The Temporality of Sexual Life in Husserl and Freud

• In this text there are two things I would like to show: Firstly, that the so-called "timelessness" of the Freudian unconscious can be elucidated through an interpretation of the concept of Nachträglichkeit as it functions in Freud's texts, and showing thereby that there is indeed a temporality specific to the workings of the unconscious. Freud's analysis of early psychic trauma related to sexual phenomena pointed to a serious complication for all believers in the immediate transparency of consciousness. For the "wound" itself was constituted over time, and the possibility of coming to understand the trauma was again only possible after the event had passed. The Nachträglichkeit involved in the psychoanalytical understanding of sexual trauma thus hinges on a threefold temporal process at work in subjective life. Secondly, I wish to show that Husserl, in his analyses of time and intersubjectivity, delivered the materials with which a phenomenological clarification of the Freudian idea of Nachträglichkeit can be given in its most formal outlines. Since Nachträglichkeit is essentially tied to the structure of repression (and thus the very constitution of the unconscious), what I am suggesting is a prolegomenon to a phenomenological clarification of Freudian repression.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Filosofi, etik och religion -- Filosofi (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Philosophy, Ethics and Religion -- Philosophy (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Phenomenology

psychoanalysis

Husserl

Freud

sexuality

temporality

unconscious

Nachträglichkeit

Kritisk kulturteori

Critical and Cultural Theory

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kap (subject category)