ABSTRACT
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was Professor of Child Psychology at the Sorbonne. He is the only one of phenomenology’s pioneers to have taken seriously both psychoanalysis and empirical research in psychology. In fact, it has been noted that his reading of Freud redefined and deepened the field of existential phenomenology. That his work has not been taken up in psychoanalysis and psychology is a curious neglect, but for those interested in understanding the roots of thought in human embodiment, the relationships between gesture, desire and perception, the dialectics of interaction, or the interpersonal constitution of identity, Merleau-Ponty’s work is the mother lode. It is thus a special pleasure to reprint this little gem by David Michael Levin, as it is the only paper in this volume to investigate explicitly Merleau-Ponty’s significance for analytical psychology —and vice versa. Levin’s concern is twofold: to articulate a phenomenology of corporeality that is the latent ground of Jung’s and Neumann’s accounts of psychological transformation, and to articulate one of the central archetypal processes that transform the blind animality of the human body into an embodiment of compassion and self-reflective insight. Although Levin shows how analytical psychology and phenomenology “complement” each other, his work stands as an original synthesis, and it anticipates a number of books that appeared in the years after this paper was written.
