Intersubjectivity is a key term used in philosophy, psychology, sociology and anthropology to conceptualize the psychological relation between people. It is usually used in contrast to solipsistic individual experience, emphasizing our inherently social being.

Definition[link]

The term has been defined in at least three ways^[1]:

1. First, in its weakest sense intersubjectivity refers to agreement. There is intersubjectivity between people if they agree on a given set of meanings or a definition of the situation. For example, Thomas Scheff defines intersubjectivity as "the sharing of subjective states by two or more individuals."^[2]
2. Second, and more subtly intersubjectivity refers to the "common-sense," shared meanings constructed by people in their interactions with each other and used as an everyday resource to interpret the meaning of elements of social and cultural life. If people share common sense, then they share a definition of the situation.^[3]
3. Third, the term has been used to refer to shared (or partially shared) divergences of meaning. Self-presentation, lying, practical jokes, and social emotions, for example, all entail not a shared definition of the situation, but partially shared divergences of meaning. Someone who is telling a lie is engaged in an intersubjective act because they are working with two different definitions of the situation. Lying is thus genuinely inter-subjective (in the sense of operating between two subjective definitions of reality).

Intersubjectivity emphasizes that shared cognition and consensus is essential in the shaping of our ideas and relations. Language, quintessentially, is viewed as communal rather than private. Therefore, it is problematic to view the individual as partaking in a private world, one which has a meaning defined apart from any other subjects. But in our shared divergence from a commonly understood experience, these private worlds of semi-solipsism naturally emerge.

Intersubjectivity can also be understood as the process of psychological energy moving between two or more subjects. In a room where someone is lying on their deathbed, for example, the room can appear to be enveloped in a shroud of gloom for other people interacting with the dying person. The psychological weight of one subject comes to bear on the minds of others depending on how they react to it, thereby creating an intersubjective experience that, without multiple consciousnesses interacting with each other, would be otherwise strictly solitary. Love is a prime example of intersubjectivity that implies a shared feeling of care and affection, among others.

In psychoanalysis[link]

Intersubjectivity is an important concept in modern schools of psychoanalysis, where it has found application to the theory of the interrelations between analyst and analysand. Adopting an intersubjective perspective in psychoanalysis means, above all, to give up what Robert Stolorow and George E. Atwood define as "the myth of isolated mind."^[4] In Stolorow, Atwood, and Orange's "intersubjective-systems theory," "intersubjective" refers not to the sharing of subjective states but to the constitution of psychological systems or fields in the interplay of differently organized experiential worlds. In their view, emotional experience always takes form within such intersubjective systems.

Among the early authors who explored this conception in psychoanalysis, in an explicit or implicit way, were Heinz Kohut, Robert Stolorow, George E. Atwood, Jessica Benjamin in the United States and Silvia Montefoschi in Italy.

Since the late 1980s, a direction in psychoanalysis often referred to as relational psychoanalysis or just relational theory has developed. A central person figure in the theory is Daniel Stern.^[5] Empirically, the intersubjective school is inspired by research on the non-verbal communication of infants, young children, and their parents.^[6][7] A central question is how relational issues are communicated at a very fast pace in a non-verbal fashion. Scholars also stress the importance of real relationships between two equivalent partners. The journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues is devoted to relational psychoanalysis.

In philosophy[link]

Intersubjectivity is a major topic in philosophy. The duality of self and other has long been contemplated by philosophers, and what it means to have an intersubjective experience, and what sort of lessons can be drawn from them. Ethics, for example, deals with how one should act and what one owes in an intersubjective experience where there is an identifiable other.

Phenomenology[link]

In phenomenology, intersubjectivity performs many functions. It allows empathy, which in phenomenology involves experiencing another person as a subject rather than just as an object among objects. In so doing, one experiences oneself as seen by the Other, and the world in general as a shared world instead of one only available to oneself.

Early studies on the phenomenology of intersubjectivity were done by Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. His student, Edith Stein, extended the concept and its basis in empathy in her 1917 doctoral dissertation On the Problem of Empathy (Zum Problem der Einfühlung).

Intersubjectivity also helps in the constitution of objectivity: in the experience of the world as available not only to oneself, but also to the Other, there is a bridge between the personal and the shared, the self and the Others.

In Psychology[link]

Studies of dialogue and dialogism have revealed how language is deeply intersubjective. When we speak, we always address our interlocutors, taking their perspective, and orienting to what we think they think (or more usually don't think).^[8] Within this tradition of research it has been argued that the structure of individual signs or symbols, the basis of language, are intersubjective^[9] and that the psychological process of self-reflection entails intersubjectivity.^[10] Recent research on mirror neurons provides evidence for the deeply intersubjective basis of human psychology,^[11] and arguably much of the literature on empathy and theory of mind relate directly to intersubjectivity.

See also[link]

References[link]

1. ^ Gillespie, A. & Cornish, F. (2010). Intersubjectivity: Towards a dialogical analysis. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 40, 19-46
2. ^ Scheff, Thomas et al. (2006). Goffman Unbound!: A New Paradigm for Social Science (The Sociological Imagination), Paradigm Publishers (ISBN 978-1-59451-196-7)
3. ^ Clive Seale. Glossary, Researching Society and Culture.
4. ^ http://books.google.com/books?id=EbuJO7ZOHtMC&pg=PA7&lpg=PA7&dq=the+myth+of+isolated+mind&source=web&ots=q8NGjSl1CH&sig=JlbsdG9ldNL_K3yffYPf5waPbmQ
5. ^ Stern, Daniel (2004). The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life. W.W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-70429-7. 
6. ^ Beebe, Beatrice; Frank M Lachmann (2002). Infant Research and Adult Treatment. Co-constructing Interactions. London: Analytic Press. ISBN 978-0-88163-245-3. 
7. ^ Schechter DS (2003). Intergenerational communication of maternal violent trauma: Understanding the interplay of reflective functioning and posttraumatic psychopathology. In S.W. Coates, J.L. Rosenthal and D.S. Schechter (eds.) September 11: Trauma and Human Bonds. Hillside, NJ: Analytic Press, Inc. pp. 115-142.
8. ^ Linell, P. (2009). Rethinking language, mind and world dialogically. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing
9. ^ Gillespie, A. (2009). The intersubjective nature of symbols. In Brady Wagoner (Ed), Symbolic transformations. London: Routledge
10. ^ Gillespie, A. (2007). The social basis of self-reflection. In Valsiner and Rosa (Eds), The Cambridge handbook of sociocultural psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University press
11. ^ Rizzolatti, G. & Arbib, M. A. (1998). Language within our grasp. Trends in neurosciences, 21, 188-194.

Further reading[link]

In psychoanalysis[link]

• Laplanche, J. & Pontalis, J. B. (1974). The Language of Psycho-Analysis, Edited by W. W. Norton & Company, ISBN 0-393-01105-4
• Stolorow, R. D., Atwood, G. E., & Orange, D. M. (2002). Worlds of Experience: Interweaving Philosophical and Clinical Dimensions in Psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books.

Philosophy[link]

• Edmund Husserl Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass 1905-1920
• Edmund Husserl Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass 1921-1928
• Edmund Husserl Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass 1929-1935
• Edmund Husserl Cartesian Meditations, Edited by S. Strasser, 1950. ISBN 978-90-247-0068-4

External links[link]

• Critique of intersubjectivity Article by Mats Winther
• Edmund Husserl: Empathy, intersubjectivity and lifeworld, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl

Edmund Husserl
Born	April 8, 1859 Proßnitz, Moravia, Austria (today Prostějov, Czech Republic)
Died	April 28, 1938(1938-04-28) (aged 79) Freiburg, Germany
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Phenomenology
Main interests	Epistemology, Mathematics
Notable ideas	Epoché, Natural Standpoint, Noema, Noesis, Eidetic Reduction, Retention and protention, Phenomenology
Influenced by Franz Brentano, Carl Stumpf, Karl Weierstrass, Gottlob Frege, Bernard Bolzano, Johann Friedrich Herbart, Friedrich Nietzsche, René Descartes, Saint Augustine, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Plato
Influenced Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Adolf Reinach, Eugène Minkowski, Edith Stein (St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross), Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Roman Ingarden, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Hannah Arendt, Alfred Schütz, Paul Ricœur, Kurt Gödel, John Paul II, Rudolf Carnap, Jacques Derrida, Leszek Kołakowski, José Ortega y Gasset, Milan Kundera, Eugen Fink, Alexandre Koyré, Millán-Puelles, Hans Blumenberg, Bernard Stiegler, Ludwig Landgrebe, Marvin Farber, Jan Patočka, Jean-Luc Marion Olavo de Carvalho, Dallas Willard, Jan Patočka, Francisco Varela, Theodor Adorno, Ludwig von Mises.

Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl (German pronunciation: [ˈhʊsɛʁl]; April 8, 1859, Proßnitz, Moravia, Austrian Empire – April 26, 1938, Freiburg, Germany) was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic. Not limited to empiricism, but believing that experience is the source of all knowledge, he worked on a method of phenomenological reduction by which a subject may come to know directly an essence.

Although born into a Jewish family, Husserl was baptized as a Lutheran in 1886. He studied mathematics under Karl Weierstrass and Leo Königsberger, and philosophy under Franz Brentano and Carl Stumpf. Husserl himself taught philosophy as a Privatdozent at Halle from 1887, then as professor, first at Göttingen from 1901, then at Freiburg from 1916 until he retired in 1928. Thereafter he gave two notable lectures: at Paris in 1929, and at Prague in 1935. The notorious 1933 race laws of the Nazi regime took away his academic standing and privileges. Following an illness, he died at Freiburg in 1938.

