From the Experience of Intersubjective Time to the Experience of Maternal Empathy

Abstract

The paper draws on Husserl’s description of primordial intersubjective temporality, which I present as consistent with and integral to his understanding of the continuum between empathy and instinct. Because Husserl presents the mother-child relation as the foundational relation which constitutes the most primordial site of intersubjective temporal continuity, I focus my attention on the role that the mother-child relation plays as an original source of empathetic and instinctual experience and as the original source of an awakening to the past and to the future. Although Husserl did not pursue an extended account of maternal empathy and instinct, I demonstrate how Husserl’s account of the merging of empathy and instinct reflects his account of the intermingling of heteronomous temporalities and thereby bolsters his account of the intersubjective experience while anticipating the possibility of a generative empathetic ethics of continuity. By reading Husserl in this way, I show that he provides us with the theoretic foundation of the maternal temporal experience, which provides the necessary support for an empathetic ethics of engagement.