The Enigma of the Egos

Abstract

Abstract The chapter addresses the ego as a legacy of idealism and in light of Avenarius’s critiques of it. It compares the function and history of the ‘ego’ in Freud’s neurology and in Husserl’s evolving phenomenology, wherein the ego was firstly ‘absolute subjectivity’ (1905) only to grow more complex in Ideas I and II. This chapter discusses how Husserl’s turn to the phenomenological subject as a “monad” (around 1910) allowed him to integrate memory and intersubjectivity into the intimate sphere of the transcendental ego. But a central difficulty persisted: Memory, and what persists of memories that combined to constitute the ego. While this question would lead Husserl to intersubjectivity, those dimensions of the ego were built into Freud’s psychoanalysis, which was itself influenced by his dynamic neurology. The combination of an unconscious ego and a conscious, social one, allowed Freud to think about embodiment from within and without, something Husserl attempted through sedimentation, nested egos, and Einfühlung (empathy).