ABSTRACT
This chapter explains people discussion on the intimate relation between subjectivity and madness as treated in Jacques Lacan's early writings who was a French psychoanalyst and in Merleau-Ponty a French phenomenological philosopher, his seminal work the Phenomenology of Perception. In doing so, people outline the difference between Lacan's and Merleau-Ponty's readings of Henry Wallon a French philosopher, psychologist his psychogenetic model of the mirror stage. Subjectivity takes shape as a more or less typical series of ideal identifications start to define who one is. These successive imaginary identifications, taken as an ever-developing ensemble, constitute the ego. Wallon considers the mirror stage as the phase during which the child overcomes its premature epistemological attitude of believing in the independence of the interoceptive felt body and the virtual body in the mirror. Whereas both Lacan and Merleau-Ponty take madness seriously, and assume that madness teaches something about the nature of human subjectivity, they actually arrive at contrasting conclusions.
