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Maurice Merleau-Pontyi died suddenly of a stroke at the age of 53. At the time of his death he was working on a book laying the groundwork for his radical critique of and contribution to the field of phenomenology. This book, The Visible and the Invisible (1968), was published posthumously, and, in conjunction with his other major publications, most notably The Phenomenology of Perception (1945), his writings continue to make their way into fields beyond philosophy as diverse as neuropsychology, linguistics, aesthetics, eco-phenomenology, literature, political theory, and more. At long last, with the help of analytic writers like Giuseppe Civitarese, Merleau-Ponty's ideas are making their way into our field of psychoanalysis.ii
The timing of this entrance into more mainstream psychoanalysis is coincident with the movement in psychoanalysis itself out of an era of “why-ness” — dominated by prefigured conceptual explanations — into one of “whatness” (Ogden, Alvarez) and “withness” (Eshel), in which we ask ourselves what is happening, what are we perceiving, feeling, seeing, hearing, and sensing, especially as our experiences and perceptions guide our capacities to form closer contact with our patients.
In my opinion, Merleau-Ponty was allergic to dualisms. He objected to the tenets of his predecessors, relying heavily on the principles of Descartes, and his famous mind/body dualism, to illustrate his objections. Descartes viewed the body as a subordinate object that a transcendent mind ordered to perform various functions. Merleau-Ponty sought to rearticulate the relationship between subject and object, self and world, mind and body, by beginning at the beginning — the “thing itself and our embodied “intertwining” with whatever it is we encounter in the world. He generated a host of new terms, all of which direct us to the realm of the “operative” in contrast to the “cultivated”; the pre-reflective, sensory dimension we share with the creatures of the world; the embodie