Central and East European
Society for Phenomenology

Conference | Paper

The World of Perception in Psychopathological Experience. An Approach from Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology

Bryan Zúñiga Iturra

Wednesday 4 September 2024

12:20 - 13:00

TU-Small Venue

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s thought aims to describe our daily link with the world (Lebenswelt), which he calls perception from the 1940s onwards. Thus, the author elaborates a proposal in which this interrogation leads him to propose different theoretical models linked to each other.

 

First is a descriptive psychology, in which he discusses objective thought through the concept of behaviour (comportement). Secondly, a phenomenology of human existence in which embodiment is fundamental. Thirdly, an ontological psychoanalysis that moves him to describe the human being as a knot of mobile relations that starts in childhood. Finally, he develops an ontology in which he understands being (être), and by extension of the world, under the dynamics of latency and indetermination.

 

Placed in this context, the following presentation aims to show a description of a transversal subject to all the author’s work, namely, the meaningful appearance of the world, and particularly within an experience of growing interest in phenomenology, namely, psychopathology. In other words, this presentation seeks to delimit the type of perception at stake in psychopathology. To achieve this, our inquiry will have three moments. First, and in the light of La structure du comportement, it will describe the perceptual relation with the world through what we call the creative sense power of the human being. Second, and based on Phénoménologie de la perception, it will describe the relationship between sense, world, and corporeality. Finally, and through a reading of L’institution, la passivité, it will develop a phenomenology about an unthought of Merleau-Ponty’s proposal, i.e., the sense constitution of the world in psychopathology. At the end of this presentation, it hopes to demonstrate that in the psychopathological experience, there is a kind of perception in which human beings are challenged in their daily ability to create sense.