence it is strange that existentialism, concerned with nothingness, would branch off from Husserl’s own disciples, Heidegger and Jaspers, and from them through Sartre and the French existentialists. That is why I qualified Husserl and Freud as belonging to a lost and lone generation – Gyemant’s account demonstrates how their ideas were as strange and revolutionary to those who preceded them as to those who followed them.

Moreover, Gyemant dwells on Husserl’s notion of ‘filledness’ – and that is reminiscent once again of Bergson, who in Creative Evolution deemed ridiculous that philosophers opposed the whole with nothingness, since according to him that meant to oppose the whole with the whole. We are still here circling around the notion of existence; and how could we not think about Rene Descartes’s I think, therefore I am? Of course both Bergson and Husserl (and Freud, but through a detour) stand opposite of Descartes, since they wish to surpass the ego, the I, and look at existence from a general viewpoint.

But Gyemant rightly paints Husserl as a kind of heir of Descartes, when she singles out one quote from his journal: “I have tasted enough the torments of obscurity, of doubt which comes and go. I must arrive to an intimate assurance,” (107). These two sentences encapsulate the brave journey Descartes embarked on to find a similar assurance; except that while Descartes found himself to exist, it seems Husserl landed upon the existence of everything. By finding that totality existed, truth, that last bastion Husserl wished to defend against the scepticism, romanticism, and idealism of his time, appeared to exist along with it.

IV. The notion of trauma

One of the last and curious inquiries Gyemant wages in her book is the question of trauma. She is very right to square Freud and Husserl against each other on the issue, and frankly this moment in her inquiry is the gem in the crown. Gyemant postulates that “psychical trauma, understood as such, seems radically incompatible with the phenomenological idea of an absolute consciousness, which encompasses all psychical possibilities,” (120). Yet trauma, under Freudian inquiry, is precisely that which escapes the conscious; Gyemant rightly notes that it is that which “is impossible to integrate without bringing with it the collapse of the coherence of our world,” (114). Hence why we repress traumatic events; it is a trade-off which our unconscious brands for the greater good. What should we then make of Husserl’s loyalty to the conscious, to its professed ability to grasp everything, including traumatic events?

The disagreement between Freud and Husserl here is about categories and degrees as Gyemant points out: whereas there is a qualitative difference in Freud, between the conscious and the unconscious; for Husserl, there is only a quantitative difference; there is “never night but always dawn,” that is, “there is no distinction of categories but only a gradual distinction,” (128-129). Admittedly, this is a very poetic difference between Freud and Husserl; because their disagreement is about rupture or continuity, the beginning of sin following the irredeemable departure from Eden or the continued love of God in spite of human fault, the final collapse of a long-standing empire or the refusal of nostalgia for a reign not completely lost.

If anyone brought forth such a distinction to Freud’s ears, it would have been Lou Andreas-Salomé, whose psychoanalysis seems to follow a similar aversion to rupture as Husserl’s phenomenology. Hence the disagreement about trauma is not so much between psychoanalysis and phenomenology as between Freud and Husserl, between the founders of these two disciplines, as though the problem were indeed about the very act of founding something; that the founder must decide on very essential laws to their enterprise.

It is a philosophical question on its own to begin musing over whether Freud or Husserl was right, whether categories should exist or whether changes in degree are not neutral. But I do want to dwell on a very provocative insight that Gyemant draws from the debate. “Shouldn’t we then conclude,” she asks, “that trauma is an experience that is inconceivable unless it is attached to an individual subject, imprisoned in a personal history?” (121). Gyemant is telling us that it is only when feel to be individually ourselves, separate and isolated, that trauma becomes relevant to us; that the I feels traumatized only when there is an I.

