Freudianism Philosophie and Gestalt according Merleau-Ponty

Abstract

In this article I present and discuss a reading hypothesis, according to which, with the purpose of thinking about the genesis of meaning in the lived experience without needing, for that, to resort to the reflexive transparency expedient ensured by the idea of a pure self, Merleau-Ponty promotes a shift in the way of employing the Gestalt notion, which starts to be read from the unconscious drive Freudian theory. Interpreted from psychoanalysis, however, Gestalt's notion would no longer address the lived from a descriptive point of view and would assume a dynamic point of view, which Merleau-Ponty (1964a, p. 165) will call ontological, which, in turn, it will influence the Merleau-Ponty appropriation of psychoanalysis. Beyond anthropology, psychoanalysis, as a gestalt (or ontological) reading of the way the lived is articulated, would become a form of philosophy (MERLEAU-PONTY, 1964a, p. 323), the presentation of Being as a process of differentiation between incarnated signifiers, which would configure a “primary symbolism”. And my greatest interest, with this hypothesis, is to measure to what extent, with this approaching strategy between gestalt and psychoanalytic operators, Merleau-Ponty manages to solve a problem that he himself faced in his way of understanding how it is possible to have singularity in a context of production of spontaneous and generic meanings wholes. This means asking: in what sense the notion of gestalt whole clarifies what is the intimacy that, for example, psychoanalysis believes it can hear from the people?