Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, and Psychopathology (original) (raw)

On the Phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Merleau-Ponty offers a significant renewal and deepening of the phenomenological project by introducing the body itself as the locus of the “upsurge of the world.” His career represents an unfolding revelation of this fundamental insight, beginning with a realization of the inadequacy of objective/mechanistic psychology and eventually moving toward a never completed project of re-imagining ontology in terms of the self revelation of the world as living existence. In this paper, I concentrate on the first phase of Merleau-Ponty’s career, which includes his challenge to the objectivist tendencies in biology and psychology and his alternative phenomenological vision of life and significance. In Phenomenology of Perception, in particular, Merleau-Ponty argues that scientific knowledge passes over the true nature of perception and, therefore, misses its origin in the silent immersion of the body in a world with which it is always already intimate. Indeed, for Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology reveals, in perceptual experience, the birth of meaning as it is lived by bodies in the subtle dance that is existence.

Merleau-Ponty and the Foundations of Psychopathology

The Bloomsbury Companion to the Philosophy of Psychiatry, 2018

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a 20 th -century French philosopher who worked at the intersection of phenomenology and existentialism. Phenomenology, founded by Edmund Husserl and further developed by his students, including Martin Heidegger, is the study of human experience and existence. Traditionally, it describes the essential structures of consciousness-i.e., those features that hold for any experiencing human subject-including selfhood, intersubjectivity, affectivity, and temporality. Existentialism, in contrast with phenomenology, is not a systematic research program. Its themes originate in the 19 th -century work of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, though "existentialism" was not used as a philosophical label until Gabriel Marcel applied it to the work of Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1940s (Fulton 1999, 12-13). Like phenomenology, existentialism is the study of the nature of human existence and with how we experience a meaningful world. But existentialists are primarily concerned with human processes of self-creation-such as how we become who we are, or transform our identity-rather than with the unchanging essence of human being. In this respect, existentialists typically study contingent, rather than necessary, features of human existence.

Merleau-Ponty's modification of phenomenology: Cognition, passion and philosophy

Synthese, 1999

This paper problematizes the analogy that Hubert Dreyfus has presented between phenomenology and cognitive science. It argues that Dreyfus presents Merleau-Ponty's modification of Husserl's phenomenology in a misleading way. He ignores the idea of philosophy as a radical interrogation and self-responsibility that stems from Husserl's work and recurs in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. The paper focuses on Merleau-Ponty's understanding of the phenomenological reduction. It shows that his critical idea was not to restrict the scope of Husserl's reductions but to study the conditions of possibility for the thetic acts. Merleau-Ponty argued, following Husserl's texts, that the thetic acts rest on the basis of primordial pre-thetic experience. This layer of experience cannot, by its nature, be explicated or clarified, but it can be questioned and unveiled. This is the recurrent task of phenomenological philosophy, as Merleau-Ponty understands it.

Misinterpretations of the Conception of Psychoanalysis According to Merleau-Ponty

This article is part of ongoing research on Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Psychoanalysis. The study proceeds from the thesis that the philosopher has an original intuition, which reveals important and innovative points to Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. The work presented here addresses one of the courses taught by Merleau-Ponty at the Sorbonne from 1949 to 1952 that deals with the adult’s view of the child. On this subject, the philosopher presents the limits of the current philosophical and scientific conceptions, and concerning the purpose of our study, he presents misconceptions, not only about the child but about Psychoanalysis; interpretations of Freudian concepts that contradict what is original and innovative in Psychoanalysis, and how this generates a misconception about the child, reducing Psychoanalysis to a reactionary theory.