Review of Jagna Brudzińska, Bi-Valenz der Erfahrung: Assoziation, Imaginäres und Trieb in der Genesis der Subjektivität bei Husserl und Freud, Dordrecht: Springer, 2019

Jagna Brudzińska’s Bi-Valenz der Erfahrung: Assoziation, Imaginäres und Trieb in der Genesis der Subjektivität bei Husserl und Freud is the first book-length study¹ to investigate the relationship of phenomenology and psychoanalysis from the perspective of Edmund Husserl’s genetic philosophy.² The book addresses scholars of philosophy and psychology who wish to gain a deeper understanding of genetic phenomenology and the philosophy of psychoanalysis alike. Taking a historical perspective pursued with a systematic interest, the text can be read by students who might benefit from an introduction into Husserl’s genetic phenomenology as well as accomplished scientists that work in the fields of phenomenology and psychoanalysis. The latter is due especially to the author referencing both published texts and unpublished manuscripts from Husserl’s œuvre for her study, allowing phenomenology to appear in a new light. The precision and scope of Brudzińska’s grasp of both phenomenological and psychoanalytic theory as well as her own involvement in the interdisciplinary advancement of both disciplines make this book a commendable reading to these audiences.

Following a concise historical account of the philosophical and psychiatric exchanges between phenomenology and psychoanalysis from the lifetimes of Edmund Husserl and Sigmund Freud through the caesura of the second world war to Lacan and Ricœur (Brudzińska, 2019a, 1–6), the first chapter of Bi-Valenz der Erfahrung problematises the possibility of interdisciplinary conjunctions of phenomenology and psychoanalysis, introducing Brudzińska’s own approach as a solution to the arising difficulties (ibid., 6–15). Whereas phenomenological research commences with the description of the structures of consciousness and is methodically committed to this guideline, the starting point of psychoanalytic investigation is the study of the unconscious as a psychic reality with reliance on methods that go beyond the givenness of presently conscious experience (ibid., 1). As phenomenology and psychoanalysis therefore prima facie might seem to be diametrically opposed in their access to experience, let us recall that it was Freud who upon asking the question: “How are we to arrive at a knowledge of the unconscious?”, gave the answer: “It is of course only as something conscious that we know it, after it has undergone transformation [Umsetzung] or translation [Übersetzung] into something conscious” (Freud, 1957, 166). Accordingly, the phenomenologist undertakes the study of the unconscious not as a lack of experience, but as a class of phenomena that are motivated unconsciously, but given consciously in modes of emotive, phantasmatic and kinaesthetic-bodily representifications (Vergegenwärtigungen) in both active and passive intentional and pre-intentional subjective performances.³ Thus, in contrast to conventional philosophical accounts of intentionality by the paradigms of perception and cognition, phantasmatic and imaginary intentionality come to the fore in this book. According to Husserl himself, the experience of affective tension that accompanies the pressing of unfulfilled drives and its preservation and unfolding in subjectivity “is a nod towards Freudian psychoanalysis, with its ›strangulated affects‹ and ›repressions‹” (Husserl, 2014, 126; my translation). Subjective experience thereby emerges as a developmental structure that operates under a twofold regime: we and our world are shaped not only by perception and cognition, but also by imaginary performances, by libidinal tendencies and unconscious desires. In this context, Brudzińska coins the notion of the impressive-phantasmatic “bi-valence” of subjective reality (Brudzińska, 2019a, 6). Following the early modern discovery of the ego as the locus of subjectivity, the ego is a constant point of reference in phenomenology at large and so too in Brudzińska’s study.⁴ Consequently, association, imaginary performances, and drive intentionality are investigated as guiding concepts that structure the ego as a field of experience. In accordance with both Husserl and Freud, the unconscious is thus uncovered at the elementary level of the genesis of subjectivity in the realm of phantasmatic-imaginary and passive-affective experience.

Brudzińska structures the main body of her text into a bigger group of six chapters (2 to 7) that reconstruct and reinterpret the development of genetic phenomenology in Edmund Husserl’s philosophy and a smaller group of three chapters (8 to 10) that apply phenomenological analysis to Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, with some interdisciplinary exchanges already in Chap. 7. As it is impossible to do justice to the entirety of Brudzińska’s analyses in the limited scope of a book review, I will focus my coverage of the individual chapters on aspects that might be of special interest to the interdisciplinary minded reader of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.

