Merleau-PontyPhenomenologyandPsychopathologyoxfordhb-9780198803157-e-5

See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.
net/publication/324226279
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, and Psychopathology
Chapter · March 2018
CITATIONS READS
2 854
All content following this page was uploaded by Maxine Sheets-Johnstone on 05 April 2018.
The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Oxford Handbooks Online

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone
The Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology
Edited by Giovanni Stanghellini, Andrea Raballo, Matthew Broome, Anthony Vincent Fernandez,
Paolo Fusar-Poli, and René Rosfort
Subject: Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind Online Publication Date: Mar 2018

DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198803157.013.5
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter begins with a brief biography of Merleau-Ponty and then sets forth eight
condensed perspectives on Merleau-Ponty’s relationship to phenomenology and
psychopathology: Assessing Merleau-Ponty’s Writings in Psychopathology; Cezanne’s
Doubt and Merleau-Ponty’s Doubt; Merleau-Ponty’s Ambiguous Way of Life; Sexuality and
Ambiguity; Freudian Influences and Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Analyses;: Merleau-
Ponty’s Analysis of Schneider; Puzzles about Touching and the Touched; Back to Cezanne.
The eight condensed perspectives highlight fundamental themes in Merleau-Ponty’s
phenomenology and in his psychopathological analyses at the same time as they highlight
fundamental questions and concerns that arise in an examination of these themes. The
fundamental themes emerge first in an assessment of how Merleau-Ponty’s writings on
psychopathology are both exceptional and non-exceptional and in the end in a question
about the possible confluence of what Merleau-Ponty describes as Cezanne’s “creative
liberty” and Merleau-Ponty’s own creative liberty
Keywords: Gelb and Goldstein, doubt, ambiguity, sexuality, Schneider, touching/touched relationship, existential
analysis
Page 1 of 12
PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights
Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in
Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 17 March 2018

A Brief Biography of Merleau-Ponty

Merleau-Ponty was born on March 14, 1908, in Rochefort-sur-Mer, France. He was raised
by his mother, his father having died when Merleau-Ponty was five years old. After
completing his secondary schooling and studies at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris,
Merleau-Ponty was a student at the École Normale Supérieure where he met Jean-Paul
Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. He attended the “Paris Lectures” of Edmund Husserl in
1929 and received his agrégation in philosophy in 1930. In 1934, he was given a
permanent professorship at a lycée in Chartres and had his first article—“Christianity and
Ressentiment”—published in 1935. He was conscripted in 1939 and served briefly as a
lieutenant in an infantry regiment. In 1940 he returned to teaching at a lycée in Paris and
later that year married Suzanne Berthe Jolibois. Their only child, Marianne Merleau-
Ponty, was born in June 1941. In 1945, Merleau-Ponty defended his major doctoral thesis,
“Phenomenology of Perception,” and, with Sartre, Beauvoir, and others, founded Les
temps modernes. In 1949 he was appointed Professor of Child Psychology and Pedagogy
at the Université de Paris, Sorbonne, and in 1952 was elected Chair of Philosophy at the
College de France. From 1935 onward, in addition to writing several books, he wrote a
number of articles, many of which are included in The Primacy of Perception and Sens et
Non-sens. He continued teaching as well as writing, teaching in particular courses on
Nature, until his death on May 3, 1961. He died of coronary thrombosis. Several of his
writings, including The Visible and the Invisible, were published posthumously.
Assessing Merleau-Ponty’s Writings in

Psychopathology
Merleau-Ponty’s writings in psychopathology were both exceptional and non-exceptional.
They were exceptional in bringing scientific research into phenomenology. Husserl had
written from time to time on the abnormal—for example, in Ideas II, Husserl considers
what transpires when a particular sense organ no longer functions normally while others
continue to do so (Husserl 1989: 71ff.)—but he did not delve into the psychopathological.
Heidegger too might be cited: the “they” might be viewed as metaphysically abnormal,
the “they” being those who repress recognition of their own mortality, who see death as
happening only to others, and whom Heidegger deems “inauthentic” (Heidegger 1962).
Merleau-Ponty, in contrast, delved into contemporary studies of psychopathology, in
particular, the extensive studies of Kurt Goldstein and Adhémar Gelb. He also based his
own psychopathological analyses on the writings of Sigmund Freud even as he diverged
from them. Thus one might say that he devoted himself assiduously to available
contemporary literature in the then burgeoning fields of neuropsychiatry and
psychoanalysis.
Page 2 of 12

