Can an emotion be unconscious? 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 or feelings.Footnote 1 If, unlike ideas and other cognitive experiences, the essence of an emotion does not lie in its content but in its quality—in the way it is experienced, in “what it feels like”—then the expression “unconscious emotions” itself seems to be a contradiction. From the point of view of phenomenology in a large sense, beginning with Brentano’s descriptive psychology and including early Husserlian phenomenology, either is there a describable emotion but it is necessarily conscious, or if no conscious expression of this emotion is present to the subject, there is simply no emotion to describe at all.

However, this intuitive conclusion is challenged by the discoveries made by Freud at the beginning of the 20th century as he explored the realms of psychopathology using the psychoanalytical method. Most of the unconscious processes revealed in the course of an analysis do indeed have strong emotional connotations. This emotional aspect of unconscious processes is the main reason for their repression: an absolutely neutral thought would not need to be repressed. And if we deny the possibility for an emotion to be unconscious, how can we account for all the unconscious feelings and desires that Freud managed to bring to light using his analytical method?

Are unconscious emotions then possible? In La nature des émotions. Une introduction partisane, Samuel Lepine explicitly asks this very question (Lepine, 2023: 30), and after a few pages of discussion, arrives at the conclusion that neither feelings nor emotions can be unconscious in a strong (i.e., psychological) sense (Lepine, 2023: 35). Lepine considers, in fact, that there are two ways of defending the hypothesis of unconscious emotions: one uses the psychoanalytical approach, the other uses neuroscience. Here we will not discuss the second approach,Footnote 2 and this for two reasons: first, it leads us beyond the limits of what phenomenology could teach us because it addresses events that take place on the somatic level by observing them from an objective, third-person point of view, while phenomenology’s first rule is to provide an account of experience from a subjective, first-person point of view; second, if neuroscience can study phenomena that could be called unconscious, these phenomena are not part of what the phenomenological tradition in a large sense (beginning with Brentano) would call psychic or mental phenomena. In any case, even if the neural dispositions brought to light by neuroscience could indeed be qualified as unconscious, since the subject is not aware of their action and cannot control them or even describe them from a subjective point of view, they are not psychological at all—so the neuroscientific defense of the unconscious does not contradict the widespread thesis that all that is psychological is also conscious. In the neuroscientific view, the term “unconscious” can only be used to qualify the neural connections in the brain, on a somatic level, thus belonging precisely to the sphere of what is not psychological.

It is accordingly the other way to defend unconscious emotions that interests us here—the one using the psychoanalytical approach to the unconscious, which consists in defending the existence of a properly psychological unconscious. But Lepine’s analysis dismisses this possibility as well. In this Lepine is following J. Deonna and F. Teroni’s The Emotions: A Philosophical Introduction (Deonna & Teroni, 2012), who defend a theory of emotions understood as evaluative attitudes (Smith, 2014)—a theory that is profoundly coherent with a classical phenomenological stance such as we can already find in Husserl’s work around 1910 (Husserl, 2020, Texts I and II). This attitudinal theory of emotions is based on three principles: first, all emotions possess a phenomenological character; second, they all possess intentionality; and third, they are all submitted to epistemological evaluations that qualify them as correct, justified, and appropriate or inappropriate. For Deonna and Teroni, an emotion could appear unconscious only because it was either ignored while the attention of the subject was directed toward other, more important thoughts or actions, or because it was actually experienced but misunderstood by the subject, who describes it using an inappropriate concept. In both cases the emotion is not, strictly speaking, unconscious: the subject is indeed feeling the emotion, even though she cannot or does not care to describe it appropriately. Defending this argument, Lepine quotes Freud himself in section III of “The Unconscious” (Freud, 1957b), where we can find this assertion: “Strictly speaking, […] there are no unconscious affects as there are unconscious ideas” (Freud, 1957b: 178), an assertion that brings Lepine to the conclusion that it is “trivial and consensual to acknowledge that there are, strictly speaking, no unconscious emotions or feelings” (Lepine, 2023: 34). It is in fact so consensual that even the inventor of psychoanalysis agrees that there are no unconscious emotions.

However, things are more complicated if we take the point of view of the psychoanalytical theory of the unconscious that Freud advanced at the beginning of the 20th century. The quote that Lepine cites from “The Unconscious” plays in the latter text precisely the role of an introduction to the real question addressed by psychoanalysis: the question of repression as the only means to understand the unconscious in a strong psychological sense. In this statement, Freud wants to stress the fact that emotions and ideas are not that similar: emotions are to be understood in a dynamic manner, as complex processes that can follow many different paths on their way to consciousness and can suffer all sorts of vicissitudes on these paths (Freud, 1957a). On the other hand, ideas are not processes but contents, and their being conscious or unconscious is to be understood quite differently from the case of emotions. Thus far from being the expression of Freud’s doubts concerning the existence of unconscious emotions, the aforementioned statement does in fact open the way to reflect upon the psychoanalytical unconscious, and from this perspective, unconscious emotions are indeed not only a possibility but a psychological reality.

Consider, for instance, one of the very first cases of hysteria described by Freud and Breuer in their Studies on Hysteria from 1895: the case of Anna O. (Breuer & Freud, 1957: 21–45). Many of Anna O.’s symptoms went back to one traumatic hallucination. While taking care of her sick father, Anna O., half asleep by his bed, had the vision of a black snake coming out of the wall, threatening the life of her father. But when she tried to chase the snake she realized that she could not move her arm or speak. She saw her own fingers turning to snakes, and all she could pronounce were some children’s verses in English (Breuer & Freud, 1957: 37). Some of the symptoms she developed later reproduced the main elements of this hallucination. But only a long and difficult process of interpretation was able to bring to light the feeling in which the first hallucination and the following symptoms originated: a desire that she could not face, the desire that her father was dead, liberating her from the heavy task of nursing him, which prevented her from living her youth. We must agree that for Anna O., this desire was utterly inaccessible. The symptoms’ only reason to be was in fact to block this desire from becoming conscious, since it placed everything that Anna O. wanted and believed of herself into question.

Are we then allowed simply to ignore this and all the other clinical examples that Freud brought forth and explained using his theory of a psychological unconscious? Should we declare that these phenomena correspond to nothing describable or accessible to phenomenology? Of course, nothing stops us from adopting this position and either denying that Freud’s discovery is of any philosophical interest or considering that psychopathological phenomena go beyond the limits of the phenomenological project and fall out of its conceptual boundaries, just as neuroscientific results do. In fact, from the very beginning, the phenomenology of emotions is itself founded on a supposition that we can situate in Brentano’s work—namely, on the supposition that emotions are necessarily intentional, and thus conscious. Is it then impossible from a phenomenological point of view to take into account Freud’s discovery of unconscious emotions?

