ABSTRACT
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61), the eminent French psychologist and philosopher, and another major figure in the development of twentieth-century phenomenology, who really emphasized the notion of 'visibility,' in his manuscript The Visible and the Invisible (1968), which was published after his death. Merleau Ponty makes the point, in commenting on the relationship between so-called 'things' and the 'seer' of things, that there is not a hard and fast 'thing,' or object, out there, observed by an 'empty' seer. Diseases, too, represent crossing-over places, of objective and subjective aspects of the patient's reality. They are a chiasm or crossingover place of both meaning and biological dysfunction. Merleau-Ponty's concepts of flesh and chiasm fit well with the idea that diseases carry both objective and subjective aspects, that diseases are meaning-full.
