The Ethics of Immediacy: Dangerous Experience in Freud, Woolf, and Merleau-Ponty

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Drawing connections between Freudian psychoanalysis, Virginia Woolfs criticism and fiction, and Maurice Merleau-Pontys phenomenology, The Ethics of Immediacy recounts the far-reaching consequences of the modern turn towards a new ethics of immediacy. During the first half of the 20th century, a profound transformation an existential revolution took place in European culture in how human beings conceived of themselves. Inspired by Freuds psychoanalysis, a newfound appreciation for the realm of immediate experience in human life emerged. With Freud himself making a signal contribution to this existential revolution, and with Woolf and Merleau-Ponty taking up Freuds ideas in their own unique ways, all three figures began to regard first-order, spontaneous, direct, unselfconscious, concrete experience of self and world as standing at the heart of what it means to be human. Jeffrey McCurry describes how this new state of affairs stood in contrast to how immediate experience had been historically dismissed, devalued, repressed, and even negated in the fields of psychology, literature, and philosophy. This experience posed dangers to psychological stability, social order, and philosophical certainty. McCurry examines how Freuds psychoanalytic theory, Woolfs modernist criticism and fiction, and Merleau-Pontys phenomenology, psychology, literature, and philosophy in turns embraced the risks and dangers of putting immediate experience as the center of humanity, of respecting, understanding, appreciating, and following the lead of immediate, spontaneous, pre-reflective, pre-evaluative, concrete experience in human life.

Reviews

Jeffrey McCurrys superb study of Freud, Virginia Woolf, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty reveals the essence of the phenomenological project as shared by all three: a focus on the ephemeral yet indelible immediacy of our existence as living subjects. In so doing he sheds original light on the ethical, esthetic, and spiritual resonances of this project, thereby locating phenomenology at the beating heart of modernist life and thought. McCurry shows that Woolf and Merleau-Ponty are key participants in what he terms the Freudian age. At a still deeper level he demonstrates that Freud himself is imbued with the spirit of phenomenology. This is a book of unusual subtlety that offers a novel orientation toward key questions of psychology and philosophy. * Louis Sass, Distinguished Professor of Clinical Psychology, Rutgers University, USA, and author of Madness and Modernism and The Paradoxes of Delusion *
It is generally thought phenomenology and psychoanalysis do not go together.The Ethics of Immediacy shows the limits of this view. Jeffrey McCurry demonstrates and develops Freudian interpolations in Woolfs modernist literature and in Merleau-Pontys phenomenology, and in doing, so incites the possibility of a renewed ethics from immediate experience. This book launches an ethical depth-charge to its reader: without any ideal, normative prescription, or even expectation, what responsibility, if any, does one have to interrogate immediate experience in ones own life and times * Athena V. Colman, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Brock University, Canada *

Author Bio

Jeffrey McCurry is Director of the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center and Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Philosophy, Duquesne University, USA. He is also a member of the faculty at the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Center.