Life and career[link]

Youth and education[link]

Husserl was born in 1859 in Prostějov (German: Prossnitz), a town in the Bohemian province of Moravia, that was then in the Austrian Empire, after 1918 in Czechoslovakia, and since 1993 in the Czech Republic. He was born into a Jewish family, the second of four children (boy, boy, girl, boy). His father was a milliner (one who designs, makes, trims, or sells women's hats). His childhood was spent in Prostějov, where he attended the elementary school. Then Husserl traveled to Vienna to study at the Realgymnasium there, followed next by the Staatsgymnasium in Olomouc (Ger: Olmütz).^[1][2]

At the University of Leipzig from 1876 to 1878, Husserl studied mathematics, physics, and astronomy. At Leipzig he was inspired by philosophy lectures given by Wilhelm Wundt, one of the founders of modern psychology. Then he moved to the Humboldt University of Berlin (then called the Friedrich William University) in 1878 where he continued his study of mathematics under Leopold Kronecker and the renowned Karl Weierstrass. In Berlin he found a mentor in Thomas Masaryk, then a former philosophy student of Franz Brentano and later the first president of Czechoslovakia. There Husserl also attended Friedrich Paulsen's philosophy lectures. In 1881 he left for the University of Vienna to complete his mathematics studies under the supervision of Leo Königsberger (a former student of Weierstrass). At Vienna in 1883 he obtained his Ph.D. with the work Beiträge zur Variationsrechnung ("Contributions to the Calculus of Variations").^[1]

Evidently as a result of his becoming familiar with the New Testament during his twenties, he asked to be baptized into the Lutheran Church in 1886. Husserl's father Adolf had died in 1884. Prof. Spiegelberg writes, "While outward religious practice never entered his life any more than it did that of most academic scholars of the time, his mind remained open for the religious phenomenon as for any other genuine experience." At times Husserl saw his goal as one of moral "renewal". Although a steadfast proponent of a radical and rational autonomy in all things, Husserl could also speak "about his vocation and even about his mission under God's will to find new ways for philosophy and science," observes Spiegelberg.^[3]

Following his doctorate in mathematics, he returned to Berlin to work as the assistant to Karl Weierstrass. Yet already Husserl had felt the desire to pursue philosophy. Then professor Weierstrass became very ill. Husserl became free to return to Vienna where, after serving a short military duty, he devoted his attention to philosophy. In 1884 at the University of Vienna he attended the lectures of Franz Brentano on philosophy and philosophical psychology. Brentano introduced him to the writings of Bernard Bolzano, Hermann Lotze, J. Stuart Mill, and David Hume. Husserl was so impressed by Brentano that he decided to dedicate his life to philosophy. Indeed, Franz Brentano is often credited as being his most important influence, e.g., with regard to intentionality. Following academic advice, two years later in 1886 Husserl followed Carl Stumpf, a former student of Brentano, to the University of Halle, seeking to obtain his Habilitation which would qualify him to teach at the university level. There under Stumpf's supervision he wrote Über den Begriff der Zahl (On the concept of Number) in 1887, which would serve later as the base for his first important work, Philosophie der Arithmetik (1891).^[4]

In 1887 he married Malvine Steinschneider, a union that would last over fifty years. In 1892 their daughter Elizabeth was born, in 1893 their son Gerhard, and in 1894 their son Wolfgang. Elizabeth would marry in 1922, and Gerhard in 1923; Wolfgang, however, became a casualty of the First World War.^[2]

Professor of philosophy[link]

Following his marriage Husserl began his long teaching career in philosophy. He started where he was in 1887 as a Privatdozent at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg. In 1891 he published his Philosophie der Arithmetik. Psychologische und logische Untersuchungen which, drawing on his prior studies in mathematics and philosophy, proposed a psychological context as the basis of mathematics. It drew the adverse notice of Gottlob Frege, who criticized its psychologism.^[5][6]

In 1901 Husserl with his family moved to the Georg-August University of Göttingen where he taught as extraordinarius professor. Just prior a major work of his was published: Logische Untersuchungen (Halle 1900-1901). Volume one contains seasoned reflections on "pure logic" in which he carefully refutes "psychologism".^[7][8] This work was well received and became the subject of a seminar given by Wilhelm Dilthey; Husserl in 1905 traveled to Berlin to visit Dilthey. Two years later in Italy he paid a visit to Franz Brentano his inspiring old teacher and to Constantin Carathéodory the mathematician. Kant and Descartes were also now influencing his thought. In 1910 he became joint editor of the journal Logos. During this period Husserl had delivered lectures on internal time consciousness, which several decades later his former student Heidegger edited for publication.^[9]

In 1912 at Freiburg the journal Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Phänomenologische Forschung was founded by Husserl and his school, which published articles of their phenomenological movement from 1913 to 1930. His important work Ideen^[10] was published in its first issue. Before beginning Ideen Husserl's thought had reached the stage where "each subject is 'presented' to itself, and to each all others are 'presentiated' (Vergegenwartigung), not as parts of nature but as pure consciousness."^[11] Ideen advanced his transition to a "transcendental interpretation" of phenomenology, a view later criticized by, among others, Jean-Paul Sartre.^[12] In Ideen Paul Ricoeur sees the development of Husserl's thought as leading "from the psychological cogito to the transcendental cogito." As phenomenology further evolves, it leads (when viewed from another vantage point in Husserl's 'labyrinth') to "transcendental subjectivity".^[13] Also in Ideen Husserl explicitly elaborates the eidetic and phenomenological reductions.^[14][15] In 1913 Karl Jaspers visited Husserl at Göttingen.

In October, 1914, both his sons were sent to the fighting on the Western Front of World War I. The next year his son Wolfgang was badly injured at the front. On March 8, 1916, on the battlefield of Verdun, Wolfgang Husserl was killed in action. The next year his son Gerhard was wounded in the war but survived, and his mother Julia died. In November, 1917, one of his outstanding students and later a noted philosophy professor in his own right, Adolf Reinach, was killed in the war while serving in Flanders.^[2]

Husserl had transferred in 1916 to the Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg (Freiburg im Breisgau) where he continued bringing his work in philosophy to fruition, now as a full professor.^[16] Edith Stein served as his personal assistant during his first few years in Freiburg, followed later by Martin Heidegger from 1920 to 1923. The mathematician Hermann Weyl began corresponding with him in 1918. Husserl gave four lectures on Phenomenological method at University College, London, in 1922. The University of Berlin in 1923 called on him to relocate there, but he declined the offer. In 1926 Heidegger dedicated his book Sein und Zeit to him "in grateful respect and friendship."^[17] Husserl remained in his professorship at Freiburg until he requested retirement, teaching his last class on July 25, 1928. A festschrift to celebrate his seventieth birthday was presented to him on April 8, 1929.

Nineteen thirty-three was an ugly year in Germany when the racial laws of the new Nazi regime were enacted. On April 6 Husserl was suspended from the University of Freiburg by the Badische Ministry of Culture; the following week he was disallowed any university activities. Yet his colleague Heidegger was elected Rektor of the university on April 21–22, and joined the Nazi party. By contrast, in July Husserl resigned from the Deutsche Academie.^[2]

Despite retirement, Husserl gave several notable lectures. The first, at Paris in 1929,^[18] led to Méditations cartésiennes (Paris 1931).^[19] Husserl here reviews the "transcendental ego", presented earlier in his pivotal Ideen (1913), in terms of Descartes' "cogito". Yet instead of infinity and the Deity being the ego's gateway to the Other as in Descartes, Husserl's ego itself becomes transcendent. It remains, however, alone (unconnected). Only the ego's grasp "by analogy" of the Other (e.g., by conjectural reciprocity) allows the possibility for an 'objective' intersubjectivity, and hence for community.^[20] In 1934 José Ortega y Gasset came to visit him.

Later Husserl lectured at Prague in 1935 and Vienna in 1936, which resulted in a very differently styled work that while innovative is no less problematic: Die Krisis (Belgrade 1936).^[21][22] Husserl describes here the cultural crisis gripping Europe, then approaches a philosophy of history, discussing Galileo, Descartes, several British philosophers, and Kant. The apolitical Husserl before had specifically avoided such historical discussions, pointedly preferring to go directly to an investigation of consciousness. Merleau-Ponty and others question whether Husserl here does not undercut his own position, in that Husserl had attacked in principle historicism, while specifically designing his phenomenology to be rigorous enough to transcend the limits of history. Au contraire, Husserl may be indicating here that historical traditions are merely features given to the pure ego's intuition, like any other.^[23][24] A longer section follows on the "life world" [Lebenswelt], one not observed by the objective logic of science, but a world seen in our subjective experience.^[25] Yet a problem arises similar to that dealing with 'history' above, a chicken-and-egg problem. Does the life world contextualize and thus compromise the gaze of the pure ego, or does the phenomenological method nonetheless raise the ego up transcendent?^[26] These last writings presented the fruits of his professional life. Since his university retirement Husserl had "worked at a tremendous pace, producing several major works."^[1]

After suffering a fall the autumn of 1937, the philosopher became ill with pleurisy. Edmund Husserl died at Freiburg on April 27, 1938, having just turned 79. His wife Malvine survived him. Eugen Fink, his research assistant, delivered his eulogy.^[27] Gerhard Ritter was the only Freiburg faculty member to attend the funeral, as an anti-Nazi protest.

Heidegger and the Nazi era[link]

Professor Husserl was denied the use of the library at Freiburg as a result of the anti-Jewish legislation the Nazis passed in April 1933.^[28] It was rumoured that his former pupil and Nazi Party member, Martin Heidegger, informed Husserl that he was discharged, but Heidegger later denied this, labeling it as slander.^[29]

Apparently Husserl and Heidegger had moved apart during the 1920s, which became clearer after 1928 when Husserl retired and Heidegger succeeded to his University chair. In the summer of 1929 Husserl had studied carefully selected writings of Heidegger, coming to the conclusion that on several of their key positions they differed, e.g., Heidegger substituted Dasein ["Being-there"] for the pure ego, thus transforming phenomenology into an anthropology, a specie of psychologism strongly disfavored by Husserl. Such observations of Heidegger, along with a critique of Max Scheler, were put into a lecture Husserl gave to various Kant Societies in Frankfurt, Berlin, and Halle during 1931 entitled Phänomenologie und Anthropologie.^[30][31]

In the war-time 1941 edition of Heidegger's primary work, Being and Time (first published in 1927), the original dedication to Husserl was removed. This was not due to a negation of the relationship between the two philosophers, however, but rather was the result of a suggested censorship by Heidegger's publisher who feared that the book might otherwise be banned by the Nazi regime.^[29] The dedication can still be found in a footnote on page 38, thanking Husserl for his guidance and generosity. Husserl, of course, had died several years earlier. In post-war editions of Sein und Zeit the dedication to Husserl is restored. The complex, troubled, and sundered philosophical relationship between Husserl and Heidegger has been widely discussed.^[32][33]

On May 4, 1933, Professor Edmund Husserl addressed the recent regime change in Germany and its consequences:

"The future alone will judge which was the true Germany in 1933, and who were the true Germans--those who subscribe to the more or less materialistic-mythical racial prejudices of the day, or those Germans pure in heart and mind, heirs to the great Germans of the past whose tradition they revere and perpetuate."^[34]

After his death, Husserl's manuscripts, amounting to approximately 40,000 pages of "Gabelsberger" stenography and his complete research library, were in 1939 smuggled to Belgium by the Franciscan priest Herman Van Breda. There they were deposited at Leuven to form the Husserl-Archives of the Higher Institute of Philosophy.^[35] Much of the material in his research manuscripts has since been published in the Husserliana critical edition series.^[36]

Development of his thought[link]

Several early themes[link]

In his first works Husserl tries to combine mathematics, psychology and philosophy with a main goal to provide a sound foundation for mathematics. He analyzes the psychological process needed to obtain the concept of number and then tries to build up a systematical theory on this analysis. To achieve this he uses several methods and concepts taken from his teachers. From Weierstrass he derives the idea that we generate the concept of number by counting a certain collection of objects.

