The not-yet-conscious

Abstract

Not only our conscious expectations, wishes and intentions are directed towards the future, but also pre- or unconscious tendencies, hunches and anticipations. Using a term of Ernst Bloch, they can be summarized as the not-yet-conscious. This not-yet-conscious mostly unfolds spontaneously and without plan; it is not directly anticipated or aimed at, but rather comes to awareness in such a way that the subject is, as it were, surprised by itself. Thus it gives rise to phenomena such as the striking, the coincidental, the new, and the improvised, which are particularly important for understanding creative and therapeutic processes. The paper aims at providing a general phenomenological framework for the understanding of not-yet-conscious dynamics and their unfolding in different contexts. To this end, the structure of the not-yet-conscious is examined in light of protention, in which the phenomenon is fundamentally to be located. I propose to describe the general structure of protention as a future-directed horizon of graded probabilities, i.e., as a “protentional cone”. This cone is fed by current experiences and bodily tendencies and is focused to varying degrees by attention. This results in either more focused or rather defocused states of anticipation, the latter giving space to the not-yet-conscious as a meaning “in statu nascendi”. On this basis, selected manifestations of the not-yet-conscious are analyzed, including extemporaneous speech, artistic improvisation and creativity, bodily meaning implicates, decision-making, and meaningful coincidence.

1 Introduction

Our temporal experience is predominantly directed towards the future, be it in drive, desire and interest, be it in intention and planning, in purposeful action or in expectation and hope. This is the prospective future: the future which we foresee and expect from the development of things, or which we ourselves can achieve and bring about. Yet the future also means that which “comes towards us”¹, which happens to us, and which we encounter without anticipation: the surprising, the new, the unexpected or the coincidental. It is in the nature of the future that its possibilities exceed our expectations and that it can thwart our anticipations at any time.

Now the prospective, consciously anticipated future is not as clearly separated from the unexpected and surprising future as it seems. For much of what spontaneously unfolds before us or what we encounter, we ourselves have implicitly anticipated or unconsciously helped to bring about, namely in the form of dispositions, hunches, anticipations and tendencies, which we only become aware of in the course of further experience. Moreover, we also carry latent potentials within us, which can only unfold in a process of gradual articulation that we cannot deliberately bring about. Borrowing a term of Ernst Bloch, I call these implicit anticipations and tendencies the not-yet-conscious. This not-yet-conscious mostly unfolds spontaneously and without plan, surprising us to a certain extent, especially in the phenomena of the new and the creative. A phenomenology of the not-yet-conscious is therefore crucial for understanding not only creative but also therapeutic processes. Finally, the not-yet-conscious also influences what we encounter from the outside: Our implicit tendencies select what fits our present state from the possibilities that the situation affords, resulting in the phenomena of the striking and the coincidental.

Ernst Bloch coined the concept of the not-yet-conscious, calling it a “still unconscious directed towards its other side, forwards, not backwards; to the side of a dawning new” (Bloch, 1959, 10, own trans.). In this way he aimed at locating his central creative principles of “tendency” and “latency” not just in history but also in the psyche: “The not-yet-conscious is thus uniquely the preconscious of what is to come, the psychic birthplace of the new” (ibid., 132). This form of the unconscious, then, consists not of the forgotten and repressed, but of psychic tendencies that are still hidden, but are about to appear and articulate themselves:

Thus it is a matter here of the psychic processes of emergence, as they are so characteristic above all for youth, for turning points, for the adventures of productivity, thus for all phenomena, in which the uncreated hides and wants to articulate itself. (ibid., 10)

Bloch contrasts this creative unconscious with the past-oriented view of the unconscious in psychoanalysis: “The unconscious of psychoanalysis is therefore, as can be seen, never a not-yet-conscious, an element of progressions; it consists rather of regressions. […] in the Freudian unconscious there is nothing new” (ibid., 61). Even if this past-oriented, “archaeological” conception of the unconscious is no longer dominant in contemporary psychoanalysis, Bloch’s alternative term has not been taken up by psychoanalysis or phenomenology.

Without limiting themselves to Bloch’s understanding of the not-yet-conscious, the following considerations investigate this “presentiment consciousness” with a phenomenological intention. Let us begin by visualizing a few relevant phenomena:

• a vague sense of what is to come, which also manifests itself as a foreboding or intuition of situations and their tendencies; this includes diffuse bodily sensations whose tendency and significance can only gradually be articulated (“gut feeling”, “felt sense”);

• desires, impulses, aspirations that are not yet clearly defined;

• vague anticipations of ideas, connections, solutions that one is on the trail of, but which elude one’s grasp;

• attempts to retrieve lost memories or words that are “on the tip of one’s tongue”;

• thoughts or speech that are not yet fully formed, but rather are unfolded in a groping and searching way;

• artistic or theatrical improvisation, and creative activities in general.

What these phenomena have in common is that they are not or not yet in the focus of attention, but rather in the background of consciousness: vague, blurred, shadowy, indeterminate, but nevertheless not entirely outside of the experiential field. In this context a phenomenological distinction is often made between an implicit, pre-reflective, or unthematic awareness and an explicit or thematic awareness (Gurwitsch, 1964). However, the merely implicit or unthematic should be easy to make explicit, which is often not the case in the phenomena mentioned (for instance, when a name is “on the tip of one’s tongue”, but cannot be recalled). A mere shift of attention is not sufficient to make them conscious. Even though I also use the terms ‘implicit’ or ‘pre-reflective’ in the following, I therefore choose the superordinate term ‘not-yet-conscious’, on the one hand because of the particular temporal structure of the phenomena, which often become conscious only in retrospect as one’s own anticipations, and on the other hand because they reach beyond the merely implicit or unthematic into what can also be called the unconscious in phenomenology (see below).

The not-yet-conscious can also be conceived as a horizon of possibilities, which surrounds the focal consciousness and, depending on the course of experience, can be made explicit or have an unnoticed influence on the focal events.² This horizon often also contains the new “in statu nascendi”, which unfolds, as it were, in the reverse direction, namely from the future. It is not directly anticipated or aimed at, but rather encounters the subject in such a way that the latter is, so to say, surprised by itself. This temporal structure and unfolding of the not-yet-conscious is what I want to examine more closely in the following.