In the following pages, I will argue that it is indeed of interest to phenomenology to undertake a serious examination of Freud’s discovery of the repressed unconscious, particularly with regard to the case of unconscious emotions. This is for at least three reasons. First, this discovery concerns a side of subjective experience inaccessible to phenomenology because it is only revealed by a clinical approach and only visible through the study of psychopathological phenomena. And since phenomenology concerns itself with all subjective experience, the Freudian discovery of the unconscious opens the way toward new questions for phenomenology. Second, the dynamic approach to emotions that we find in Freud’s works directly challenges any type of phenomenology of emotions and cannot be dismissed as easily as the authors mentioned above would like. The results and theories brought forth by this new science of the psyche, whose most important discoveries concern emotions and their impact on the rest of the psychological life of the subject, reveal the limits of descriptive and even of dynamic phenomenology. The descriptive point of view, traditionally associated with the study of mental phenomena since Brentano’s Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, is, in fact, unable to give us an account not only of unconscious emotions but of any unconscious mental event or process since describing such an event would mean that it instantly becomes conscious. Using reflection as the main instrument allowing us to describe mental phenomena is an approach that denies by definition any access to the unconscious aspects of the experience, which are precisely the aspects we would have wanted to describe in the first place if we were to take Freud’s perspective. It is thus in principle that in order to understand the unconscious, we need to switch from a descriptive to a dynamic point of view that includes the causal inference of unconscious processes from their conscious effects or symptoms. Third, even in this dynamic perspective, which allows us a certain phenomenological access to the unconscious aspects of mental life, it is a challenge to prove that an emotion can actually be lived without our knowledge—that we can feel pain, sadness, anger, or joy, and yet have no notion of it. Phenomenology can live up to this challenge, extending the limits of what it is possible for us to seize phenomenologically, but only on one condition: by taking up the Freudian concept of a psychological unconscious defined by repression.

In order better to understand what an unconscious emotion could mean and whether there is a way to conceive it without contradiction from a phenomenological point of view, we therefore need to take three successive steps beyond the limits of traditional phenomenology.

The first step is to shift from the descriptive point of view that we find in Brentano and in the early Husserl toward a dynamic point of view that emerges with the transcendental turn and that we can already find in Husserl’s Ideas I, but that is fully developed by Husserl in his later texts. Thus in our first section, we will examine both the changes brought to Husserl’s conception of emotions by the transcendental turn and the consequences for our question concerning unconscious emotions.

The second step is to show how from a dynamic point of view, we can move from consciousness to the unconscious and ascertain how they are articulated with one another. For this, we will begin by discussing the place the unconscious receives in Husserl’s lesser-known manuscripts as well as in his later published works. But despite a certain fascination that we find in recent phenomenological works with Husserl’s interest in the unconscious and with a comparison of Husserl with Freud (Bernet, 2003; Trincia, 2008; Smith, 2010; Brudzińska, 2006, 2019; Aenishanslin, 2019; Geniusas, 2024), and despite the undeniable interest of this issue, we must agree that Husserl is not the most obvious reference on this subject. Since it is consciousness that is ultimately at the core of Husserlian phenomenology, Husserl only considers the unconscious in relation to consciousness as its zero-degree. There is, however, one other philosopher, Husserl’s contemporary and correspondent, who not only had a dynamic approach to psychology but put the concept of the unconscious at the center of his psychology. Far less known today than either Husserl or Freud, the German philosopher Theodor Lipps was a student of Wilhelm Wundt and an important personality of his time to whom we owe, for example, a most interesting analysis of the phenomena of Einfühlung. Lipps’s philosophical understanding of the unconscious, its role in mental life, and its relation to emotions and affectivity will guide us throughout our second section.

However, unconscious emotions seem to be impossible even in Lipps’s unconscious-friendly psychology. Even though Lipps was a major philosophical reference for Freud (and the only contemporary oneFootnote 3), it is only by examining Freud’s more radical position on the unconscious that we can take the third and final step, one that takes us from the dynamic to the repressed, from a merely philosophical concept of the unconscious to the psychoanalytical discovery of a radical unconscious, inaccessible to reflection—which, as we will see in the third section, is the only type of unconscious able to support a non-contradictory conception of unconscious emotions.

The Impossibility of Unconscious Emotions from a Descriptive Point of View: From Brentano’s Descriptive Psychology to Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology

Emotions in Brentano’s Descriptive Psychology

If we are to understand why descriptive phenomenology cannot account for unconscious emotions—and indeed, for any unconscious phenomenon at all—we need to return briefly to Brentano and his classification of mental phenomena. Brentano distinguishes three types of mental phenomena: presentations, judgments, and “acts of love and hate” (Brentano, 1973). Presentations are the most basic type of mental acts; they simply present an object to the mind, while judgments and feelings need and include a previous presentation of their object, which means that they are complex mental acts founded on the simpler act of presentation:

This act of presentation forms the foundation not merely of the act of judging, but also of desiring and of every other mental act. Nothing can be judged, desired, hoped or feared, unless one has a presentation of that thing. (Brentano, 1973: 61)

The third class of mental acts is complex and heterogeneous, including feelings, desires, and volitions, each presenting a double positive-negative face, with “pro- or contra-attitudes towards their object” (Vendrell Ferran, 2015: 353). As Uriah Kriegel suggests in Brentano’s Philosophical System, even though we could separate the third class of mental phenomena into three different and irreducible categories—namely, states of will, emotional states, and affective sensations such as pleasure and pain—“Brentano has a unified account of all three as characterized by a distinctive, inherently evaluative mode or attitude” (Kriegel, 2018: 10), which is not very different from the perspective advocated by Deonna and Teroni. In fact, despite their heterogeneity, mental acts belonging to the third class all share one common characteristic: an evaluative attitude toward an intentional object. We can thus notice that in the Brentanian model, emotions have more in common with judgments than with presentations, as argued by Fisette in La philosophie de Franz Brentano (Fisette, 2022: 95). Both emotions and judgments are complex acts that include the acceptance or rejection of a presentation. It is the type of acceptance and rejection that distinguishes between the two; judgments accept or reject presentations as true or false, while feelings accept or reject them as desirable or detestable. Thus emotions in Brentano are fully intentional acts, comprising “a sui generis category characterized by a distinctive intentional mode” (Kriegel, 2017: 46). And this is true even of their most basic forms, pleasure and pain, traditionally associated with sensations rather than judgments.

