Triebspha ¨re und Urkindheit des Ich Alice Pugliese Published online: 26 February 2009 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 Abstract This paper explores Husserl’s late manuscripts in order to sketch a phenomenological description of drives and the dimension of passive constitution that belongs to them. Although this topic touches upon psychological issues, it will be shown that a specifically phenomenological approach allows us to recognize the transcendental significance of instincts. By means of the phenomenological reduc- tion, drives reveal a peculiar subject, the ‘original child’, which is described not as a figure of developmental psychology but as a transcendental subject pre-forming the way the world appears to us. Drives work constantly and passively as obscure sources of sense, and the original child is always involved in the constitution of the world. Sharpening our understanding of the inner structure of subjectivity by dig- ging into deeper constitutive levels has important consequences for our view of intersubjectivity: it is not only the individual subject’s consciousness but equally the relation between human subjects which is necessarily rooted in the dimension of drives. Accordingly, collective teleology cannot be considered a late product of human cooperation. Instead, it is an original and pre-predicative impulse. Die Thematik des Triebs erha ¨lt im Rahmen der Entwicklung der genetischen Pha ¨nomenologie in den spa ¨ten husserlschen Untersuchungen zunehmende Rel- evanz: Insbesondere in den E-III-Manuskripten widmet sich Husserl u ¨berwiegend der Beschreibung des Instinktlebens. Die teilweise bru ¨chigen und oft an Psychol- ogie und Anthropologie eng angrenzenden Beschreibungen du ¨rfen aber nicht—so meine These—als ein Ru ¨ckfall Husserls in eine bloß empirische Darstellung verstanden werden. Ich werde dagegen versuchen, die Mo ¨glichkeit einer transzen- dentalen Interpretation des Triebes selbst und seines Zusammenhangs mit der Konstitution der Intersubjektivita ¨t darzulegen. Der Trieb wird sich dann als A. Pugliese (&) Universita ` degli Studi di Palermo, Viale delle Scienze, Ed. 12, 90128 Palermo, Italy e-mail: alice.pugliese@gmail.com 123 Husserl Stud (2009) 25:141–157 DOI 10.1007/s10743-009-9055-9