Surprise and Unconscious

Natalie Depraz (1)

1 ERIAC - Équipe de Recherche Interdisciplinaire sur les Aires Culturelles

In this contribution I would like to make a room for another unconscious, which I name the "heart unconscious". To me it appears as a remarkable possible thread in order to bridge, more, to weave together two already well-known threads, that is, broadly speaking, the physical and the subjective, which first appear ontologically irreducible. Why? Well, one initial argument in favour is that the heart-unconscious allows a pre-conscious continuity of our experiential dynamics because of its very twofold structure, organic (the heart-muscle) and lived (heart-affectivity). In order to reveal the specificity of such an experiential pre-conscious heart-unconscious, I will put to work a very simple and daily experience, the experience of surprise. Why surprise? My idea is that surprise is a remarkable marker of heart-unconscious, insofar as, in a similar structural way, it also appears as a twofold objective-subjective pre-conscious, easily conscious becoming occurrence, manifesting as a physiological-cardiac startle as well as a lived perplexity.

Mots clés: unconscious; heart; surprise; emotion; pre-conscious; explicitation interviews; first-person methods; micro-phenomenology; neuro-phenomenology; cardio-phenomenology

Domaines: Sciences de l'Homme et Société; Philosophie

Natalie Depraz. Surprise and Unconscious. Is there a Phenomenology of Unconscious? Springer Heidelberg, 2016. ⟨hal-02121804⟩