From Brentano and Stumpf he takes over the distinction between proper and improper presenting. In an example Husserl explains this in the following way: if you are standing in front of a house, you have a proper, direct presentation of that house, but if you are looking for it and ask for directions, then these directions (e.g. the house on the corner of this and that street) are an indirect, improper presentation. In other words, you can have a proper presentation of an object if it is actually present, and an improper (or symbolic as he also calls it) if you only can indicate that object through signs, symbols, etc. Husserl's Logical Investigations (1900–1901) is considered the starting point for the formal theory of wholes and their parts known as mereology.^[37]

Another important element that Husserl took over from Brentano is intentionality, the notion that the main characteristic of consciousness is that it is always intentional. While often simplistically summarised as "aboutness" or the relationship between mental acts and the external world, Brentano defined it as the main characteristic of mental phenomena, by which they could be distinguished from physical phenomena. Every mental phenomenon, every psychological act, has a content, is directed at an object (the intentional object). Every belief, desire, etc. has an object that it is about: the believed, the wanted. Brentano used the expression "intentional inexistence" to indicate the status of the objects of thought in the mind. The property of being intentional, of having an intentional object, was the key feature to distinguish mental phenomena and physical phenomena, because physical phenomena lack intentionality altogether.

The elaboration of phenomenology[link]

Some years after the 1900-1901 publication of his main work, the Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations), Husserl made some key conceptual elaborations which led him to assert that in order to study the structure of consciousness, one would have to distinguish between the act of consciousness and the phenomena at which it is directed (the objects as intended). Knowledge of essences would only be possible by "bracketing" all assumptions about the existence of an external world. This procedure he called epoché. These new concepts prompted the publication of the Ideen (Ideas) in 1913, in which they were at first incorporated, and a plan for a second edition of the Logische Untersuchungen.

From the Ideen onward, Husserl concentrated on the ideal, essential structures of consciousness. The metaphysical problem of establishing the material reality of what we perceive was of little interest to Husserl in spite of his being a transcendental idealist. Husserl proposed that the world of objects and ways in which we direct ourselves toward and perceive those objects is normally conceived of in what he called the "natural standpoint", which is characterized by a belief that objects materially exist and exhibit properties that we see as emanating from them. Husserl proposed a radical new phenomenological way of looking at objects by examining how we, in our many ways of being intentionally directed toward them, actually "constitute" them (to be distinguished from materially creating objects or objects merely being figments of the imagination); in the Phenomenological standpoint, the object ceases to be something simply "external" and ceases to be seen as providing indicators about what it is, and becomes a grouping of perceptual and functional aspects that imply one another under the idea of a particular object or "type". The notion of objects as real is not expelled by phenomenology, but "bracketed" as a way in which we regard objects instead of a feature that inheres in an object's essence founded in the relation between the object and the perceiver. In order to better understand the world of appearances and objects, phenomenology attempts to identify the invariant features of how objects are perceived and pushes attributions of reality into their role as an attribution about the things we perceive (or an assumption underlying how we perceive objects).

In a later period, Husserl began to wrestle with the complicated issues of intersubjectivity, specifically, how communication about an object can be assumed to refer to the same ideal entity (Cartesian Meditations, Meditation V). Husserl tries new methods of bringing his readers to understand the importance of phenomenology to scientific inquiry (and specifically to psychology) and what it means to "bracket" the natural attitude. The Crisis of the European Sciences is Husserl's unfinished work that deals most directly with these issues. In it, Husserl for the first time attempts a historical overview of the development of Western philosophy and science, emphasizing the challenges presented by their increasingly (one-sidedly) empirical and naturalistic orientation. Husserl declares that mental and spiritual reality possess their own reality independent of any physical basis,^[38] and that a science of the mind ('Geisteswissenschaft') must be established on as scientific a foundation as the natural sciences have managed:

"It is my conviction that intentional phenomenology has for the first time made spirit as spirit the field of systematic scientific experience, thus effecting a total transformation of the task of knowledge."^[39]

Philosophy[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

Meaning and object[link]

From Logical Investigations (1900/1901) to Experience and Judgment (published in 1939), Husserl expressed clearly the difference between meaning and object. He identified several different kinds of names. For example, there are names that have the role of properties that uniquely identify an object. Each of these names express a meaning and designate the same object. Examples of this are "the victor in Jena" and "the loser in Waterloo", or "the equilateral triangle" and "the equiangular triangle"; in both cases, both names express different meanings, but designate the same object. There are names which have no meaning, but have the role of designating an object: "Aristotle", "Socrates", and so on. Finally, there are names which designate a variety of objects. These are called "universal names"; their meaning is a "concept" and refers to a series of objects (the extension of the concept). The way we know sensible objects is called "sensible intuition".

Husserl also identifies a series of "formal words" which are necessary to form sentences and have no sensible correlates. Examples of formal words are "a", "the", "more than", "over", "under", "two", "group", and so on. Every sentence must contain formal words to designate what Husserl calls "formal categories". There are two kinds of categories: meaning categories and formal-ontological categories. Meaning categories relate judgments; they include forms of conjunction, disjunction, forms of plural, among others. Formal-ontological categories relate objects and include notions such as set, cardinal number, ordinal number, part and whole, relation, and so on. The way we know these categories is through a faculty of understanding called "categorial intuition".

Through sensible intuition our consciousness constitutes what Husserl calls a "situation of affairs" (Sachlage). It is a passive constitution where objects themselves are presented to us. To this situation of affairs, through categorial intuition, we are able to constitute a "state of affairs" (Sachverhalt). One situation of affairs through objective acts of consciousness (acts of constituting categorially) can serve as the basis for constituting multiple states of affairs. For example, suppose a and b are two sensible objects in a certain situation of affairs. We can use it as basis to say, "a<b" and "b>a", two judgments which designate the same state of affairs. For Husserl a sentence has a proposition or judgment as its meaning, and refers to a state of affairs which has a situation of affairs as a reference base.

Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics[link]

Husserl believed that truth-in-itself has as ontological correlate being-in-itself, just as meaning categories have formal-ontological categories as correlates. Logic is a formal theory of judgment, that studies the formal a priori relations among judgments using meaning categories. Mathematics, on the other hand, is formal ontology; it studies all the possible forms of being (of objects). Hence for both logic and mathematics, the different formal categories are the objects of study, not the sensible objects themselves. The problem with the psychological approach to mathematics and logic is that it fails to account for the fact that this approach is about formal categories, and not simply about abstractions from sensibility alone. The reason why we do not deal with sensible objects in mathematics is because of another faculty of understanding called "categorial abstraction." Through this faculty we are able to get rid of sensible components of judgments, and just focus on formal categories themselves.

Thanks to "eidetic intuition" (or "essential intuition"), we are able to grasp the possibility, impossibility, necessity and contingency among concepts and among formal categories. Categorial intuition, along with categorial abstraction and eidetic intuition, are the basis for logical and mathematical knowledge.

Husserl criticized the logicians of his day for not focusing on the relation between subjective processes that give us objective knowledge of pure logic. All subjective activities of consciousness need an ideal correlate, and objective logic (constituted noematically) as it is constituted by consciousness needs a noetic correlate (the subjective activities of consciousness).

Husserl stated that logic has three strata, each further away from consciousness and psychology than those that precede it.

• The first stratum is what Husserl called a "morphology of meanings" concerning a priori ways to relate judgments to make them meaningful. In this stratum we elaborate a "pure grammar" or a logical syntax, and he would call its rules "laws to prevent non-sense", which would be similar to what logic calls today "formation rules". Mathematics, as logic's ontological correlate, also has a similar stratum, a "morphology of formal-ontological categories".
• The second stratum would be called by Husserl "logic of consequence" or the "logic of non-contradiction" which explores all possible forms of true judgments. He includes here syllogistic classic logic, propositional logic and that of predicates. This is a semantic stratum, and the rules of this stratum would be the "laws to avoid counter-sense" or "laws to prevent contradiction". They are very similar to today's logic "transformation rules". Mathematics also has a similar stratum which is based among others on pure theory of pluralities, and a pure theory of numbers. They provide a science of the conditions of possibility of any theory whatsoever. Husserl also talked about what he called "logic of truth" which consists of the formal laws of possible truth and its modalities, and precedes the third logical third stratum.
• The third stratum is metalogical, what he called a "theory of all possible forms of theories." It explores all possible theories in an a priori fashion, rather than the possibility of theory in general. We could establish theories of possible relations between pure forms of theories, investigate these logical relations and the deductions from such general connection. The logician is free to see the extension of this deductive, theoretical sphere of pure logic.

The ontological correlate to the third stratum is the "theory of manifolds". In formal ontology, it is a free investigation where a mathematician can assign several meanings to several symbols, and all their possible valid deductions in a general and indeterminate manner. It is, properly speaking, the most universal mathematics of all. Through the posit of certain indeterminate objects (formal-ontological categories) as well as any combination of mathematical axioms, mathematicians can explore the apodeictic connections between them, as long as consistency is preserved.

According to Husserl, this view of logic and mathematics accounted for the objectivity of a series of mathematical developments of his time, such as n-dimensional manifolds (both Euclidean and non-Euclidean), Hermann Grassmann's theory of extensions, William Rowan Hamilton's Hamiltonians, Sophus Lie's theory of transformation groups, and Cantor's set theory.

Jacob Klein was one student of Husserl who pursued this line of inquiry, seeking to "desedimentize" mathematics and the mathematical sciences.^[40]

Husserl and the Critique of Psychologism[link]

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Philosophy of Arithmetic and Frege[link]

After obtaining his PhD in mathematics, Husserl began analyzing the foundations of mathematics from a psychological point of view. In his professorial doctoral dissertation, On the Concept of Number (1886) and in his Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891), Husserl sought, by employing Brentano's descriptive psychology, to define the natural numbers in a way that advanced the methods and techniques of Karl Weierstrass, Richard Dedekind, Georg Cantor, Gottlob Frege, and other contemporary mathematicians. Later, in the first volume of his Logical Investigations, the Prolegomena of Pure Logic, Husserl, while attacking the psychologistic point of view in logic and mathematics, also appears to reject much of his early work, although the forms of psychologism analysed and refuted in the Prolegomena did not apply directly to his Philosophy of Arithmetic. Some scholars question whether Frege's negative review of the Philosophy of Arithmetic helped turn Husserl towards Platonism, but he had already discovered the work of Bernhard Bolzano independently around 1890/91 and explicitly mentioned Bernard Bolzano, Gottfried Leibniz and Hermann Lotze as inspirations for his newer position.

Husserl's review of Ernst Schröder, published before Frege's landmark 1892 article, clearly distinguishes sense from reference; thus Husserl's notions of noema and object also arose independently. Likewise, in his criticism of Frege in the Philosophy of Arithmetic, Husserl remarks on the distinction between the content and the extension of a concept. Moreover, the distinction between the subjective mental act, namely the content of a concept, and the (external) object, was developed independently by Brentano and his school, and may have surfaced as early as Brentano's 1870's lectures on logic.