Here is a very common example illustrating Gyemant’s argument. Many of us will say, after a breakup with a love partner, that we did not feel the pain that the relationship caused throughout its life. We will say, ‘gosh, this was so toxic, I don’t know why only now I am feeling the pain it caused.’ This common experience reveals that when we are not individuals, when we are with someone, as a twoness, trauma does not knock on our doors; it does not or cannot make itself felt, not even symptomatically. It is only when we regain our individuality that pain begins to make sense to us, both psychically and physiologically.

Where does this push our Husserl-Freud debate? For Gyemant, the subject of trauma “creates a hole in the phenomenological coherence of the transcendental ego,” (123). But does it? I am not sure, and I don’t fault Gyemant for not probing further, because the matter appears to be an intellectual rabbit hole. Yet it is so interesting, and we might need another Freud and another Husserl to settle the debate in outlandish terms; for the next frontier of that debate, clearly, has to do with seemingly mystical notions of the self that neither Freud neither Husserl wished to entertain. And maybe they were right not to go there? Jung did, and the rest was history!

V. Freud, Husserl… philosophers?

The last subject Gyemant entertains in her book concerns Freud’s status as a philosopher. She tells us the Freud’s earliest ambitions, regardless of his later dismissal of philosophers, was a “step toward philosophy,” (139). When I read this sentence, I felt compelled to write in the margin: “or poetry?”. For after reading Gyemant’s book, our view of philosophers is rather poor. Freud and Husserl strike to us as anomalies in their epochs, misunderstood poetic insights, and it is of the ironies of history that we remember them both very well today though we might have better understood them had their works remained in obscurity. Husserl is part of the philosophical canon, Freud to a lesser extent – but what does it mean for their respective revolutions, when their works were finally ‘admitted’ into the academy? Gyemant’s book, after all, is a reminder that we misread them both equally. But at what cost do we wish to rehabilitate the images of these two figures; and does rehabilitation mean to call them philosophers?

It may be loftier, to call them poets! But it is also fairer, for while Husserl is regarded as a philosopher, his thinking defied, like Freud’s, the regal innocence of philosophy; or more generally that of the human intellect. But Gyemant’s hunch at the end of her book is right, that after clarifying our relationship with Freud and Husserl, it is our / their rapport with philosophy that should be made clear. This task, too titanic to embark on, might be more suited to the philosophers themselves, who, if we understand Gyemant well, should be critical of their reliance on Husserl if they dismiss Freud, their loyalty to Freud if they dismiss Husserl.

Conclusion

How often did Freud think of Husserl and Husserl of Freud? That is a question Gyemant rightly chooses to ignore: her book brought them closer together in the same way one reminds two estranged brothers that their origins are common. If Freud and Husserl are deemed irreconcilable, it is because they are in some way brothers; that is, by growing up so close, it was natural for them to grow apart. I salute Gyemant’s effort, because she did not succumb to the lassitude with which we normally distinguish both thinkers; a too intellectual lassitude which we ought to discard, and replace with the childlike confidence that no, sometimes, two things, so seemingly different, are one and the same.

Matthew Clemente, Bryan J. Cocchiara, William J. Hendel (Eds.): misReading Plato, Routledge, 2022






misReading Plato: Continental and Psychoanalytic Glimpses Beyond the Mask Book Cover




misReading Plato: Continental and Psychoanalytic Glimpses Beyond the Mask





Matthew Clemente, Bryan J. Cocchiara, William J. Hendel (Eds.)




Routledge




2022




Paperback £25.49




312

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The Possibility of Philosophy, Northwestern University Press, 2022






The Possibility of Philosophy: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1959–1961 Book Cover




The Possibility of Philosophy: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1959–1961




Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy





Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Translated by Keith Whitmoyer. Foreword by Claude Lefort. Edited by Stéphanie Ménasé




