In a famous passage in Ideas I, Husserl claims that the pure consciousness is to be understood as independent of anything apart from itself in order to constitute itself, and that it therefore is able exist without a world at all. This notion seems to be contradicted in many of Husserl’s other works as well as stand in conflict with the core of phenomenology itself as a descriptive science of intentional consciousness. Three years before the publication of Ideas I, Husserl held a series of lectures that were later published with the title The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Here, in stark contrast to Ideas I, the inquiry culminates in stepping beyond the subject as self-given and immanent by instead focusing on intersbjectivity and phenomenological time-consciousness. This essay sets out to examine the relation between the transcendental subject in these two works. It is argued that, while the phenomenological epoché indeed establishes a subject that is prior to the world in the sense that it does not need to suppose the world to guarantee its own existence, Husserl’s philosophical project in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology shows the importance of going beyond such an immanent subject to uncover the full phenomenological field.