Scholars such as J. N. Mohanty, Claire Ortiz Hill, and Guillermo E. Rosado Haddock, among others, have argued that Husserl's so-called change from psychologism to Platonism came about independently of Frege's review.^[41] For example, the review falsely accuses Husserl of subjectivizing everything, so that no objectivity is possible, and falsely attributes to him a notion of abstraction whereby objects disappear until we are left with numbers as mere ghosts. Contrary to what Frege states, in Husserl's Philosophy of Arithmetic we already find two different kinds of representations: subjective and objective. Moreover, objectivity is clearly defined in that work. Frege's attack seems to be directed at certain foundational doctrines then current in Weierstrass's Berlin School, of which Husserl and Cantor cannot be said to be orthodox representatives.

Furthermore, various sources indicate that Husserl changed his mind about psychologism as early as 1890, a year before he published the Philosophy of Arithmetic. Husserl stated that by the time he published that book, he had already changed his mind—that he had doubts about psychologism from the very outset. He attributed this change of mind to his reading of Leibniz, Bolzano, Lotze, and David Hume.^[42] Husserl makes no mention of Frege as a decisive factor in this change. In his Logical Investigations, Husserl mentions Frege only twice, once in a footnote to point out that he had retracted three pages of his criticism of Frege's The Foundations of Arithmetic, and again to question Frege's use of the word Bedeutung to designate "reference" rather than "meaning" (sense).

In a letter dated May 24, 1891, Frege thanked Husserl for sending him a copy of the Philosophy of Arithmetic and Husserl's review of Ernst Schröder's Vorlesungen über die Algebra der Logik. In the same letter, Frege used the review of Schröder's book to analyze Husserl's notion of the sense of reference of concept words. Hence Frege recognized, as early as 1891, that Husserl distinguished between sense and reference. Consequently, Frege and Husserl independently elaborated a theory of sense and reference before 1891.

Commentators argue that Husserl's notion of noema has nothing to do with Frege's notion of sense, because noemata are necessarily fused with noeses which are the conscious activities of consciousness. Noemata have three different levels:

• The substratum, which is never presented to the consciousness, and is the support of all the properties of the object;
• The noematic senses, which are the different ways the objects are presented to us;
• The modalities^{[disambiguation needed ]} of being (possible, doubtful, existent, non-existent, absurd, and so on).

Consequently, in intentional activities, even non-existent objects can be constituted, and form part of the whole noema. Frege, however, did not conceive of objects as forming parts of senses: If a proper name denotes a non-existent object, it does not have a reference, hence concepts with no objects have no truth value in arguments. Moreover, Husserl did not maintain that predicates of sentences designate concepts. According to Frege the reference of a sentence is a truth value; for Husserl it is a "state of affairs." Frege's notion of "sense" is unrelated to Husserl's noema, while the latter's notions of "meaning" and "object" differ from those of Frege.

In fine, Husserl's conception of logic and mathematics differs from that of Frege, who held that arithmetic could be derived from logic. For Husserl this is not the case: mathematics (with the exception of geometry) is the ontological correlate of logic, and while both fields are related, neither one is strictly reducible to the other.

Husserl's Criticism of Psychologism[link]

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Reacting against authors such as J. S. Mill, Sigwart and his own former teacher Brentano, Husserl criticised their psychologism in mathematics and logic, i.e. their conception of these abstract and a-priori sciences as having an essentially empirical foundation and a prescriptive or descriptive nature. According to psychologism, logic would not be an autonomous discipline, but a branch of psychology, either proposing a prescriptive and practical "art" of correct judgement (as Brentano and some of his more orthodox students did)^[43] or a description of the factual processes of human thought. Husserl pointed out that the failure of anti-psychologists to defeat psychologism was a result of being unable to distinguish between the foundational, theoretical side of logic, and the applied, practical side. Pure logic does not deal at all with "thoughts" or "judgings" as mental episodes but about a priori laws and conditions for any theory and any judgments whatsoever, conceived as propositions in themselves.

Here ‘Judgement’ has the same meaning as ‘proposition’, understood, not as a grammatical, but as an ideal unity of meaning. This is the case with all the distinctions of acts or forms of judgement, which provide the foundations for the laws of pure logic. Categorial, hypothetical, disjunctive, existential judgements, and however else we may call them, in pure logic are not names for classes of judgements, but for ideal forms of propositions.^[44]

Since "truth-in-itself" has "being-in-itself" as ontological correlate, and since psychologists reduce truth (and hence logic) to empirical psychology, the inevitable consequence is scepticism. Psychologists have also not been successful in showing how from induction or psychological processes we can justify the absolute certainty of logical principles, such as the principles of identity and non-contradiction. It is therefore futile to base certain logical laws and principles on uncertain processes of the mind.

This confusion made by psychologism (and related disciplines such as biologism and anthropologism) can be due to three specific prejudices:

1. The first prejudice is the supposition that logic is somehow normative in nature. Husserl argues that logic is theoretical, i.e., that logic itself proposes a priori laws which are themselves the basis of the normative side of logic. Since mathematics is related to logic, he cites an example from mathematics: If we have a formula like (a+b)(a-b)=a²-b² it does not tell us how to think mathematically. It just expresses a truth. A proposition that says: "The product of the sum and the difference of a and b should give us the difference of the squares of a and b" does express a normative proposition, but this normative statement is based on the theoretical statement "(a+b)(a-b)=a²-b²".

2. For psychologists, the acts of judging, reasoning, deriving, and so on, are all psychological processes. Therefore, it is the role of psychology to provide the foundation of these processes. Husserl states that this effort made by psychologists is a "metábasis eis állo génos" (Gr. "a transgression to another field")^{[citation needed]}. It is a metábasis because psychology cannot possibly provide any foundations for a priori laws which themselves are the basis for all the ways we should think correctly. Psychologists have the problem of confusing intentional activities with the object of these activities. It is important to distinguish between the act of judging and the judgment itself, the act of counting and the number itself, and so on. Counting five objects is undeniably a psychological process, but the number 5 is not.

3. Judgments can be true or not true. Psychologists argue that judgments are true because they become "evidently" true to us. This evidence, a psychological process that "guarantees" truth, is indeed a psychological process. Husserl responds by saying that truth itself as well as logical laws always remain valid regardless of psychological "evidence" that they are true. No psychological process can explain the a priori objectivity of these logical truths.

From this criticism to psychologism, the distinction between psychological acts and their intentional objects, and the difference between the normative side of logic and the theoretical side, derives from a platonist conception of logic. This means that we should regard logical and mathematical laws as being independent of the human mind, and also as an autonomy of meanings. It is essentially the difference between the real (everything subject to time) and the ideal or irreal (everything that is atemporal), such as logical truths, mathematical entities, mathematical truths and meanings in general.

Philosophers influenced by Husserl[link]

David Carr of Yale University commented in 1970 on Husserl's following: "It is well known that Husserl was always disappointed at the tendency of his students to go their own way, to embark upon fundamental revisions of phenomenology rather than engage in the communal task" as originally intended by the radical new science.^[45] Notwithstanding, he did attract philosophers to phenomenology.

Martin Heidegger is the best known of Husserl's students, the one whom Husserl chose as his successor at Freiburg. Heidegger's magnum opus Being and Time was dedicated to Husserl. They shared their thoughts and worked alongside each other for over a decade at the University of Freiburg, Heidegger being Husserl's assistant during 1920-1923.^[46][47][48] Heidegger's early work followed his teacher, but with time he began to develop new insights distinctively variant. Husserl became increasingly critical of Heidegger's work, especially in 1929, and included pointed criticism of Heidegger in lectures he gave during 1931.^[49] Heidegger, while acknowledging his debt to Husserl, followed a political position offensive and harmful to Husserl after the Nazi regime came to power in 1933, Husserl being of Jewish origin and Heidegger infamously being then a Nazi proponent.^[50] Academic discussion of Husserl and Heidegger is extensive.

Adolf Reinach (1884–1917). Reinach at Göttingen in 1913 "was now Husserl's right hand. He was above all the mediator between Husserl and the students, for he understood extremely well how to deal with other persons, whereas Husserl was pretty much helpless in this respect."^[51] He was an original editor of Husserl's new journal, Jahrbuch; one of his works (giving a phenomenological analysis of the law of obligations) appeared in its first issue.^[52] Reinach was widely admired and a remarkable teacher. Husserl in his 1917 obituary wrote, "He wanted to draw only from the deepest sources, he wanted to produce only work of enduring value. And through his wise restrain he succeeded in this."^[53]

Edith Stein was Husserl's student at Göttingen while she wrote her On the Problem of Empathy (1916). She then became his assistant at Freiburg 1916-1918. She later adapted her phenomenology to the modern school of Thomas Aquinas.^[54]

Ludwig Landgrebe became assistant to Husserl in 1923. From 1939 he collaborated with Eugen Fink at the Husserl-Archives in Leuven. In 1954 he became leader of the Husserl-Archives. Landgrebe is known as one of Husserl's closest associates, but also for his independent views relating to history, religion and politics as seen from the viewpoints of existentialist philosophy and metaphysics.

Eugen Fink was a close associate of Husserl during the 1920s and 1930s. He delivered the eulogy for Husserl in 1938.^[2]

Roman Ingarden, an early student of Husserl at Freiburg, corresponded with Husserl into the mid-1930s. Ingarden, however, did not accept the later transcendental idealism of Husserl which he thought would lead to relativism. Ingarden has written his work in German and Polish. In his Spór o istnienie świata (Ger: "Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt", Eng: "Dispute about existence of the world") he created his own realistic position, which also helped to spread phenomenology in Poland.

Max Scheler met Husserl in Halle in 1901 and found in his phenomenology a methodological breakthrough for his own philosophy. Scheler, who was at Göttingen when Husserl taught there, was one of the original few editors of the journal Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Phänomenologische Forschung (1913). Scheler's work Formalism in Ethics and Nonformal Ethics of Value appeared in the new journal (1913 & 1916) and drew acclaim. The personal relationship between the two men, however, became strained, due to Scheler's legal troubles, and Scheler returned to Munich.^[55] Although Scheler later criticised Husserl's idealistic logical approach and proposed instead a "phenomenology of love", he states that he remained "deeply indebted" to Husserl throughout his work.

