Genealogy of psychoanalysis (1985)
Michel Henry undertook a study of the historical and philosophical genesis of psychoanalysis in the light of phenomenology of life in Généalogie de la psychanalyse, le commencement perdu (Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, the Lost Beginning), in which he shows that the Freudian notion of the unconscious results from the inability of Freud, its founder, to think the essence of life in its purity as affectivity and auto-affection.[62] The repressed representation does not come from the unconscious, it is simply unformed:[63] the unconscious is only an empty representation, it does not exist—or rather, the real unconscious is life itself in its pathetic reality.[64] And it is not repression that provokes anguish, whose existence depends on the mere fact of power, but unused psychic energy or libido.[65] As for the notion of consciousness, it simply means the power of seeing, it is nothing but a consciousness of the object which leads to an empty subjectivity.[66]