The writings of Merleau-Ponty were non-exceptional in that Merleau-Ponty was not the
only philosopher to take up the studies of Gelb and Goldstein. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty
drew on the writings of Ernst Cassirer in his own investigations, sometimes without due
citation. A remarkable difference exists between the two philosophers. While Merleau-
Ponty read the writings of Gelb and Goldstein, Cassirer visited the Frankfurt Neurological
Institute where Gelb and Goldstein conducted their research. He observed patients at the
Institute and even had “frequent conversations” with a patient (unnamed, but quite likely
Schneider, a patient whose spatial sense of his own body, including its orientation, was
severely damaged, and whose capacities and lack thereof were at the time taken to be
basic to phenomenological understandings of the body and space) (Cassirer 1957: 239). It
is not surprising, then, that Goldstein cites Cassirer substantively in his own writings
(Goldstein 1939, 1940). Cassirer’s citations of Goldstein and Gelb in support of his
differentiating “active space” and “symbolic space” are of particular interest insofar as
they mirror Goldstein and Gelb’s original distinction, and in turn, Merleau-Ponty’s
distinction, between concrete movement and abstract movement. Cassirer states,
“Certain experiments dealing with pathological modifications in the spatial consciousness
… show that many persons[,] whose ability to recognize spatial forms and to interpret
them objectively is gravely impaired[,] can perform highly complex spatial tasks if these
can be approached in another way, through certain movements and ‘kinesthetic’
perceptions” (Cassirer 1957: 153 n. 10). Cassirer’s conclusion in which he cites studies of
blind persons—“we must conceive the ‘space’ of the blind not as a representative image-
space but primarily as a dynamic ‘behavior space’, a definite field of action and
movement” (1957: 153 n. 10)—reads in its structure and “must” as if it could have come
from the later hand of Merleau-Ponty (see, e.g., 1968: 134; 1962: xvi, 254). Merleau-Ponty
in fact echoes Cassirer’s recognition of “movements and ‘kinesthetic’ perceptions,” and a
“‘behavior space’” when he introduces the idea of “the body in face of its task” (1962:
100), though without giving prominence to kinesthesia. The sensory modality to which
Merleau-Ponty attaches primary significance is vision, and this not only in taking up Gelb
and Goldstein’s specifications of concrete and abstract movement and in his own
specification of “the spatiality of the situation” (1962: 100) with respect to Schneider, the
patient on whom he focuses, but in his later writings in The Visible and the Invisible in
which he draws far more extensively on Freud.
Cezanne’s Doubt and Merleau-Ponty’s Doubt

Merleau-Ponty’s article “Cezanne’s Doubt” is a blueprint of Merleau-Ponty’s own doubt,
and in turn, a blueprint of his philosophy of existence. In other words, what Merleau-
Ponty construes in his psychoanalytic diagnosis of Cezanne and how he construes it are
reflected in his own personally tinged psychoanalytic philosophy. Psychoanalytic
diagnosis and philosophy are indeed intertwined. For example, Merleau-Ponty states, “My
point of view: a philosophy, like a work of art, is an object that can arouse more thoughts
than those that are ‘contained’ in it…. [Like a work of art, a philosophy] retains a
Page 3 of 12

meaning outside of its historical context, even has a meaning only outside of that
context” (1968: 199). Merleau-Ponty’s chosen title, “Cezanne’s Doubt,” exemplifies this
“point of view.” While Descartes’s famous methodological doubt is epistemologically
oriented, Cezanne’s methodological doubt is artistically oriented. The doubts, however,
are essentially and existentially intertwined: both Descartes and Cezanne broke away
from tradition, Descartes with respect to philosophy, Cezanne with respect to art. What
may surely be termed Merleau-Ponty’s doubt, as evidenced in Phenomenology of
Perception, centers in part on Sartre’s ontological Being and Nothingness, on what Sartre
describes as the in-itself and the for-itself, or in other words, on what Merleau-Ponty sees
as divisionary thinking that admits no middle ground, and on what he proceeds to
centralize in ambiguity. His specific methodological doubt, however, is tethered
exclusively to Husserl. As Albert Rabil points out, “Merleau-Ponty’s method was drawn
from a variety of sources among which he made few distinctions” (Rabil 1967: 164). He
earlier astutely observes, “It is interesting that the preface to Phenomenology of
Perception can be read independently of the body of that book. There is no attempt to
apply the phenomenological method as it is outlined to the descriptions of experience
which abound there” (1967: 62). Phenomenologist and phenomenological historian
Herbert Spiegelberg makes a similar observation:
How far can Merleau-Ponty’s writings be considered to be demonstrations of the

