This is a sharp and significant question—one that goes to the heart of how self psychology, which emerges from psychoanalysis, negotiates its phenomenological foundations while retaining fidelity to the psychoanalytic mission of engaging the unconscious.
Let’s unpack the tension first, then see how self psychology (particularly Kohut and his successors) addresses it.
I. The Critique: Phenomenology = Consciousness = Inaccessible to the Unconscious
Phenomenology, especially in the Husserlian tradition, aims to describe experience as it is given—that is, in the immediacy of consciousness, from the first-person perspective. Critics (often coming from classical Freudian or Lacanian camps) argue:
- Phenomenology brackets the unconscious by focusing on intentionality and meaning as constituted in consciousness.
- Psychoanalysis, by contrast, is founded on the opacity of experience, the decentered subject, and the symptom as a compromise formation—the very opposite of phenomenological transparency.
- Therefore, grounding self psychology in phenomenology could be seen as a return to ego psychology or pre-analytic introspectionism, losing sight of the radical alterity of the unconscious.
II. The Self Psychological Response
1. The “Primacy of Self-Experience” Does Not Mean Total Transparency
Kohut begins with the self as experienced, but he never claims that this experience is fully transparent. Instead, he emphasizes the emergence of self-cohesion, through developmentally structured interactions with others (especially selfobjects). This includes:
- Empathic immersion by the analyst, not just observation of behavior or interpretation of drives.
- Recognition that self-experience is layered, often pre-reflective, and that fragmentation or deficit in experience is not easily accessible.
So, phenomenology here functions as a method of inquiry, not a denial of the unconscious. It foregrounds the lived, subjective effect of unconscious disruption, rather than tracing symptoms back to repressed contents.
2. The Unconscious is Not Denied, but Reframed
Kohut explicitly states that he does not deny the unconscious, but redefines it structurally rather than topographically:
“The self is unconscious not because it is repressed but because it has never been structured.” (Kohut, 1977)
This resonates with a developmental model: many aspects of the self are unconscious because they were never articulated, not because they are actively defended against.
In this sense, self psychology extends psychoanalysis to include experiences of deficit, not only conflict. That is, the unconscious is real, but its nature shifts—from the repressed to the unformulated.
3. Phenomenology of the Analyst’s Empathy as Access Point
Kohut reframes the analytic process: rather than deducing unconscious conflict through free association and interpretation, the analyst listens empathically to the patient’s lived experience. That is:
- Empathy becomes the “observational instrument” of psychoanalysis.
- This creates a phenomenological bridge into the patient’s internal world, including unconscious processes as they manifest in disrupted experience.
Phenomenology here is not an alternative to the unconscious, but a method for encountering its traces in experience—e.g., fragmentation, anxiety, shame, incoherence.
4. Later Developments: Intersubjectivity and “Implicit Relational Knowing”
Heinz Kohut’s successors, like Stolorow, Atwood, and later Robert D. Stolorow (with George Atwood and Donna Orange), move toward intersubjective systems theory, which merges phenomenology with psychoanalytic thinking. They argue:
- All experience (even unconscious affect) emerges within relational contexts.
- The unconscious is not a storehouse, but a field of organizing principles that shape affective experience beyond reflection.
- Phenomenology becomes a clinical attitude, not an epistemological constraint: it’s how the analyst tunes into the implicit, nonverbal, and embodied meanings that patients themselves may not yet articulate.
This links with contemporary concepts like “unformulated experience” (Donnel Stern), or “the not-me” (Winnicott), where the unconscious is experienced affectively but not yet narratively.
III. Conclusion: Self Psychology as a Phenomenological Psychoanalysis of the Unconscious
So, to the critique: yes, self psychology draws from phenomenology; no, this does not foreclose access to the unconscious. Rather:
- It shifts the locus of the unconscious from repressed content to disruption of self-experience.
- It uses empathic attunement (a phenomenological act) to enter into the patient’s world, including their non-verbalized, dissociated, or fragmented inner life.
- It affirms that subjective experience is the ground, but that ground is unstable, porous, haunted.
As one might say: phenomenology becomes the portal through which the unconscious absence, the not-yet-formed, makes itself felt.
Would you like me to contrast this with Lacan’s position—that the unconscious is structured like a language and thus radically non-phenomenological?
