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THEORETICAL / PHILOSOPHICAL PAOER
Human Studies (2025) 48:139–162
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-024-09755-0
Abstract
Can an emotion be unconscious? The aim of this paper is to answer this dicult
question. Is it possible for an emotion to be a fully lived experience and at the same
time remain unknown to the subject? Or, in clearer terms, how can one have a feel-
ing without actually feeling it? At rst sight, it seems impossible to imagine the
existence of unconscious emotions. If, unlike ideas and other cognitive experiences,
the essence of an emotion does not lie in its content but in the way it is experienced,
in “the way it feels like,” then the expression “unconscious emotions” itself seems
to be a contradiction. However, if we place ourselves from the point of view of
the psychoanalytical theory of the unconscious, this statement creates a problem.
Most of the unconscious processes revealed in the course of an analysis have strong
emotional connotations. A phenomenology of emotions cannot ignore the results
and theories brought forth by Freud and his psychoanalysis, whose most important
discoveries concern emotions and their impact on the rest of the psychological life
of the subject. If unconscious emotions question the limits of phenomenology, my
aim in this paper is to show the way phenomenology can take in order to push
these limits further. I will start by explaining the way phenomenology traditionally
conceives emotions and their relation to other mental phenomena, using mainly
Brentano and Husserl’s view on emotions. However, I will show further that there
is a way that allows us to conceive the possibility of emotions that do not belong
to consciousness. It is the way of a dynamic phenomenology, inspired by the works
of Theodor Lipps, which constitute the main philosophical reference in the works
of Sigmund Freud.
Keywords Husserl · Freud · Lipps · Phenomenology · Emotions ·
Psychoanalysis · Descriptive psychology · Unconscious
Accepted: 15 August 2024 / Published online: 30 August 2024
© The Author(s) 2024
Unconscious Emotions and the Limits of Phenomenology:
Husserl, Lipps and Freud
MariaGyemant1
Maria Gyemant
gyemantmaria@yahoo.com
1 University of Bucharest, Soseaua Panduri nr. 90, sector 5, Bucharest 050663, Romania
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M. Gyemant
Can an emotion be unconscious? Is it possible for an emotion to be a fully lived expe-
rience and at the same time remain unknown to the subject? Or in clearer terms, how
can one have a feeling without actually feeling it? At rst sight, it seems impossible to
imagine the existence of unconscious emotions or feelings.1 If, unlike ideas and other
cognitive experiences, the essence of an emotion does not lie in its content but in its
quality—in the way it is experienced, in “what it feels like”—then the expression
“unconscious emotions” itself seems to be a contradiction. From the point of view of
phenomenology in a large sense, beginning with Brentano’s descriptive psychology
and including early Husserlian phenomenology, either is there a describable emotion
but it is necessarily conscious, or if no conscious expression of this emotion is present
to the subject, there is simply no emotion to describe at all.
However, this intuitive conclusion is challenged by the discoveries made by Freud
at the beginning of the 20th century as he explored the realms of psychopathology
using the psychoanalytical method. Most of the unconscious processes revealed in
the course of an analysis do indeed have strong emotional connotations. This emo-
tional aspect of unconscious processes is the main reason for their repression: an
absolutely neutral thought would not need to be repressed. And if we deny the pos-
sibility for an emotion to be unconscious, how can we account for all the unconscious
feelings and desires that Freud managed to bring to light using his analytical method?
Are unconscious emotions then possible? In La nature des émotions. Une intro-
duction partisane, Samuel Lepine explicitly asks this very question (Lepine, 2023:
30), and after a few pages of discussion, arrives at the conclusion that neither feel-
ings nor emotions can be unconscious in a strong (i.e., psychological) sense (Lep-
ine, 2023: 35). Lepine considers, in fact, that there are two ways of defending the
hypothesis of unconscious emotions: one uses the psychoanalytical approach, the
other uses neuroscience. Here we will not discuss the second approach,2 and this
for two reasons: rst, it leads us beyond the limits of what phenomenology could
teach us because it addresses events that take place on the somatic level by observ-
ing them from an objective, third-person point of view, while phenomenology’s rst
rule is to provide an account of experience from a subjective, rst-person point of
view; second, if neuroscience can study phenomena that could be called unconscious,
these phenomena are not part of what the phenomenological tradition in a large sense
(beginning with Brentano) would call psychic or mental phenomena. In any case,
even if the neural dispositions brought to light by neuroscience could indeed be quali-
ed as unconscious, since the subject is not aware of their action and cannot control
them or even describe them from a subjective point of view, they are not psychologi-
cal at all—so the neuroscientic defense of the unconscious does not contradict the
1 There is a dierence of nuance between the two terms: the term “emotion” indicates the internal aective
movement, as in the expression “I am moved by your gesture,” while the term “feeling” puts the accent on
the bodily dimension, inviting comparison with physical sensations. However, both terms describe, from
dierent points of view, the same type of experience. This point could be explored further, but in the pres-
ent work, I will use the two terms as synonyms.
2 On the subject of the neuroscientic approach to unconscious emotions, see the work of A. R. Damasio,
in particular, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (Damasio,
1999). See also Chap. 2 of J. Deonna and F. Teroni’s The Emotions: A Philosophical Introduction (Deonna
& Teroni, 2012).
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Unconscious Emotions and the Limits of Phenomenology: Husserl,…
widespread thesis that all that is psychological is also conscious. In the neuroscien-
tic view, the term “unconscious” can only be used to qualify the neural connections
in the brain, on a somatic level, thus belonging precisely to the sphere of what is not
psychological.
It is accordingly the other way to defend unconscious emotions that interests us
here—the one using the psychoanalytical approach to the unconscious, which con-
sists in defending the existence of a properly psychological unconscious. But Lepine’s
analysis dismisses this possibility as well. In this Lepine is following J. Deonna and
F. Teroni’s The Emotions: A Philosophical Introduction (Deonna & Teroni, 2012),
who defend a theory of emotions understood as evaluative attitudes (Smith, 2014)—a
theory that is profoundly coherent with a classical phenomenological stance such as
we can already nd in Husserl’s work around 1910 (Husserl, 2020, Texts I and II).
This attitudinal theory of emotions is based on three principles: rst, all emotions
possess a phenomenological character; second, they all possess intentionality; and
third, they are all submitted to epistemological evaluations that qualify them as cor-
rect, justied, and appropriate or inappropriate. For Deonna and Teroni, an emotion
could appear unconscious only because it was either ignored while the attention of
the subject was directed toward other, more important thoughts or actions, or because
it was actually experienced but misunderstood by the subject, who describes it using
an inappropriate concept. In both cases the emotion is not, strictly speaking, uncon-
scious: the subject is indeed feeling the emotion, even though she cannot or does
not care to describe it appropriately. Defending this argument, Lepine quotes Freud
himself in section III of “The Unconscious” (Freud, 1957b), where we can nd this
assertion: “Strictly speaking, […] there are no unconscious aects as there are uncon-
scious ideas” (Freud, 1957b: 178), an assertion that brings Lepine to the conclusion
that it is “trivial and consensual to acknowledge that there are, strictly speaking, no
unconscious emotions or feelings” (Lepine, 2023: 34). It is in fact so consensual that
even the inventor of psychoanalysis agrees that there are no unconscious emotions.
However, things are more complicated if we take the point of view of the psy-
choanalytical theory of the unconscious that Freud advanced at the beginning of the
20th century. The quote that Lepine cites from “The Unconscious” plays in the latter
text precisely the role of an introduction to the real question addressed by psycho-
analysis: the question of repression as the only means to understand the unconscious
in a strong psychological sense. In this statement, Freud wants to stress the fact that
emotions and ideas are not that similar: emotions are to be understood in a dynamic
manner, as complex processes that can follow many dierent paths on their way to
consciousness and can suer all sorts of vicissitudes on these paths (Freud, 1957a).