Nicolai Hartmann was once thought to be at the center of phenomenology, but perhaps no longer. In 1921 the prestige of Nicolai Hartmann the Neo-Kantian, the Professor of Philosophy at Marburg, was added to the Movement; he "publicly declared his solidarity with the actual work of die Phänomenologie." Yet Hartmann's connections were with Max Scheler and the Munich circle; Husserl himself evidently did not consider him as a phenomenologist. His philosophy, however, is said to include an innovative use of the method.^[56]

Emmanuel Levinas in 1929 gave a presentation at one of Husserl's last seminars in Freiburg. Also that year he wrote on Husserl's Ideen (1913) a long review published by a French journal. With Gabrielle Peiffer, Levinas translated into French Husserl's Méditations cartésiennes (1931). He was at first impressed with Heidegger and began a book on him, but broke off the project when Heidegger became involved with the Nazis. After the war he wrote on Jewish spirituality; most of his family had been murdered by the Nazis in Lithuania. Levinas then began to write works that would become widely known and admired.^[57]

Jean-Paul Sartre was also largely influenced by Husserl, although he later came to disagree with key points in his analyses. Sartre rejected Husserl's transcendental interpretations begun in his Ideen (1913) and instead followed Heidegger's ontology.^[58]

Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception is influenced by Edmund Husserl's work on perception and temporality, including Husserl's theory of retention and protention. Yet he did not accept the "eidetic reduction" nor the "pure essence" said to result.^[59] Merleau-Ponty was the first student to study at the Husserl-archives in Leuven.

Gabriel Marcel explicitly rejected existentialism, due to Sartre, but not phenomenology, which has enjoyed a wide following among French Catholics. He appreciated Husserl, Scheler, and (but with apprehension) Heidegger.^[60] His expressions like "ontology of sensability" when referring to the body, indicate influence by phenomenological thought.^[61]

Kurt Gödel is known to have read Cartesian Meditations. He expressed very strong appreciation for Husserl's work, especially with regard to "bracketing" or epoché.

Hermann Weyl's interest in intuitionistic logic and impredicativity appears to have resulted from his reading of Husserl. He was introduced to Husserl's work through his wife, Helene Joseph, herself a student of Husserl at Göttingen.

Rudolf Carnap was also influenced by Husserl, not only concerning Husserl's notion of essential insight that Carnap used in his Der Raum, but also his notion of "formation rules" and "transformation rules" is founded on Husserl's philosophy of logic.

Karol Wojtyla, who would later become became Pope John-Paul II was influenced by Husserl. Phenomenology appears in a work co-authored by him, The Acting Person (1969). Originally published in Polish, it was written in collaboration with the Polish phenomenologist Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka.^[62] It combines phenomenological work with Thomistic Ethics.^[63]

Paul Ricoeur has translated many works of Husserl into French. He has also written many of his own studies of the philosopher.^[64] Among other works, Ricoeur employed phenomenology in his Freud & Philosophy (1965).^[65]

Jacques Derrida wrote several critical studies of Husserl early in his academic career. These included his dissertation, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy, and also his introduction to The Origin of Geometry). Derrida continued to make reference to Husserl in works such as Of Grammatology.

Stanisław Leśniewski and Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz were inspired by Husserl's formal analysis of language. Accordingly, they employed phenomenology in the development of categorial grammar.^[66]

Ortega y Gasset visited Husserl at Freiburg in 1934. He credited phenomenology for having 'liberated him' from a narrow neo-Kantian thought. While perhaps not a phenomenologist himself, he introduced the philosophy to the Iberia and Latin America.^[67]

Wilfrid Sellars, an influential figure in the so-called "Pittsburgh school" (Robert Brandom, John McDowell) had been a student of Marvin Farber, a pupil of Husserl, and was influenced by phenomenology through him:

Marvin Farber led me through my first careful reading of the Critique of Pure Reason and introduced me to Husserl. His combination of utter respect for the structure of Husserl's thought with the equally firm conviction that this structure could be given a naturalistic interpretation was undoubtedly a key influence on my own subsequent philosophical strategy.^[68]

Hans Blumenberg received his postdoctoral qualification in 1950, with a dissertation on 'Ontological distance', an inquiry into the crisis of Husserl's phenomenology.

The influence of the Husserlian phenomenological tradition in the 21st century is extending beyond the confines of the European and North American legacies. It has already started to impact (indirectly) scholarship in Eastern and Oriental thought, including research on the impetus of philosophical thinking in the history of ideas in Islam.^[69][70]

See also[link]

• Intentionality
• Intersubjectivity
• Noema
• Phenomenology
• State of affairs

Reference notes[link]

Bibliography[link]

This article's citation style may be unclear. The references used may be made clearer with a different or consistent style of citation, footnoting, or external linking. (September 2009)

Primary literature[link]

In German[link]

• 1887. Über den Begriff der Zahl. Psychologische Analysen.
• 1891. Philosophie der Arithmetik. Psychologische und logische Untersuchungen (Philosophy of Arithmetic)
• 1900. Logische Untersuchungen. Erster Teil: Prolegomena zur reinen Logik (Logical Investigations, Vol 1)
• 1901. Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Teil: Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis (Logical Investigations, Vol 2)
• 1911. Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft (included in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy: Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man)
• 1913. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie (Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology)
• 1923-24. Erste Philosophie. Zweiter Teil: Theorie der phänomenologischen Reduktion (First Philosophy, Vol 2: Phenomenological Reductions)
• 1925. Erste Philosophie. Erster Teil: Kritische Ideengeschichte (First Philosophy Vol 1: Critical History of Ideas)
• 1928. Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins.
• 1929. Formale und transzendentale Logik. Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft (Formal and Transcendental Logic)
• 1931. Méditations cartésiennes (Cartesian Meditations)
• 1936. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie (The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy)
• 1939. Erfahrung und Urteil. Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik. (Experience and Judgment)
• 1952. Ideen II: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution.
• 1952. Ideen III: Die Phänomenologie und die Fundamente der Wissenschaften.

In English[link]

• “Universal Teleology”. Telos 4 (Fall 1969). New York: Telos Press.
• Cartesian Meditations, 1960 [1931]. Cairns, D., trans. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Online.
• The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy, 1970 [1936/54], Carr, D., trans. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
• Experience and Judgement, 1973 [1939], Churchill, J. S., and Ameriks, K., translators. London: Routledge.
• Formal and Transcendental Logic, 1969 [1929], Cairns, D., trans. The Hague: Nijhoff.
• Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy—First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, 1982 [1913]. Kersten, F., trans. The Hague: Nijhoff.
• Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy - Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, 1989. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer, translators. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
• Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy - Third Book: Phenomenology and the Foundations of the Sciences, 1980, Klein, T. E., and Pohl, W. E., translators. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
• Logical Investigations, 1973 [1913], Findlay, J. N., trans. London: Routledge.
• On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917), 1990 [1928]. Brough, J.B., trans. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
• "Philosophy as Rigorous Science", translated in Quentin Lauer, editor, 1965 [1910] Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy. New York: Harper & Row.
• Philosophy of Arithmetic, Willard, Dallas, trans., 2003 [1891]. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Anthologies:

• Willard, Dallas, trans., 1994. Early Writings in the Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
• Welton, D., ed., 1999. The Essential Husserl. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Secondary literature[link]

• Bernet, Rudolf, et al., 1993. Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ISBN 0-8101-1030-X
• Derrida, Jacques, 1954 (French), 2003 (English). The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press.
• --------, 1962 (French), 1976 (English). Introduction to Husserl's The Origin of Geometry. Includes Derrida's translation of Appendix III of Husserl's 1936 The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.
• --------, 1967 (French), 1973 (English). Speech and Phenomena (La Voix et le Phénomène), and other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs. ISBN 0-8101-0397-4
• Everdell, William R. (1998), The First Moderns, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ISBN 0-226-22480-5 
• Fine, Kit, 1995, "Part-Whole" in Smith, B., and Smith, D. W., eds., The Cambridge Companion to Husserl. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Føllesdal, Dagfinn, 1972, "An Introduction to Phenomenology for Analytic Philosophers" in Olson, R. E., and Paul, A. M., eds., Contemporary Philosophy in Scandinavia. John Hopkins Univ. Press: 417-30.
• Hill, C. O., 1991. Word and Object in Husserl, Frege, and Russell: The Roots of Twentieth-Century Philosophy. Ohio Univ. Press.
• -------- and Rosado Haddock, G. E., 2000. Husserl or Frege? Meaning, Objectivity, and Mathematics. Open Court.
• Levinas, Emmanuel, 1963 (French), 1973 (English). The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
• Köchler, Hans, 1983, "The Relativity of the Soul and the Absolute State of the Pure Ego", Analecta Husserliana 16: 95-107.
• --------, 1986. Phenomenological Realism. Selected Essays. Frankfurt a. M./Bern: Peter Lang.
• Mohanty, J. N., 1974, "Husserl and Frege: A New Look at Their Relationship", Research in Phenomenology 4: 51-62.
• --------, 1982. Edmund Husserl's Theory of Meaning. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
• --------, 1982. Husserl and Frege. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Moran, D. and Cohen, J., 2012, The Husserl Dictionary. London, Continuum Press.
• Natanson, Maurice, 1973. Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ISBN 0-8101-0425-3
• Ricoeur, Paul, 1967. Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
• Rollinger, R. D., 1999, Husserl's Position in the School of Brentano in Phaenomenologica 150. Kluwer. ISBN 0-7923-5684-5
• --------, 2008. Austrian Phenomenology: Brentano, Husserl, Meinong, and Others on Mind and Language. Frankfurt am Main: Ontos-Verlag. ISBN 978-3-86838-005-7
• Schuhmann, K., 1977. Husserl – Chronik (Denk- und Lebensweg Edmund Husserls). Number I in Husserliana Dokumente. Martinus Nijhoff. ISBN 90-247-1972-0
• Simons, Peter, 1987. Parts: A Study in Ontology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Sokolowski, Robert. Introduction to Phenomenology [2]. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ISBN 978-0-521-66792-0
• Smith, B. & Smith, D. W., eds. (1995), The Cambridge companion to Husserl, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-43616-8, http://books.google.ru/books?id=1PIhzc6ZBlIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22cambridge+companion+to+husserl%22#v=onepage&q&f=false 
• Smith, David Woodruff, 2007. Husserl London: Routledge.
• Stiegler, Bernard, 2009. Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
• Zahavi, Dan, 2003. Husserl's Phenomenology. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ISBN 0-8047-4546-3

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Edmund Husserl

Husserl archives[link]

• Husserl-Archives Leuven, the main Husserl-Archive in Leuven, International Centre for Phenomenological Research.
  • Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke, the ongoing critical edition of Husserl's works.
  • Husserliana:Materialien, edition for lectures and shorter works.
  • Edmund Husserl Collected Works, English translation of Husserl's works.
• Husserl-Archives at the University of Cologne.
• Husserl-Archives Freiburg.
• Husserl Archives at the New School (New York).
• Archives Husserl de Paris, at the École normale supérieure, Paris.
• Husserl Archives at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh.

