Merleau-Ponty and the Foundations of Psychopathology

Abstract

Merleau-Ponty and the Foundations of Psychopathology 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

The Landscape of Merleau-Pontyan Thought

“…That this is a significant challenge is evidenced first of all by the fractious and often contradictory state of the philosophical scholarship on Merleau-Ponty, second by the replication of those fractures in the interdisciplinary engagement with his thought. For instance, Merleau-Ponty's work has attracted interest in fields as wideranging as architectural theory (Locke & McCann, 2016) and animal studies (Westling, 2014;Lestel et al, 2014); environmental thought (Abram, 1997;Cataldi & Hamrick, 2007;Toadvine, 2009) and archaeology (Malafouris, 2013); physics (Wiltsche & Berghofer, 2020) and psychopathology (Fernandez, 2018;Sheets-Johnstone, 2019), yet these fields often draw on very different, and sometimes seemingly incompatible aspects of Merleau-Ponty's work. They are encouraged, moreover, by a scholarship that finds radically different arguments within the primary texts.…”

fundação do ser sexual

“…26-65 normal). O autor está, assim, interessado em acomodar as formas psicopatológicas da experiência humana dentro de um projeto fenomenológico mais geral (Fernandez, 2019). Dito de outro modo, na direção inversa da tradição psicopatológica fenomenológica -interessada na aplicação rigorosa do método filosóficofenomenológico às vivências psicopatológicas verificáveis na clínica -, a psicopatologia merleau-pontyana trouxe a ciência psicopatológica à fundamentação de um programa rigorosamente filosófico, por sua vez, capaz de ampliar a acepção essencial estática e universal da consciência, como postulou a fenomenologia transcendental husserliana.…”

“…Ou seja, com vistas a percorrer e ligar a sexualidade (conteúdo com significação sexual) ao sentido geral (forma) da existência, batiza a apreensão fenomenológica da experiência sexual. Trata-se de participar a sexualidade do índice maior de submeter a contingência humana ao escrutínio fenomenológico, como cláusula de necessidade da própria existência (Fernandez, 2019). Afinal, a fundação merleau-pontyana do ser sexual não se presta a postular uma nova teoria da sexualidade.…”

Self and mental disorder: Lessons for psychiatry from naturalistic philosophy

“…Some phenomenologists evaluated psychopathology in their examination of the human experience in the world, using it as a thought experiment to support their own views of the nature of human perception. For instance, Merleau‐Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception examines how some aspects of perceptual experience are disrupted in psychopathologies such as schizophrenia; however, he uses this analysis pragmatically to develop an account of typical consciousness/perception (Fernandez, 2019; Merleau‐Ponty, 1945/2012). He does not give a detailed analysis of mental disorder in relation to the concept of the self, using actual cases.…”