For the interdisciplinary thinker, the second chapter dedicated to association as a unifying principle of the subjective sphere will be of special interest. A standalone contribution to the history of ideas in its own right, this chapter opens with a discussion of the empiricist theories of association and their influence on psychological theories of the constitution of consciousness that dates at least to David Hume’s and John Stuart Mill’s accounts. Systematically, Brudzińska shows that the phenomenological analysis of association goes substantially beyond these empiricist accounts. While empiricists traditionally study association merely as a formal nexus, i.e., as relations passively resulting from the mnemic inscription of impressions under the laws of contiguity, similarity and causality, phenomenology focusses on the active and creative capacity of association. Emphasising the teleological nature of association, Brudzińska shows that this discovery, characteristic of genetic research in phenomenology, is already present in Husserl’s descriptive phenomenology of the Logical Investigations. As genetic phenomenology is usually considered the latest development of Husserl’s thought, Brudzińska’s reconstruction of the first intentional-genetic motif of Husserl’s philosophy already in this founding document of phenomenology gives reason for a serious reassessment of the stages of Husserl’s philosophical development and the transition from static to genetic phenomenology.⁵ In Chap. 3, the debate with empiricism is further advanced. The development of the ego concept from the pre-egologic period of phenomenology to its inception and advancement during the transcendental turn is covered with special regard for the genesis of subjectivity. Over this course, memory, phantasy, expectation, and empathy are discovered and recognised as valid evidences alongside perception, all functioning as legitimate sources of phenomenological knowledge. Thereby the empiricist privilege of perception as the proper source of knowledge is overcome in Husserl’s phenomenology. To the interdisciplinary thinker, this must be of utmost importance, since it questions the way we continue to adhere to the empiricist paradigm and keep favouring perceptual evidence as the hallmark of reality and truth in the cognitive sciences to this day. Brudzińska shows that phenomenology offers alternatives to this dogma that have the potential to do better justice to subjective lived experience through recourse to these classes of evidence in the human sciences.⁶ Brudzińska’s individual-egological analysis of experience results in a paradigm shift in the theory of phantasy in the fourth chapter. From a functional and genetic point of view, phantasy is reassessed as an independent and original consciousness drawing on immanent phantasmata rather than being merely reproductive of transcendent impressions. These insights are gained from Husserl’s analyses of the phenomena of vision, hallucination, illusion, dream, and daydream. Especially the analyses of dream consciousness show that phantasmata operate as originally giving evidence, since we do experience the dreamworld as real even though its objects are not given through perceptual impressions. These findings substantially support Brudzińska’s thesis of bi-valence: the apperceptive-impressive order of perception and the phantasmatic-imaginary order are two equivalent regimes of experience contributing equally to the constitution of subjective reality. Chap. 5 is devoted to differentiations in the two areas of sensual foundations of experience as sensation and phantasma and thus further elaborates the thesis of bi-valence. The sixth chapter returns to analyses of subjectivity. Anticipated in pre-egologic descriptive phenomenology as the unified stream of consciousness, Husserl’s eidetic phenomenology advances to the notion of the subject as a transcendental ego: by all means a pure ego, though always connected to the lived body and anchored in intersubjective experience. In late genetic phenomenology, the transcendental ego then takes stage as a “transcendental person” in the lifeworld: a concrete structure of subjectivity that accomplishes its intentional aims in motivational, kinaesthetic and emotive performances, extended in inner time-consciousness. While the person can be described from the static perspective as the eidetic identity pole of experience, genetic phenomenology traces the development of this identity as a dynamic process of individuation and thus from the point of view of biographical and collective historicity.⁷ Brudzińska’s analyses of the so-called sedimentation process shed a bright light on these complicated interweavings. “Sedimentation” designates the “storing” of the past that Husserl acknowledges as an efficacious horizon of past experiences that can take action in present life. In Husserl’s account, this is described as a largely peaceful process. With Freud, this is different. Freud turns to the dramatic, highly affective, and conflictual dynamics that shape subjective reality. This shifts attention to the “eruptive” processes in experience, whereby Brudzińska moves on to the analyses of affectivity in Chap. 7. In this chapter, an analysis and interpretation of the so-called “affective relief” is presented. To this end, Husserl’s still partly unpublished late work from around 1930 onwards is evaluated, particularly regarding his analyses of drive intentionality, e.g., in self-preservation but also in sexuality. The subjective side of the affective relief is shown to be structured by unconscious strivings and counter-strivings, formed by libidinal and instinctual tendencies as well as past experiences. An astounding proximity between phenomena that Freud uncovered in psychoanalysis such as contradiction, inhibition, concealment, sublimation and even repression and Husserl’s account of drive intentionality thus comes to light. Brudzińska demonstrates in detail that the psychoanalytic notion of drive can in its entirety be founded on the phenomenological conceptions provided by Husserl – and in accordance with Husserl’s own insights, too. In Chap. 8, Brudzińska explicitly places the focus on Freud’s psychology of the unconscious. The phenomenological instruments developed earlier are now applied to the interpretation of Freudian theses concerning drive and ego-formation. The interpretation is guided by analyses of the phenomena of phantasy, dreams and daydreams, hallucinations, mnemic incursions and seemingly arbitrary shifts in affect. Regarding the dynamic unconscious, the procedure of the technique of free association is examined as a performative structure of psychic life operative not only in treatment but outside the consulting room, too. In the ninth chapter, Brudzińska reconstructs and discusses Freud’s central findings from the study of dreams. Originally, Brudzińska devotes an epistemological analysis to the dream phenomenon whereby important connections to previous analyses are drawn. Chapter 10 undertakes a final phenomenological interpretation of the Freudian unconscious, thus concluding by identifying the common field of research of both disciplines. Brudzińska stresses that it is decisive that the unconscious must not be understood as an absent non-phenomenon that can only be approached ex negativo. Rather, the unconscious must be studied as an “other presence” that presents itself in a hitherto largely unrecognised form of givenness. ⁸