For this purpose, I will start from the concept of protention or indeterminate anticipation, in which, according to my thesis, the not-yet-conscious is fundamentally to be located. I will first examine the general structure of protention as a horizon of graded probabilities, which I propose to describe as a “protentional cone” (Section 2). This cone is mainly fed by obvious expectations, but also by more implicit, in particular bodily experiences and tendencies. The function of attention focuses this cone to varying degrees, thereby restricting the available possibilities of what is to come. The actualization of the not-yet-conscious thus usually requires a defocused attitude. Having established this basis, I then turn to a selection of manifestations of the not-yet-conscious, namely extemporaneous speech (Section 3), improvisation and creative incubation (4), the articulation of a bodily “felt sense” in psychotherapy and decision-making (5), and finally, meaningful coincidence (6).

The aim of my analysis is to explore the potentials of phenomenology for illuminating the pre- and unconscious dimensions of mental life that are directed towards the future. To this end, alongside Husserl’s relevant texts, I draw on approaches by Merleau-Ponty (1962, 1964), Ferrer (2015), Soultzis (2021), and others, who, however, have not addressed the phenomena of the not-yet-conscious in the sense described above, nor their location in the sphere of protentions, specifically marginal and bodily protentions. By combining the general analysis of protention with examples of the not-yet-conscious, I attempt to elaborate a general structure of these diverse experiences. This framework conception can then be used to further investigate the various phenomena of the not-yet-conscious, which are presented here only exemplarily and sketchily.

2 The protentional cone

According to Husserl’s well-known analysis of time-consciousness, the stream of consciousness has a three-part structure, consisting of primal impressions (the present perception or activity of consciousness), retentions (holding in awareness what has just been experienced) and protentions (approximate expectations of what is to come). Husserl’s favorite example relates to music: when we hear a melody, we remain continuously aware of the tones we have just heard, and at the same time they generate a certain expectation of how the melody might continue. Our perception of a melody is thus not a sequence of individual tones – that would not result in a melody – but a dynamic, self-organizing process that integrates the tone impressions into the temporal unity of the melody.

Protention, which we will now examine in more detail, initially means a rough expectation of the further course of external or self-initiated events – such as moving objects, melodies heard, one’s own movement or thought processes.³ Protentions thus constitute an “open future horizon” (Husserl, 2001, 4); the protended is not prefigured in affective and qualitative concreteness but only in a certain generality, as an “empty intention” (Husserl, 2001, 5; Ferrer 2015, 41). Protentions fundamentally imply the expectation of the probable, i.e. that things will go on as before or happen as usual. Now it is possible that the protentions are smoothly fulfilled or confirmed in the primal impression: the door slams shut and it bangs as expected; the melody continues in a familiar way; I reach for the hammer and it is as heavy as ever. But the impression can also turn out differently than expected, and a surprise or disappointment arises – for example, when the melody unexpectedly changes from major to minor. A shrill discordant note that suddenly interrupts the melody would be completely contrary to expectation, i.e., quite improbable. Nevertheless, as DeRoo (2013, 38) rightly points out, even a surprise rests on some kind of continuity, or a partial fulfillment of protentions, for otherwise the continuity of experience itself would be lost.

Now, protention is not only directed towards the respective next moment, but always somewhat beyond it towards the following phases of the expected sequence.⁴ With this, however, the future possibilities rapidly expand, becoming more indeterminate and forming only a “dark horizon” of what is to come (Husserl, 1966a, 84); Husserl also speaks of a “protentional halo” (Hof; ibid., 105). Rodemeyer has aptly distinguished between “near protentions” (immediate anticipation, based on the current experience) and “far protentions” (extended, but less determined anticipation, based on acquired patterns of experience) (Rodemeyer, 2006, 161 f.).⁵ Summarizing these considerations, we can say that protention, as a general and involuntary directedness of conscious life towards the future, opens up a horizon or a cone of probabilities (Fig. 1; cf. also Fuchs, 2007).

Fig. 1

Protentional cone

The image of the light cone to describe attentional consciousness is equally prominent in psychology and philosophy and is also used by Husserl.⁶ In the schema presented here, however, the cone serves neither as a metaphor for attention nor for the present field of consciousness with its center and margins (Gurwitsch, 1964) but rather for the horizon of possibility and probability of future-oriented protention. This cone has its origin in the present with its primal impression (“now”) and anticipates what is to come, moving forward with the flow of experience in constantly modified expectation. Within the cone lies what is more or less probable and expected; towards its blurred edges, external events or emerging inner ideas become increasingly improbable, up to the completely unexpected, situated outside the cone. Nevertheless, the protentional cone is still wider than the cone of focused attention, and its less probable and blurred margins are of particular interest for the analysis of the not-yet-conscious.

What are likely protentions in each case depends on several factors:

• (1) on the current primal impression as well as on those retentions of previous impressions which generally suggest a similar or coherent continuation (for example, the current and the last heard tones of a melody); these are examples of “near protentions” (see above).⁷

• (2) on the dispositions of perceiving, thinking, feeling and acting, which are determined by the subject’s previous experiences and habits, and which imply corresponding, typical patterns of further progression or “far protentions” (for example, the familiar melody itself). Such dispositions are anchored in a special way in implicit or body memory, which can be understood as the set of all acquired habitualities that allow us to anticipate or enact the immediate future (Casey, 1984, Fuchs, 2000a, 2012). In this sense, one can also speak of bodily protentions, which can be fulfilled in the further course of perceiving or acting (Behnke, 2009, Rodemeyer, 2015).

• (3) on attention, which is directed towards certain expected, relevant or intended events and restricts the field of probable protentions accordingly (e.g. active, attentive listening, which largely blocks out other sounds or impressions);

• (4) on the overarching interest and intention of the subject (e.g. the desire to listen to a concert), which motivates one’s attention. Husserl also speaks of the “affective relief” of a given situation, which co-determines the protentions and is shaped by the subject’s affective tendencies and interests (Husserl, 1966a, 168). To these he later added “natural instincts” and drives (Husserl, 2006, 258, 326; cf. Soueltzis, 2021, 165 ff.).