Other links[link]

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
  • "Edmund Husserl." – Christian Beyer. Accessed 2008-09-11.
  • "Phenomenology" – David Woodruff Smith. Accessed 2008-17-11.
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Edmund Husserl (1859-1938). – Marianne Sawicki. Accessed 2011-04-28.
• Barry Smith, Papers on Edmund Husserl
• www.husserlpage.com. Includes a number of online texts in German and English.
• Husserl.net, open content project.
• Wesenschau. Phenomenological articles, Directory, bibliographic Database, Dictionary, Forums, and Guides.
• "Edmund Husserl: Formal Ontology and Transcendental Logic." Resource guide on Husserl's logic and formal ontology, with annotated bibliography.
• The Husserl Circle.
• Spanish website on Husserl and phenomenology.
• Website devoted to Husserl's phenomenology and its relation to art and architecture, with specific reference to architectural drawings.
• Cartesian Meditations in Internet Archive
• Ideas, Part I in Internet Archive
• Working with Husserl in the field of independent and autonomous living, Nicola Cuomo

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Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (French pronunciation: [ʒak lakɑ̃]; April 13, 1901 – September 9, 1981) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who made prominent contributions to psychoanalysis and philosophy, and has been called "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud".^[1] Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan influenced France's intellectuals in the 1960s and the 1970s, especially the post-structuralist philosophers. His interdisciplinary work was as a "self-proclaimed Freudian....'It is up to you to be Lacanians if you wish. I am a Freudian'";^[2] and featured the unconscious, the castration complex, the ego, identification, and language as subjective perception. His ideas have had a significant impact on critical theory, literary theory, 20th-century French philosophy, sociology, feminist theory, film theory and clinical psychoanalysis.

Biography[link]

Early life[link]

Lacan was born in Paris, the eldest of Emilie and Alfred Lacan's three children. His father was a successful soap and oils salesman. His mother was ardently Catholic—his younger brother went to a monastery in 1929 and Lacan attended the Jesuit Collège Stanislas. During the early 1920s, Lacan attended right-wing Action Française political meetings and met the founder, Charles Maurras. By the mid-1920s, Lacan had become dissatisfied with religion and quarrelled with his family over it.^[3][4]

In 1920, on being rejected as too thin for military service, he entered medical school and, in 1926, specialised in psychiatry at the Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris. He was especially interested in the philosophies of Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger and attended the seminars about Hegel given by Alexandre Kojève. Sometime in that decade, and until 1938, Lacan sought psychoanalysis by Rudolph Loewenstein. The analysis was lengthy and perhaps not wholly successful: "Loewenstein... often expressed his opinion orally to the people around him: the man was unanalyzable. And Lacan was unanalyzable in those conditions".^[5]

1930s[link]

In 1931, Lacan became a licensed forensic psychiatrist. In 1932, he was awarded the Doctorat d'état for his thesis On Paranoiac Psychosis in its Relations to the Personality ( De la Psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité suivi de Premiers écrits sur la paranoïa. Paris : Éditions du Seuil, 1975.) Psychoanalysts mostly ignored it, although it was acclaimed beyond psychoanalytic circles, especially by surrealist artists. Two years later, he was elected to the Société psychanalytique de Paris. In January 1934, he married Marie-Louise Blondin and they had their first child, a daughter called Caroline. Their second child, a son named Thibaut, was born in August 1939.

In 1936, Lacan presented his first analytic report at the Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Marienbad on the "Mirror Phase". The congress chairman, Ernest Jones, terminated the lecture before its conclusion, since he was unwilling to extend Lacan's stated presentation time. Insulted, Lacan left the congress to witness the Berlin Olympic Games. Unfortunately, no copy of the original lecture remains.^[6]

Lacan was an active intellectual of the inter-war period—he associated with André Breton, Georges Bataille, Salvador Dalí, and Pablo Picasso. He attended the mouvement Psyché that Maryse Choisy founded. He published in the Surrealist journal Minotaure and attended the first public reading of James Joyce's Ulysses. "[Lacan's] interest in surrealism predated his interest in psychoanalysis," Dylan Evans explains, speculating that "perhaps Lacan never really abandoned his early surrealist sympathies, its neo-Romantic view of madness as ‘convulsive beauty’, its celebration of irrationality, and its hostility to the scientist who murders nature by dissecting it".^[7] Others would agree that "the importance of surrealism can hardly be over-stated... to the young Lacan... [who] also shared the surrealists' taste for scandal and provocation, and viewed provocation as an important element in psycho-analysis itself".^[8]

1940s[link]

The Société Psychoanalytique de Paris (SPP) was disbanded due to Nazi Germany's occupation of France in 1940. Lacan was called up to serve in the French army at the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris, where he spent the duration of the war. His third child, Sibylle, was born in 1940.

The following year, Lacan fathered a child, Judith (who kept the name Bataille), with Sylvia Bataille (née Maklès), the estranged wife of his friend Georges Bataille. There are contradictory accounts of his romantic life with Sylvia in southern France during the war. The official record shows only that Marie-Louise requested divorce after Judith's birth and that Lacan married Sylvia in 1953.

After the war, the SPP recommenced their meetings. Lacan visited England for a five-week study trip, where he met the English analysts Wilfred Bion and John Rickman. Bion’s analytic work with groups influenced Lacan, contributing to his own subsequent emphasis on study groups as a structure within which to advance theoretical work in psychoanalysis. In 1949, Lacan presented a new paper on the mirror stage to the sixteenth IPA congress in Zurich.

1950s[link]

In 1951, Lacan started to hold a private weekly seminar in Paris, in which he urged what he described as "a return to Freud" that would concentrate on the linguistic nature of psychological symptomatology. Becoming public in 1953, Lacan's twenty-seven year long seminar was highly influential in Parisian cultural life, as well as in psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice.

In 1953, after a disagreement over the variable-length session, Lacan and many of his colleagues left the Société Parisienne de Psychanalyse to form a new group, the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP). One consequence of this was to deprive the new group of membership within the International Psychoanalytical Association.

Encouraged by the reception of "the return to Freud" and of his report "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis," Lacan began to re-read Freud's works in relation to contemporary philosophy, linguistics, ethnology, biology, and topology. From 1953 to 1964 at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, he held his Seminars and presented case histories of patients. During this period he wrote the texts that are found in the collection Écrits, which was first published in 1966. In his seventh Seminar "The Ethics of Psychoanalysis" (1959–60), Lacan defined the ethical foundations of psychoanalysis and presented his "ethics for our time"—one that would, in the words of Freud, prove to be equal to the tragedy of modern man and to the "discontent of civilization." At the roots of the ethics is desire: analysis' only promise is austere, it is the entrance-into-the-I (in French a play on words between l'entrée en je and l'entrée en jeu). "I must come to the place where the id was," where the analysand discovers, in its absolute nakedness, the truth of his desire. The end of psychoanalysis entails "the purification of desire." This text formed the foundation of Lacan's work for the subsequent years^{[citation needed]}. He defended three assertions: that psychoanalysis must have a scientific status; that Freudian ideas have radically changed the concepts of subject, of knowledge, and of desire; and that the analytic field is the only place from which it is possible to question the insufficiencies of science and philosophy.^[9]

1960s[link]

Starting in 1962, a complex negotiation took place to determine the status of the SFP within the IPA. Lacan’s practice (with its controversial indeterminate-length sessions) and his critical stance towards psychoanalytic orthodoxy led, in 1963, to the IPA setting the condition that registration of the SFP was dependent upon the removal of Lacan from the list of SFP analysts. Lacan left the SFP to form his own school, which became known as the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP), and "took many representatives of the third generation with him: among them were Maud and Octave Mannoni, Serge Leclaire...and Jean Clavreul".^[10]

With Lévi-Strauss and Althusser's support, Lacan was appointed lecturer at the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes. He started with a seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis in January 1964 in the Dussane room at the École Normale Supérieure. Lacan began to set forth his own approach to psychoanalysis to an audience of colleagues that had joined him from the SFP. His lectures also attracted many of the École Normale’s students. He divided the École de la Cause freudienne into three sections: the section of pure psychoanalysis (training and elaboration of the theory, where members who have been analyzed but haven't become analysts can participate); the section for applied psychoanalysis (therapeutic and clinical, physicians who either have not started or have not yet completed analysis are welcome); and the section for taking inventory of the Freudian field (concerning the critique of psychoanalytic literature and the analysis of the theoretical relations with related or affiliated sciences).^[11]

By the 1960s, Lacan was associated, at least in the public mind, with the far left in France.^[12] In May 1968, Lacan voiced his sympathy for the student protests and as a corollary his followers set up a Department of Psychology at the University of Vincennes (Paris VIII). In 1969, Lacan moved his public seminars to the Faculté de Droit (Panthéon), where he continued to deliver his expositions of analytic theory and practice until the dissolution of his School in 1980.

1970s[link]

Throughout the final decade of his life, Lacan continued his widely followed seminars. During this period, he developed his concepts of masculine and feminine jouissance and placed an increased emphasis on the concept of "the Real" as a point of impossible contradiction in the "Symbolic order". This late work had the greatest influence on feminist thought, as well as upon the informal movement that arose in the 1970s or 1980s called post-modernism.

Major concepts[link]

Return to Freud[link]

Lacan's "return to Freud" emphasizes a renewed attention to the original texts of Freud, and included a radical critique of Ego psychology, whereas "Lacan's quarrel with Object Relations psychoanalysis"^[13] was a more muted affair. Here he attempted "to restore to the notion of the Object Relation... the capital of experience that legitimately belongs to it",^[14] building upon what he termed "the hesitant, but controlled work of Melanie Klein... Through her we know the function of the imaginary primordial enclosure formed by the imago of the mother's body",^[15] as well as upon "the notion of the transitional object, introduced by D. W. Winnicott... a key-point for the explanation of the genesis of fetishism".^[16] Nevertheless, "Lacan systematically questioned those psychoanalytic developments from the 1930s to the 1970s, which were increasingly and almost exclusively focused on the child's early relations with the mother... the pre-Oedipal or Kleinian mother";^[17] and Lacan's rereading of Freud—"characteristically, Lacan insists that his return to Freud supplies the only valid model"^[18]—formed a basic conceptual starting-point in that oppositional strategy.

Lacan thought that Freud's ideas of "slips of the tongue," jokes, and the interpretation of dreams all emphasized the agency of language in subjective constitution. In "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud," he proposes that "the unconscious is structured like a language." The unconscious is not a primitive or archetypal part of the mind separate from the conscious, linguistic ego, he explained, but rather a formation as complex and structurally sophisticated as consciousness itself. One consequence of the unconscious being structured like a language is that the self is denied any point of reference to which to be "restored" following trauma or a crisis of identity.