On the other hand, ideas are not processes but contents, and their being conscious or
unconscious is to be understood quite dierently from the case of emotions. Thus far
from being the expression of Freud’s doubts concerning the existence of unconscious
emotions, the aforementioned statement does in fact open the way to reect upon the
psychoanalytical unconscious, and from this perspective, unconscious emotions are
indeed not only a possibility but a psychological reality.
Consider, for instance, one of the very rst cases of hysteria described by Freud
and Breuer in their Studies on Hysteria from 1895: the case of Anna O. (Breuer &
Freud, 1957: 21–45). Many of Anna O.’s symptoms went back to one traumatic hal-
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M. Gyemant
lucination. While taking care of her sick father, Anna O., half asleep by his bed, had
the vision of a black snake coming out of the wall, threatening the life of her father.
But when she tried to chase the snake she realized that she could not move her arm or
speak. She saw her own ngers turning to snakes, and all she could pronounce were
some children’s verses in English (Breuer & Freud, 1957: 37). Some of the symptoms
she developed later reproduced the main elements of this hallucination. But only a
long and dicult process of interpretation was able to bring to light the feeling in
which the rst hallucination and the following symptoms originated: a desire that she
could not face, the desire that her father was dead, liberating her from the heavy task
of nursing him, which prevented her from living her youth. We must agree that for
Anna O., this desire was utterly inaccessible. The symptoms’ only reason to be was
in fact to block this desire from becoming conscious, since it placed everything that
Anna O. wanted and believed of herself into question.
Are we then allowed simply to ignore this and all the other clinical examples that
Freud brought forth and explained using his theory of a psychological unconscious?
Should we declare that these phenomena correspond to nothing describable or acces-
sible to phenomenology? Of course, nothing stops us from adopting this position and
either denying that Freud’s discovery is of any philosophical interest or considering
that psychopathological phenomena go beyond the limits of the phenomenological
project and fall out of its conceptual boundaries, just as neuroscientic results do. In
fact, from the very beginning, the phenomenology of emotions is itself founded on a
supposition that we can situate in Brentano’s work—namely, on the supposition that
emotions are necessarily intentional, and thus conscious. Is it then impossible from
a phenomenological point of view to take into account Freud’s discovery of uncon-
scious emotions?
In the following pages, I will argue that it is indeed of interest to phenomenol-
ogy to undertake a serious examination of Freud’s discovery of the repressed uncon-
scious, particularly with regard to the case of unconscious emotions. This is for at
least three reasons. First, this discovery concerns a side of subjective experience inac-
cessible to phenomenology because it is only revealed by a clinical approach and
only visible through the study of psychopathological phenomena. And since phe-
nomenology concerns itself with all subjective experience, the Freudian discovery of
the unconscious opens the way toward new questions for phenomenology. Second,
the dynamic approach to emotions that we nd in Freud’s works directly challenges
any type of phenomenology of emotions and cannot be dismissed as easily as the
authors mentioned above would like. The results and theories brought forth by this
new science of the psyche, whose most important discoveries concern emotions and
their impact on the rest of the psychological life of the subject, reveal the limits of
descriptive and even of dynamic phenomenology. The descriptive point of view, tra-
ditionally associated with the study of mental phenomena since Brentano’s Psychol-
ogy from an Empirical Standpoint, is, in fact, unable to give us an account not only of
unconscious emotions but of any unconscious mental event or process since describ-
ing such an event would mean that it instantly becomes conscious. Using reection
as the main instrument allowing us to describe mental phenomena is an approach that
denies by denition any access to the unconscious aspects of the experience, which
are precisely the aspects we would have wanted to describe in the rst place if we
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Unconscious Emotions and the Limits of Phenomenology: Husserl,…
were to take Freud’s perspective. It is thus in principle that in order to understand the
unconscious, we need to switch from a descriptive to a dynamic point of view that
includes the causal inference of unconscious processes from their conscious eects
or symptoms. Third, even in this dynamic perspective, which allows us a certain
phenomenological access to the unconscious aspects of mental life, it is a challenge
to prove that an emotion can actually be lived without our knowledge—that we can
feel pain, sadness, anger, or joy, and yet have no notion of it. Phenomenology can
live up to this challenge, extending the limits of what it is possible for us to seize
phenomenologically, but only on one condition: by taking up the Freudian concept of
a psychological unconscious dened by repression.
In order better to understand what an unconscious emotion could mean and
whether there is a way to conceive it without contradiction from a phenomenological
point of view, we therefore need to take three successive steps beyond the limits of
traditional phenomenology.
The rst step is to shift from the descriptive point of view that we nd in Bren-
tano and in the early Husserl toward a dynamic point of view that emerges with the
transcendental turn and that we can already nd in Husserl’s Ideas I, but that is fully
developed by Husserl in his later texts. Thus in our rst section, we will examine both
the changes brought to Husserl’s conception of emotions by the transcendental turn
and the consequences for our question concerning unconscious emotions.
The second step is to show how from a dynamic point of view, we can move from
consciousness to the unconscious and ascertain how they are articulated with one
another. For this, we will begin by discussing the place the unconscious receives
in Husserl’s lesser-known manuscripts as well as in his later published works. But
despite a certain fascination that we nd in recent phenomenological works with
Husserl’s interest in the unconscious and with a comparison of Husserl with Freud
(Bernet, 2003; Trincia, 2008; Smith, 2010; Brudzińska, 2006, 2019; Aenishanslin,
2019; Geniusas, 2024), and despite the undeniable interest of this issue, we must
agree that Husserl is not the most obvious reference on this subject. Since it is con-
sciousness that is ultimately at the core of Husserlian phenomenology, Husserl only
considers the unconscious in relation to consciousness as its zero-degree. There is,
however, one other philosopher, Husserl’s contemporary and correspondent, who not
only had a dynamic approach to psychology but put the concept of the unconscious
at the center of his psychology. Far less known today than either Husserl or Freud,
the German philosopher Theodor Lipps was a student of Wilhelm Wundt and an
important personality of his time to whom we owe, for example, a most interesting
analysis of the phenomena of Einfühlung. Lipps’s philosophical understanding of the
unconscious, its role in mental life, and its relation to emotions and aectivity will
guide us throughout our second section.
However, unconscious emotions seem to be impossible even in Lipps’s uncon-
scious-friendly psychology. Even though Lipps was a major philosophical reference
for Freud (and the only contemporary one3), it is only by examining Freud’s more
3 Indeed, Freud possessed almost all of the works of Theodor Lipps and quoted him as a source up to his
nal writings in 1938 (see Pigman, 1995). Here is a list of the works of Theodor Lipps found in Freud’s
library: Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens (1883), Psychologische Studien (1891), Der Streit über die
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M. Gyemant
radical position on the unconscious that we can take the third and nal step, one
that takes us from the dynamic to the repressed, from a merely philosophical con-
cept of the unconscious to the psychoanalytical discovery of a radical unconscious,
inaccessible to reection—which, as we will see in the third section, is the only
type of unconscious able to support a non-contradictory conception of unconscious
emotions.