Of particular importance here is obviously the degree and direction of attention, which as “concentration” narrows or focuses the cone of protentions, whereas a lessening or lack of attention is associated with a widening of the cone – in which case marginal protentions will become more vivid and the subject is more easily distracted.⁸ For attention to remain directed at the focused event, it is not enough to keep the latter in the center of awareness; unrelated impressions or inappropriate associations (“distractors”) must also be blotted out or repressed from focus, i.e. inhibited. The scope of the probable or the width of the protentional cone are thus determined both by attention and by the inhibition of distracting impressions or ideas.

As an active, volitionally directed performance, attention requires a certain tension and mental effort. This tension provides the energy, so to say, that shields the focused protentional cone from disturbances or distractions. Depending on the individual’s given vigilance, this tension can be maintained for different lengths of time until attention is finally exhausted and the cone dilates accordingly, giving way to divergent tendencies, ideas or perceptions. Habituation or monotony are also well known to reduce attention.

The cone of protentional expectation thus shows itself to be highly variable, depending on the factors mentioned. Of particular interest for a phenomenology of the not-yet-conscious are the relationships between the focal protentions, i.e., the primary expectations corresponding to the current attentional focus, and the marginal protentions or ideas that are not clearly anticipated but unfold in the course of a creative process. Such protentions can also go back to unconscious bodily dispositions or “meaning implicates” (see below, Section 5); however, as we will see, they do not simply result from habit but require their own articulation, an “unfolding” or “explication of the implicit”.

Of course, the question arises whether Husserl’s concept of protention is able to serve as a locus of the not-yet-conscious in the sense explained at the beginning. After all, protention, like retention, belongs to the realm of conscious presence, so it cannot be said to be unconscious to begin with. What I anticipate in protention is “emptily pre-figured”, thus unfulfilled or “not yet”, but nevertheless not unconscious. On the other hand, as we have seen, the stream of protentions is not monolinearly directed but fanned out into increasingly indistinct and only marginally conscious expectations. Held therefore described protention as an “unthematic co-awareness of the marginal phases of the present, which […] still lie in an essential obscurity, in an unresolvable semi-darkness” (Held, 1966, 39; my transl. and italics).

This already approaches the notion of an unconscious, as long as one does not understand the latter as sharply separated from consciousness. For example, one no longer notices the steady ticking of a clock in the room and yet is surprised when it suddenly stops: In this case, the protention was ‘not conscious’ or only implicitly conscious, but becomes explicit through its non-fulfillment in retrospect. Other phenomena of the not-yet-conscious are not as easily detected, such as the aforementioned example of the name that is on the tip of one’s tongue, or the unconscious tendencies highlighted by psychoanalysis that can give rise to mishearing, misspeaking, overlooking, etc. Thus, there is no clear distinction between implicit, marginal, and unconscious anticipations in the experiential field.

Husserl himself later used the term “unconscious”, but only for that which has sunk far into the retentional past, namely for the “indiscriminate substratum of remote retention” (Husserl, 1966b, 385). This phenomenological unconscious then consists in a “sedimentation of dark retentions” (Ferrer, 2015, 149). Nevertheless, it seems justified to go beyond Husserl here and to assign the border areas of the protentional cone to another kind of unconscious, precisely the not-yet-conscious. I will therefore also speak of “unconscious protentions”, particularly when they derive from unconsious instincts, desires and tendencies that cannot easily become explicit, although this is not clearly covered by Husserl’s use of the term ‘protention’.

Having sketched this conceptual basis, I will now examine the relations between the center and the periphery of the cone in different situations, progressing from a narrow to an increasingly widened cone; first I will begin with the examples of a prepared and an extemporaneous speech.

3 Speech

3.1 Prepared speech

In order to work out the dynamics of extemporaneous speech, I first distinguish it from prepared speech, as in the reciting of a poem (Fig. 2). Here, the protentions resulting from the word and verse sequences are – once learned by heart – largely fixed; the protentional cone is focused by attention and clearly demarcated from interfering ideas. The poem is anchored in the reciter’s body memory as a temporal gestalt or a processual scheme and thus provides the corresponding protentions, so that the words appear appropriately in the process of the recital. At the same time, however, an overarching intention of the speaker is directed towards the form of the individual stanzas and their semantic meaning (since the reader normally tries to avoid speaking mechanically or “soullessly” but instead has a guiding awareness of the poem’s sense). Using a term from Merleau-Ponty (1962, 120), I am speaking here of the intentional arc that embraces the temporal gestalt of the respective intention and thus keeps the individual protentions on track (Fig. 2).⁹

Fig. 2

Strongly focused protention, e.g. in prepared speech (small arrows indicating the sequence of the most likely protentions, directed towards the respective next words)

3.2 Extemporaneous speech

Let us now move on to extemporaneous speech, as illustrated, for example, by a spontaneous eulogy at a celebration. How does it happen here that the speaker finds the appropriate words? We are now dealing with what Kleist (1951) called the “gradual construction of thoughts during speech”, with meaning in statu nascendi:

For since I always have some obscure preconception, distantly connected in some way with whatever I am looking for, I have only to begin boldly, and the mind, obliged to find an end for this beginning, transforms my confused concept as I speak into thoughts that are perfectly clear, so that, to my surprise, the end of the sentence coincides with the desired knowledge. (Kleist, 1951; my italics)

Here thinking does not precede speaking, as if the words were only signs for thoughts independent of them, but is rather a speaking, embodied thinking in Merleau-Ponty’s sense:

Thus speech, in the speaker, does not translate ready-made thought, but accomplishes it. […] The orator does not think before speaking, nor even while speaking; his speech is his thought (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, 207, 209).