phenomenological method? This is not an easy question to answer. Few if any of
his texts read like protocols of phenomenological research. The reason is not only
that he usually starts out from a critical discussion of the traditional views. Most
of the presentation of his own position takes the form of simple assertions of
findings that he seems to have made long before. Rarely does he carry out the
analysis before our very eyes or invite us to look with him at the phenomena by a
methodical and painstaking investigation. Instead, he gives us his results ready-
made, leaving it to us to do our own verifying.
(Spiegelberg 1971: 559)
Merleau-Ponty’s methodological insistence on finding and describing a reversibility

(chiasm, Ineinander, intertwining) that sustains ambiguity is readily evident in
“Cezanne’s Doubt”:
There is a rapport between Cezanne’s schizoid temperament and his work

because the work reveals a metaphysical sense of the disease: a way of seeing the
world reduced to the totality of frozen appearances, with all expressive values
suspended. Thus illness ceases to be an absurd fact and a fate and becomes a
general possibility of human existence. It becomes so when this existence bravely
faces one of its paradoxes, the phenomenon of expression. In this sense to be
schizoid and to be Cezanne come to the same thing. It is therefore impossible to
separate creative liberty from that behavior … already evident in Cezanne’s first
gestures as a child and in the way he reacted to things. (1964: 20–21)
Page 4 of 12

This same intertwining describes sexuality and existence.
Merleau-Ponty’s Ambiguous Way of Life

Merleau-Ponty writes of the “interfusion between sexuality and existence” (1962: 169).
He states, “[A]s an ambiguous atmosphere, sexuality is co-extensive with life. In other
words, ambiguity is of the essence of human existence, and everything we live or think
has always several meanings” (1962: 169). A puzzling and at the same time highly
suggestive remark concerning sexuality follows. Merleau-Ponty observes, “A way of life—
an attitude of escapism and the need of solitude—is perhaps a generalized expression of a
certain state of sexuality” (1962: 169). That “certain state of sexuality” remains
unelucidated, though Merleau-Ponty proceeds to remark:
In thus becoming transformed into existence, sexuality has taken upon itself so
general a significance, the sexual theme has contrived to be for the subject the
occasion for so many accurate and true observations in themselves, of so many
rationally based decisions, and it has become so loaded with the passage of time
that it is an impossible undertaking to seek, within the framework of sexuality, the
explanation of the framework of existence. The fact remains that this existence is
the act of taking up and making explicit a sexual situation, and that in this way it
has always at least a double sense. (1962: 169)
“[A]n attitude of escapism” and “the need of solitude” are a striking “way of life” in light
of commentaries about Merleau-Ponty. At the very beginning of his Preface to Merleau-
Ponty’s Signs, Richard McCleary states, “[Merleau-Ponty] was well enough known in the
cosmopolitan world he comments on in Signs, but the studied wall of solitude he built
about him made it hard for even intimates to know him” (McCleary 1964: ix). In fact,
McCleary states, “He kept his distance,” though “from that distance he made men
wonder … [h]is studied anonymity became at times intensely personal” (1964: ix). He
furthermore remarks on what Merleau-Ponty himself would designate as his personal
“style”: Merleau-Ponty’s “stage is a shifting world, which he sees according to his own
lights”; Merleau-Ponty “is simply trying to express more clearly the experience he shares
with other men, who cannot put it into words and yet are vital to his effort”; Merleau-
Ponty is “searching for himself by questioning his world. We hear him learning ‘to speak
with his own voice’” (1964: x). A comment by Spiegelberg runs along similar lines:
Usually the writings of Merleau-Ponty avoid the first person singular. This is
hardly [an] accident. The focus of his thought is not on the ego, but on the
phenomenon ahead, the Sache. It is therefore not surprising that Merleau-Ponty
has not yet given any autobiographical statement nor has any formulation of his
comprehensive plans or guiding motifs appeared…. Perhaps the most revealing
Page 5 of 12

among the titles of Merleau-Ponty’s books to appear thus far is that of the
collection of his essays, Sens et non-sens.
(Spiegelberg 1971: 524).
It is notable that Spiegelberg goes on to point out, “Merleau-Ponty’s thought has been
called a ‘Philosophy of Ambiguity’” (1971: 524–525). Does a certain “way of life” with its
“attitude of escapism and the need of solitude” constitute the “thought” that personally
motivates a philosophy of ambiguity?
Sexuality and Ambiguity