Andre Green objected that "when you read Freud, it is obvious that this proposition doesn't work for a minute. Freud very clearly opposes the unconscious (which he says is constituted by thing-presentations and nothing else) to the pre-conscious. What is related to language can only belong to the pre-conscious".^[19] Freud certainly contrasted "the presentation of the word and the presentation of the thing... the unconscious presentation is the presentation of the thing alone"^[20] in his metapsychology. However "Dylan Evans, Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis... takes issue with those who, like Andre Green, question the linguistic aspect of the unconscious, emphasizing Lacan's distinction between das Ding and die Sache in Freud's account of thing-presentation".^[21]. Green's criticism of Lacan also included accusations of intellectual dishonesty, he said, "“ [He] cheated everybody… the return to Freud was an excuse, it just meant going to Lacan." ^[22]

Mirror stage[link]

Lacan's first official contribution to psychoanalysis was the mirror stage, which he described as "formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience." By the early 1950s, he came to regard the mirror stage as more than a moment in the life of the infant; instead, it formed part of the permanent structure of subjectivity. In "the Imaginary order," their own image permanently catches and captivates the subject. Lacan explains that "the mirror stage is a phenomenon to which I assign a twofold value. In the first place, it has historical value as it marks a decisive turning-point in the mental development of the child. In the second place, it typifies an essential libidinal relationship with the body-image".^[23]

As this concept developed further, the stress fell less on its historical value and more on its structural value.^[7] In his fourth Seminar, "La relation d'objet," Lacan states that "the mirror stage is far from a mere phenomenon which occurs in the development of the child. It illustrates the conflictual nature of the dual relationship."

The mirror stage describes the formation of the Ego via the process of objectification, the Ego being the result of a conflict between one's perceived visual appearance and one's emotional experience. This identification is what Lacan called alienation. At six months, the baby still lacks physical co-ordination. The child is able to recognize themselves in a mirror prior to the attainment of control over their bodily movements. The child sees their image as a whole and the synthesis of this image produces a sense of contrast with the lack of co-ordination of the body, which is perceived as a fragmented body. The child experiences this contrast initially as a rivalry with their image, because the wholeness of the image threatens the child with fragmentation—thus the mirror stage gives rise to an aggressive tension between the subject and the image. To resolve this aggressive tension, the child identifies with the image: this primary identification with the counterpart forms the Ego.^[7] Lacan understands this moment of identification as a moment of jubilation, since it leads to an imaginary sense of mastery; yet when the child compares their own precarious sense of mastery with the omnipotence of the mother, a depressive reaction may accompany the jubilation.^[24]

Lacan calls the specular image "orthopaedic," since it leads the child to anticipate the overcoming of its "real specific prematurity of birth." The vision of the body as integrated and contained, in opposition to the child's actual experience of motor incapacity and the sense of his or her body as fragmented, induces a movement from "insufficiency to anticipation."^[25] In other words, the mirror image initiates and then aids, like a crutch, the process of the formation of an integrated sense of self.

In the mirror stage a "misunderstanding" (méconnaissance) constitutes the Ego—the "me" (moi) becomes alienated from itself through the introduction of an imaginary dimension to the subject. The mirror stage also has a significant symbolic dimension, due to the presence of the figure of the adult who carries the infant. Having jubilantly assumed the image as their own, the child turns their head towards this adult, who represents the big Other, as if to call on the adult to ratify this image.^[26]

Other/other[link]

While Freud uses the term "other", referring to der Andere (the other person) and "das Andere" (otherness), under the influence of Alexandre Kojève, Lacan's use is closer to Hegel's.

Lacan often used an algebraic symbology for his concepts: the big Other is designated A (for French Autre) and the little other is designated a (italicized French autre).^[27] He asserts that an awareness of this distinction is fundamental to analytic practice: "the analyst must be imbued with the difference between A and a, so he can situate himself in the place of Other, and not the other."^[28] Dylan Evans explains that:

"1. The little other is the other who is not really other, but a reflection and projection of the Ego. He [autre] is simultaneously the counterpart and the specular image. The little other is thus entirely inscribed in the imaginary order.

2. The big Other designates radical alterity, an other-ness which transcends the illusory otherness of the imaginary because it cannot be assimilated through identification. Lacan equates this radical alterity with language and the law, and hence the big Other is inscribed in the order of the symbolic. Indeed, the big Other is the symbolic insofar as it is particularized for each subject. The Other is thus both another subject, in his radical alterity and unassimilable uniqueness, and also the symbolic order which mediates the relationship with that other subject."^[29]

"The Other must first of all be considered a locus," Lacan writes, "the locus in which speech is constituted".^[30] We can speak of the Other as a subject in a secondary sense only when a subject occupies this position and thereby embodies the Other for another subject.^[31]

In arguing that speech originates not in the Ego nor in the subject but rather in the Other, Lacan stresses that speech and language are beyond the subject's conscious control. They come from another place, outside of consciousness—"the unconscious is the discourse of the Other."^[32] When conceiving the Other as a place, Lacan refers to Freud's concept of psychical locality, in which the unconscious is described as "the other scene".

"It is the mother who first occupies the position of the big Other for the child," Dylan Evans explains, "it is she who receives the child's primitive cries and retroactively sanctions them as a particular message".^[7] The castration complex is formed when the child discovers that this Other is not complete because there is a "Lack (manque)" in the Other. This means that there is always a signifier missing from the trove of signifiers constituted by the Other. Lacan illustrates this incomplete Other graphically by striking a bar through the symbol A; hence another name for the castrated, incomplete Other is the "barred Other."^[33]

Feminist thinkers have both utilised and criticised Lacan's concepts of castration and the Phallus. Some feminists have argued that Lacan's phallocentric analysis provides a useful means of understanding gender biases and imposed roles, while other feminist critics, most notably Luce Irigaray, accuse Lacan of maintaining the sexist tradition in psychoanalysis.^[34] For Irigaray, the Phallus does not define a single axis of gender by its presence/absence; instead, gender has two positive poles. Like Irigaray, Jacques Derrida, in criticizing Lacan's concept of castration, discusses the phallus in a chiasmus with the hymen, as both one and other.^[35] Other feminists, such as Judith Butler, Jane Gallop, and Elizabeth Grosz, have interpreted Lacan's work as opening up new possibilities for feminist theory.^[36][37]

The three orders[link]

The Imaginary[link]

The Imaginary is the field of images and imagination, and deception. The main illusions of this order are synthesis, autonomy, duality, and similarity. Lacan thought that the relationship created within the mirror stage between the Ego and the reflected image means that the Ego and the Imaginary order itself are places of radical alienation: "alienation is constitutive of the Imaginary order."^[30] This relationship is also narcissistic.

In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan argues that the Symbolic order structures the visual field of the Imaginary, which means that it involves a linguistic dimension. If the signifier is the foundation of the Symbolic, the signified and signification are part of the Imaginary order. Language has Symbolic and Imaginary connotations—in its Imaginary aspect, language is the "wall of language" that inverts and distorts the discourse of the Other. On the other hand, the Imaginary is rooted in the subject's relationship with his or her own body (the image of the body). In Fetishism: the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real, Lacan argues that in the sexual plane the Imaginary appears as sexual display and courtship love.

Insofar as identification with the analyst is the objective of analysis, Lacan accused major psychoanalytic schools of reducing the practice of psychoanalysis to the Imaginary order.^[38] Instead, Lacan proposes the use of the Symbolic to dislodge the disabling fixations of the Imaginary—the analyst transforms the images into words. "The use of the Symbolic," he argued, "is the only way for the analytic process to cross the plane of identification."^[39]

The Symbolic[link]

In his Seminar IV, "La relation d'objet," Lacan argues that the concepts of "Law" and "Structure" are unthinkable without language—thus the Symbolic is a linguistic dimension. This order is not equivalent to language, however, since language involves the Imaginary and the Real as well. The dimension proper to language in the Symbolic is that of the signifier—that is, a dimension in which elements have no positive existence, but which are constituted by virtue of their mutual differences.

The Symbolic is also the field of radical alterity—that is, the Other; the unconscious is the discourse of this Other. It is the realm of the Law that regulates desire in the Oedipus complex. The Symbolic is the domain of culture as opposed to the Imaginary order of nature. As important elements in the Symbolic, the concepts of death and lack (manque) connive to make of the pleasure principle the regulator of the distance from the Thing ("das Ding an sich") and the death drive that goes "beyond the pleasure principle by means of repetition"—"the death drive is only a mask of the Symbolic order."^[27]

By working in the Symbolic order, the analyst is able to produce changes in the subjective position of the analysand. These changes will produce imaginary effects because the Imaginary is structured by the Symbolic.^[7]

The Real[link]

Lacan's concept of the Real dates back to 1936 and his doctoral thesis on psychosis. It was a term that was popular at the time, particularly with Émile Meyerson, who referred to it as "an ontological absolute, a true being-in-itself".^[40] Lacan returned to the theme of the Real in 1953 and continued to develop it until his death. The Real, for Lacan, is not synonymous with reality. Not only opposed to the Imaginary, the Real is also exterior to the Symbolic. Unlike the latter, which is constituted in terms of oppositions (i.e. presence/absence), "there is no absence in the Real."^[27] Whereas the Symbolic opposition "presence/absence" implies the possibility that something may be missing from the Symbolic, "the Real is always in its place."^[39] If the Symbolic is a set of differentiated elements (signifiers), the Real in itself is undifferentiated—it bears no fissure. The Symbolic introduces "a cut in the real" in the process of signification: "it is the world of words that creates the world of things—things originally confused in the "here and now" of the all in the process of coming into being."^[41] The Real is that which is outside language and that resists symbolization absolutely. In Seminar XI Lacan defines the Real as "the impossible" because it is impossible to imagine, impossible to integrate into the Symbolic, and impossible to attain. It is this resistance to symbolization that lends the Real its traumatic quality. Finally, the Real is the object of anxiety, insofar as it lacks any possible mediation and is "the essential object which is not an object any longer, but this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail, the object of anxiety par excellence."^[27]

Desire[link]

Lacan's conception of desire is central to his theories and follows Freud's concept of Wunsch. The aim of psychoanalysis is to lead the analysand and to uncover the truth about his or her desire, but this is possible only if that desire is articulated.^[42] Lacan wrote that "it is only once it is formulated, named in the presence of the other, that desire appears in the full sense of the term."^[43] This naming of desire "is not a question of recognizing something which would be entirely given. In naming it, the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world."^[27] Psychoanalysis teaches the patient "to bring desire into existence." The truth about desire is somehow present in discourse, although discourse is never able to articulate the entire truth about desire—whenever discourse attempts to articulate desire, there is always a leftover or surplus.^[42]

In "The Signification of the Phallus," Lacan distinguishes desire from need and demand. Need is a biological instinct that is articulated in demand, yet demand has a double function: on the one hand, it articulates need, and on the other, acts as a demand for love. Even after the need articulated in demand is satisfied, the demand for love remains unsatisfied. This remainder is desire.^[44] For Lacan, "desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second." Lacan adds that "desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need." Hence desire can never be satisfied, or as Slavoj Žižek puts it, "desire's raison d'être is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire."^[45]

It is also important to distinguish between desire and the drives. The drives are the partial manifestations of a single force called desire.^[46] Lacan's concept of the "objet petit a" is the object of desire, although this object is not that towards which desire tends, but rather the cause of desire. Desire is not a relation to an object but a relation to a lack (manque).