The Impossibility of Unconscious Emotions from a Descriptive
Point of View: From Brentano’s Descriptive Psychology to Husserl’s
Transcendental Phenomenology
Emotions in Brentano’s Descriptive Psychology
If we are to understand why descriptive phenomenology cannot account for uncon-
scious emotions—and indeed, for any unconscious phenomenon at all—we need to
return briey to Brentano and his classication of mental phenomena. Brentano dis-
tinguishes three types of mental phenomena: presentations, judgments, and “acts of
love and hate” (Brentano, 1973). Presentations are the most basic type of mental acts;
they simply present an object to the mind, while judgments and feelings need and
include a previous presentation of their object, which means that they are complex
mental acts founded on the simpler act of presentation:
This act of presentation forms the foundation not merely of the act of judg-
ing, but also of desiring and of every other mental act. Nothing can be judged,
desired, hoped or feared, unless one has a presentation of that thing. (Brentano,
1973: 61)
The third class of mental acts is complex and heterogeneous, including feelings,
desires, and volitions, each presenting a double positive-negative face, with “pro- or
contra-attitudes towards their object” (Vendrell Ferran, 2015: 353). As Uriah Kriegel
suggests in Brentano’s Philosophical System, even though we could separate the third
class of mental phenomena into three dierent and irreducible categories—namely,
states of will, emotional states, and aective sensations such as pleasure and pain—
“Brentano has a unied account of all three as characterized by a distinctive, inher-
ently evaluative mode or attitude” (Kriegel, 2018: 10), which is not very dierent
from the perspective advocated by Deonna and Teroni. In fact, despite their heteroge-
neity, mental acts belonging to the third class all share one common characteristic: an
evaluative attitude toward an intentional object. We can thus notice that in the Brenta-
nian model, emotions have more in common with judgments than with presentations,
as argued by Fisette in La philosophie de Franz Brentano (Fisette, 2022: 95). Both
Tragödie (1891), Ästhetische Faktoren der Raumanschauung (1893), Grundzüge der Logik (1897), Der
Begri des Unbewussten in der Psychologie (1897), Raumästhetik und geometrische Täuschungen (1898),
Komik und Humor. Eine psychologisch-ästhetische Untersuchung (1902), and Vom Fühlen, Wollen und
Denken. Eine psychologische Skizze (1902).
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Unconscious Emotions and the Limits of Phenomenology: Husserl,…
emotions and judgments are complex acts that include the acceptance or rejection of a
presentation. It is the type of acceptance and rejection that distinguishes between the
two; judgments accept or reject presentations as true or false, while feelings accept or
reject them as desirable or detestable. Thus emotions in Brentano are fully intentional
acts, comprising “a sui generis category characterized by a distinctive intentional
mode” (Kriegel, 2017: 46). And this is true even of their most basic forms, pleasure
and pain, traditionally associated with sensations rather than judgments.
But what is particular to Brentano’s view is that all intentional phenomena are
also conscious. Intentionality and consciousness go together and imply each other
(Fisette, 2022: 70). Since emotions are mental phenomena, they present both of these
essential characteristics: they are intentional, even in their most basic forms, and as
a consequence, they are necessarily conscious. The hypothesis of unconscious emo-
tions is thus barred from the very beginning in Brentano’s perspective.
Husserl’s Phenomenology of Emotion from the Logical Investigations to Ideas I
We can recognize the inuence of the Brentanian model of descriptive psychology in
the account of emotions that Husserl provides starting with the Fifth Logical Inves-
tigation (Husserl, 2001b, vol. 2). When Husserl directly approaches the question of
intentional acts in his Fifth Logical Investigation, Brentano’s model is thoroughly
considered, and this consideration gives way to an objection to his classication.
The main concern of this critique is that presentations seem to be at the same time
full-blooded acts and mere parts of other acts. Husserl’s alternative to the Brentanian
classication in § 41 of the Fifth Logical Investigation is to unite presentations and
judgments in a unique class of acts that he calls objectifying acts. Emotions, together
with volitional acts, are thus singled out in the Logical Investigations as the class of
non-objectifying acts. In a nutshell, the correct classication according to the Logical
Investigations does not then separate between simple and complex acts, but between
emotional and cognitive acts: cognitive acts provide the intentional objects—which
are the proper objects of judgments, whether simple objects of presentations or states
of aairs (Sachverhalte)—and this is why they are called “objectifying”. Emotions
refer to these same intentional objects by adding an aective, qualitative nuance, and
they are thus considered “secondary intentions” (Husserl, 2001b, vol. 2: 167) depen-
dent on objectifying acts.4
However, Husserl’s view on emotions changes between the Logical Investigations
and Ideas I. In Ideas I, Husserl gives up the distinction between objectifying and non-
objectifying acts: the category of objectifying acts is extended to all intentional acts,
including emotions. We nd, for example, the following statement in § 117: “any
acts whatever—even emotional and volitional acts—are ‘objectifying,’ ‘constituting’
objects originaliter” (Husserl, 1983: 282).
The reason for this new perspective on emotions in Husserl’s phenomenology
is, of course, to be found in the transcendental turn. But it is not our ambition here
4 This view can, of course, be rened, since there are certain mental acts—for instance, questions—that do
not seem to be satisfyingly captured by this classication. For a more detailed discussion of this issue, see
Ullrich Melle’s analyses (2012, 2019). See also Fisette (2021).
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M. Gyemant
to give an extensive interpretation of the Husserlian transcendental turn; the issue
has probably been one of the most extensively discussed in the phenomenological
literature, and a thorough exploration would take us too far away from our point.
However, with regard to Husserl’s approach to emotions, it should be said that one of
the consequences of the transcendental turn in phenomenology is that the intentional
object is no longer supposed to have an independent existence with respect to the
act. As everybody knows, the epochē suspends any judgment concerning anything
that would or would not take place in a world independent from transcendental con-
sciousness. The eld of phenomenology is thus limited to consciousness and its acts,
but there is a counterpart to this limitation: the consciousness in question is tran-
scendental and not empirical, and as such, it contains all the subjective possibilities
imaginable.
Thus the transcendental turn brings forth a new approach to intentionality and
to mental acts. Since the intentional object becomes entirely dependent on the act
in which it is given, intentionality in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology is to
be conceived not simply as a relation between the act and its intentional object, but
as a noetic-noematic correlation. All intentional acts present this double structure:
the qualitative side of the act, the noesis, comprises one half of the act and is indis-
sociable from the other half, the noema (which is, of course, the new name for the
intentional object contained in the act). The main consequence of this change in Hus-
serl’s viewpoint is that the act and its intentional object can no longer be thought of
independently. If emotions are intentional acts, they accordingly need to contain not
only a specic noetic character but also a specic noematic moment.
Analogous statements hold, then, as one can easily see, for the emotional and
volitional spheres, for mental processes of liking or disliking, of valuing in any
sense, of wishing, deciding, acting. All these are mental processes which con-
tain many and often heterogeneous intentive strata, the noetic and, correspond-
ingly, also the noematic ones. (Husserl, 1983: 231)
While in the Logical Investigations emotion was considered simply as a noetic qual-
ity that would attach itself to a previously given object, the possibility of such purely
noetic acts, containing no specic noematic counterpart, disappears in the Ideas I.
Emotions are considered from now on as objectifying, just like cognitive acts. There-
fore from now on, all acts are considered intentional in exactly the same sense.
Parallel to this, Husserl also acknowledges that the general structure of all inten-
tional acts includes the possibility that the act can give way to a corresponding reec-
tive act of which it becomes the object:
Any mental process which is not an object of regard can, with respect to ideal
possibility, become “regarded”; a reection on the part of the Ego is directed to
it, it now becomes an object for the Ego. […] In turn, the reections are mental
processes and, as reections, can become the substrates of new reections; and
so on ad innitum as a matter of essentially necessary universality. (Husserl,
1983: 174)
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Unconscious Emotions and the Limits of Phenomenology: Husserl,…
Intentionality and reectivity, together with the temporal structure of mental life,
are identied by Husserl as the three fundamental structures of pure consciousness,
a thesis he extensively discusses in the second chapter of the third section of Ideas
I. Anticipating his answer (Ideas I, § 79) to H. J. Watt’s objection (see Watt, 2018)
against the pertinence of introspection, Husserl shows in § 78 of Ideas I that reec-
tion is an ideal possibility contained, in principle, in any mental act. While from
an empirical perspective, we can always imagine acts that do not actually become
the object of a new reexive act, transcendental phenomenology, which concerns
itself with the ideal possibilities of subjective experience, brings to light the fact that
reection is a universal possibility for all mental acts: if an act is actually lived, it is
by its essence susceptible of becoming the object of a new, reective act. Denying
this possibility for a mental act amounts to excluding it from the sphere of tran-
scendental consciousness, and therefore from the sphere of phenomenology itself. In
other words, if an act belongs to the transcendental ego, it is necessarily both inten-
tional and accessible to consciousness through reection, and in consequence, no act
belonging to the transcendental ego can be called “unconscious”.
