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'''Maurice Merleau-Ponty''' (March 14, 1908 – May 4, 1961) was a [[France|French]] [[phenomenology|phenomenologist]] philosopher, strongly influenced by [[Edmund Husserl]], and often somewhat mistakenly classified as an [[existentialism|existentialist]] thinker because of his close association with [[Jean-Paul Sartre]] and [[Simone de Beauvoir]], and his distinctly [[Heidegger]]ian conception of Being.
==Dictionary==
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a French philosopher, was born on March 14, 1908, in Rochefort-sur-Mer and died on May 3, 1961, in Paris. A graduate of theÉcole Normale Supérieure, he held a degree in philosophy and a PhD in literature. He taught in the literature department of the University of Lyon, then at the Sorbonne, and he succeeded Louis Lavelle at the Collège de France in 1952. Introduced to existentialism by Gabriel Marcel, familiar with the work of Edmund Husserl, gestalt theory, and the work of Max Weber, he published several important works of philosophy: <i>The Structure of Behavior</i> (1963), <i>The Phenomenology of Perception</i> (1962), and <i>Adventures of the Dialectic</i> (1973), a critique of a certain conception of Marxism. He also left behind the unfinished manuscript <i>The Visible and the Invisible</i> (1968), which pointed to a fundamental reorientation in his thinking. Merleau-Ponty occasionally attended Jacques Lacan's seminar and was present at the Journées de Bonneval conference on the unconscious in 1960.
Merleau-Ponty's work touches on psychoanalysis in three different ways. In his early work he was part of a tradition that viewed phenomenology as an integral part of a comprehensive conception of the world and knowledge, as it was represented in experimental psychology by Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka, in neurology by Kurt Goldstein, and in philosophy by Max Scheler and Georges Pollitzer. Freud's work also played a role, in that it seemed to Merleau-Ponty to be a search for the concrete and a counterbalance to reductionism, which made behavior and experience the sum of discrete elements, arranged <i>partes extra partes</i>, within an unacceptable empirical system.
More specifically, in the chapter of the <i>Phenomenology of Perception</i> titled "The Body in its Sexual Being," Merleau-Ponty proposes that we conceive of sexuality not as a mixture of representations and reflexes but as a purposeful way of being in the world and an unalterable drama. The sexual history of a person provides the key to that person's life because it expresses synthetically that person's way of being with respect to time and other people. Merleau-Ponty then considers two aspects of Freud's work. One aspect of Freud's work, his theoretical work, Merleau-Ponty felt, was tinged with nineteenth-century scientism and hence made obsolete by a holistic and dialectical conception of being in the world that challenges the causal approach to studying this order of phenomena. Merleau-Ponty finds value in the other aspect of Freud's work, concrete individual research, where symptoms have several meanings, where everything is overdetermined, and where a person's singular history is ultimately incomparable to any other. It is this second aspect that Merleau-Ponty emphasizes.
What Merleau-Ponty frequently referred to as "existential psychoanalysis" represents less a theory and practice based on the work of Ludwig Binswanger than a holistic conception of humans. Here, sexual life retains its specificity while being part of a dialectical relationship with being in the world, a dialectical relationship that binds the body to sexual activity without making sexual activity a supplemental and possibly dissociable part. Such a conception could result in a form of therapeutic practice.
== Life ==
*''The World of Perception'', trans. Oliver Davis, London: Routledge, 2004.
== References See Also== *Clark, A. 1997. ''Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again'[[Colloque sur l'. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.inconscient]]*Gallagher, S. 2003. ''How the Body Shapes the Mind''. Oxford: Oxford University Press.[[France]]*Noë, A. ''Action in Perception''. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.*Petitot, J., Varela, F., Pachoud, B. and Roy, J-M. (eds.). 1999. ''Naturalizing [[Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science''. Stanford: Stanford University Press. *Varela, F. J., Thompson, E. and Rosch, E. 1991. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge: MIT Press.psychoanalysis]]*Abram, D. (1988) "Merleau-Ponty [[Philosophy and the Voice of the Earth." ''Environmental Ethics'' 10, no. 2 (Summer 1988): 101-20.psychoanalysis]]
=== Notes =References==<div class="references/># Editors of Les temps modernes. (1961). Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Les temps modernes, 184-185.# Merleau-small">Ponty, Maurice. (1962). Phenomenology of perception (Colin Smith, Trans.). London: Routledge. (Original work published 1945)# ——. (1963). The structure of behavior (Alden L. Fisher, Trans.). Boston: Beacon Press. (Original work published 1942)<references /># ——. (1968). The visible and the invisible (Alphonso Lingis, Trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. (Original work published 1964)</div># ——. (1973). Adventures of the dialectic (Joseph Bien, Trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. (Original work published 1955)
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