Two disciplines have greatly contributed to a new understanding of phantasy and imagination in contemporary thought: phenomenology and psychoanalysis. These two different approaches to Phantasie developed almost simultaneously at the beginning of the twentieth century. The examination of Phantasie can focus on the concrete form of the phantasm as a unique object formation—or better, as scene. The attention can also be directed to the style of imagining as specific intentionality. Whereas the second line of research has been extensively studied in (...) the context of phenomenological investigation, psychoanalytical inquiry has greatly contributed to the understanding of the phantasm as scene. In the present paper, the author primarily examines the notion of phantasy from a phenomenological perspective. More specifically, the author intends to show the inner tensions between the concept of pure phantasy as intentional act and the manner of appearance of unclear phantasy. If we consider the essential traits of the appearances of unclear phantasies, the unclear phantasies cannot be considered as quasi-perceptions of a fictional object, since no intentional object constitutes itself in this confused dimension. (shrink)

The validity of Husserl’s early apprehension/content of apprehension schema (_Auffassung/Auffassungsinhalt Schema_) of intentionality has long been a subject of dispute. In the case of phantasy (_Phantasie_), commentators often assert that the talk of “non-intentional content,” i.e. the phantasm, is abandoned in Husserl’s mature phenomenology of phantasy, and his subsequent theory of reproductive consciousness aims precisely to replace the previous schema. Against the current dismissive stance in the literature, this paper argues for the centrality of the concept of phantasm in the (...) phenomenology of phantasy. This is achieved in three steps. First, I argue for a functional interpretation of the schema, which maintains that it is not an empirical-genetic account of how non-intentional “sense-data” is transformed into presentations of intentional objects, but a structural exposition of the essential moments of objectifying consciousness. Second, I revisit Husserl’s theory of reproductive consciousness, arguing that in reproduction, what is reproduced is not only the noetic experience but also the hyletic substrate. Hence, the theory of reproductive consciousness, far from calling for an abandonment of the concept of phantasm, instead clarifies this concept and its function in phantasy. To fortify the point that the phantasm is crucial for the phenomenology of phantasy, I examine two features of phantasy, namely the perspectivalness of phantasized objects and the experience of my phantasy Ego being the “zero point of orientation” in phantasy, arguing that these two essential features can only be accounted for by appealing to the concept of phantasm. (shrink)