Northwestern University Press




2022




Paperback $34.95




360

Maria Gyemant: Husserl et Freud, un héritage commun, Classiques Garnier, 2021






Husserl et Freud, un héritage commun Book Cover




Husserl et Freud, un héritage commun




Philosophies contemporaines, n° 14





Maria Gyemant




Classiques Garnier




2021




Paperback 29,00 €




160

Emmanuel Falque: Nothing to It: Reading Freud as a Philosopher






Nothing to It: Reading Freud as a Philosopher Book Cover




Nothing to It: Reading Freud as a Philosopher





Emmanuel Falque. Translators: Robert Vallier (DePaul University), William L. Connelly (The Catholic University of Paris)




Leuven University Press




2020




Paperback €25.00




136

Reviewed by: Matteo Pastorino (Deakin University)

In his book Nothing to It: Reading Freud as a Philosopher, Emmanuel Falque has provided a compact and dense argument in order to show the importance of Freud’s work for the phenomenological debate.

In the opening section, Falque chooses to present the affinities between Freud’s psychological theory and the ideas of Paul Ricoeur and Merleau-Ponty. As starting point, the author suggests that psychoanalysis as discipline, and in particular, Freudian psychoanalytic theory, can be studied independently of the practice underlying it. (24)

Thus, from the beginning, Falque abandons any issue concerning the practical aspects of psychoanalysis, following the lead of Ricouer. Previous philosophical approaches to Freudian psychoanalysis, like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972) or Jacques Derrida’s Resistances to Psychoanalysis (1996), were characterized, in the author’s view, by a polemic tone. (26) One may add that this line of criticism in France continues in the new millennium, for example in Michel Onfray’s The Twilight of an Idol: The Freudian Confabulation (2010).

However, Falque wants to focus on a more sympathetic, if minoritarian, current in French phenomenology. As example, he points at the work of Merleau- Ponty in the period from his Phenomenology of Perception (1945) to his death. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty has openly declared that the phenomenological method was developed with the contribution of psychoanalysis. Falque then concludes by saying:

In short, we need not to reconcile psychoanalysis and philosophy because in reality they have already been married for a long time. But we still have to nourish the link, and any fidelity demands not only self-denial, but instead a willingness to approach the other. (27-28)

After providing the historical precedent for his attempt, Falque considers which moments or stages of “fecundity” in psychoanalysis have produced a transformation in phenomenology.

The author describes them as ‘backlashes’ of psychoanalysis, producing a radical change of course in phenomenology. (28) The first moment is described in Ricouer’s Freud and Philosophy (1965), in which the earliest psychoanalytic theory is presented as one the greatest or even the principal authority of the unfurling of hermeneutics. (29)

In Ricoeur’s view, the conflict between psychoanalysis and phenomenology does not emerge from their original works, namely Freud’s Interpretations of Dreams (1899) and Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1900), which actually show a certain affinity, but rather in the

necessity, at least in Ricoeur’s eyes, to radicalize the theory of “signification” (Husserl) with a theory of “interpretation” (Freud). (29)

The second moment comes when Merleau-Ponty recognizes the shared interest in both psychoanalysis and phenomenology in applying reason to the irrational, which should be considered as a form of progress for reason (30). Yet, phenomenology, according to Falque, has not been able to move beyond the statement that “all consciousness is consciousness of something”.

The “below” of sense drills into spheres that do not reach the pair “sense” and “non-sense”. Deeper and more gaping, this stratum of the existent says nothing and has nothing to tell me, is not seen nor is demonstrable, is not understood, and does not let itself be read. (31)

So, it appears that psychoanalysis understood the multi-layered nature of the Id, Merleau-Ponty’s ‘raw nature’, and then phenomenology, influenced by Freud’s insight, developed its own theory.

The It is the pivotal point in Falque’s discussion, and he himself chooses this point to clarify his title, Nothing to It:

It only shows that “to see oneself”, following the Id, one first has to renounce seeing (…) because one is borne from below by the neuter of the “Self” of our existentiality. (32)

At this point, Falque develops his idea of a superiority of Freud’s idea of latency,

this hidden cache that stands in a place where there is nothing to “It” .(32)

compared to Husserl, Heidegger and Lévinas’ concepts of intuition, manifestation and invisible’s excess.