We can see that Husserl’s position on emotional acts is nally not that dierent
from Brentano’s. On the contrary, Husserl recapitulates on a transcendental level
what Brentano had already armed on an empirical level: since emotions are to be
considered intentional in the same sense as cognitive acts, they cannot be uncon-
scious, i.e., inaccessible to the transcendental ego. All mental acts, including emo-
tions, are on the one hand intentional in the same sense since they are all objectifying
acts dened by a noetic-noematic correlation.5 On the other hand, since they are
the intentional acts of a transcendental ego, they are all also accessible to reec-
tion, which is one of the fundamental structures of pure consciousness. Thus if all
that is intentional is (potentially) conscious and all consciousness is intentional, then
emotions, considered by Husserl as full-blooded intentional acts, cannot be uncon-
scious (at least not indenitely unconscious, since they are all in principle accessible
through reection). We can conclude, then, that from the descriptive point of view of
transcendental phenomenology, it is no easier to conceive emotions as unconscious
than it was from the empirical point of view of Brentano’s descriptive psychology
since it is obvious that we can only oer a phenomenological description of that of
which we are actually aware.
5 However, we should note one dierence between the two positions. It concerns aective sensations
(Gefühlsempndungen)—for instance, pleasure and pain. These were included by Brentano in the third
class of acts and considered by him, to be intentional, while Husserl places them in the subintentional
category called hylē, together with sensuous data and drives (Husserl, 1983: 203).
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M. Gyemant
Dynamic Phenomenology: The Possibility of Unconscious Mental
Acts in Husserl and Lipps
Husserl’s Dynamic Phenomenology and the Question of the Unconscious
But as we know, Husserlian phenomenology was never purely descriptive. From the
very beginning, the descriptive works published by Husserl were accompanied by an
enormous number of research manuscripts that remained unknown to the public at
the time but were progressively discovered and put to use by Husserl’s commenta-
tors. This subterranean side of Husserl’s phenomenology, which remained for some
time in the state of shorthand manuscripts, has now been transcribed and for the
most part has been published in the Husserliana collection, demonstrating Husserl’s
constant preoccupation with the more dynamic aspects of mental life. How sense
emerges from the diversity of passive syntheses, how attention focuses on a par-
ticular aspect of the object while leaving the rest in the background, how every act
implies a temporal horizon, are questions that constantly nourished Husserl’s reec-
tion, even before the transcendental turn. However, they become preponderant in
Husserl’s later works, especially after 1930, as several commentators have remarked
(Moran, 2017: 16; Nakamura, 2019: 99; Geniusas, 2024). As Husserl’s phenomenol-
ogy became progressively more and more dynamic, taking a genetic and generative
turn, the question of the unconscious emerged as a question of the limits that the tran-
scendental ego encounters in the constitution of the world.6 Since the transcendental
ego is conceived as summing up all subjective possibilities, questions arise about
limit phenomena, such as the horizon of what has sunk so far into forgetfulness that
it has become invisible to the subject, or dreamless sleep, and even more metaphysi-
cal questions such as those concerning birth and death. All these questions appeal
to a phenomenological consideration of phenomena that might be qualied, as Dan
Zahavi puts it clearly in an Appendix to Self-Awareness and Alterity called “Self-
Awareness and the Unconscious,” as belonging to the category of the unconscious:
“the moment phenomenology moves beyond an investigation of object-manifestation
and act-intentionality, it enters a realm that has traditionally been called the uncon-
scious” (Zahavi, 2020: 207).
From Husserl’s exploration of unconscious phenomena a question spontaneously
arises: can a parallel be drawn between this concept and the psychoanalytical uncon-
scious revealed by Freud? Is Husserl’s unconscious the same as the one produced
by the psychoanalytical tradition? Or should we distinguish the two, and consider
that the use of the term “unconscious” in psychoanalysis and phenomenology is
polysemic?
Husserl’s increasing interest in the unconscious might in fact seem paradoxical,
especially from the point of view of transcendental phenomenology, whose rst and
clearest gesture is to reduce the eld of research open to phenomenological explora-
tion to the pure consciousness of the transcendental ego. Earlier commentators on
6 In this respect, as S. Geniusas points out (Geniusas, 2024: 2), Husserliana XLII is particularly rich, as
we can see from its very subtitle: Limit Problems of Phenomenology: Analyses of the Unconscious and of
Instincts. Metaphysics. Late Ethics.
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Unconscious Emotions and the Limits of Phenomenology: Husserl,…
Husserl’s phenomenology did not fail to notice this, as we can read, for instance,
in Ricœur’s classical Essay on Interpretation (Ricœur, 1970). Even though Ricœur
thinks that “no reexive phenomenology has come as close to the Freudian uncon-
scious as the phenomenology of Husserl” (Ricœur, 1970: 376), he shows that the
comparison has its limits, and after a very thorough analysis, he arrives at the conclu-
sion that “the unconscious of phenomenology is the preconscious of psychoanalysis”
(Ricœur, 1970: 392).
It has been argued, however, that Ricœur’s analysis was based only on the pub-
lished works of Husserl since he had no access to the numerous unpublished manu-
scripts that have progressively been rendered accessible by the dedicated work of
researchers associated with the Husserl Archives. The manuscripts have revealed
that the theme of the unconscious was a constant preoccupation in Husserl’s work,
a preoccupation that took many dierent forms as dynamic aspects of phenomenol-
ogy progressively emerged—namely, the temporal structure of consciousness and the
question of the horizon implied by what is present, as well as that of the uctuations
of attention that generate a contrast between the explicit themes of the intentional acts
and their background. These progressively lead Husserl toward an interrogation of
the limit cases of consciousness. And this has motivated quite a few phenomenolo-
gists to reconsider Ricœur’s conclusion, seeking a way to compare, articulate, or (for
the most audacious) invert the importance of Freud’s and Husserl’s conceptions of
the unconscious, claiming that Freud was only able to give a less precise and concep-
tually poorer version of Husserl’s phenomenological approach (Bernet, 2008: 126).
The most prominent of the phenomenologists concerned with constructing a parallel
between Husserl and Freud is Rudolf Bernet (Bernet, 2003, 2008), whose works have
brilliantly seized the issue and opened the way for many others (Trincia, 2008; Smith,
2010; Moran, 2017; Togni, 2018; Brudzińska, 2006, 2019; Nakamura, 2019; Geniu-
sas, 2024, etc.). Yet their conclusion is often negative, and for some this results in a
certain mistrust of the very concept of the unconscious, at least in its psychoanalytical
sense. Rudolf Bernet himself concludes his discussion of the unconscious in Husserl
and Freud with the remark that “Freud’s economic determination of the Unconscious
as a primary process appeared questionable to us unless it is combined with the phe-
nomenologically understood process of repression” (Bernet, 2003: 219).