Here, too, there is an anticipatory intention whose content and goal, however, initially remain undefined; they are only vaguely present in the speaker’s mind, as an “empty intention” (Leerintention) in Husserl’s sense (Husserl, 1966b, 71). It could be compared to a cloud or to a watercolor where the painter first applies some blurred areas with a wet brush before elaborating the motif with more precise brushstrokes. Accordingly, the protentional cone is set wider (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3

Moderately focused protention, e.g. in extemporaneous speech (arrows indicating a sequence of less likely protentions or next words)

The vague “cloud of meaning” or pre-gestalt gives the speech at least an approximate direction; it opens up a horizon of possibilities, so that the first words do not begin completely arbitrarily but instead penetrate into the vague, cutting an articulating swathe, as it were. “When I take the floor today,” the speaker may start his eulogy, “I do so with the feeling …” With this, the following now happens:

• (1) Through the first articulation, the cloud of meaning gains definiteness, because the words once pronounced have their own meanings and connotations. Even if it is by no means clear where the speech will lead, the implied halo of meaning can now no longer be articulated at will. The requirements of semantic and syntactic coherence allow only a certain range of possible continuations. Over the trajectory of the sentence, more and more possibilities projected into the future are eliminated, that is, the initially broad protentional cone increasingly narrows.

• (2) The spoken and retained words help determine the protentions and thus the meaning of the words to come. If, for example, a sentence begins with “In the evening we went …”, then the continuation “… to a ball” will evoke for speaker and listener not the spherical object but the social event. Conversely, the continuation can retroactively modify the meaning of the retained words: compare, for example, “the match was quickly won” with “the match was quickly lit”.

• (3) The temporal gestalt of the sentence has now begun, i.e., an intentional arc has been opened up, recognizable as a perceptible absence or lack, which will only come to fulfilment with the conclusion of the sentence. The speaker perceives this as a tension that pushes forward; it manifests itself, for example, in the “struggle for words” when trying to find the right articulation and feeling the pressure to keep speaking.

The following words in each case emerge from a preconscious repertoire of possible word and meaning sequences available to the speaker. This repertoire does not belong to a purely cognitive domain of memory, but entails a bodily capacity of speaking that can be attributed to implicit or body memory. It is the lived body as our general set of capacities that also includes language as the ability to form sequences of words and sentences, even though we must, of course, guide these sequences intentionally.¹⁰ We speak without having to search for words in a lexicon; they unfold in the speech. The emerging words are continuously added to the sentence we have begun, like iron filings that arrange themselves in a magnetic field. It is the lack that gives rise to the fitting words; in other words, it is the absent, the empty or unfulfilled that exerts a pull on the implicit bodily readiness to fill it.¹¹ Following Eugene Gendlin, we can say that bodily subjectivity generally implies what is possible and what is to come next (Gendlin, 2018, 20 ff.), and this implication includes the subject’s whole situatedness. Accordingly, the unfolding of the not-yet-conscious is promoted by bodily gestures¹², but also by the interested attention of the others to whom we speak. Heinrich von Kleist described this in his already mentioned text:

“The human face confronting a speaker is an extraordinary source of inspiration to him and a glance which informs us that a thought we have only half expressed has already been grasped often gives us the expression for quite the other half of it” (Kleist, 1951).

The addressees of the speech are thus always involved in its unfolding, stimulating it according to a “participatory sense-making” (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007).¹³

3.3 Emergence of meaning

Extemporaneous speech, as we see, is a temporally and semantically circular process, a unity of spontaneity and receptivity: the speaker hears his articulated words himself, they are available to him in retention, so he takes up the emergent meaning of his spontaneous utterances. This unfolding meaning restricts the protentional cone of further possibilities; on the other hand, the words now added further express and retroactively modify the meaning of the sentence begun that is still present in retention.¹⁴ The articulated and the newly added words mutually determine each other. It is thus a matter of a progressive unfolding or explication of the implicit, a meaning in statu nascendi, which in its emergence simultaneously creates the conditions for its further continuation. Words and sentences, by the very act of uttering, weave the next situation out of the present one. In other words, it means “laying down a path in talking” (van Dijk, 2016): the realized and the possible, the present and what it implies or affords, continuously determine and modify each other. The process does not proceed in a linear temporality, but in a circular one; and insofar as the interaction of its components allows a new meaningful order to emerge, it is a self-organizing process. The meaning is neither pregiven nor does it only emerge at the end of the sentence; rather, it already works as a creative force within the movement that produces it.¹⁵

The speaker cannot completely anticipate the unfolding meaning; he must surrender himself to his speech to a certain extent, “listen to himself”, and is thus carried along by the emerging flow of meaning. However, he will also continuously compare whether the articulation “stays on track”, i.e., whether it actually comes close to what he vaguely intended. In other words, the speaker has an accompanying sense of congruence between the roughly intended and the articulated meaning. William James describes this process in a central section of his Psychology, with the explicit aim of a “reinstatement of the vague and inarticulate to its proper place in our mental life” (James, 1961, 32):

And has the reader ever asked himself, what kind of mental fact is his intention of saying a thing before he has said it? …. Linger, and the words and things come into the mind; the anticipatory intention, the divination is there no more. But as the words that replace it arrive, it welcomes them successively, and calls them right if they agree with it, it rejects them and calls them wrong if they do not. The intention to-say-so-and-so is the only name it can receive. One can admit that a good third of our psychic life consists in these rapid premonitory perspective views of schemes of thought not yet articulate (ibid., 31).¹⁶

Guiding this complex process, that is, spanning the intentional arc of the sentence despite its initial indeterminacy, requires continued attention, because the unfolding of the meaning must not be disturbed by inappropriate associations, incursions or peripheral perceptions. It is the public nature of speech that necessitates this restriction of the protentional cone. Selective attention is therefore required to shield the protentional cone from disturbances or associative deviations. Sometimes, however, it can happen that a sentence that has been started leads in an unintended or unclear direction due to its own momentum – then the speaker may have to correct or interrupt himself; or he may succeed in inserting the association into a parenthesis and thus integrating it into the course of the sentence. Guiding the process therefore needs an attitude of both receptive openness and active attention, such as that embodied by a conductor leading an orchestra.

