Notes on the phenomenology of interiority and the foundations of psychology

Abstract

Interiority and any reference to an inner life have been radically deconstructed by the philosophical anthropologists, who find in the psychological constructions of the self and the theories of mental life the legacy of Descartes and Galileo. This critique is argued in some detail. However, the language of interiority is not merely an epistemological error on the part of the speaker. Psychoanalysis and psychopathology have documented the developmental significance of interiority and its absence. A phenomenological analysis of interiority, based in part on a clinical example, reveals several interrelated themes: temporal continuity; imagination; responsibility and ownership; privacy; self-reflection. Each of these themes is interpreted existentially in terms of being in the world. A critical discussion of interiority in Giegerich's work concludes the paper. It is argued paradoxically that the dialectical tension between interiority and exteriority – psyche and its grounding in events and relations to others – is a dimension within interiority itself.

Keywords:

• phenomenology
• interiority

Notes

1. In Klein's words: ‘Side by side with the destructive impulses in the unconscious mind … there exists a profound urge to make sacrifices, in order to help and put right loved people who in fantasy have been harmed or destroyed. In the depths of the mind, the urge to make people happy is linked up with a strong feeling of responsibility and concern for them, which manifests itself in genuine sympathy with other people and in the ability to understand them, as they are and feel’ (Klein, 1964, pp. 65–66). For a Jungian discussion of the relation between Oedipal ambivalence and the awakening of the ethical imagination, see Stein, 1984).

2. In these pages Levinas does not discuss imagination directly, but it is impossible to read them without thematizing imagination accordingly.

3. John White, PhD, is a Candidate in the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, Pittsburgh.

4. A rigorous phenomenology of introversion would require a study on its own. For a solid start, see Shapiro and Alexander (1975).

5. An especially clear introductory paper, systematically setting out his terms of reference is Giegerich (2007). My own caution is influenced by Marlan (2012), whose reading of Giegerich is painstakingly nuanced and careful.

6. This distinction is discussed by Madison (1988).

7. For a nuanced discussion of these issues, including the links to Heidegger, see Mogenson (2007).

8. Another, more sustained discussion of the place and significance of materiality in psychological life is presented by Romanyshyn (2008). However, Giegerich (2009) rejects any notion of an ecological sensibility in psychology, as though a psychology of the soul can have no ethical sensibility or share in the experience of suffering. Romanyshyn's (2010) reply offers a sustained defense of psychology's use of Merleau-Ponty's term, flesh.

9. See Merleau-Ponty (1963) for a sustained discussion of this dialectical relation between the human (psychological) and vital (animal) orders of human embodiment. For Merleau-Ponty, the human is not the addition of psychological life onto an animal body left intact but the internal transformation of the body into the human order. If this is sublation, it remains embodied and grounded, not emptied into ‘thought’.