Abstract

This, the second in the Psychological Series of Duquesne Studies, is a translation of the author’s classic Théorie du Champ de la Conscience, written in 1953, first published in 1957. The thesis of the book is that ‘every total field of consciousness consists of three domains, each domain exhibiting a specific type of organization of its own. The first domain is the theme, that which engrosses the mind of the experiencing subject, or as it is often expressed, which stands in the “focus of his attention”. Second is the thematic field, defined as the totality of those data, co-present with the theme, which are experienced as materially relevant or pertinent to the theme and form the background or horizon out of which the theme emerges as the center. The third includes data which, though co-present with, have no relevancy to, the theme and comprise in their totality what we propose to call the margin’. The aim is ‘to bring out the structure of each of these domains’. We perceive a material thing in a context of other things, and if our mind is preoccupied with a problem we are also aware not only of its intellectual background and possible solutions, but of our actual environment and of ourselves as sitting in our room or walking in the street; all these data are experienced simultaneously. Consciousness here includes not only perceiving but remembering, imagining etc and its objects may be material things, mathematical relations, musical compositions or theoretical implications. These objects of consciousness are, however, objects understood descriptively, not as independent realities with causal relations to a mind but as they appear to a subject. It is the intentionality of consciousness, the bipolarity of the subject and its object which is shown to render inadequate Bergson‘s and William James’ correction of Humean empiricism in terms of temporal interpenetration of elements of the ’stream of thought‘, although the author uses concepts and theories of James’ to formulate and present problems to which a more Husserlian answer is given. Gestalt theory is explored and its phenomenological potential used to solve the problems of a theory of organization.