4 Improvisation and incubation

So much for an analysis of protentionality in prepared and in extemporaneous speech. The situation is different when the overriding intention is not to achieve a more or less clear goal, but when the subject loosens the attentional focus even further or lets it go completely, so as to abandon himself to his free associations, creative ideas, brainstorming or daydreaming.

Such situations no longer require the stringency of public speech. Rather, the protentional cone can widen even more (Fig. 4), and the inhibition of distractions ceases. Images, ideas and memories now arise spontaneously, flowing into the center from the pre- or unconscious margins of the field of awareness. Unexpected connections and new combinations can emerge, revealing a hitherto latent or long sought-after meaning. Artistic improvisation, composition or the search for creative ideas require an attitude of “searching not-searching”, of expectantly letting things happen. I will take a closer look at two forms: musical improvisation and creative incubation.

Fig. 4

Dilated, defocused protention (e.g. in daydreaming, free association, artistic improvisation) (arrows indicating an irregular sequence of protentions that are gradually fulfilled)

4.1 Musical improvisation

Unlike musical recitals based on pre-written compositions, improvising musicians create the composition as the audience listens, often collectively as in jazz improvisation (Torrance & Schumann, 2019). Usually the improvisation does not proceed completely unprepared, but may include pre-arranged structural constraints (e.g. a fixed number of repetitions of a chord sequence). Moreover, it typically makes use of habitual patterns (such as the “licks” in jazz) that carry the emerging melody while also providing the opportunity to pursue other paths at certain points. The improvisation thus unfolds on the basis of implicit schemes and prefigurations available in body memory, which are reshaped in new ways in their actualization. The jazz musician Enrico Pieranunzi describes this process as follows:

The starting point for a composition is always, almost always, the piano. I’m playing something […] and all of a sudden, for no reason, I interrupt what I’m doing and go off in a different direction. The urge is irresistible. It’s as if my hands are eyes and they’ve seen something that I don’t know yet, but which they know exists. It might be a chord that is new to me, a rhythm, an interval (…) In these situations, sometimes an idea is born that might turn into a jazz piece, or other music. (Angelino, 2019, 210; italics added)

The musician has no precise plan or future-intention prior to the play; he leaves himself to his hands, trusting the implicit readiness of the body, and thus allowing for a free proliferation of possibilities:

When I fully improvise, I trust my hands completely… They seem to transport me, introduce themselves through their sounds and stop for an instant on one of them, “feeling” them as a sculptor does with clay … (Angelino, 2019, 220).

Playing music generally means a rhythmic-melodic movement of the whole body, not only of the hands or the mouth, and this is even more true for jazz improvisation, the dynamics of which always manifest themselves in bodily co-movements. The simultaneously playing, moving, sensing and hearing body registers its own production, and in reaction to this it continues its movement. This can be called an enacted improvisation (Rose, 2017), in which the lived body carries its own process forward. The emerging sequences contain for their part felt dynamic protentions, which suggest certain continuations: “this chord sequence must grow, unfold …; this one sounds like completion, it demands a coda …,” and so on. Sometimes it is precisely “errors” that can be used to leave familiar paths and create new possibilities.

The unfolding temporal gestalt of the melodic sequence is thus quite active, dynamic, and pushes forward (Pieranunzi speaks of an “irresistible urge”). Without pursuing a certain goal, it is nevertheless protentionally stretched out into the future, as an autopoietic, self-searching and self-forming form, until it has realized itself and, in fulfillment, arrives at itself, so to say. This requires the already mentioned attitude of “expectantly letting happen”, combined with a sense of trust in what unfolds under one’s own hands. On the other hand, improvisation does not mean a mindless performance from moment to moment but needs a supervisory intention directed at the rhythm and form of the flow, the affective relief of the playing, and of course the interaction with other musicians (Torrance & Schumann, 2019).

The extended protentional cone is thus accompanied by a hightened awareness: “The improviser is at a high level of attention and arousal, aware of the potentiality of the structures at every moment, conscious of all the actions that might follow“ (Breyer et al., 2011, 187). One could distinguish here between a state of attention that is focused on the expected or familiar and the state of awareness that is open for the unexpected, the surprising, that which “comes from the future.” Improvisation is based on the latter, looking for what could be different at any moment, for the new. It “expects the unexpected” – precisely the unforeseeable in the Latin sense of improvisum. At the same time, improvisation does not completely break through what is expected – otherwise the listener would only hear chaos. The new only stands out as such from the background of the familiar. “Improvisation is always both - surprise and anticipated order” (Breyer et al., 2011, 191).

4.2 Incubation and illumination

In creativity research, following Wallas (1926), one speaks of a phase of incubation, in which the answer to a complex question or the solution to a problem emerges after a phase of preparation. Characteristic of incubation is that the actual task is put aside and left to autopoietic, mostly unconscious processing. Goal-oriented, “convergent” thinking is replaced by “divergent thinking” (Guilford 1950), which gives room to associations and free ideas without evaluation and censorship. The creative idea or solution that often emerges surprisingly after a longer incubation period is then referred to as inspiration or illumination. The beneficial effect of incubation as a phase of the creative process has been proven by a large number of empirical studies (Sio & Ormerod, 2009, Gilhooly, 2016).

Incubation can once again be described as meaning in statu nascendi, which cannot be sought intentionally but only “received”. William James compared this to the search for a name that one has forgotten but that is on the tip of one’s tongue. All targeted efforts to remember the name usually only lead further down a blind alley. It is “… as though the name were jammed, and pressure in its direction only kept it all the more from rising. And then the opposite expedient often succeeds. Give up the effort entirely; think of something altogether different, and in half an hour the lost name comes sauntering into your mind …” (James, 1917, 205). Only the abandonment of the search, the renunciation of the specific intention, opens the cone of protention and frees the space for a new formation of meaning; intentionally directed thoughts disturb this process and are counterproductive. Since the idea emerges after a period of latency – not by chance but obviously as a delayed result of the initial search – it can be concluded that the unconsciously ongoing protentions also possess a fulfillment tendency, as Husserl attributed to protentions in general (Husserl, 2001, 4).