At this point, the author starts to expand his idea about the need to combine psychoanalytic insights and philosophical explorations. What makes the comparison harder to understand is the fact that Falque repeatedly compares a few notions of Freud’s theory, only his, and only his “second topography”, (37) with a variety of philosophers, usually French and broadly definable as phenomenologists, but sometimes including Nietzsche and even Kant as well. (35)

Chapter 1 opens with a few considerations about personal and historical events  shaping Freud’s worldview in the last decades of his life. Personal and social tragedies have both contributed to change Freud’s optimism about an enduring Enlightenment. (40-42)

Thus,

The First World War is thus for Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, not only a “crisis”, (…). It is properly speaking a “revolution”, the imposition of a change of paradigm and not merely the correction of an old system. (46)

At this point, Falque attempts to read “metaphysically” the impact of the Great War on psychoanalysis, claiming that

It introduces the ego and destroys not only the ego’s capacity to present or be represented, but the very idea that there is something to “present” or something “representable”. (46)

The impact of the historical event on the discipline of psychoanalysis, according to Falque, is analogous to that of the Second World War on Lévinas’s phenomenology, particularly about the question of “evil”. On the other hand, Freud’s contemporary philosophers, like Husserl, Bergson, and Russell, were unable to grasp this metaphysical level,

the “it” of the event of the war and the “id/it” of the submission or even of the annihilation of the ego. (47)

The discussion on Freud’s superior understanding of the Great War as the proof of humanity’s barbarism continues in Chapter 2, and Falque makes the claim that this barbarism is characteristic of the First but not of the Second World War:

One knows why people die, or rather why there is death in the Second World War, because it is thoroughly “rationalized” even if it is never “reasonable”. (…) Inversely, one does not die merely for nothing in the First World War, but one does not know why one dies, who dies, or where the people who die go or might want to go. (50)

Falque’s claims are debatable, not only for historical reasons, but also because Freud’s death before the Second World War prevented anyone from knowing if he would have shared Falque’s distinction between a “barbaric” First World War and an “ideological” Second World War, as the author seems to imply.  (51)

In any case, Falque’s focus in this section is on the impact of barbarism on psychoanalysis, and, specifically, on the discovery of the “death drive”, which, in Falque’s view, had always been the ‘unknown object’ of psychoanalysis since the beginning. (51-52)

What First World War brought to the fore was the presence of a violent “primitive man” lying just beneath the surface of civilization (probably meaning  Western Civilization, although Falque does not clarify).

The realization of the existence of a “death drive”, in the author’s opinion, makes Freud’s understanding of the conflict comparable with that of Franz Rosenzweig, author of The Star of Redemption (1921). (54)

The analogy between the experiences of a man fighting in the trenches, as was the case of Rosenzweig, with those of someone  “in the rear guard” is rather contestable, as Falque himself recognizes. (57) Yet, they reach very similar conclusions regarding the loss of Enlightenment’s illusions, wiped away by the sheer violence of the fighting. (56)

What Freud comes to call the “Id” emerges as the brutality of the “animal component” of the individual, revealed by the war in all its brutal power. (57)

The conclusion of this chapter is:

That there is an “Id” prior to an “Ego” (Freud) or a “Self” prior to the “me” (Nietzsche) is the lesson drawn from the conflict- not primarily military or political but metaphysical- from which Freud and we after him have not finished drawing the lessons for philosophy itself. (58)

The change occurred to psychoanalysis in the aftermath of the war is the starting point for Chapter 3:

not only thinking through the war, but thinking oneself thinking through the war, and showing that the thought of the war becomes the place of and the tool for the destruction of all thought. (60)

The consequences of this change is a new consideration for the “somatic” component, whose corporeality is understood differently by Freud, Jung and Lacan. (60) Falque mentions here other psychoanalytic schools in order to clarify that the concept of “drive” should be understood only as

the force in me that I do not recognize as being me- appears to me as “a known that is unknown”. (61)

As noticed before, Falque usually restricts his discussion of psychoanalysis to Freud’s theory, while covering a number of philosophers. At this point, he briefly considers Lacan’s “symbolic”, only to notice how it ignores the “somatic origin of the drive”. (63) While it is understandable to reduce sometimes the differences between psychoanalysis and phenomenology, some clarification about the choice of excluding in toto any other psychoanalyst may have been useful at this stage.

