The phenomenology of the ego developed by the philosopher Edmund Husserl has not generated much interest among leading theorists in the Freudian tradition. Ricoeur (1970, pp. 375-418) must be writing the epitaph for a rare idea indeed when he concludes that the ego of psychoanalysis, extending into the (descriptive) unconscious, can never be made consistent with the ego of Husserlian phenomenology, which is fully transparent to itself in the immediacy of intuitive introspection. Save by the indirect route of Gestalt psychology, the kind of “phenomenology” that has appealed in its small way to the mainstream of psychoanalytic thinking stems primarily from Heidegger, who broke with the line of Western metaphysics as it evolved from Plato to Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, and Hegel, rather than from Husserl, who was the heir of these philosophers (Spiegelberg, 1972, pp. xix, 219-231). As a result,