The term incubation derives from the ritual sleep performed in a Greek temple, in which supplicants sought answers to unresolved questions in their dreams (incubatio = lying on, breeding). Dreams and creativity are not linked by chance: the dream state can also be understood as a maximum dilation of the protentional cone (Fig. 5). The oneiric consciousness is no longer directed by an intentional arc, but is completely open and passive towards what is coming. The dream subject is thrown from one event into another, often in fantastic metamorphoses, spatial or temporal leaps, without being surprised or irritated by them (Thompson, 2014, 136 f.). This is because the dreamer hardly has any directed protentional expectation that could be surprised or disappointed.¹⁷ Indeed the absence of an active intention that bundles the protentions gives free rein to a flood of inner images, motifs and memories – it is not for nothing that the dream is still regarded in psychoanalysis as the “royal road to the unconscious”. Accordingly, dream incubation is used once again today as a technique in which, before sleeping, the test persons repeatedly pose themselves a personal question, so that they may find an answer or solution through a dream (Barrett, 1993, 2017). 

Fig. 5

Maximally dilated protention (e.g. in dreams, drug intoxi-cation)

The connection between incubation and illumination has often been described in scientific discoveries too. Friedrich Kekulé’s famous discovery of the benzene ring in 1861 came thanks to a dream in which, after weeks of futile research into the possible structure of the atoms of benzene, he saw the alchemical symbol of the ouroboros before him, a snake biting its own tail. The motif gave him the idea of imagining the atoms arranged in a ring (Anschütz, 1929, 942).¹⁸ Thomas Kuhn has traced revolutions in the history of science back to such phases of irritation, chaos and the search for a new meaning, which then suddenly emerges in a phase of internal openness and can establish a new paradigm:

Scientists then often speak of the ‘scales falling from the eyes’ or of the ‘lightning flash’ that inundates a previously obscure puzzle, enabling its components to be seen in a new way that for the first time permits its solution. On other occasions the relevant illumination comes in sleep (Kuhn, 1962, 121 f.).

In summary, improvisation and creative incubation are based on the unfolding of a latent, not yet accessible sense, which prepares itself in the margins of the protentional cone and realizes itself in a dynamic, self-organizing process: Retentions and protentions, or the realized and the still possible, constantly determine and modify each other, both prospectively and retroactively. The unfolding sense thus generates the conditions of its further realization.

5 Bodily meaning implicates and their unfolding

The creative process draws upon latent motifs, images, associative patterns and gestalt similarities that can essentially be assigned to the bodily memory already mentioned – for example, the snake biting its own tail in Kekulé’s dream. This memory is not only effective in typical bodily protentions, i.e., anticipations of the familiar and probable. Rather, bodily stirrings and sensations can also represent nodal points of memories, tendencies and meanings that are initially only diffusely felt – as famously described by Proust in the “madeleine”-experience in The Way by Swann’s (Proust, 2003; Righetti, 2021). I call such a complex of bodily-emotional sensing and the meanings it encloses a “meaning implicate” (Fuchs, 2011). Such implicates may also contain pre-feelings and hints from which a new meaning can unfold, especially in polyvalent or crisis situations. Therapeutic methods that pay special attention to body awareness can help to articulate the implications of body memory and thus uncover latent motives and meanings. As examples, I will mention the “felt sense” and the pre-feelings in decision-making.

5.1 Felt sense

The psychologist Eugene Gendlin coined the term “felt sense” for the bodily experience of a not-yet-conscious meaning (Gendlin, 1998). The corresponding phenomena are well known in therapy: for example, patients feel a “lump in their throat” or other forms of discomfort, they feel “constricted”, they tremble or have tears in their eyes, without first grasping the meaning of these sensations. According to Gendlin, in order to open up or “explicate” these implicates, it is necessary to turn one’s attention to the bodily felt sense in order to wait and see in what way it is articulated – be it in a spontaneous expressive movement, in an image, in an emerging word or in a metaphor that comes closest to capturing what is sensed. Metaphors are particularly suitable for this, insofar as they transfer primary bodily experiences or protentions into symbolic language by means of gestalt similarities (Lakoff & Johnson, 2003, 147 ff.).

When the felt sense releases its implicit meanings in these first images or words, a circular movement begins that resembles the previously discussed process of extemporaneous speech. In the “unfolding of the implicit”, individual meanings are extracted from the still undetermined manifold of the primary impression, like threads from a tangled bundle. They are now tested by the patient for the feeling of congruence, i.e., whether the verbalization triggers a bodily resonance that is felt to be coherent. If this is the case, the change in bodily sensing can in turn stimulate a further, clarifying articulation – resulting in a circular, or one might also say, spiral process that leads to increasing clarification or resolution. The vaguely perceived “felt sense” of the body thus corresponds to the “cloud of meaning” in extemporaneous speech, which gradually takes shape. The final clarification is usually experienced with a feeling of evidence and relief; it provides the possibility for further therapeutic steps that embed the new meaning in the context of life. 

The entire process is essentially supported by the therapist, who acts as an additional sounding-board, accompanying and stimulating the process of articulation and meaning formation through his or her listening and mirroring expressions. Gendlin also conceptualized this process as “Thinking at the Edge” for non-therapeutic contexts (Gendlin 2004), which Schoeller and Thorgeirsdottir are currently developing further as “Embodied Critical Thinking” (Schoeller & Thorgeirsdottir 2019, Schoeller 2022).¹⁹

5.2 Pre-feelings in decision-making

The circular interplay of pre-feeling and articulation is also found in decision-making processes, in particular those involving relevant life issues such as career choice, change of residence, or the like (Fuchs, 2021). “What suits me?”, “What is important to me?” or “Who do I want to be?” – these are typical questions arising in such situations. They serve the articulation of a life plan that otherwise represents the implicit background of life but is not yet differentiated into particular directions or goals. The reference to the future is only inadequately described here as an idea of future possibilities. Anticipation also implies a kind of pre-feeling, a bodily sensing of oneself in an imagined situation: “How I will feel when I do this” (Thomae, 1960). It is based on an affective-bodily sense in which previous experiences are implicit. This corresponds to Damasio’s (1995) theory of “somatic markers”, i.e., visceral and muscular sensations such as the “gut feeling”, which are necessary for successful decisions. The reaction that occurred in earlier, similar situations has become part of the body memory and is actualized again in the current or imagined situation as a meaning implicate. Ultimately, every open situation, with its various possibilities that we face, evokes a felt sense, a pre-reflective understanding that is bodily palpable, if initially difficult to grasp and verbalize.

