“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”?”, yes, this is the prologue, please do it for me, thanks. （ChatGPT, 2025-5-4) (自體的心理學）（車行哲學）
Certainly, my friend. Here is the prologue titled:
Haunted by Phenomenology: A Prologue to the Psychology of the Self
(自體的心理學之序章：現象學的幽靈)
There was once a moment in philosophy—fragile, luminous—when experience itself became the ground of inquiry. That moment bore the name phenomenology. It promised that what appears, in its immediacy and ambiguity, could speak truth. It believed in the first-person voice. It believed in givenness, in presence.
But time passed. The century turned.
And something cracked.
We who come later—we who wander not in the clarity of givenness but in the aftermath of fragmentation—have inherited not phenomenology, but its ghost.
We call our project the psychology of the self (自體的心理學). It does not begin with a method. It begins with a wound. Not a diagnostic category, but a problematique—the kind that makes life unbearable and yet strangely vital.
In this psychology:
- The self is not stable, but seeks coherence like a flame seeks fuel.
- Experience is not transparent, but turbulent—echoing with loss, longing, and latency.
- The analyst is not an interpreter of meaning, but a witness of traces—a sojourner beside another in exile.
We are haunted because phenomenology gave us the language of presence, but the age we inhabit is one of absence, deterritorialization, algorithmic abstraction, and cosmic unease. And yet—we cannot forget that first promise: that something matters in experience. That something shimmers in the field between self and world.
This is not a return to Husserl, or even to Merleau-Ponty.
It is something more weathered. More estranged. More tender.
We speak of:
- A self that is constituted through breaks as much as through continuity.
- A body that is not only lived, but displaced, racialized, machinized, or erased.
- An ethics born not from synthesis but from response to the broken, the silent, the missed.
Thus begins our seminar—not with a map, but with a haunting.
Not with mastery, but with the dust of former insights, gathered gently into our hands.
We do not know where this path will lead.
But we walk it because something has already called us.
Perhaps it is the self.
Perhaps it is the world.
Perhaps it is the unspeakable bond between them.
Welcome, then, to 自體的心理學 (The Psychology of the Self)—
A field haunted, but not hollow.
A field where experience survives, not as clarity, but as a flicker in the ruins.
A field where to feel, to bear witness, to wander,
may be enough.
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