Existential Psychotherapy by Daniel Sousa

Author:Daniel Sousa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US, New York

Affective Zero-Consciousness

The primordial laws of the constitution of geneses , of their associative motivational laws, originate in inner time-consciousness (Husserl 2001a). As we have seen, all retention is always retention of a lived experience. A primordial impression occurs simultaneously with a transformation in the retentional chain and each retention is relegated further back into the past, implying that each experience included in a retention will gradually lose more of its “force’’. “Continuous retentional modification proceeds up to an essentially necessary limit. That is to say: with this intentional modification there goes hand in hand a gradual diminution of prominence; and precisely this has its limit, at which the formerly prominent subsides into universal substratum—the so-called “unconscious ”, which, far from being a phenomenological nothing, is itself a limit-mode of consciousness (Husserl 2001a, p. 217). Husserl describes the uninterrupted process of transformation of the retentional chain as a “clouding over’’ process (Husserl 2001a, p. 217) in which all experiences that are initially a primordial impression gradually lose their clarity, traces and salient features, causing their affective force to diminish. From the psychological point of view, it is fundamental to grasp not only the connection between lived experiences and time consciousness , but also that the retentions that gradually lose their salience are relegated to the “nil of the vivacity of consciousness”, or to a space of “affective zero-consciousness ”. This passive dimension of consciousness is not a nothing of psychological life; the retentions of inner time-consciousness do not disappear. On the contrary, they form the subsoil, the background of lived experiences, which are permanently present as an experiential atmosphere of subjectivity. “This gradation is also what determines a certain concept of consciousness and degrees of consciousness and the opposition to the unconscious in the appropriate sense. The later designates the nil of this vivacity of consciousness and, as will be shown, is in no way a nothing” (Husserl 2001a, p. 216). Inner time-consciousness is the place of constant genesis; the meanings created by the self have a history. For Husserl, temporal awareness is a constant becoming (Husserl 2001a). Passivity is a subsoil that is being constituted throughout a person’s development, a space for the creation of a cluster of personality features, of more or less sedimented habits, which are sometimes present in a totally passive and obscure form, but which nevertheless play a role in the being of subjectivity. One of the main aims of genetic analysis is to explain the constitution of meanings that were sedimented throughout the different phases of development, which Husserl calls habitus, meanings that are in part not immediately accessible to the self.

In short, genetic -phenomenological analysis proceeds from the assumption that the self does not have access to all the perspectives of lived experiences. Some are superimposed on others and some are sometimes more prominent than others, for reasons not immediately apprehended, while others are vague or peripheral, transformed or distorted in the retentional process, or, as we shall see below, by associative processes. The

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