We see across the whole of Merleau-Ponty’s developing existential analyses the
conceptual bond between intertwining and ambiguity that is everywhere descriptive of
life. A novelistic biographer might interpret this conceptual bond psychoanalytically.
Merleau-Ponty’s focal concern with Freud’s sexually based psychoanalytic and Freud’s
notion of overdetermination (discussed particularly in Freud’s writings on dreams) might
add to the hypothetical interpretive sketch. In particular, a novelistic biographer might
interpret Merleau-Ponty’s elaborations of Freud’s sexually based psychoanalytic and
notion of overdetermination together with his own existential analyses that anchor our
lives in an interfusion of sexuality and existence, in ambiguity, in a prepersonal I, and in
the anonymous—all of them central concepts in Merleau-Ponty’s writings—as living in the
challenge of a bisexual orientation, what might be described as an inescapable
Ineinander, surely a challenge given the time and the academic contexts in which he
lived. The dialectic of sexuality that he describes as “the tending of an existence toward
another existence which denies it, and yet without which it is not sustained,” and his
claim that “Sexuality conceals itself from itself beneath a mask of generality, and
continually tries to escape from the tension and drama which it sets up” (1962: 168) lend
a certain credence to the hypothetical sketch. Moreover taking up Freud’s notion of
overdetermination, Merleau-Ponty writes, “The ‘associations’ of psychoanalysis are in
reality ‘rays’ of time and of the world…. there is no association that comes into play
unless there is overdetermination, that is, a relation of relations, a coincidence that
cannot be fortuitous, that has an ominal [presumably meaning ‘portentous’] sense. The
tacit Cogito ‘thinks’ only overdeterminations” (1968: 240).
If one were to take up the novelistic biographer’s hypothetical sketch, not to convince
anyone of its truth, but to show that one’s quest to be true to the truths of experience
may well be shadowed by one’s own life challenges, and indeed in a way precisely as
Merleau-Ponty details in his conception of the invisible and of the unconscious—the “tacit
Cogito”—one might furthermore bring out in illuminating ways how historical limitations
play into one’s conceptual and theoretical perspectives and have the possibility of
skewing one’s analyses. Lacan’s notion of the “mirror image,” for example, is front and
center in Merleau-Ponty’s developmental writings on infants and children; the term “body
Page 6 of 12

image” (from neurologist Henry Head’s original writings) is front and center in Merleau-
Ponty’s elucidation of pathological bodies. As Martin Dillon astutely notes, “The term
‘image’ is ill suited for its function insofar as it suggests an exclusively visual or
representation form of awareness” (Dillon 1978: 98 n. 6; see also Sheets-Johnstone 2005).
As noted earlier, a visual awareness predominates in Merleau-Ponty’s writings. It is in
fact central throughout his analyses, a fact that explains not simply the prominence of the
invisible, but the chiasm of the visible and the invisible and their ambiguous relationship.
In brief, Merleau-Ponty anchors our lives in ambiguity, in a prepersonal I, in the

anonymous, and in an overdetermined tacit Cogito’s thinking by which “any entity can be
accentuated as an emblem of Being” (1968: 270), in which the unconscious “[is] to be
understood on the basis of the flesh” (1968: 270), in which “every analysis that
“disentangles renders unintelligible” (1968: 268), and in an overarching “interfusion of
sexuality and existence, which means that existence permeates sexuality and vice versa,
so that it is impossible to determine in a given decision or action, the proportion of sexual
to other motivations, impossible to label a decision or act ‘sexual’ or ‘non-sexual’” (1962:
169).
Page 7 of 12