But what is particular to Brentano’s view is that all intentional phenomena are also conscious. Intentionality and consciousness go together and imply each other (Fisette, 2022: 70). Since emotions are mental phenomena, they present both of these essential characteristics: they are intentional, even in their most basic forms, and as a consequence, they are necessarily conscious. The hypothesis of unconscious emotions is thus barred from the very beginning in Brentano’s perspective.

Husserl’s Phenomenology of Emotion from the Logical Investigations to Ideas I

We can recognize the influence of the Brentanian model of descriptive psychology in the account of emotions that Husserl provides starting with the Fifth Logical Investigation (Husserl, 2001b, vol. 2). When Husserl directly approaches the question of intentional acts in his Fifth Logical Investigation, Brentano’s model is thoroughly considered, and this consideration gives way to an objection to his classification. The main concern of this critique is that presentations seem to be at the same time full-blooded acts and mere parts of other acts. Husserl’s alternative to the Brentanian classification in § 41 of the Fifth Logical Investigation is to unite presentations and judgments in a unique class of acts that he calls objectifying acts. Emotions, together with volitional acts, are thus singled out in the Logical Investigations as the class of non-objectifying acts. In a nutshell, the correct classification according to the Logical Investigations does not then separate between simple and complex acts, but between emotional and cognitive acts: cognitive acts provide the intentional objects—which are the proper objects of judgments, whether simple objects of presentations or states of affairs (Sachverhalte)—and this is why they are called “objectifying”. Emotions refer to these same intentional objects by adding an affective, qualitative nuance, and they are thus considered “secondary intentions” (Husserl, 2001b, vol. 2: 167) dependent on objectifying acts.Footnote 4

However, Husserl’s view on emotions changes between the Logical Investigations and Ideas I. In Ideas I, Husserl gives up the distinction between objectifying and non-objectifying acts: the category of objectifying acts is extended to all intentional acts, including emotions. We find, for example, the following statement in § 117: “any acts whatever—even emotional and volitional acts—are ‘objectifying,’ ‘constituting’ objects originaliter” (Husserl, 1983: 282).

The reason for this new perspective on emotions in Husserl’s phenomenology is, of course, to be found in the transcendental turn. But it is not our ambition here to give an extensive interpretation of the Husserlian transcendental turn; the issue has probably been one of the most extensively discussed in the phenomenological literature, and a thorough exploration would take us too far away from our point. However, with regard to Husserl’s approach to emotions, it should be said that one of the consequences of the transcendental turn in phenomenology is that the intentional object is no longer supposed to have an independent existence with respect to the act. As everybody knows, the epochē suspends any judgment concerning anything that would or would not take place in a world independent from transcendental consciousness. The field of phenomenology is thus limited to consciousness and its acts, but there is a counterpart to this limitation: the consciousness in question is transcendental and not empirical, and as such, it contains all the subjective possibilities imaginable.

Thus the transcendental turn brings forth a new approach to intentionality and to mental acts. Since the intentional object becomes entirely dependent on the act in which it is given, intentionality in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology is to be conceived not simply as a relation between the act and its intentional object, but as a noetic-noematic correlation. All intentional acts present this double structure: the qualitative side of the act, the noesis, comprises one half of the act and is indissociable from the other half, the noema (which is, of course, the new name for the intentional object contained in the act). The main consequence of this change in Husserl’s viewpoint is that the act and its intentional object can no longer be thought of independently. If emotions are intentional acts, they accordingly need to contain not only a specific noetic character but also a specific noematic moment.

Analogous statements hold, then, as one can easily see, for the emotional and volitional spheres, for mental processes of liking or disliking, of valuing in any sense, of wishing, deciding, acting. All these are mental processes which contain many and often heterogeneous intentive strata, the noetic and, correspondingly, also the noematic ones. (Husserl, 1983: 231)

While in the Logical Investigations emotion was considered simply as a noetic quality that would attach itself to a previously given object, the possibility of such purely noetic acts, containing no specific noematic counterpart, disappears in the Ideas I. Emotions are considered from now on as objectifying, just like cognitive acts. Therefore from now on, all acts are considered intentional in exactly the same sense.

Parallel to this, Husserl also acknowledges that the general structure of all intentional acts includes the possibility that the act can give way to a corresponding reflective act of which it becomes the object:

Any mental process which is not an object of regard can, with respect to ideal possibility, become “regarded”; a reflection on the part of the Ego is directed to it, it now becomes an object for the Ego. […] In turn, the reflections are mental processes and, as reflections, can become the substrates of new reflections; and so on ad infinitum as a matter of essentially necessary universality. (Husserl, 1983: 174)

Intentionality and reflectivity, together with the temporal structure of mental life, are identified by Husserl as the three fundamental structures of pure consciousness, a thesis he extensively discusses in the second chapter of the third section of Ideas I. Anticipating his answer (Ideas I, § 79) to H. J. Watt’s objection (see Watt, 2018) against the pertinence of introspection, Husserl shows in § 78 of Ideas I that reflection is an ideal possibility contained, in principle, in any mental act. While from an empirical perspective, we can always imagine acts that do not actually become the object of a new reflexive act, transcendental phenomenology, which concerns itself with the ideal possibilities of subjective experience, brings to light the fact that reflection is a universal possibility for all mental acts: if an act is actually lived, it is by its essence susceptible of becoming the object of a new, reflective act. Denying this possibility for a mental act amounts to excluding it from the sphere of transcendental consciousness, and therefore from the sphere of phenomenology itself. In other words, if an act belongs to the transcendental ego, it is necessarily both intentional and accessible to consciousness through reflection, and in consequence, no act belonging to the transcendental ego can be called “unconscious”.

We can see that Husserl’s position on emotional acts is finally not that different from Brentano’s. On the contrary, Husserl recapitulates on a transcendental level what Brentano had already affirmed on an empirical level: since emotions are to be considered intentional in the same sense as cognitive acts, they cannot be unconscious, i.e., inaccessible to the transcendental ego. All mental acts, including emotions, are on the one hand intentional in the same sense since they are all objectifying acts defined by a noetic-noematic correlation.Footnote 5 On the other hand, since they are the intentional acts of a transcendental ego, they are all also accessible to reflection, which is one of the fundamental structures of pure consciousness. Thus if all that is intentional is (potentially) conscious and all consciousness is intentional, then emotions, considered by Husserl as full-blooded intentional acts, cannot be unconscious (at least not indefinitely unconscious, since they are all in principle accessible through reflection). We can conclude, then, that from the descriptive point of view of transcendental phenomenology, it is no easier to conceive emotions as unconscious than it was from the empirical point of view of Brentano’s descriptive psychology since it is obvious that we can only offer a phenomenological description of that of which we are actually aware.