But whether the Husserlian unconscious is similar or dierent, more or less fun-
damental than the Freudian unconscious, clear enough, or needing further phenom-
enological clarication, this discussion remains beyond the purpose of the present
paper. What we really seek to establish is whether, from a phenomenological point
of view, unconscious emotions can make sense. If dynamic phenomenology is more
prone to consider unconscious emotions than descriptive psychology is, then in order
to answer our question, we must ask what exactly Husserl understands by the term
“unconscious”. Taking a closer look at the texts in which Husserl refers explicitly to
the unconscious, we can see that the uses he makes of this term are plural. In a par-
ticularly clear and exhaustive paper, Saulius Geniusas identies and analyzes no less
than seven dierent meanings Husserl gives to the idea of the unconscious in con-
nection with the concepts of horizon; time-constitution; sedimentation; repression;
the fact that consciousness can be absorbed in its own presentications; dreamless
sleep; and nally, the question of instincts (Geniusas, 2024: 3). As we can see from
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M. Gyemant
Geniusas’s paper, the rst six uses of the term “unconscious” all demonstrate that in
each case, the Husserlian unconscious remains dependent on consciousness. It is only
the instinctual unconscious that takes us out of the sphere of consciousness, but we
could wonder whether it doesn’t take us out of the sphere of phenomenology as well.
Let’s briey examine the seven uses of the term “unconscious” in Husserl, as
described in Geniusas’s paper. Already in Ideas I, we can nd initial glimpses of
one of the most radical theories in Husserlian phenomenology: namely, that each act
reects the whole of the world, both on its noetic and on its noematic side, since each
act has as background the whole of the stream of mental processes. Indeed, each act
has its thematic core along with several layers of less and less explicit background.
The term horizon of mental processes not only signies here, however, the hori-
zon of phenomenological temporality according to its described dimensions,
but also dierences in novel modes of givenness. Accordingly, a mental process
which has become an Object of an Ego-regard, which therefore has the mode
of being made an object of regard, has its horizon of unregarded mental pro-
cesses; a mental process seized upon in a mode of “attention” and possibly in
unceasing clarity, has a horizon of inattention in the background with relative
dierences of clarity and obscurity as well as salientness and lack of salient-
ness. (Husserl, 1983: 197)
The horizonal unconscious, which includes all conscious experiences that are no lon-
ger thematic, is then to be understood as “still a mode of consciousness,” (Geniusas,
2024: 6) even though a mode that lacks aective force. Similarly, the time-constitut-
ing consciousness that characterizes the temporal ow is to be qualied as “‘uncon-
scious’ consciousness,” with the term “unconscious” here pointing to a “hidden
dimension of consciousness itself” (Geniusas, 2024: 8) corresponding to the lived
present, which is inaccessible as such to reection. The sedimented unconscious—
the third and probably the most prominent use of the term in Husserl—questions the
limits of that which has sunk so far into the experiential past that it no longer exerts
any aective force. The unconscious then appears as the zero-point of consciousness.
To the list of Husserlian texts quoted by Geniusas on this issue, we can add two later
manuscripts included in Husserliana Materialien under the title Späte Texte über
Zeitkonstitution. Texts Nr. 48 and 49 from the C10 manuscript interest us particu-
larly here because Husserl explicitly addresses the question of the unconscious as
the “zero-degree” of consciousness. In Text Nr. 48, he distinguishes between three
dimensions of the subjective experience: the explicit theme toward which the subject
directs her attention; the implicit dimensions of the theme that comprise its horizon
and implicitly aect the subject; and the “unconscious” background of that which
doesn’t aect the subject at all (Husserl, 2006: 184). But in the next text from the
C10 manuscript, Husserl considers the unconscious not only as the background of
consciousness, but in itself. If we were to imagine a completely empty experience
in which no aection touches the subject, what would it feel like? Husserl imagines
it as a completely dark consciousness, the “zero” of consciousness (das “Null” des
Bewusstseins), which he also calls “the night of the unconscious” (Husserl, 2006:
193). But even at this limit point of consciousness, where all content has sunk into
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Unconscious Emotions and the Limits of Phenomenology: Husserl,…
complete forgetfulness, the unconscious is still to be conceived as a sort of (empty)
consciousness. As Geniusas points out:
The very fact that the contents that sink into the night of the unconscious can
be brought back to memory means that they were not entirely lost, that they
were still in consciousness, although paradoxically, in consciousness without
consciousness knowing it. (Geniusas, 2024: 10)
However, this concept of a sedimented unconscious is not to be confused with what
Husserl calls the “repressed unconscious”. The term “repression” should suggest that
here we are closest to the Freudian conception of the unconscious. Indeed, there are
a few passages where Husserl talks, for instance, about the case of “a suppression
of the aection in which the aection is repressed or covered over, but is still pres-
ent” (Husserl, 2001a: 518). The dierence between the sedimented unconscious and
the repressed unconscious is that the sedimented unconscious contains experiences
that have necessarily once been conscious, while the repressed unconscious contains
experiences that were kept from arriving in consciousness by other, more vivid expe-
riences that took over and solicited all the attention of the subject, pushing other,
less vivid experiences into the background. The repressed unconscious in Husserl
should nevertheless be distinguished from the much more specic Freudian sense
since Husserl’s sense only points to background experiences that contain nothing in
their essence forbidding them from becoming conscious.
To these dierent uses of the unconscious Geniusas adds the absorbed uncon-
scious, meaning the fact that the subject can be entirely absorbed in her presentica-
tions and cease to have reective access to her present experience. However, this is
only true because she is absorbed in a reection upon her past or phantasized ego,
which Husserl characterizes as a “second-level self-consciousness”. Another type of
unconscious is the dormant unconscious, where no content whatsoever is present to
consciousness. In dreamless sleep, consciousness is completely empty and uncon-
scious of the world. But as Geniusas points out, “the very fact that the sleeping ego
can wake up means that it is still aected by the world” (Geniusas, 2024: 16). From
the analysis of this series of uses of the term “unconscious” we can conclude, follow-
ing Rudolf Bernet’s insight, that (in Husserl’s vision at least) “nothing is unconscious
in itself, instead, everything unconscious is unconscious in relation to something con-
scious” (Bernet, 2003: 214).
Finally, the only Husserlian use of the term “unconscious” that is not reducible
to a lesser form of consciousness is the one associated with instincts. Instinctual
unconscious, the seventh sense identied by Geniusas, is the only Husserlian use of
the term that opposes the unconscious to consciousness instead of considering it as a
limit case of consciousness: “the instinctual unconscious refers to irrational facticity,
i.e., to what is blind, irrational and unfree, while consciousness stands for reason, i.e.,
for rational decision and self-determination” (Geniusas, 2024:17). But in this case,
the unconscious seems to be excluded from the sphere of phenomenological experi-
ence and attached instead to concepts like nature or the innate.
From this thorough analysis, we can conclude, as Geniusas does at the end of his
paper, that rather than considering the unconscious for its own sake, Husserl under-
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M. Gyemant
stands consciousness as “a multi-layered structure and he analyzes its lowest levels
under the heading of the unconscious”. Thus Ricœur’s position with respect to the
possibility of comparing the use of the term “unconscious” in Husserl and Freud still
stands, despite the publication of all the Husserlian manuscripts: Husserl’s uncon-
scious can at best be compared to the Freudian preconscious, i.e., a form of con-
sciousness that is latent but still essentially accessible to consciousness.
However, there is another, still more fundamental dierence between Husserl’s
and Freud’s use of the term “unconscious,” a dierence that underlines the diculty
of the comparison even more forcefully. As we can see from the discussion above,
the Husserlian term “unconscious” is only used in an adjectival sense. Husserl calls
“unconscious” those experiences that escape locally or occasionally the grasp of
reective consciousness. The unconscious is then to be understood as a quality that
can belong to certain objects of experience that, for dierent reasons, fall out of the
reach of consciousness—a quality whose meaning is purely negative, expressing the
absence of certain qualities associated with consciousness such as the fact of being
the thematic object of an intentional act, or at least aecting the ego in one way
or another. In contrast, consciousness has in Husserl mainly a nominative sense, of
which the adjectival sense is only a derivation. We can speak of an object or experi-
ence as being conscious as long as it aects consciousness with a certain non-null
vivacity, but we can also speak of consciousness per se, as for instance when we
consider transcendental consciousness as synonymous with the transcendental ego.