Deciding then means moving towards a sense of congruence between the imagined possibilities, the bodily reactions to them and a newly articulated self-concept that includes one’s own motives, experiences, inclinations and desires. In this progressive process of clarification, active-searching, cognitive and passive-receptive, intuitive moments interpenetrate so that the person becomes more transparent to him- or herself and can finally identify with the choice. The bodily pre-feeling or resonance usually represents a quite reliable guide for the process.²⁰ In a successful case, it results in experiencing the congruence as evident (“this feels right for me”). In this way, the ambivalence of the decision-making situation is resolved and a new space for action is opened up.

Congruence or consonance (in German Stimmigkeit) can generally be understood as the quality of an articulation process “… that consists in connecting what is meant with what is said in a way that enables the continuation of the action or articulation” (Jung & Schlette, 2018, 588). ‘What is meant’ here corresponds to the still implicit, felt meaning, i.e., the not-yet-conscious; one could also speak of an “undetermined determinability”. Congruence thus means the perceived resonance between the bodily implied meaning and its symbolic articulation, which at the same time transfers the implicit into an intersubjective context of shared meanings.

This is, of course, only possible because language is always already present as an articulation tendency in our pre-reflective life. The implicit not only strives for immediate bodily manifestation in facial expressions, gestures or actions, but also contains the words that express it symbolically. This is because words are not merely added externally to primary experience, as if they were only labels, but instead are already inherent in the lived body and body memory as expressive linguistic gestures or “proto-language”. That the unconscious is structured like a language, as Lévi-Strauss (1963) and Lacan (1977) postulated, is only true, however, on the condition that one understands language itself, with Merleau-Ponty (1973), as a living, gestural process (parole), not as the already sedimented system of symbolic signs (langue) – in other words, on the condition that free, creative speech in the sense described above represents the basic phenomenon of language. Even under this condition, however, there always remains a surplus of the bodily implicit over its possible articulations; it is this surplus from which the future new can emerge.

In summary, bodily meaning implicates can be understood as particular ways in which the lived body anticipates a sense that is still unarticulated and not yet conscious as such. Again, sense is articulated in a circular process that links protention, articulation, and retention, striving for an increasing congruence of the implicit and the explicit. In this way latent motives, possibilities for further development and solutions to conflicts can be brought to light, especially in polyvalent or crisis situations.

6 Coincidence as a not-yet-conscious

Finally, the not-yet-conscious can, as already indicated at the beginning, also come to the subject from the outside or from the future, as it were. In cognitive psychology, one speaks of perceptual salience when an event stands out from the experiential field, either because it is new and surprising in itself, or because it meets a conscious or preconscious expectation. One could say that the protentional cone is sensitized in a certain way, so that specific probabilities and thus a selective attention arises. For example, a hungry person is more likely to notice food in the environment than a satiated person, even if he or she is not aware of being hungry. In this case, drive-related bodily protentions from the margins of the cone are effective. But the not-yet-conscious does not emerge here in one’s own ideas or as an articulation of the implicit, but is encountered in conspicuous or “salient” external events.

6.1 Meaningful coincidence

One of these phenomena is coincidence, that is, a meeting of events with a similar meaning, but without a causal connection, which is experienced as surprising, irritating, delightful, or uncanny, but in any case as significant. For example, if one has an animated conversation about cats with colleagues, it might easily happen that later, when reading a newspaper, an article about cats amazingly catches one’s eye. Here, an external, independent event matches one’s own latent tendency or readiness, and the unconscious protentions (cats were still latently present at the edge of the protentional cone) establish the salience of the event; otherwise it would have been overlooked. Since there is no discernible linkage with the similar previous event (i.e., no probable protention is fulfilled), the concurrence appears highly improbable and therefore surprising or even startling. It creates the puzzling impression of being “not accidental” or the result of some hidden intention, while in reality it is the effect of selective attention finding its fulfillment.

The protentional tendency, which favors the coincidence and establishes the link, is later often confirmed by a retroactive interpretation of meaning. Thus, one will often look back on the first encounter with one’s life partner or significant other as a fateful “providence”, even if it was a trivial coincidence. Perhaps one forgot one’s hat, went back to the place one left it, and met the woman of one's life. But the coincidence was at least favored by a latent expectation, an unconscious “search image”; possibly the forgetting already happened with an unconscious intention, since one had already perceived the woman fleetingly before – a typical example of a Freudian slip or parapraxis. The significant coincidence then does not require “providence”, because our perception of situations is always determined by an unconscious selection. “Coincidence shows me what I have an eye for at the moment, and I hear what I have an antenna for. […] We do not experience coincidences that do not belong to us” (Frisch, 1964, 464). Meaningful coincidence thus proves to be an effect of the not-yet-conscious, appearing in a circular movement of unconscious protention, salience, and retrospective sense-making.

Such striking coincidences can also occur in the course of psychotherapy – after all, therapy is often an intense, emotionally significant process that increases the patient’s receptivity. Jung (1985) coined the term “synchronicity” for these phenomena, defining the term as “the simultaneous occurrence of two meaningfully but not causally connected events” (Jung, 1985, 36). These coincidences often herald impending developments in the patient that have not yet become consciously apparent. They too can be seen as experiences of congruence that can be used for creative processes of change. They point to the fact that, from a phenomenological perspective, the unconscious is not to be sought in an archaeological way in the past, but rather in the phenomenal field of present experience – as its hidden or reverse side (Fuchs, 2019). Here the unconscious often manifests itself as an unexpected, seemingly non-random encounter, a surprising but all the more significant element of the phenomenal field.