Freudian Influences and Merleau-Ponty’s

Existential Analyses
To an interesting degree, Merleau-Ponty’s developmental journey within his discipline
follows that of Freud within his. Both Merleau-Ponty and Freud were thoroughly
cognizant of the existing knowledge and goals of their respective disciplines, but wanted
to develop that knowledge and those goals not along further lines but along different
lines. As psychiatrist Edward Nersessian notes in his essay on the concept of signal
anxiety, Freud “boldly broke new ground in his attempts to understand human suffering
both scientifically and imaginatively” (Nersessian 2013/2015: 173/827). Nersessian points
out specifically that:
As a medical doctor and neuro-pathologist, Freud’s primary goal was the

advancement of science…. At a certain point, however, around 1923, he found the
science of his day to be too limiting and restrictive, and he moved beyond the
confines of that body of knowledge, creating his own anatomy of the mind as an
alternative to the established functional anatomy of the brain. This break allowed
his imagination to move freely with little constraint. (2013/2015: 173/827)
In a similar way, Merleau-Ponty wanted to advance phenomenological studies that he

found limited and restrictive, particularly with respect to Husserl’s phenomenological
methodology and Sartre’s ontology, and in turn moved to create his own existential
analyses that were initially fortified by scientific studies of behavior and of
psychopathology. Just as Freud “forged his way forward undeterred by what we today call
confirmation bias” (ibid.), so Merleau-Ponty forged his way forward undeterred by the
fact that no method existed by which his studies and conclusions could be confirmed.
Indeed, as we have seen with respect to Phenomenology of Perception, “There is no
attempt to apply the phenomenological method as it is outlined to the descriptions of
experience which abound there” (Rabil 1967: 62).
Not only are Merleau-Ponty’s analyses methodologically akin to Freud’s self-analysis in

their idiosyncratic line of thought, but his basic concepts are offshoots of Freud’s and in
some instances even grounded in Freud’s. For example, after remarking on how “much
remains to be done to draw from psychoanalytic experience all that it contains,” and after
giving as an example the fact that “In order to account for that osmosis between the
body’s anonymous life and the person’s official life which is Freud’s great discovery, it
was necessary to introduce something between the organism and our selves considered
as a sequence of deliberate acts and express understandings,” Merleau-Ponty states,
“This was Freud’s unconscious” (1964: 229).
Merleau-Ponty does not leave the concept of the unconscious intact, but declares, “we
still have to find the right formulation for what he intended by this provisional
designation” (1964: 229). He reformulates Freud’s notion in a way that strikingly accords
Page 8 of 12

with his own philosophy: “In an approximative language, Freud is on the point of
discovering what other thinkers have more appropriately named ambiguous
perception” (1964: 229).
Merleau-Ponty’s Analysis of Schneider

Merleau-Ponty takes up Schneider’s pathological condition, his ability to execute
“[c]oncrete movements and acts of grasping,” such movements and acts “enjoy[ing] a
privileged position,” and his inability to execute abstract movements such as pointing
(1962: 103). The patient, Merleau-Ponty concludes, is aware “neither of the stimulus nor
of his reaction: quite simply he is his body and his body is the potentiality of a certain
world” (1962: 106). This world-centered body is actually “the body in face of its tasks,”
the body that Merleau-Ponty terms the prepersonal phenomenal everyday body. Thus in
spite of his disclaimer that the normal is not deduced from the abnormal, Merleau-Ponty
deduces the normal from the abnormal. In particular, possible bodily variations—a body
that is “without hands, feet, head … and, a fortiori a sexless man,” and more broadly, a
man lacking “all human ‘functions’, from sexuality to motility and intelligence” (1962:
170)—variations that Dillon points out in clarifying Merleau-Ponty’s troubled assertion in
the context of his examination of “the case of Schneider” that “[e]verything in man is a
necessity” (1962: 170), all these variations allow Merleau-Ponty “to reveal the normal
through departures from it” (Dillon 1980: 78). In fact, Dillon remarks, “In a later essay,
‘Phenomenology and the Sciences of Man’ …, Merleau-Ponty makes this very point about
the correlation between Husserlian eidetics [essences] and the ‘inductive’ methodology of
the empirial sciences” (1980: 78).
Notable in Merleau-Ponty’s linking of Schneider’s spontaneous concrete movement with