But for Husserl, there is no sense in speaking of “the unconscious” as separated from
consciousness and comparable to it.
In Freud, on the other hand, the weight of each of the two opposed concepts is
inverted: it is the unconscious that is to be dened nominatively as the essence of the
psyche, and it is consciousness that is to be understood as a mere accidental quality
that can belong occasionally to certain mental phenomena. It is the unconscious, and
not consciousness, that is “the true psychic reality” (Freud, 1931: 463), while “the
eect on consciousness is only a remote psychic product of the unconscious process”
(Freud, 1931: 462).
Theodor Lipps and his Dynamic Psychology: Emotions and the Unconscious
We can see how dicult it is, from a Husserlian point of view, to think of something
that is exterior to consciousness by denition. Ricœur seems in fact to have been right
from the very beginning in stressing the fact that the crucial role played by conscious-
ness in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology makes it impossible to carry out a
phenomenological translation of the psychoanalytical unconscious in all its radicality.
Even from a dynamic phenomenological perspective, the unconscious only appears
as relative to consciousness, as the negation of consciousness: even a zero-degree
aection is still a sort of aection, and its unconscious character is a sort of limit case
of consciousness. Thus no matter how far we let ourselves be led by Husserl on the
path of dynamic phenomenology, it remains the case that the unconscious, and all of
the more unconscious emotions, seem to be an unsurpassable blind spot.
There is, however, one philosopher who took seriously the idea that the uncon-
scious could not simply be an inessential quality of certain mental phenomena, but
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Unconscious Emotions and the Limits of Phenomenology: Husserl,…
another name for the psyche itself. Theodor Lipps thought, in fact, that the uncon-
scious is to be considered in a nominative sense and not merely as the lack of vivacity
of certain phenomena that make them unable to aect the subject. The unconscious
is not a characteristic of the objects of consciousness, but the most prominent con-
stituent of the subject itself. In this sense, the unconscious plays in Lipps’s psychol-
ogy the same fundamental role that consciousness plays in Husserl’s transcendental
phenomenology.
Despite being one of the important philosophers of his time, Theodor Lipps’s
dynamic psychology of the unconscious is not very well known today (Salvia, 2015:
381–390; Devonis, 2000: 639–664; Gyemant, 2018a, b). We can nd Lipps’s name
in three dierent but interconnected contexts. The rst is the debate that opposed
psychologism and anti-psychologism at the beginning of the 20th century (Lavigne,
2018). He is indeed mentioned in Husserl’s Prolegomena (Husserl, 2001b) as one
of the main representative gures of psychologism, a position Husserl thoroughly
criticized. He is also one of the main theorists of the concept of Einfühlung, which
inspired Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity (Taipale, 2015; Depraz, 2017) as pre-
sented in his Fifth Cartesian Meditation (Husserl, 1973), as well as Max Scheler’s
concept of sympathy (Agard, 2017). Based on a very complex theory of emotions
and aectivity, Lipps’s concept of Einfühlung was central to his theory of aesthet-
ics concerning the way a work of art can create its emotional eect on the viewer,
and this is why Lipps became a fairly important reference in this eld. His concept
of Einfühlung has also been used more recently in neuroscience in order to provide
a philosophical framework for the theory of mirror neurons (Stueber, 2019; Wang,
2022). Finally, Lipps’s work is also crucial for the historians of psychoanalysis, since
Lipps is one of the very few philosophers mentioned repeatedly and positively by
Freud—not only in his works but also in the letters he wrote to his friend Wilhelm
Fliess in the 1890s (Freud, 1986).
We can thus see that at least two of Lipps’s philosophical preoccupations converge
and make him particularly interesting for our present investigation: the main themes
of Theodor Lipps’s philosophy are emotions and aectivity on the one hand and the
unconscious dimension of mental life on the other. But can we articulate them in
order to reach a coherent understanding of unconscious emotions?
Lipps was formed in Wilhelm Wundt’s Institute of Experimental Psychology in
Leipzig. He later became a professor of aesthetics and psychology in Breslau and he
nished his career in Munich, where he succeeded Brentano’s student, Carl Stumpf.
His philosophical project rested on the belief that the foundations of human culture
and science were to be found in psychology, a belief that was the main target of
Husserl’s critique of psychologism. Lipps’s brand of psychology was, however, a
particular one. Unlike Wundt’s experimental psychology, Lipps was not interested
in nding correlations between the mind and the body. In fact, he believed that the
psychophysiological research of his time was using metaphysical assumptions that
could not be veried. He endorsed instead a pure psychology that would not trespass
beyond the limits of the mental realm. However, this psychology was not of the
same nature as Brentano’s descriptive psychology. While Brentano and his students
believed, as Lipps did, that psychology should exclusively and exhaustively study the
sphere of mental phenomena, it was their belief, as we have seen with Brentano and
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M. Gyemant
Husserl, that these phenomena were all accessible to inner consciousness. But Lipps
did not agree on this last point. His pure psychology diered from Brentano’s pure
psychology in two crucial aspects. First, it did not have the same object: Brentano
thought that the object of psychology should be conscious phenomena, while Lipps
considered that the question of the unconscious is the main question of psychology.
This was the main thesis of his 1883 book, Basic Facts of Mental Life, and also of
the famous conference paper on “The concept of the unconscious in psychology”
(Lipps, 1897), which he delivered at the close of the Third International Congress
of Psychology in Munich in 1896—a paper that summarized the main ideas of the
1883 book. The phrase opening the 1896 conference states that “the question of the
unconscious is not a psychological question but rather the question of psychology”
(Lipps, 1897: 146).
Second, as a consequence of this thesis, Lipps’s method was dierent from
Brentano’s. Brentano’s psychology was descriptive while Lipps’s psychology was
dynamic and genetic. It was in fact clear to Lipps that a descriptive method could
not seize the unconscious aspects of mental life. But it was also obvious to him
that only a very few mental phenomena were actually conscious. A vast number of
processes, including the acts through which a content became conscious, themselves
stayed unconscious. The whole dynamic aspect of mental life was inaccessible to
consciousness as such: we can be conscious of an idea, but we cannot be conscious
of the act that presents this idea. Consciousness of this act through reection trans-
forms the act into a new idea. The dynamic aspects of the act are thus lost. On the
other hand, all the contents of consciousness that are not presently thought—all the
past ideas, judgments, emotions—are not simply erased from the mind, but continue
to exercise a certain inuence on the consciousness of the subject. In his conference
presentation, Lipps uses an interesting example (Lipps, 1897: 155): we can hear a
phrase, and as soon as its content becomes conscious, it is accompanied by a feeling
of rejection. The reasons for this rejection might be extremely complex, and they
might include past experiences that are or are not related to the content of the phrase,
moral thoughts about what is right and wrong, beautiful or ugly, etc., or about who
we are and who we would like to be. Even though the feeling of rejection is present
and conscious, its complex reasons are not explicitly formulated and don’t appear in
any way to consciousness at the moment when the phrase is understood. They can, of
course, be brought to consciousness later on, by an analysis of the negative reaction,
but at the present moment, they are unconscious.