Dynamic Phenomenology: The Possibility of Unconscious Mental Acts in Husserl and Lipps

Husserl’s Dynamic Phenomenology and the Question of the Unconscious

But as we know, Husserlian phenomenology was never purely descriptive. From the very beginning, the descriptive works published by Husserl were accompanied by an enormous number of research manuscripts that remained unknown to the public at the time but were progressively discovered and put to use by Husserl’s commentators. This subterranean side of Husserl’s phenomenology, which remained for some time in the state of shorthand manuscripts, has now been transcribed and for the most part has been published in the Husserliana collection, demonstrating Husserl’s constant preoccupation with the more dynamic aspects of mental life. How sense emerges from the diversity of passive syntheses, how attention focuses on a particular aspect of the object while leaving the rest in the background, how every act implies a temporal horizon, are questions that constantly nourished Husserl’s reflection, even before the transcendental turn. However, they become preponderant in Husserl’s later works, especially after 1930, as several commentators have remarked (Moran, 2017: 16; Nakamura, 2019: 99; Geniusas, 2024). As Husserl’s phenomenology became progressively more and more dynamic, taking a genetic and generative turn, the question of the unconscious emerged as a question of the limits that the transcendental ego encounters in the constitution of the world.Footnote 6 Since the transcendental ego is conceived as summing up all subjective possibilities, questions arise about limit phenomena, such as the horizon of what has sunk so far into forgetfulness that it has become invisible to the subject, or dreamless sleep, and even more metaphysical questions such as those concerning birth and death. All these questions appeal to a phenomenological consideration of phenomena that might be qualified, as Dan Zahavi puts it clearly in an Appendix to Self-Awareness and Alterity called “Self-Awareness and the Unconscious,” as belonging to the category of the unconscious: “the moment phenomenology moves beyond an investigation of object-manifestation and act-intentionality, it enters a realm that has traditionally been called the unconscious” (Zahavi, 2020: 207).

From Husserl’s exploration of unconscious phenomena a question spontaneously arises: can a parallel be drawn between this concept and the psychoanalytical unconscious revealed by Freud? Is Husserl’s unconscious the same as the one produced by the psychoanalytical tradition? Or should we distinguish the two, and consider that the use of the term “unconscious” in psychoanalysis and phenomenology is polysemic?

Husserl’s increasing interest in the unconscious might in fact seem paradoxical, especially from the point of view of transcendental phenomenology, whose first and clearest gesture is to reduce the field of research open to phenomenological exploration to the pure consciousness of the transcendental ego. Earlier commentators on Husserl’s phenomenology did not fail to notice this, as we can read, for instance, in Ricœur’s classical Essay on Interpretation (Ricœur, 1970). Even though Ricœur thinks that “no reflexive phenomenology has come as close to the Freudian unconscious as the phenomenology of Husserl” (Ricœur, 1970: 376), he shows that the comparison has its limits, and after a very thorough analysis, he arrives at the conclusion that “the unconscious of phenomenology is the preconscious of psychoanalysis” (Ricœur, 1970: 392).

It has been argued, however, that Ricœur’s analysis was based only on the published works of Husserl since he had no access to the numerous unpublished manuscripts that have progressively been rendered accessible by the dedicated work of researchers associated with the Husserl Archives. The manuscripts have revealed that the theme of the unconscious was a constant preoccupation in Husserl’s work, a preoccupation that took many different forms as dynamic aspects of phenomenology progressively emerged—namely, the temporal structure of consciousness and the question of the horizon implied by what is present, as well as that of the fluctuations of attention that generate a contrast between the explicit themes of the intentional acts and their background. These progressively lead Husserl toward an interrogation of the limit cases of consciousness. And this has motivated quite a few phenomenologists to reconsider Ricœur’s conclusion, seeking a way to compare, articulate, or (for the most audacious) invert the importance of Freud’s and Husserl’s conceptions of the unconscious, claiming that Freud was only able to give a less precise and conceptually poorer version of Husserl’s phenomenological approach (Bernet, 2008: 126). The most prominent of the phenomenologists concerned with constructing a parallel between Husserl and Freud is Rudolf Bernet (Bernet, 2003, 2008), whose works have brilliantly seized the issue and opened the way for many others (Trincia, 2008; Smith, 2010; Moran, 2017; Togni, 2018; Brudzińska, 2006, 2019; Nakamura, 2019; Geniusas, 2024, etc.). Yet their conclusion is often negative, and for some this results in a certain mistrust of the very concept of the unconscious, at least in its psychoanalytical sense. Rudolf Bernet himself concludes his discussion of the unconscious in Husserl and Freud with the remark that “Freud’s economic determination of the Unconscious as a primary process appeared questionable to us unless it is combined with the phenomenologically understood process of repression” (Bernet, 2003: 219).

But whether the Husserlian unconscious is similar or different, more or less fundamental than the Freudian unconscious, clear enough, or needing further phenomenological clarification, this discussion remains beyond the purpose of the present paper. What we really seek to establish is whether, from a phenomenological point of view, unconscious emotions can make sense. If dynamic phenomenology is more prone to consider unconscious emotions than descriptive psychology is, then in order to answer our question, we must ask what exactly Husserl understands by the term “unconscious”. Taking a closer look at the texts in which Husserl refers explicitly to the unconscious, we can see that the uses he makes of this term are plural. In a particularly clear and exhaustive paper, Saulius Geniusas identifies and analyzes no less than seven different meanings Husserl gives to the idea of the unconscious in connection with the concepts of horizon; time-constitution; sedimentation; repression; the fact that consciousness can be absorbed in its own presentifications; dreamless sleep; and finally, the question of instincts (Geniusas, 2024: 3). As we can see from Geniusas’s paper, the first six uses of the term “unconscious” all demonstrate that in each case, the Husserlian unconscious remains dependent on consciousness. It is only the instinctual unconscious that takes us out of the sphere of consciousness, but we could wonder whether it doesn’t take us out of the sphere of phenomenology as well.

Let’s briefly examine the seven uses of the term “unconscious” in Husserl, as described in Geniusas’s paper. Already in Ideas I, we can find initial glimpses of one of the most radical theories in Husserlian phenomenology: namely, that each act reflects the whole of the world, both on its noetic and on its noematic side, since each act has as background the whole of the stream of mental processes. Indeed, each act has its thematic core along with several layers of less and less explicit background.