normal everyday movement is not only his deduction of the normal from the pathological,
but his passing over of any recognition of learning. We are not born with all those
everyday adult abilities specified and described in terms of concrete movement—for
example, the very basic capacity to grasp. As normal human infants, we all learn our
bodies and learn to move ourselves (Sheets-Johnstone 1999/exp. 2nd edn. 2011).
Following remarks on abstract movement—“The patient, like the scientist, verifies
mediately and clarifies his hypothesis by cross-checking facts, and makes his way blindly
toward the one which co-ordinates them all” (1962: 131)—Merleau-Ponty goes on to
affirm a “world-centered body,” hence the difference between concrete and abstract
movement in terms of perception: “This procedure [that patient and scientist go through]
contrasts with, and by so doing throws into relief, the sponteaneous method of normal
perception, that kind of living system of meanings which makes the concrete essence of
the object immediately recognizable, and allows its ‘sensible properties’ to appear only
the through that essence” (1962: 131).
Page 9 of 12

Puzzles about the Touching and the Touched

In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty links seer and seen with touching and
touched. The example he gives of the reversibility of seer and seen is rooted in tactility:
“We must habituate ourselves to think that every visible is cut out in the tangible”; “we
know that … vision is a palpation with the look” (1968: 134). He goes on to affirm that
“the thickness of flesh between the seer and the thing is constitutive for the thing of its
visibility as for the seer of his corporeity,” and further, that “What we call a visible is … a
quality pregnant with a texture, the surface of a depth” (1968: 136). In all his
descriptions and examples of the visible, a distinctively I-world relationship obtains. In
striking contrast, an I-world relationship is absent in his singular example and description
of tactility. In its stead is the left hand touching the right hand: “a veritable touching of
the touch, when my right hand touches my left hand while it is palpating the things,
where the ‘touching subject’ passes over to the rank of the touched” (1968: 133–134).
What is odd and even puzzling is that there is not an intercorporeity example of touching
and touched—a handshake, a pat on the back, even a kiss. What is odd and even puzzling
too is that there are no definitive “things” that the left hand is “palpating,” and even why
it is necessary to bring in “the things” since it is a question of the reversibility of touching
and touched hands. An embrace would indeed seem a more everyday life example of the
reversibility of touching and touched than what amounts to an I-I reversible relationship.
We might in fact recall the remark of philosopher Marjorie Grene, an otherwise avowed
aficionado of Merleau-Ponty: “Every time I read him, I have, once more, the sense that his
approach to philosophical problems is entirely, overwhelmingly right…. As with no other
thinker, I say, yes, so it is—but what about that hand trick? Alas, I cannot make it
work” (Grene 1976: 619).
Back to Cezanne
Is Merleau-Ponty’s diagnosis of Cezanne a self-diagnosis as well, a divergence from
tradition that engenders a new perspective and that seeks expression? Is there thus “a
rapport” between Merleau-Ponty’s “schizoid temperament and his work” as there is
between Cezanne’s “schizoid temperament and his work”? In short, is Merleau-Ponty’s
“creative liberty” akin to that of Cezanne? In support of this possibility, consider that
what Merleau-Ponty states as true of speech and expression is equally true of writing and
expression: “The analysis of speech and expression brings home to us the enigmatic
nature of our own body even more effectively than did our remarks on bodily space and
unity” (1962: 197).
Bibliography
Page 10 of 12

Cassirer E. (1957). The Phenomenology of Knowledge, vol. 3. New Haven: Yale University
Press.
Dillon M. C. (1978). “Merleau-Ponty and the Psychogenesis of the Self.” Journal of

Phenomenological Psychology 9: 84–98.
Dillon M. C. (1980). “Merleau-Ponty on Existential Sexuality: A Critique.” Journal of

Phenomenological Psychology 11: 67–82.
Goldstein K. (1939). The Organism. New York: American Book Company.
Goldstein K. (1940). Human Nature in the Light of Psychopathology. Cambridge: Harvard

University Press.
Grene M. (1976). “Merleau-Ponty and the Renewal of Ontology.” Review of Metaphysics

29: 605–625.
Heidegger M. (1962). Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. New York:
Harper & Row.
Husserl E. (1989). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological

Philosophy (Ideas II), trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer. Boston: Kluwer Academic.
McCleary R. (1964). Preface to Signs, trans. R. McCleary. Evanston: Northwestern

