Affective Matter: The Unconscious Between Brain and Mind

The problem of affect and affectivity plays a significant role in psychoanalysis, both at a theoretical and therapeutic level. In Freud’s first interpretation of hysterical symptoms affect is considered as a certain amount of energy, and this already mirrors its aporetic intertwining with the ‘reality’ of the unconscious. For Paul Ricœur, Freud’s psychoanalysis has a double, irreducible theoretical-procedural register, energetistic and hermeneutical; and his research into the unconscious reality reveals the significance and consequences of this double/dualistic approach. A combination of Husserl’s phenomenological and Ricoeur’s hermeneutical approaches helps us to find a “third, mediative way”, in which the unconscious can be reinterpreted as a “affective matter”, that is a mid-way reality placed between corporality and non-corporality, body and mind, natural causality and experiential/existential meaning. The notion of “affective matter” seems to indicate a sort of median, hybrid dimension of the unconscious as a “sphere of the unreflective” and as a “sphere of the instinctual” which is, a formula for rejecting Freud’s realism of the unconscious without denying the instinctual and transformative reality underlying the life of consciousness. The problem to be solved is how the idea of transformation can be applied to the domain of identity transformation. I tackle transformation starting from its general reference to the process of the symbolic appropriation of reality.