ABSTRACT
Angelo Hesnard (1960), a leading French psychoanalyst, once argued that Freud’s discoveries had burst the boundaries of established philosophies and stood as an anomaly with respect to their ability to faithfully contain both the insights of psychoanalysis and its own self understanding. Freud’s novel view of disorder, his discovery of the unconscious, the peculiar nature of psychological life as a theatre of meaning—showing twists and turns through symbolizations, condensations, and displacements, along with other defenses—require, says Hesnard, a “new philosophy” capable of assimilating these discoveries and clarifying their existential and clinical significance. Toward this end, Hesnard sought help from his colleague, the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. For 25 years Merleau-Ponty had maintained a dialogue between his phenomenology and psychoanalysis, until his untimely death in 1961 at the age of 55. While the scope of his writings went far beyond psychoanalysis into science, philosophy, psychology, sociology, history, language, art, and political theory, Merleau-Ponty appeared never to tire of returning to the question of how psychoanalysis could be revised through a recasting of its philosophical foundations. In turn, psychoanalytic insights drawn concretely from a therapeutic praxis would, he believed, greatly enrich his philosophical clarification of human existence by expanding the philosophical understanding of the nonrational currents of our psychological life, the nature of relationships to other people, and the role they play in our ongoing behavior and self development. Merleau-Ponty (1960) often spoke of a convergence of purpose and complementarity of insights in the relationship between phenomenology and psychoanalysis. I will detail what some of the similarities and differences between these two approaches are later, when I compare self psychology with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. For now, let us simply say that Merleau-Ponty was no stranger to psychoanalysis; his work sponsors valuable outlines for a regrounding of psychoanalysis into a truly human scientific activity.