The term horizon of mental processes not only signifies here, however, the horizon of phenomenological temporality according to its described dimensions, but also differences in novel modes of givenness. Accordingly, a mental process which has become an Object of an Ego-regard, which therefore has the mode of being made an object of regard, has its horizon of unregarded mental processes; a mental process seized upon in a mode of “attention” and possibly in unceasing clarity, has a horizon of inattention in the background with relative differences of clarity and obscurity as well as salientness and lack of salientness. (Husserl, 1983: 197)

The horizonal unconscious, which includes all conscious experiences that are no longer thematic, is then to be understood as “still a mode of consciousness,” (Geniusas, 2024: 6) even though a mode that lacks affective force. Similarly, the time-constituting consciousness that characterizes the temporal flow is to be qualified as “‘unconscious’ consciousness,” with the term “unconscious” here pointing to a “hidden dimension of consciousness itself” (Geniusas, 2024: 8) corresponding to the lived present, which is inaccessible as such to reflection. The sedimented unconscious—the third and probably the most prominent use of the term in Husserl—questions the limits of that which has sunk so far into the experiential past that it no longer exerts any affective force. The unconscious then appears as the zero-point of consciousness. To the list of Husserlian texts quoted by Geniusas on this issue, we can add two later manuscripts included in Husserliana Materialien under the title Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution. Texts Nr. 48 and 49 from the C10 manuscript interest us particularly here because Husserl explicitly addresses the question of the unconscious as the “zero-degree” of consciousness. In Text Nr. 48, he distinguishes between three dimensions of the subjective experience: the explicit theme toward which the subject directs her attention; the implicit dimensions of the theme that comprise its horizon and implicitly affect the subject; and the “unconscious” background of that which doesn’t affect the subject at all (Husserl, 2006: 184). But in the next text from the C10 manuscript, Husserl considers the unconscious not only as the background of consciousness, but in itself. If we were to imagine a completely empty experience in which no affection touches the subject, what would it feel like? Husserl imagines it as a completely dark consciousness, the “zero” of consciousness (das “Null” des Bewusstseins), which he also calls “the night of the unconscious” (Husserl, 2006: 193). But even at this limit point of consciousness, where all content has sunk into complete forgetfulness, the unconscious is still to be conceived as a sort of (empty) consciousness. As Geniusas points out:

The very fact that the contents that sink into the night of the unconscious can be brought back to memory means that they were not entirely lost, that they were still in consciousness, although paradoxically, in consciousness without consciousness knowing it. (Geniusas, 2024: 10)

However, this concept of a sedimented unconscious is not to be confused with what Husserl calls the “repressed unconscious”. The term “repression” should suggest that here we are closest to the Freudian conception of the unconscious. Indeed, there are a few passages where Husserl talks, for instance, about the case of “a suppression of the affection in which the affection is repressed or covered over, but is still present” (Husserl, 2001a: 518). The difference between the sedimented unconscious and the repressed unconscious is that the sedimented unconscious contains experiences that have necessarily once been conscious, while the repressed unconscious contains experiences that were kept from arriving in consciousness by other, more vivid experiences that took over and solicited all the attention of the subject, pushing other, less vivid experiences into the background. The repressed unconscious in Husserl should nevertheless be distinguished from the much more specific Freudian sense since Husserl’s sense only points to background experiences that contain nothing in their essence forbidding them from becoming conscious.

To these different uses of the unconscious Geniusas adds the absorbed unconscious, meaning the fact that the subject can be entirely absorbed in her presentifications and cease to have reflective access to her present experience. However, this is only true because she is absorbed in a reflection upon her past or phantasized ego, which Husserl characterizes as a “second-level self-consciousness”. Another type of unconscious is the dormant unconscious, where no content whatsoever is present to consciousness. In dreamless sleep, consciousness is completely empty and unconscious of the world. But as Geniusas points out, “the very fact that the sleeping ego can wake up means that it is still affected by the world” (Geniusas, 2024: 16). From the analysis of this series of uses of the term “unconscious” we can conclude, following Rudolf Bernet’s insight, that (in Husserl’s vision at least) “nothing is unconscious in itself, instead, everything unconscious is unconscious in relation to something conscious” (Bernet, 2003: 214).

Finally, the only Husserlian use of the term “unconscious” that is not reducible to a lesser form of consciousness is the one associated with instincts. Instinctual unconscious, the seventh sense identified by Geniusas, is the only Husserlian use of the term that opposes the unconscious to consciousness instead of considering it as a limit case of consciousness: “the instinctual unconscious refers to irrational facticity, i.e., to what is blind, irrational and unfree, while consciousness stands for reason, i.e., for rational decision and self-determination” (Geniusas, 2024:17). But in this case, the unconscious seems to be excluded from the sphere of phenomenological experience and attached instead to concepts like nature or the innate.

From this thorough analysis, we can conclude, as Geniusas does at the end of his paper, that rather than considering the unconscious for its own sake, Husserl understands consciousness as “a multi-layered structure and he analyzes its lowest levels under the heading of the unconscious”. Thus Ricœur’s position with respect to the possibility of comparing the use of the term “unconscious” in Husserl and Freud still stands, despite the publication of all the Husserlian manuscripts: Husserl’s unconscious can at best be compared to the Freudian preconscious, i.e., a form of consciousness that is latent but still essentially accessible to consciousness.

However, there is another, still more fundamental difference between Husserl’s and Freud’s use of the term “unconscious,” a difference that underlines the difficulty of the comparison even more forcefully. As we can see from the discussion above, the Husserlian term “unconscious” is only used in an adjectival sense. Husserl calls “unconscious” those experiences that escape locally or occasionally the grasp of reflective consciousness. The unconscious is then to be understood as a quality that can belong to certain objects of experience that, for different reasons, fall out of the reach of consciousness—a quality whose meaning is purely negative, expressing the absence of certain qualities associated with consciousness such as the fact of being the thematic object of an intentional act, or at least affecting the ego in one way or another. In contrast, consciousness has in Husserl mainly a nominative sense, of which the adjectival sense is only a derivation. We can speak of an object or experience as being conscious as long as it affects consciousness with a certain non-null vivacity, but we can also speak of consciousness per se, as for instance when we consider transcendental consciousness as synonymous with the transcendental ego. But for Husserl, there is no sense in speaking of “the unconscious” as separated from consciousness and comparable to it.

In Freud, on the other hand, the weight of each of the two opposed concepts is inverted: it is the unconscious that is to be defined nominatively as the essence of the psyche, and it is consciousness that is to be understood as a mere accidental quality that can belong occasionally to certain mental phenomena. It is the unconscious, and not consciousness, that is “the true psychic reality” (Freud, 1931: 463), while “the effect on consciousness is only a remote psychic product of the unconscious process” (Freud, 1931: 462).