6.2 The exclusion of randomness in schizophrenia

In incipient schizophrenic psychoses, salience and sensitivity to stimuli can be pathologically heightened (“hypersalience”, Kapur, 2003), so that those affected see an ominous significance everywhere, refer everything delusionally to themselves and can no longer accept random occurrences. The “exclusion of randomness” has been described in psychopathology as the very characteristic of delusion (Berner, 1978). As a result, the experience of “meaningful coincidences” becomes ubiquitous and overwhelming, as in the following cases:

A patient in acute psychosis suspected a magnetic field installed under a lawn, as the leaves that fell from the trees seemed to lie there in a certain arrangement which “could not be random”. – Another patient with schizophrenia reported constant duplications of events by which someone wanted to signal something to him. The day before, for example, someone had talked about a gun, today there was one in the newspaper. He was sure that this could not be “mere coincidence”; on the contrary, it meant that he should shoot himself. (Fuchs, 2000b, 142)

In these cases, the protentional cone is not only expanded, but also extremely sensitized. In the patients’ perception, everything happens “just for them”, and therefore nothing seems to be accidental any more. Instead it points to an alien, hidden intention behind the occurrences. This leads to the impression of being at the center of all events, and sometimes even of bringing about these events oneself:

It really felt as if the world revolved around me … that the sun did not shine when I had bad thoughts. As soon as I had good thoughts, the sun came again … I had related everything to myself as if it were made for me. (Schmidt, 1941)

Significantly, this so-called “delusional mood” of incipient psychosis (Jaspers, 1968) is often associated with a vague sense of the impending, the imminent, and the uncanny, which can encompass the entire experiential field, as in the following account of a patient:

Then everything seemed to stop, to wait, to hold its breath, in a state of extreme tension. […] Something seemed about to occur, some extraordinary catastrophe. (Sass et al., 2017, 24)

In this heightened protentional tension directed towards the future, not only do striking coincidences emerge. Sufferers may also experience a consistent sense of novelty, surprise or trepidation even in relation to banal events that would normally be anticipated and so elicit no such response. This can be understood as a disruption of the normal bodily protentionality, which otherwise mediates the expectation of the familiar and thus one’s continuity with the past. The habitual protentions are, as it were, overwhelmed by the hypersalience, and the world continually appears to the patient in a new light:

Everything was constantly new to me. – [Every morning] everything always seemed to be completely different. (Blankenburg 1971)

This hypersalience of novelty is certainly different from the creative unfolding of the new and from the normal susceptibility to coincidences. Nevertheless, psychopathological phenomena make it clear that the “salience of the coincidental” and the experience of the new always depend on the subject’s respective condition and attitude. Coincidence therefore becomes significant for a phenomenology and psychology that emphasizes the effect of unconscious attitudes, tendencies and motives on selective attention.

7 Conclusion

I have examined the phenomenon of the not-yet-conscious in its temporal and bodily structure and described it as the unfolding of a latent, not-yet actualized meaning. This unfolding is based on the special temporal and field structure of consciousness, which I have illustrated with the image of the protentional cone. It connects the future orientation of the stream of consciousness with a degree of focus or openness that varies according to the attitude of the subject. With a high degree of focus, more probable protentions are actualized or fulfilled; with a lower degree of focus, more improbable or latent protentions are also admitted.

The focusing of the protentional cone mainly occurs through the function of attention; it ensures that a pursued intention is shielded from external distractors as well as interfering inner associations, so that the preferred protentions apply to the intended perceptual or action focus. For the unfolding of a not-yet-conscious meaning, on the other hand, a relaxation of attention is necessary, which corresponds to an intermediate state of awareness between active goal pursuit and pure receptivity, an “intentional letting happen”. In this scenario, the latent meaning can gradually become explicit and articulate.

The not-yet-conscious can essentially be assigned to the bodily protentions and thus also to the body memory. On the one hand, it feeds the anticipations of the probable, the habitual and the familiar in perception and action – protentions that go back to similar or typical earlier experiences. On the other hand, the lived body also contains vague pre-feelings and as yet undeveloped, qualitative sensory complexes, which I have called “meaning implicates”. These still undetermined implicates and their spontaneous revealing are of central importance for creative processes.

As we have seen, the unfolding of the not-yet-conscious is based on a circular, forward and backward linking of protentions, articulations and the bodily resonance that these articulations generate in the retention. In a successful case, this leads to a feeling of congruence, in which what is expressed proves to be appropriate and can motivate further articulations. This both prospective and retroactive temporality enables the gradual specification of the meaning that is still latent or only vaguely present at the beginning. It often happens in such a way that what was not yet known appears to the subject as a surprising “inspiration” or “illumination” and thus, in a certain sense, comes to him from the future. This experience is grounded in the circular temporality of subjectivity, whose unconscious protentions can become surprising impressions. We have also seen from extemporaneous speech that the linear model of time as mere succession is not adequate to understand the unfolding of the not-yet-conscious. What is required instead is the concept of a circular, forward and backward interlocking movement of consciousness.²¹

Meaningful coincidences have a similar structure, in which unconscious dispositions, tendencies or desires influence the intentional field in such a way that selective attention is directed towards what is “non-randomly coincidental”. The surprising – be it gratifying or uncanny – aspect of coincidence thus lies precisely in the fact that it matches an already latent meaning and its expectations. From such coincidences too, if the subject is willing and open for it, possibilities for further articulation arise, which allow already prepared inner developments to emerge and be realized. Here, the creative new arises from a coincidence of inner and outer moments.

The not-yet-conscious thus reveals overall an ambiguous structure of consciousness that remains hidden from itself in important parts, so that it is unable to grasp them directly. Only in a circular, prospective and retrospective movement can it become aware of these parts, whether they unfold step by step in an articulating process or come to the subject from outside in the form of surprising coincidences. Undoubtedly, the potentials of the not-yet-conscious have always been utilized in various ways for creative, artistic, and therapeutic processes. However, a phenomenology of embodied experience, which particularly focuses on its ambiguous bodily and temporal structure, is able to make these hidden potentials and their realization more comprehensible and to provide suggestions for various forms of practice.