University Press.
Merleau-Ponty M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith. New York:

Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Merleau-Ponty Maurice. (1964). Signs, trans. R. McCleary. Evanston: Northwestern

University Press.
Merleau-Ponty M. (1968). The Visible and the Invisible, ed. C. Lefort, trans. A. Lingis.
Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Nersessian E. (2013/2015). “Psychoanalytic Theory of Anxiety: Proposals for

Reconsideration.” In S. Arbiser and J. Schneider (eds.), On Freud’s “Inhibitions,
Symptoms and Anxiety,” pp. 172–184. London: Karnac Press. Eine Überprüfung des
Konzepts der Signalangst. In V. W. Bohleber (ed.) Angst. Neubetrachtungen Eines
Psychoanalytischen Konzepts. Psyche 69: 826–845.
Rabil A. (1967). Merleau-Ponty: Existentialist of the Social World. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Sheets-Johnstone M. (2005). “What Are We Naming?” In H. D. Preester and V. Knockaert

(eds.), Body Image and Body Schema: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Body, pp.
211–231. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Page 11 of 12

Sheets-Johnstone M. (2011). The Primacy of Movement, expanded 2nd edn. Philadelphia:

John Benjamins.
Spiegelberg H. (1971). The Phenomenological Movement, vol. 2, 2nd edn. The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff.
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone
Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon
Page 12 of 12
View publication stats

Merleau-PontyPhenomenologyandPsychopathologyoxfordhb-9780198803157-e-5

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Merleau-PontyPhenomenologyandPsychopathologyoxfordhb-9780198803157-e-5

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, and Psychopathology

Chapter · March 2018

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Oxford Handbooks Online

Subject: Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind Online Publication Date: Mar 2018

Abstract and Keywords

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 17 March 2018

A Brief Biography of Merleau-Ponty

Assessing Merleau-Ponty’s Writings in

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 17 March 2018

Cezanne’s Doubt and Merleau-Ponty’s Doubt

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 17 March 2018

How far can Merleau-Ponty’s writings be considered to be demonstrations of the

(Spiegelberg 1971: 559)

Merleau-Ponty’s methodological insistence on finding and describing a reversibility

There is a rapport between Cezanne’s schizoid temperament and his work

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 17 March 2018

This same intertwining describes sexuality and existence.

Merleau-Ponty’s Ambiguous Way of Life

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 17 March 2018

(Spiegelberg 1971: 524).

Sexuality and Ambiguity

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 17 March 2018

In brief, Merleau-Ponty anchors our lives in ambiguity, in a prepersonal I, in the

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 17 March 2018

Freudian Influences and Merleau-Ponty’s

As a medical doctor and neuro-pathologist, Freud’s primary goal was the

In a similar way, Merleau-Ponty wanted to advance phenomenological studies that he

Not only are Merleau-Ponty’s analyses methodologically akin to Freud’s self-analysis in

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 17 March 2018

Merleau-Ponty’s Analysis of Schneider

Notable in Merleau-Ponty’s linking of Schneider’s spontaneous concrete movement with

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 17 March 2018

Puzzles about the Touching and the Touched

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 17 March 2018

Dillon M. C. (1978). “Merleau-Ponty and the Psychogenesis of the Self.” Journal of

Dillon M. C. (1980). “Merleau-Ponty on Existential Sexuality: A Critique.” Journal of

Goldstein K. (1939). The Organism. New York: American Book Company.

Goldstein K. (1940). Human Nature in the Light of Psychopathology. Cambridge: Harvard

Grene M. (1976). “Merleau-Ponty and the Renewal of Ontology.” Review of Metaphysics

Husserl E. (1989). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological

McCleary R. (1964). Preface to Signs, trans. R. McCleary. Evanston: Northwestern

Merleau-Ponty M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith. New York:

Merleau-Ponty Maurice. (1964). Signs, trans. R. McCleary. Evanston: Northwestern

Nersessian E. (2013/2015). “Psychoanalytic Theory of Anxiety: Proposals for

Sheets-Johnstone M. (2005). “What Are We Naming?” In H. D. Preester and V. Knockaert

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 17 March 2018

Sheets-Johnstone M. (2011). The Primacy of Movement, expanded 2nd edn. Philadelphia:

Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 17 March 2018

View publication stats

You might also like