Overall, two major goals are achieved by Brudzińska’s Bi-Valenz der Erfahrung: On the one hand, thanks to phenomenological analysis, the psychoanalytic notion of “drive” is freed from its naturalistic residue. On the other hand, a new research domain is uncovered for phenomenology: the experiential field of the “dynamic unconscious.” This experience is expressed in the performances of a strong, productive faculty of phantasy consciousness that draws from immanent libidinal sources, co-shaping reality in conjunction with transcendent perception and deliberate cognition.

From my point of view, Brudzińska’s accounts of experiential evidence for the unconscious are among the most valuable passages of Bi-Valenz. Her depth phenomenological approach allows us to make sense of the unconscious not as an anti-phenomenon, but as evidently given. Thereby, the unconscious is rendered accessible to scientific study, though in a phenomenological paradigm that goes beyond the widespread positivist model. A brief digression might give an idea of what’s at stake in this novelty. After Freud’s early attempts to make sense of the unconscious in a framework of physiological dispositions by means of “neuronal canalisation” before 1900 (Freud, 1966, 299–300), Freud gave his definitive account of the unconscious as a psychic reality in 1912, though stressing that it is closed off from direct access and therefore must be studied through less direct means (Freud, 1958, 260). Due to this peculiar scientific style, psychoanalysis has consequently been the target of influential criticism by the Vienna Circle, which, following the falsifiability criterion and adhering to a respective ideal of scientific knowledge, imputed to psychoanalysis the status of a pseudoscience (Popper, 1963, 34–5; see also Grünbaum, 1984). With the recent rise of the cognitive sciences, scientific interest in the study of the unconscious has risen anew. However, in this tradition, the study of the unconscious is pursued mostly following research paradigms that meet the criteria of positivism such as experimental psychology and neuroscience. Thereby, Freud’s discovery that the unconscious in not something akin to a physiological disposition but a psychic reality recedes into the background. To reconcile these opposing ends, Brudzińska’s approach offers a solution. If we turn our attention to the emotive, phantasmatic and kinaesthetic-bodily representifications (Vergegenwärtigungen) of the unconscious, we may engage in research that is grounded in evidences of originary givenness, whereby the Husserlian “principle of all principles” (Husserl, 1983, 44) guarantees that we engage in solid science rather than lofty guesswork.⁹ For all its potential, one apparent shortcoming of Bi-Valenz can in this regard not be overseen: the role of language as a locus of the manifestation of the unconscious is hardly discussed at all. This may be because for the Husserlian phenomenologist, language is not a consciousness of originary givenness (Lohmar, 2016). Nonetheless, as Freud decidedly stated: “Nothing takes place in a psycho-analytic treatment but an interchange of words between the patient and the analyst” (Freud, 1961, 17) and therefore, the spoken work is of outmost importance for psychoanalytic studies of the unconscious. Taking this state of affairs serious, the list of evidences that Brudzińska proposes should be supplemented with the manifestations of the unconscious also at the level of speech.¹⁰ The Husserlian approach may well be suited to account for this as well, though according analyses in the framework of depth phenomenology have yet to be undertaken.

Included in a unique series that unites several generations of phenomenologists, among them Emmanuel Levinas, Jan Patočka, Eugen Fink, Roman Ingarden, Alfred Schütz, Bernhard Waldenfels and Marc Richir, Jagna Brudzińska’s Bi-Valenz der Erfahrung is the 229th entry in Phaenomenologica which was founded in 1958 by Hermann Leo van Breda and is published to this day under the auspices of the Husserl-Archives. The meticulous research and scholarly depth of thought that went into the writing of Bi-Valenz der Erfahrung makes this book an addition on par with the other great entries in this venerable series.