Drives[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

Lacan maintains Freud's distinction between drive (Trieb) and instinct (Instinkt). Drives differ from biological needs because they can never be satisfied and do not aim at an object but rather circle perpetually around it. The true source of jouissance is the repetition of the movement of this closed circuit. Lacan posits the drives as both cultural and symbolic constructs—to him, "the drive is not a given, something archaic, primordial." He incorporates the four elements of the drives as defined by Freud (the pressure, the end, the object and the source) to his theory of the drive's circuit: the drive originates in the erogenous zone, circles round the object, and returns to the erogenous zone. The three grammatical voices structure this circuit:

1. the active voice (to see)
2. the reflexive voice (to see oneself)
3. the passive voice (to be seen)

The active and reflexive voices are autoerotic—they lack a subject. It is only when the drive completes its circuit with the passive voice that a new subject appears. Despite being the "passive" voice, the drive is essentially active: "to make oneself be seen" rather than "to be seen." The circuit of the drive is the only way for the subject to transgress the pleasure principle.

Lacan identifies four partial drives: the oral drive (the erogenous zones are the lips, the partial object the breast), the anal drive (the anus and the faeces), the scopic drive (the eyes and the gaze) and the invocatory drive (the ears and the voice). The first two relate to demand and the last two to desire. If the drives are closely related to desire, they are the partial aspects in which desire is realized—desire is one and undivided, whereas the drives are its partial manifestations.

Other concepts[link]

"Les Non-dupes errent": Lacan on error and knowledge[link]

Building on Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Lacan long argued that "every unsuccessful act is a successful, not to say 'well-turned', discourse", highlighting as well "sudden transformations of errors into truths, which seemed to be due to nothing more than perseverance".^[47] In a late seminar, he generalised more fully the psychoanalytic discovery of "truth—arising from misunderstanding", so as to maintain that "the subject is naturally erring... discourse structures alone give him his moorings and reference points, signs identify and orient him; if he neglects, forgets, or loses them, he is condemned to err anew".^[48]

Because of "the alienation to which speaking beings are subjected due to their being in language",^[49] to survive "one must let oneself be taken in by signs and become the dupe of a discourse... [of] fictions organized in to a discourse".^[50] For Lacan, with "masculine knowledge irredeemably an erring",^[51] the individual "must thus allow himself to be fooled by these signs to have a chance of getting his bearings amidst them; he must place and maintain himself in the wake of a discourse... become the dupe of a discourse... les Non-dupes errent".^[50]

Lacan comes close here to one of the points where "very occasionally he sounds like Thomas Kuhn (whom he never mentions)",^[52] with Lacan's "discourse" resembling Kuhn's "paradigm" seen as "the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by the members of a given community"^[53] – something reinforced perhaps^{[original research?]} by Kuhn's approval of "Francis Bacon's acute methodological dictum: 'Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion'".^[54]

Clinical contributions[link]

Variable-length session[link]

The "variable-length psychoanalytic session" was one of Lacan's crucial clinical innovations^{[citation needed]}, and a key element in his conflicts with the IPA, to whom his "innovation of reducing the fifty-minute analytic hour to a Delphic seven or eight minutes (or sometimes even to a single oracular parole murmured in the waiting-room)"^[55] was unacceptable. Lacan's variable-length sessions lasted anywhere from a few minutes (or even, if deemed appropriate by the analyst, a few seconds) to several hours^{[citation needed]}. This practice replaced the classical Freudian "fifty minute hour".

With respect to what he called "the cutting up of the 'timing'", Lacan asked the question, "Why make an intervention impossible at this point, which is consequently privileged in this way?"^[56] By allowing the analyst's intervention on timing, the variable-length session removed the patient's—or, technically, "the analysand's"—former certainty as to the length of time that they would be on the couch.^[57] When Lacan adopted the practice, "the psychoanalytic establishment were scandalized"^[58][59]—and, given that "between 1979 and 1980 he saw an average of ten patients an hour", it is perhaps not hard to see why: "psychoanalysis reduced to zero",^[60] if no less lucrative.

At the time of his original innovation, Lacan described the issue as concerning "the systematic use of shorter sessions in certain analyses, and in particular in training analyses";^[61] and in practice it was certainly a shortening of the session around the so-called "critical moment"^[62] which took place, so that critics wrote that 'everyone is well aware what is meant by the deceptive phrase "variable length"... sessions systematically reduced to just a few minutes'.^[63] Irrespective of the theoretical merits of breaking up patients' expectations, it was clear that "the Lacanian analyst never wants to 'shake up' the routine by keeping them for more rather than less time".^[64]

"Whatever the justification, the practical effects were startling. It does not take a cynic to point out that Lacan was able to take on many more analysands than anyone using classical Freudian techniques... [and] as the technique was adopted by his pupils and followers an almost exponential rate of growth became possible".^[65]

Accepting the importance of "the critical moment when insight arises",^[66] object relations theory would nonetheless quietly suggest that "if the analyst does not provide the patient with space in which nothing needs to happen there is no space in which something can happen".^[67] Julia Kristeva, if in very different language, would concur that "Lacan, alert to the scandal of the timeless intrinsic to the analytic experience, was mistaken in wanting to ritualize it as a technique of scansion (short sessions)".^[68]

Writings and writing style[link]

Jacques-Alain Miller is the sole editor of Lacan's seminars, which contain the majority of his life's work. "There has been considerable controversy over the accuracy or otherwise of the transcription and editing", as well as over "Miller's refusal to allow any critical or annotated edition to be published".^[69] Despite Lacan's status as a major figure in the history of psychoanalysis, some of his seminars remain unpublished. Since 1984, Miller has been regularly conducting a series of lectures, "L'orientation lacanienne." Miller's teachings have been published in the US by the journal Lacanian Ink.

Lacan claimed that his Écrits were not to be understood rationally, but would rather produce an effect in the reader similar to the sense of enlightenment one might experience while reading mystical texts.^[70] Lacan's writing is notoriously difficult, due in part to the repeated Hegelian/Kojèvean allusions, wide theoretical divergences from other psychoanalytic and philosophical theory, and an obscure prose style. For some, "the impenetrability of Lacan's prose... [is] too often regarded as profundity precisely because it cannot be understood".^[71] Arguably at least, "the imitation of his style by other 'Lacanian' commentators" has resulted in "an obscurantist antisystematic tradition in Lacanian literature".^[72]

The broader psychotherapeutic literature has little or nothing to say about the effectiveness of Lacanian psychoanalysis.^[73] Though a major influence on psychoanalysis in France and parts of Latin America, Lacan's influence on clinical psychology in the English-speaking world is negligible, where his ideas are best known in the arts and humanities.^[7]

A notable exception is the works of Dr. Annie G. Rogers (A Shining Affliction; The Unsayable: The Hidden Language of Trauma), which credit Lacanian theory for many therapeutic insights in successfully treating sexually abused young women.^[74]

Criticism[link]

Alan D. Sokal and Jean Bricmont in their book Fashionable Nonsense have criticised Lacan's use of terms from mathematical fields such as topology, accusing him of "superficial erudition" and of abusing scientific concepts that he does not understand.^[75] Other critics have dismissed Lacan's work wholesale. François Roustang called it an "incoherent system of pseudo-scientific gibberish," and quoted linguist Noam Chomsky's opinion that Lacan was an "amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan".^[76] Dylan Evans, formerly a Lacanian analyst, eventually dismissed Lacanianism as lacking a sound scientific basis and for harming rather than helping patients, and has criticized Lacan's followers for treating his writings as "holy writ."^[7] Richard Webster has decried what he sees as Lacan's obscurity, arrogance, and the resultant "Cult of Lacan".^[77] Richard Dawkins, in a review of Fashionable Nonsense, said regarding Lacan: "We do not need the mathematical expertise of Sokal and Bricmont to assure us that the author of this stuff is a fake. Perhaps he is genuine when he speaks of non-scientific subjects? But a philosopher who is caught equating the erectile organ to the square root of minus one has, for my money, blown his credentials when it comes to things that I don't know anything about."^[78]

Lacan's colleague Daniel Lagache considered that "[Lacan] embodied the analyst's bad conscience. But... a good conscience in a psychoanalyst is no less dangerous".^[79] Others have been more forceful, describing him as "The Shrink from Hell... [an] attractive psychopath", and detailing a long list of collateral damage to "patients, colleagues, mistresses, wives, children, publishers, editors and opponents... [as his] lunatic legacy".^[80] Certainly many of "the conflicts around Lacan's school and his person" have been linked to the "form of charismatic authority which, in his personal and institutional presence, he so dramatically provoked".^[81] Lacan himself defended his approach on the grounds that "psychosis is an attempt at rigor... I am psychotic for the simple reason that I have always tried to be rigorous".^[82]

Malcolm Bowie has suggested that Lacan "had the fatal weakness of all those who are fanatically against all forms of totalization (the complete picture) in the so-called human sciences: a love of system".^[83] Similarly, Jacqueline Rose has argued that "Lacan was implicated in the phallocentrism he described, just as his utterance constantly rejoins the mastery which he sought to undermine".^[84] Feminists would then raise the question: "is Lacan, in claiming the law of the father, merely himself in the grip of the Oedipus complex?"^[85]

While it is widely recognised that "Lacan was... an intellectual magpie",^[86] this was not simply a matter of borrowing from others. Instead, "Lacan was so zealous in invoking other men's work and claiming to base his own arguments on them, when in reality he was departing from their teachings, leaving behind mere skeletons".^[87] Even with Freud, it is seldom clearly signposted when Lacan is expounding Freud, when he is reinterpreting Freud, or when he is proposing a completely new theory in Freudian guise. The result was "a complete pattern of dissenting assent to the ideas of Freud... Lacan's argument is conducted on Freud's behalf and, at the same time, against him",^[88] so as to leave Lacan himself the "master" of his (and everyone's) thought. "Castoriadis... maintained that Lacan had gradually come to prevent anyone else from thinking because of the way he tried to make all thought dependent on himself".^[89]

More personal criticism of his intellectual style is that it depended on a kind of teasing lure—"fundamental truths to be revealed... but always at some further point".^[90] In such a (feminist) perspective, "Lacan's sadistic capriciousness reveals the prick behind the Phallus... a narcissistic tease who persuades by means of attraction and resistance, not by orderly systematic discourse".^[91] To intimates like Dolto, "Lacan was like a narcissistic and wayward child... All he thought about was himself and his work".^[92] Yet if Lacan was a narcissist, if his writings are essentially "the confessions of a self-justifying megalomaniac", fuelled by "Lacan's craving for recognition—his almost demonic hunger"^[93]—if they reveal "a narcissistic enjoyment of mystification as a form of omnipotent power... phantasies of narcissistic omnipotence",^[94] yet Lacan was clearly one of "what Maccoby calls 'productive narcissists'... [who] get others to buy into their vision and help to make it a reality... the narcissists who change our world".^[95]

Works[link]

Selected works published in English listed below. More complete listings can be found at Lacan Dot Com.