Theodor Lipps and his Dynamic Psychology: Emotions and the Unconscious

We can see how difficult it is, from a Husserlian point of view, to think of something that is exterior to consciousness by definition. Ricœur seems in fact to have been right from the very beginning in stressing the fact that the crucial role played by consciousness in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology makes it impossible to carry out a phenomenological translation of the psychoanalytical unconscious in all its radicality. Even from a dynamic phenomenological perspective, the unconscious only appears as relative to consciousness, as the negation of consciousness: even a zero-degree affection is still a sort of affection, and its unconscious character is a sort of limit case of consciousness. Thus no matter how far we let ourselves be led by Husserl on the path of dynamic phenomenology, it remains the case that the unconscious, and all of the more unconscious emotions, seem to be an unsurpassable blind spot.

There is, however, one philosopher who took seriously the idea that the unconscious could not simply be an inessential quality of certain mental phenomena, but another name for the psyche itself. Theodor Lipps thought, in fact, that the unconscious is to be considered in a nominative sense and not merely as the lack of vivacity of certain phenomena that make them unable to affect the subject. The unconscious is not a characteristic of the objects of consciousness, but the most prominent constituent of the subject itself. In this sense, the unconscious plays in Lipps’s psychology the same fundamental role that consciousness plays in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology.

Despite being one of the important philosophers of his time, Theodor Lipps’s dynamic psychology of the unconscious is not very well known today (Salvia, 2015: 381–390; Devonis, 2000: 639–664; Gyemant, 2018a, b). We can find Lipps’s name in three different but interconnected contexts. The first is the debate that opposed psychologism and anti-psychologism at the beginning of the 20th century (Lavigne, 2018). He is indeed mentioned in Husserl’s Prolegomena (Husserl, 2001b) as one of the main representative figures of psychologism, a position Husserl thoroughly criticized. He is also one of the main theorists of the concept of Einfühlung, which inspired Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity (Taipale, 2015; Depraz, 2017) as presented in his Fifth Cartesian Meditation (Husserl, 1973), as well as Max Scheler’s concept of sympathy (Agard, 2017). Based on a very complex theory of emotions and affectivity, Lipps’s concept of Einfühlung was central to his theory of aesthetics concerning the way a work of art can create its emotional effect on the viewer, and this is why Lipps became a fairly important reference in this field. His concept of Einfühlung has also been used more recently in neuroscience in order to provide a philosophical framework for the theory of mirror neurons (Stueber, 2019; Wang, 2022). Finally, Lipps’s work is also crucial for the historians of psychoanalysis, since Lipps is one of the very few philosophers mentioned repeatedly and positively by Freud—not only in his works but also in the letters he wrote to his friend Wilhelm Fliess in the 1890s (Freud, 1986).

We can thus see that at least two of Lipps’s philosophical preoccupations converge and make him particularly interesting for our present investigation: the main themes of Theodor Lipps’s philosophy are emotions and affectivity on the one hand and the unconscious dimension of mental life on the other. But can we articulate them in order to reach a coherent understanding of unconscious emotions?

Lipps was formed in Wilhelm Wundt’s Institute of Experimental Psychology in Leipzig. He later became a professor of aesthetics and psychology in Breslau and he finished his career in Munich, where he succeeded Brentano’s student, Carl Stumpf. His philosophical project rested on the belief that the foundations of human culture and science were to be found in psychology, a belief that was the main target of Husserl’s critique of psychologism. Lipps’s brand of psychology was, however, a particular one. Unlike Wundt’s experimental psychology, Lipps was not interested in finding correlations between the mind and the body. In fact, he believed that the psychophysiological research of his time was using metaphysical assumptions that could not be verified. He endorsed instead a pure psychology that would not trespass beyond the limits of the mental realm. However, this psychology was not of the same nature as Brentano’s descriptive psychology. While Brentano and his students believed, as Lipps did, that psychology should exclusively and exhaustively study the sphere of mental phenomena, it was their belief, as we have seen with Brentano and Husserl, that these phenomena were all accessible to inner consciousness. But Lipps did not agree on this last point. His pure psychology differed from Brentano’s pure psychology in two crucial aspects. First, it did not have the same object: Brentano thought that the object of psychology should be conscious phenomena, while Lipps considered that the question of the unconscious is the main question of psychology. This was the main thesis of his 1883 book, Basic Facts of Mental Life, and also of the famous conference paper on “The concept of the unconscious in psychology” (Lipps, 1897), which he delivered at the close of the Third International Congress of Psychology in Munich in 1896—a paper that summarized the main ideas of the 1883 book. The phrase opening the 1896 conference states that “the question of the unconscious is not a psychological question but rather the question of psychology” (Lipps, 1897: 146).

Second, as a consequence of this thesis, Lipps’s method was different from Brentano’s. Brentano’s psychology was descriptive while Lipps’s psychology was dynamic and genetic. It was in fact clear to Lipps that a descriptive method could not seize the unconscious aspects of mental life. But it was also obvious to him that only a very few mental phenomena were actually conscious. A vast number of processes, including the acts through which a content became conscious, themselves stayed unconscious. The whole dynamic aspect of mental life was inaccessible to consciousness as such: we can be conscious of an idea, but we cannot be conscious of the act that presents this idea. Consciousness of this act through reflection transforms the act into a new idea. The dynamic aspects of the act are thus lost. On the other hand, all the contents of consciousness that are not presently thought—all the past ideas, judgments, emotions—are not simply erased from the mind, but continue to exercise a certain influence on the consciousness of the subject. In his conference presentation, Lipps uses an interesting example (Lipps, 1897: 155): we can hear a phrase, and as soon as its content becomes conscious, it is accompanied by a feeling of rejection. The reasons for this rejection might be extremely complex, and they might include past experiences that are or are not related to the content of the phrase, moral thoughts about what is right and wrong, beautiful or ugly, etc., or about who we are and who we would like to be. Even though the feeling of rejection is present and conscious, its complex reasons are not explicitly formulated and don’t appear in any way to consciousness at the moment when the phrase is understood. They can, of course, be brought to consciousness later on, by an analysis of the negative reaction, but at the present moment, they are unconscious.

This example proves, in Lipps’s view, that there are phenomena that have the same structure as conscious mental phenomena, but stay unconscious. They are not actually present at a conscious level. They have, however, a certain form of presence as unconscious phenomena, and the proof is that they have conscious effects, namely, the feeling of rejection in our example. We can thus see that there is no contradiction in stating the existence of a mental act that is unconscious and not simply physical. There is no contradiction, for instance, in stating the existence of unconscious representations. They are unconscious because they are not effectively conscious at the present moment, but they can be described as representations because they are potentially conscious, either because they had already once been conscious, or because they are actually in the process of becoming conscious at the present moment. Thus an unconscious mental phenomenon is in Lipps’s view a phenomenon that is potentially conscious. An unconscious representation, for instance, is a potential representation.