This example proves, in Lipps’s view, that there are phenomena that have the same
structure as conscious mental phenomena, but stay unconscious. They are not actu-
ally present at a conscious level. They have, however, a certain form of presence as
unconscious phenomena, and the proof is that they have conscious eects, namely,
the feeling of rejection in our example. We can thus see that there is no contradiction
in stating the existence of a mental act that is unconscious and not simply physical.
There is no contradiction, for instance, in stating the existence of unconscious rep-
resentations. They are unconscious because they are not eectively conscious at the
present moment, but they can be described as representations because they are poten-
tially conscious, either because they had already once been conscious, or because they
are actually in the process of becoming conscious at the present moment. Thus an
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Unconscious Emotions and the Limits of Phenomenology: Husserl,…
unconscious mental phenomenon is in Lipps’s view a phenomenon that is potentially
conscious. An unconscious representation, for instance, is a potential representation.
Now, if we follow this conclusion in the eld of emotions, we should conclude that
there is such a thing as a potential emotion. However, emotions are characterized not
by their object or content, but by the way they feel. It seems hard to imagine that an
emotion could be present without being actually felt. What sort of joy is one I cannot
enjoy?
Theodor Lipps’s theory of aectivity is based on a series of ne distinctions. The
rst and most important one is between sensations (Empndungen) and feelings
(Gefühle) (Lipps, 1889). The former are aections of the body, while the latter aect
the ego as a whole. But there is another distinction to be made—that between feelings
and aective movements (Gemütsbewegungen), which dier from feelings in that the
latter are more often associated with states of mind rather than with movements. Such
a complex aective movement is not reducible to one act or another, but rather goes
from one act to the other, uniting them together. Thus several (sometimes contradic-
tory) feelings such as fear, uncertainty, and hope can be united in one and the same
movement, together with other types of acts such as presentations or judgments in
what Lipps calls the merging together of feelings (ineinander übergehende Gefühle)
(Lipps, 1905: 682).
Nonetheless, this general aective movement, in which we can recognize the
dynamic aspects of the psychological unconscious that Lipps describes in his 1896
conference paper, is not to be assimilated into a sort of unconscious emotion. The
feeling itself is something completely dierent from the general movement in which
it may participate. If we go back to Lipps’s example of the feeling of rejection, it
becomes clear that while the reasons for the rejection remain unconscious, the feeling
of rejection, which is the eect these unconscious phenomena produce, is precisely a
conscious eect. In Lipps’s view, mental life is a whole in which all the processes are
related to one another. At each moment, a very complex net of processes is at work,
but only a few of them arrive in consciousness. All the others stay unconscious but
are still associated in many dierent ways with the whole. We could say with Lipps
that a conscious representation is the nal result of a complex unconscious process,
one that is itself in relation with all the other mental processes that take place at the
same time (Lipps, 1897: 158). On the basis of this theory and of the example we
have already analyzed, we could conclude that for Lipps, emotions function precisely
as the conscious indicators of this mass of interconnected unconscious processes. A
certain process produces a conscious content, and the relation this content has to the
whole of mental life—including what stays unconscious—appears to consciousness
in the form of emotions. We must therefore conclude that in Lipps’s theory, even
though emotions are intimately related to the unconscious, they themselves cannot
be unconscious. They are, on the contrary, the conscious indicators of an unconscious
activity. In other words, even a dynamic perspective that manages to give the uncon-
scious a central place in the psychological activity of the subject seems to confront
its limits when it comes to thinking unconscious emotions. Should we then conclude
that it is impossible to think unconscious emotions without contradiction?
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M. Gyemant
Freud’s Contribution to the Phenomenology of Emotions: How
Unconscious Emotions can make Sense
Several letters that Freud wrote to Wilhelm Fliess in 1898 (namely, the letters of
August 26 and 31, as well as September 27) show that the inventor of psychoanalysis
was reading Lipps’s Basic Facts of Mental Life at the moment that the Interpretation
of Dreams was conceived. And in fact, Lipps is quoted in Chapter VII of the Interpre-
tation of Dreams as the only contemporary philosopher who has supported the idea
that everything that is psychic is not necessarily also conscious (Freud, 1931: 464).
But no matter how much Freud agreed with Lipps’s position in Basic Facts and in
the 1896 conference presentation, he still made the point that even Lipps could not
imagine the profound psychological dimension called the unconscious in Freud’s
metapsychology (Gyemant, 2021: 71–85).
In fact, Lipps’s point in his 1896 conference presentation was that there is continu-
ity between the unconscious and the conscious aspects of mental life. For Lipps, there
is no essential dierence between the unconscious and the conscious dimensions of
mental life, since all unconscious phenomena are potentially conscious. Freud, on
the other hand, has a dierent idea of the dynamics of mental life. It is not continuity,
but fracture that appears to be the main dynamic structure relating the unconscious
to the conscious. This is because Freud does not use the term “unconscious” in the
same way as Lipps. What Lipps (like Husserl, for that matter) called unconscious
corresponds instead to Freud’s “preconscious”: a part of our mental life that is not
actually conscious, but could arrive in consciousness without any obstacle. But for
Freud, the phenomena that he calls “preconscious” are actually part of a larger sys-
tem including consciousness. They correspond to what Husserlian phenomenologists
who discuss the unconscious like to point to as a broader concept of consciousness
that cannot be conned to objectifying intentionality. But besides Freud’s concept
of the preconscious—which indicates a part of the human psyche already identied
by Husserl, Lipps, and any other philosopher who tried to conceptualize the uncon-
scious—he also has his own concept of the unconscious, to be distinguished from
the preconscious. Whereas the preconscious and the conscious work together in a
coherent system, the Freudian unconscious corresponds to a dierent system obeying
dierent rules. If there is a dynamic that relates the two, it is a dynamic of fracture, of
attack and defense, for which Freud uses one word: repression.
There are consequently two kinds of unconscious, which have not as yet been
distinguished by psychologists. Both are unconscious in the psychological
sense; but in our sense the rst, which we call Ucs., is likewise incapable of
consciousness; whereas the second we call Pcs. Because its excitations, after
the observance of certain rules, are capable of reaching consciousness. (Freud,
1931: 464f.)
What characterizes Freud’s concept of the repressed unconscious is precisely the fact
that it cannot become conscious as such. And it is repression—this resistance that
forbids a particular process to reach the preconscious stages that precede the arrival
of a certain content in consciousness—that makes any negotiation impossible. The
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Unconscious Emotions and the Limits of Phenomenology: Husserl,…
repressed part of mental life never was and never can become conscious. Freud’s
psychoanalytical concept of the unconscious is thus much more radical than the psy-
chological concept used by Lipps: it names a part of mental life that is inaccessible
to any kind of knowledge.
Of course, it is then vital to show how we can even imagine the existence of such
a profoundly mysterious unconscious. Freud’s answer is similar to the one provided
by Lipps: we know about the existence of this part of our mental life because it has
visible eects on our conscious life. These eects are dreams, lapsus linguae, and
neurotic symptoms that can only be explained in a satisfactory manner by introducing
the hypothesis of a repressed unconscious. Proving that such a repressed unconscious
exists is the main metapsychological task of psychoanalysis. I will not go through all
the arguments Freud could muster in order to defend his discovery against philoso-
phers, scientists, and public opinion. Suce it to say that this was the major ght he
fought his whole life.
I would rather get back to my original question concerning unconscious emotions
and feelings. Freud’s repressed unconscious is in fact made mostly of aective ele-
ments. In the Interpretation of Dreams, he denes all dreams as the accomplishments
of unconscious desires. This denition thus clearly assumes the existence of such
unconscious desires. The neurotic symptoms are also explained in terms of desire.
But why should a desire suer repression, rather than simply being acknowledged by
the subject and consequently rejected?
