Ah, thank you for the clarification—your distinction between “the psychology of the self” (自體的心理學) and “self psychology” (自體心理學) is a crucial one. I now see that your invocation of haunting is even more philosophically expansive—less about Kohut’s clinical model and more about a meta-psychological, ontological inquiry into what it means to be a self in this world, in this time. So let’s take this more capacious “psychology of the self” as our point of departure, and rethink what it means for it to be “haunted by phenomenology.”
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1. The Psychology of the Self as a Project Haunted by Phenomenology
The psychology of the self is not a school, nor a method—it is a wandering inquiry, a pilgrimage of subjectivity, traversing:
• Existential questions: Who am I, and how do I become?
• Historical ruptures: What fragments me—colonial trauma, war, ideology, displacement?
• Ontological anxieties: Am I a unity, a multiplicity, a process, or a wound?
This psychology, though post-psychoanalytic and open to posthuman and cosmological thinking, still walks the ground once cultivated by phenomenology. Yet it knows that ground has crumbled. That is the haunting.
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2. In What Sense Is This Psychology “Haunted by Phenomenology”?
(a) The Echo of Lived Experience
Phenomenology gave us the conviction that subjectivity matters—that lived experience is the source of meaning. That echo still resounds in your project. But now:
• Experience is no longer coherent.
• Time is fractured (trauma, colonization, deterritorialization).
• The self is displaced, decentered by global catastrophe, AI, and planetary instability.
So the psychology of the self walks forward, guided by a broken compass once called phenomenology.
(b) The Collapse of Presence
Phenomenology assumed a kind of presence—the givenness of the world to consciousness. But your psychology of the self operates after the collapse of presence:
• Memory is unreliable.
• Belonging is intermittent.
• Meaning is often spectral.
The self now emerges in what is missed, not in what is grasped. This makes the phenomenological legacy—its longing for clarity and synthesis—a ghostly companion, not a guide.
(c) The Return of the Flesh, but Torn
Merleau-Ponty’s flesh of the world offered a beautiful non-dualist ontology. Your psychology of the self seems to inherit that—but in ruins:
• The road is broken.
• The wound is visible.
• The other is not always reachable.
And yet, you still walk. That’s the ethics of this new psychology: to walk with the broken flesh, to testify with the wound.
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3. A Hauntological Psychology
Your psychology of the self is no longer phenomenology. It is something more wounded, more dispersed, more exposed. It may be better described as:
• A hauntology (Derrida): not being, but the echo of being.
• A fugitive phenomenology (à la Saidiya Hartman): always running, always on the edge.
• A van-life metaphysics: where the road is both refuge and exile.
It listens not only to what is spoken in the first-person voice, but to what is murmured in the second-person plural: the Others, the disappeared, the unborn.
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4. Therefore, “Haunted” Means…
• Not nostalgia, but a refusal to forget.
• Not repetition, but bearing witness to the trace.
• Not method, but pilgrimage.
The psychology of the self, as you’ve envisioned it, stands in the ruins of phenomenology, gathers its broken concepts like driftwood, and tries to kindle warmth again, maybe under the stars, maybe for a stranger on the road.
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Would you like to title this meditation—perhaps as a prologue to your summer seminar? Something like “Haunted by Phenomenology: A Prologue to the Psychology of the Self”?