Now, if we follow this conclusion in the field of emotions, we should conclude that there is such a thing as a potential emotion. However, emotions are characterized not by their object or content, but by the way they feel. It seems hard to imagine that an emotion could be present without being actually felt. What sort of joy is one I cannot enjoy?

Theodor Lipps’s theory of affectivity is based on a series of fine distinctions. The first and most important one is between sensations (Empfindungen) and feelings (Gefühle) (Lipps, 1889). The former are affections of the body, while the latter affect the ego as a whole. But there is another distinction to be made—that between feelings and affective movements (Gemütsbewegungen), which differ from feelings in that the latter are more often associated with states of mind rather than with movements. Such a complex affective movement is not reducible to one act or another, but rather goes from one act to the other, uniting them together. Thus several (sometimes contradictory) feelings such as fear, uncertainty, and hope can be united in one and the same movement, together with other types of acts such as presentations or judgments in what Lipps calls the merging together of feelings (ineinander übergehende Gefühle) (Lipps, 1905: 682).

Nonetheless, this general affective movement, in which we can recognize the dynamic aspects of the psychological unconscious that Lipps describes in his 1896 conference paper, is not to be assimilated into a sort of unconscious emotion. The feeling itself is something completely different from the general movement in which it may participate. If we go back to Lipps’s example of the feeling of rejection, it becomes clear that while the reasons for the rejection remain unconscious, the feeling of rejection, which is the effect these unconscious phenomena produce, is precisely a conscious effect. In Lipps’s view, mental life is a whole in which all the processes are related to one another. At each moment, a very complex net of processes is at work, but only a few of them arrive in consciousness. All the others stay unconscious but are still associated in many different ways with the whole. We could say with Lipps that a conscious representation is the final result of a complex unconscious process, one that is itself in relation with all the other mental processes that take place at the same time (Lipps, 1897: 158). On the basis of this theory and of the example we have already analyzed, we could conclude that for Lipps, emotions function precisely as the conscious indicators of this mass of interconnected unconscious processes. A certain process produces a conscious content, and the relation this content has to the whole of mental life—including what stays unconscious—appears to consciousness in the form of emotions. We must therefore conclude that in Lipps’s theory, even though emotions are intimately related to the unconscious, they themselves cannot be unconscious. They are, on the contrary, the conscious indicators of an unconscious activity. In other words, even a dynamic perspective that manages to give the unconscious a central place in the psychological activity of the subject seems to confront its limits when it comes to thinking unconscious emotions. Should we then conclude that it is impossible to think unconscious emotions without contradiction?

Freud’s Contribution to the Phenomenology of Emotions: How Unconscious Emotions can make Sense

Several letters that Freud wrote to Wilhelm Fliess in 1898 (namely, the letters of August 26 and 31, as well as September 27) show that the inventor of psychoanalysis was reading Lipps’s Basic Facts of Mental Life at the moment that the Interpretation of Dreams was conceived. And in fact, Lipps is quoted in Chapter VII of the Interpretation of Dreams as the only contemporary philosopher who has supported the idea that everything that is psychic is not necessarily also conscious (Freud, 1931: 464). But no matter how much Freud agreed with Lipps’s position in Basic Facts and in the 1896 conference presentation, he still made the point that even Lipps could not imagine the profound psychological dimension called the unconscious in Freud’s metapsychology (Gyemant, 2021: 71–85).

In fact, Lipps’s point in his 1896 conference presentation was that there is continuity between the unconscious and the conscious aspects of mental life. For Lipps, there is no essential difference between the unconscious and the conscious dimensions of mental life, since all unconscious phenomena are potentially conscious. Freud, on the other hand, has a different idea of the dynamics of mental life. It is not continuity, but fracture that appears to be the main dynamic structure relating the unconscious to the conscious. This is because Freud does not use the term “unconscious” in the same way as Lipps. What Lipps (like Husserl, for that matter) called unconscious corresponds instead to Freud’s “preconscious”: a part of our mental life that is not actually conscious, but could arrive in consciousness without any obstacle. But for Freud, the phenomena that he calls “preconscious” are actually part of a larger system including consciousness. They correspond to what Husserlian phenomenologists who discuss the unconscious like to point to as a broader concept of consciousness that cannot be confined to objectifying intentionality. But besides Freud’s concept of the preconscious—which indicates a part of the human psyche already identified by Husserl, Lipps, and any other philosopher who tried to conceptualize the unconscious—he also has his own concept of the unconscious, to be distinguished from the preconscious. Whereas the preconscious and the conscious work together in a coherent system, the Freudian unconscious corresponds to a different system obeying different rules. If there is a dynamic that relates the two, it is a dynamic of fracture, of attack and defense, for which Freud uses one word: repression.

There are consequently two kinds of unconscious, which have not as yet been distinguished by psychologists. Both are unconscious in the psychological sense; but in our sense the first, which we call Ucs., is likewise incapable of consciousness; whereas the second we call Pcs. Because its excitations, after the observance of certain rules, are capable of reaching consciousness. (Freud, 1931: 464f.)

What characterizes Freud’s concept of the repressed unconscious is precisely the fact that it cannot become conscious as such. And it is repression—this resistance that forbids a particular process to reach the preconscious stages that precede the arrival of a certain content in consciousness—that makes any negotiation impossible. The repressed part of mental life never was and never can become conscious. Freud’s psychoanalytical concept of the unconscious is thus much more radical than the psychological concept used by Lipps: it names a part of mental life that is inaccessible to any kind of knowledge.

Of course, it is then vital to show how we can even imagine the existence of such a profoundly mysterious unconscious. Freud’s answer is similar to the one provided by Lipps: we know about the existence of this part of our mental life because it has visible effects on our conscious life. These effects are dreams, lapsus linguae, and neurotic symptoms that can only be explained in a satisfactory manner by introducing the hypothesis of a repressed unconscious. Proving that such a repressed unconscious exists is the main metapsychological task of psychoanalysis. I will not go through all the arguments Freud could muster in order to defend his discovery against philosophers, scientists, and public opinion. Suffice it to say that this was the major fight he fought his whole life.

I would rather get back to my original question concerning unconscious emotions and feelings. Freud’s repressed unconscious is in fact made mostly of affective elements. In the Interpretation of Dreams, he defines all dreams as the accomplishments of unconscious desires. This definition thus clearly assumes the existence of such unconscious desires. The neurotic symptoms are also explained in terms of desire. But why should a desire suffer repression, rather than simply being acknowledged by the subject and consequently rejected?

