Unconscious Emotions and the Limits of Phenomenology: Husserl, Lipps and Freud

Abstract Can an emotion be unconscious? The aim of this paper is to answer this difficult question. Is it possible for an emotion to be a fully lived experience and at the same time remain unknown to the subject? Or, in clearer terms, how can one have a feeling without actually feeling it? At first sight, it seems impossible to imagine the existence of unconscious emotions. If, unlike ideas and other cognitive experiences, the essence of an emotion does not lie in its content but in the way it is experienced, in “the way it feels like,” then the expression “unconscious emotions” itself seems to be a contradiction. However, if we place ourselves from the point of view of the psychoanalytical theory of the unconscious, this statement creates a problem. Most of the unconscious processes revealed in the course of an analysis have strong emotional connotations. A phenomenology of emotions cannot ignore the results and theories brought forth by Freud and his psychoanalysis, whose most important discoveries concern emotions and their impact on the rest of the psychological life of the subject. If unconscious emotions question the limits of phenomenology, my aim in this paper is to show the way phenomenology can take in order to push these limits further. I will start by explaining the way phenomenology traditionally conceives emotions and their relation to other mental phenomena, using mainly Brentano and Husserl’s view on emotions. However, I will show further that there is a way that allows us to conceive the possibility of emotions that do not belong to consciousness. It is the way of a dynamic phenomenology, inspired by the works of Theodor Lipps, which constitute the main philosophical reference in the works of Sigmund Freud.