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I offer here a rereading of the pages Maurice Merleau-Ponty dedicated to hallucinations in his Phenomenology of Perception, in particular because those pages effectively illustrate the phenomenological approach to a psychiatric symptom. As we know, phenomenology was very successful in the psychiatric field—especially in continental Europe—throughout the twentieth century. I will demonstrate, however, that this analysis of hallucinations clearly shows the philosophical limits of the phenomenological approach to psychiatry as a field and to subjectivity in general. I will also draft a deconstruction of phenomenological discourse that tries to question the deep sense of phenomenological psychiatry and its theoretical and methodological assumptions.
In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty devotes several pages to hallucination. In his opinion hallucinations play a philosophically strategic role: they are “counter evidence” for his reflections in the chapter “The Thing and the Natural World.” In short, hallucinations are alternative proof of what he has already proved, as we call hallucination the (apparent) perception of things that do not exist. According to Merleau-Ponty, this borderline case of our ‘being in the world,’ if described correctly, proves the phenomenological description of our perceptive relation to the natural world (1945, pp. 391-402; 1945/1978, pp. 299-345).
Merleau-Ponty juxtaposes the phenomenological description of hallucinatory states to two classical philosophical approaches, which he calls “Empiricism” and “Intellectualism.” In fact, he is referring to the offspring of the two main philosophical traditions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: