Merleau-Ponty's Ontological Psychoanalysis

In the phase of his thinking which followed the publication of Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty accentuated his interest in psychoanalysis, sometimes in a self-critical manner (1960a). Although he could not claim to have founded the discipline, nor was he an analyst himself, Merleau-Ponty nevertheless certainly nurtured an ever-stronger interest in psychoanalysis, which was present in his earliest works but over time became one of the favourite reference points in his thinking. This was an interest reciprocated by many analysts, obviously in France above all, where his work was discussed by figures of the calibre of J.B. Pontalis and A. Green, but he found an attentive interlocutor in J. Lacan above all, one respectful of their mutual differences even though he did not fail to make critical observations; observations which Merleau-Ponty, equally amicably, reciprocated. Witness the famous episode in 1960 at the Bonneval Symposium (Laplanche, Leclaire, 1966) dedicated to the subject of the unconscious.

Unfortunately we only have a transcription made by Pontalis of Merleau-Ponty's contribution, from which we can, however, conclude that he was not inclined to subscribe without reservations to the position then held by Lacan with regard to the unconscious as a «linguistic» structure (an expression used here for the sake of brevity, but to which we shall return later).

This was a criticism that did not fail to wound Lacan when he took issue with Pontalis, who was guilty in his eyes of distorting the authentic meaning of Merleau-Ponty's words in his report. But it was a critique that did not stop Lacan paying his departed friend a great tribute in 1964, when he changed the programme of his Seminar (the eleventh, on the Four Concepts of Psychoanalysis) and dedicated it to Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible then published posthumously by C. Lefort. Lacan took from this work a teaching which still remains among the most valuable not only for psychoanalysis