In the following section, the author underlines once more the importance and utility of a greater consideration of Freud’s ideas in phenomenology, suggesting that the latter could gain some insights, for psychoanalytic theory would lead phenomenology

back to its Urgrund or toward the “obscure ground” of the human, which it cannot avoid (…). (63)

It seems that it has already done so in some measure, since Merleau-Ponty’s “raw nature” and Derrida’s Khora derive from the backlash of psychoanalysis as they recover

the obscure point of what is below or beneath any signification intended by the Freudian “unconscious”(…). (63)

After this passage, as in others, one may expect some explanation of the link between three concepts which are quite complex and debated on their own right. Yet, Falque moves on without further discussion, and he also exits the field of phenomenology for drawing two short comparisons between the Freudian drive and an idea of force that is to be found in Nietzsche and Spinoza. Again, there is no further analysis, and the interesting possibilities are left open.

Chapter 4 suspends the comparison between phenomenology and psychoanalysis, considering instead the latter’s similarities with some “spiritual” work by Christian authors. Falque considers Freud’s concepts of “uncanny” (69-70), “death and repetition” (71), and “anorganic” (72-73), as similar to the spiritual experience of being “outside of time” and “outside of space”, defined as “acedia” by the authors he quotes. (76)

The following chapters mostly discuss Freud’s works in the last decade of his life, in particular the confrontation between the Ego and the Id, which Falque sometimes writes as the it, as in the title, making hard to distinguish in some case which meaning of the word “it” he is employing. He sometimes interrupts what would be an historical overview of Freud’s ouvre for showing some possible link with phenomenology, mostly Derrida, and the spiritual and theological concepts he briefly considered in Chapter 4.

The conclusion of his analysis is that the Id, in order to be understood, requires the combination of three disciplines. This is necessary since the self to be explored is not only of the human, but of God and of the world as well. And thus

One “crosses the Rubicon” from phenomenology into theology, and vice versa, but also from phenomenology to psychoanalysis, and vice versa. It is by learning and by being modified by its “other” that phenomenology will advance and will stop condemning every other science as “ontic”. (90)

The concluding chapter presents an almost religious undertone, discussing the Id as something to be “saved”, and the Ego presented as its saviour (93-94). This considerations are inspired by the notes Freud made in the last months of his life, in which a mystical allure clearly emerges.

The epilogue lists the achievements of Freud:

To bring the Enlightenment to an end, to conceive the inconceivable, to be rooted in the organic, not to fear the uncanny, to go all the way to the anorganic, to be lived by the Id, (…) such is the path lived simultaneously by Freud himself, and through him, the history of the development of psychoanalysis. (100)

Each of these results has been analyzed in the book, although rather shortly. As noticed by Philippe Van Haute in the Foreword, Falque’s book “leaves many questions open”. Sometimes it is also rather obscure, adopting concepts from Freud, Derrida and others without a proper explanation, which would be in some case necessary . The continuous changes of terminology are quite confusing as well, with a few chapters discussing psychoanalysis but employing a phenomenological lexicon and another doing the contrary.

Another potential weakness of the book is the considerable difference between the analysis of Freud’s works, often involving historical and biographical considerations, and, on the other hand, the ideas of philosophers, which are usually thrown in as means of comparison without any elaboration or contextualization.

Yet, this book is undeniably fascinating in its re-evaluation of Freud’s theories, and all the parts concerning the founder of psychoanalysis and his ideas are rich in insights and make a strong case for further philosophical explorations.