The Unconscious Abyss: Hegel's Anticipation of Psychoanalysis (SUNY Series in Hegelian Studies) by Jon Mills

Author:Jon Mills [Mills, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2012-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

PHANTASY

Phantasy is the third movement of imagination where the ego fully manipulates its representations and images, drawing lines of interconnection where particulars are subsumed under universals and given the richer elaboration of symbols and signs that effect the ego’s transition to memory, the third stage of presentation. Phantasy is a subjective bond the ego has with its contents, and with the introduction of symbolization, allegory, and sign, imagination gains increased synthetic mastery over its presentations that are imbued with “reason.” Here the inwardness of intelligence “is internally determined concrete subjectivity, with a capacity of its own deriving” (EG § 456). Within phantasy, there is an imagined existence as hidden unconscious processes infiltrate the creative centers of subjectivity. While phantasy attains its most elaborate articulation in language and speech—as well as in the creative power of art, it does not strictly require words in order to show itself. This may be achieved by the mind’s manipulation of its own operations with respect to both content and cognitive functions, such as the confluence of certain feeling states attached to interrelated images. In fact, phantasy is the a priori condition for language: it is a prelinguistic organization that precedes organized conceptual thought.31

Phantasy both symbolizes and engenders signs. Initially it subsumes singulars under a universal through symbolization, but because the immediate content is both a particularization and a universal, interpretation remains ambiguous. While not articulated by Hegel, phantasy becomes a central operation in unconscious production, a spewing forth of impulses and desires from the wishing well of the abyss. It may be suspended in space and time, conform to the abyss’s will through regression or withdrawal irrespective of the ego’s counterintentions, and warp objective reality to the tone of the ego’s own subjective caprice. This is why images may be either disturbing or pleasing. The “symbolizing, allegorizing or poetical power of the imagination” (EG § 456) is not confined to the mere subjective, however, it may take an external objective referent as the embodiment of its creativity. This move constitutes “the phantasy of sign making” (EG § 457).

Through signification, intelligence is concerned with unifying the relations between determinate content and what it signifies universally. The synthesis of phantasy is the unity of the sign with the universal and its self-relation. Hegel states, “[I]n phantasy intelligence has being, for the first time, not as an indeterminate abyss and universal, but as a singularity, i.e. as concrete subjectivity, in which the self-relation is determined in respect of being as well as universality” (EG § 457). This statement suggests that abstract universality itself is a sort of abyss, in that all particularity is lost in it, whether this be the soul’s initial immersion with and undifferentiation from nature or its subsumption in universal spirit. Such unification of the sign with universality is seen by spirit as its own activity that is internal and proper to it. Here intelligence gives itself being, which is now within its own capacity to do. Not to be underestimated in its importance, the sign “adds proper intuitability” to images as an objective existent (EG § 457).

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