A vast number of cases that Freud describes in his work show that the psychologi-
cal reason for repression always has to do with an unbearable emotion—unbearable
either because of its intensity or because of its quality in relation to its object. Let’s
go back to the example of Anna O. Her symptoms are the result of repressed desires;
for instance, the desire to join the party, to dance with the other young people to the
music she can remotely hear while being stuck by the bed of her suering father,
produced a cough that repeated itself through the length of her illness each time
she heard rhythmic music (Breuer & Freud, 1957: 39). But for such an understand-
able desire, there would have been no need for repression. However, the desire was
repressed because of the strong feelings of frustration, anger, and aggression directed
against her father, which gave it the particular color of a desire for the death of the
father. It was the presence of these negative emotions attached to a father she loved
and to whom she was devoted that were unbearable to such a point that Anna O.’s
resistance forcefully pushed the desire back as if it never existed.
It is not uncommon for strong feelings of anger or love to seem unconscious,
unknown to a subject who cannot confess them to herself. But how can we give a
theoretical explanation of the actual existence in the psyche of feelings that are not
actually felt, feelings of which the subject is not aware? If Anna O. does not let her-
self feel the hostility against her father, can we still say this emotion belongs to her?
Freud himself asks this question in one of the most important metapsychological
texts from 1915 titled “The Unconscious”. A short section of this text, the same that
was quoted by Samuel Lepine, is dedicated to the question whether in addition to
unconscious ideas, we can also consider the possibility of unconscious emotions. The
term “emotion” encompasses, for Freud, two categories of experiences: instinctual
impulses or drives on the one hand, emotions and feelings on the other. In the case
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M. Gyemant
of instincts, Freud’s position is clear: “An instinct can never become an object of
consciousness—only the idea that represents the instinct can” (Freud, 1957b: 177).
This is because the only way an instinct manifests itself is through its ideational
representative, which can be either an idea or an aective movement (an emotion).
But in the case of emotions and feelings, the answer is more complicated, since
they play precisely the role of the conscious representative of a drive. Freud has him-
self identied the diculty we have mentioned concerning the problem of imagining
an emotion or a feeling of which we know nothing. Indeed, what we call by these
terms is precisely an experience we are able to identify and acknowledge as such. In
Freud’s words:
It is surely of the essence of an emotion that we should be aware of it, i.e. that
it should become known to consciousness. Thus, the possibility of the attribute
of unconsciousness would be completely excluded as far as emotions, feelings
and aects are concerned. (Freud, 1957b: 177)
And yet, as we have already mentioned, unconscious emotions comprise the main
object of psychoanalysis. This point can only be understood in relation to Freud’s
dynamic perspective and his concept of repression, because for Freud, “to suppress
the development of aect is the true work of repression and […] its work is incom-
plete if this aim is not achieved” (Freud, 1957b: 178).
Repression doesn’t simply aim at forbidding certain ideas to be thought. Ideas in
themselves are neutral. What motivates repression is the amount of emotion an idea
can awaken. It is this emotion that threatens to disrupt the coherence of the subject’s
idea of herself and thus to create chaos in her conscious life, as we have seen with
Anna O. This is why repression is mainly directed toward such emotions.
Once repression is activated, the vicissitudes of the repressed process can be of
many sorts, but they can be classied into three categories: the aect is either suc-
cessfully repressed (1) or only partially repressed, and in the latter case, it can either
remain wholly or partly as it is (2), or it can be transformed into a qualitatively dier-
ent aect, often into anxiety (3). If the aect is successfully repressed, Freud notices
that its status is nevertheless dierent from that of repressed ideas. Repressed ideas
continue to exist as unconscious and to have conscious eects, “whereas all that cor-
responds in [the Ucs.] system to unconscious aects is a potential beginning which is
prevented from developing” (Freud, 1957b: 178).
If repression were always entirely successful, then we could indeed say that there
are no actual unconscious emotions: they have no real occurrence in the psyche.
Once repressed, they don’t stay unconscious but disappear completely, and the only
thing that remains is the possibility that they might appear again. But it is problem-
atic to know whether the trace of repression can vanish completely—in other words,
whether such a perfectly successful repression is possible. In any case, if it is, we can
know nothing of it.
There are, however, cases in which repression fails, partially or completely. If it
fails completely, the emotion is actually felt and becomes conscious, so this cannot
count as an example of unconscious emotions either. But when repression succeeds
only partially, even though the emotion does not become conscious as such, it still has
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Unconscious Emotions and the Limits of Phenomenology: Husserl,…
enough force to produce certain conscious eects. The symptoms of Anna O.—for
instance, her paralytic contracture, her sight problems, the anxiety and absences, and
the fact that for some time she only spoke in English—are such eects. It is precisely
the main task of the psychoanalyst to decode these symptoms in order to make them
disappear, and instead let the emotion come to consciousness in a safe environment
so that the subject is able to face it and control it.
Partially repressed emotions thus continue to exist as mental realities without
being felt as such. They are either disconnected from their real idea or object—as, for
instance, in the case where anger is directed toward oneself instead of toward loved
ones—or they appear to consciousness in a disguised form, often as their opposites
(for instance, repressed love becomes conscious anxiety or even conscious hate).
Thus the emotion in its real form stays unconscious and unknown to the subject, but
it does not disappear from the mind. Due to repression, it cannot be actually felt as
such, but because of the symptoms it produces it cannot be ignored either. It is in this
case of unsuccessfully repressed emotions—and only in this case—that we can talk
of unconscious emotions. The ways an unconscious emotion can make itself known
to consciousness are various and complex, but the results of psychoanalysis show
without a doubt that there it makes sense to speak of unconscious emotions, provided
that we adopt a dynamic point of view of psychic processes and that we have in mind
both Freud’s denition of the unconscious as the repressed part of our psyche and the
idea that repression can sometimes fail.
Conclusion
We can then conclude that unconscious emotions are indeed not only possible but
an undeniable part of our mental life, as is abundantly shown by the results of psy-
choanalysis. But in order to understand these unconscious emotions, we rst need to
acknowledge the existence of an important part of our psyche that stays unconscious.
This thesis is dependent on a change of point of view. Only a dynamic phenomenol-
ogy, similar to the position defended by Lipps, can provide a meaningful concept of
the unconscious because unconscious events cannot be seized and described for their
own sake. Since we only have access to our conscious life, unconscious phenomena
can only be inferred from their conscious eects. As we have seen, however, this
dynamic point of view concerning the unconscious, one that Lipps and Freud share is
not itself sucient to demonstrate the existence of unconscious emotions. In Lipps’s
view, emotions are, on the contrary, precisely the conscious signs that show us that
an unconscious process is taking place. Freud’s theory of repression is the only one
capable of explaining the existence of unconscious emotions. It is only when under-
stood as the unknown causes related to certain conscious symptoms that uncon-
scious emotions can nally be validated. Paradoxically, they only make sense if the
unconscious in question is irreducible to and radically dierent from consciousness
because it is only if they have been deformed by repression that unconscious emo-
tions can be simultaneously present and unknown. But since Freud has demonstrated
the existence of unconscious emotions, phenomenology cannot turn its back on this
discovery: on the contrary, following Freud, it can and must push its limits further
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M. Gyemant
and fully embrace this new eld opened for exploration—the eld of the repressed,
of the pathological, of unconscious emotions.
Acknowledgements This work was funded by the EU’s NextGenerationEU instrument through the
National Recovery and Resilience Plan of Romania - Pillar III-C9-I-8, managed by the Ministry of
Research, Innovation and Digitalization, within the project entitled “The Life of the Heart: Phenom-
enology of Body and Emotions” (University of Bucharest), contract no. 760052/23.05.2023, code CF
21/14.11.2022.
Declarations
Conict of Interest The Author has no conict of interest to declare.
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License,
which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long
as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative
Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this
article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line
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is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission
directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/.
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