A vast number of cases that Freud describes in his work show that the psychological reason for repression always has to do with an unbearable emotion—unbearable either because of its intensity or because of its quality in relation to its object. Let’s go back to the example of Anna O. Her symptoms are the result of repressed desires; for instance, the desire to join the party, to dance with the other young people to the music she can remotely hear while being stuck by the bed of her suffering father, produced a cough that repeated itself through the length of her illness each time she heard rhythmic music (Breuer & Freud, 1957: 39). But for such an understandable desire, there would have been no need for repression. However, the desire was repressed because of the strong feelings of frustration, anger, and aggression directed against her father, which gave it the particular color of a desire for the death of the father. It was the presence of these negative emotions attached to a father she loved and to whom she was devoted that were unbearable to such a point that Anna O.’s resistance forcefully pushed the desire back as if it never existed.

It is not uncommon for strong feelings of anger or love to seem unconscious, unknown to a subject who cannot confess them to herself. But how can we give a theoretical explanation of the actual existence in the psyche of feelings that are not actually felt, feelings of which the subject is not aware? If Anna O. does not let herself feel the hostility against her father, can we still say this emotion belongs to her?

Freud himself asks this question in one of the most important metapsychological texts from 1915 titled “The Unconscious”. A short section of this text, the same that was quoted by Samuel Lepine, is dedicated to the question whether in addition to unconscious ideas, we can also consider the possibility of unconscious emotions. The term “emotion” encompasses, for Freud, two categories of experiences: instinctual impulses or drives on the one hand, emotions and feelings on the other. In the case of instincts, Freud’s position is clear: “An instinct can never become an object of consciousness—only the idea that represents the instinct can” (Freud, 1957b: 177). This is because the only way an instinct manifests itself is through its ideational representative, which can be either an idea or an affective movement (an emotion).

But in the case of emotions and feelings, the answer is more complicated, since they play precisely the role of the conscious representative of a drive. Freud has himself identified the difficulty we have mentioned concerning the problem of imagining an emotion or a feeling of which we know nothing. Indeed, what we call by these terms is precisely an experience we are able to identify and acknowledge as such. In Freud’s words:

It is surely of the essence of an emotion that we should be aware of it, i.e. that it should become known to consciousness. Thus, the possibility of the attribute of unconsciousness would be completely excluded as far as emotions, feelings and affects are concerned. (Freud, 1957b: 177)

And yet, as we have already mentioned, unconscious emotions comprise the main object of psychoanalysis. This point can only be understood in relation to Freud’s dynamic perspective and his concept of repression, because for Freud, “to suppress the development of affect is the true work of repression and […] its work is incomplete if this aim is not achieved” (Freud, 1957b: 178).

Repression doesn’t simply aim at forbidding certain ideas to be thought. Ideas in themselves are neutral. What motivates repression is the amount of emotion an idea can awaken. It is this emotion that threatens to disrupt the coherence of the subject’s idea of herself and thus to create chaos in her conscious life, as we have seen with Anna O. This is why repression is mainly directed toward such emotions.

Once repression is activated, the vicissitudes of the repressed process can be of many sorts, but they can be classified into three categories: the affect is either successfully repressed (1) or only partially repressed, and in the latter case, it can either remain wholly or partly as it is (2), or it can be transformed into a qualitatively different affect, often into anxiety (3). If the affect is successfully repressed, Freud notices that its status is nevertheless different from that of repressed ideas. Repressed ideas continue to exist as unconscious and to have conscious effects, “whereas all that corresponds in [the Ucs.] system to unconscious affects is a potential beginning which is prevented from developing” (Freud, 1957b: 178).

If repression were always entirely successful, then we could indeed say that there are no actual unconscious emotions: they have no real occurrence in the psyche. Once repressed, they don’t stay unconscious but disappear completely, and the only thing that remains is the possibility that they might appear again. But it is problematic to know whether the trace of repression can vanish completely—in other words, whether such a perfectly successful repression is possible. In any case, if it is, we can know nothing of it.

There are, however, cases in which repression fails, partially or completely. If it fails completely, the emotion is actually felt and becomes conscious, so this cannot count as an example of unconscious emotions either. But when repression succeeds only partially, even though the emotion does not become conscious as such, it still has enough force to produce certain conscious effects. The symptoms of Anna O.—for instance, her paralytic contracture, her sight problems, the anxiety and absences, and the fact that for some time she only spoke in English—are such effects. It is precisely the main task of the psychoanalyst to decode these symptoms in order to make them disappear, and instead let the emotion come to consciousness in a safe environment so that the subject is able to face it and control it.

Partially repressed emotions thus continue to exist as mental realities without being felt as such. They are either disconnected from their real idea or object—as, for instance, in the case where anger is directed toward oneself instead of toward loved ones—or they appear to consciousness in a disguised form, often as their opposites (for instance, repressed love becomes conscious anxiety or even conscious hate). Thus the emotion in its real form stays unconscious and unknown to the subject, but it does not disappear from the mind. Due to repression, it cannot be actually felt as such, but because of the symptoms it produces it cannot be ignored either. It is in this case of unsuccessfully repressed emotions—and only in this case—that we can talk of unconscious emotions. The ways an unconscious emotion can make itself known to consciousness are various and complex, but the results of psychoanalysis show without a doubt that there it makes sense to speak of unconscious emotions, provided that we adopt a dynamic point of view of psychic processes and that we have in mind both Freud’s definition of the unconscious as the repressed part of our psyche and the idea that repression can sometimes fail.

Conclusion

We can then conclude that unconscious emotions are indeed not only possible but an undeniable part of our mental life, as is abundantly shown by the results of psychoanalysis. But in order to understand these unconscious emotions, we first need to acknowledge the existence of an important part of our psyche that stays unconscious. This thesis is dependent on a change of point of view. Only a dynamic phenomenology, similar to the position defended by Lipps, can provide a meaningful concept of the unconscious because unconscious events cannot be seized and described for their own sake. Since we only have access to our conscious life, unconscious phenomena can only be inferred from their conscious effects. As we have seen, however, this dynamic point of view concerning the unconscious, one that Lipps and Freud share is not itself sufficient to demonstrate the existence of unconscious emotions. In Lipps’s view, emotions are, on the contrary, precisely the conscious signs that show us that an unconscious process is taking place. Freud’s theory of repression is the only one capable of explaining the existence of unconscious emotions. It is only when understood as the unknown causes related to certain conscious symptoms that unconscious emotions can finally be validated. Paradoxically, they only make sense if the unconscious in question is irreducible to and radically different from consciousness because it is only if they have been deformed by repression that unconscious emotions can be simultaneously present and unknown. But since Freud has demonstrated the existence of unconscious emotions, phenomenology cannot turn its back on this discovery: on the contrary, following Freud, it can and must push its limits further and fully embrace this new field opened for exploration—the field of the repressed, of the pathological, of unconscious emotions.