Body and psychopathology in Merleau-Ponty\'s philosophy.

Author(s)

Marcelo Georgétti Vieira

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: Ribeirão Preto.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras de Ribeirão Preto (PCARP/BC)
• Defense date: 2010-06-18

Examining board members

Reinaldo Furlan; Simeão Donizeti Sass; Richard Theisen Simanke

• Advisor: Reinaldo Furlan

Abstract

In the present work, we aim to study the notion of psychopathology in Merleau-Ponty\'s first works, The Structure of Behavior, published in 1942, Phenomenology of Perception, published in 1945 and in part of the resumes in Sorbonne\'s courses, offered between 1948 and 1952. Once it\'s not a theme straightly approached by the philosopher, and once sickness is understood as an injury to life, firstly we look for a rough-draw of his notion of life, considered as a self regulative and normative principle, turned to an amount of concrete relations between the organism and its environment, attempting to solve both in first one\'s biological needs as in adaptive demands imposed by the second. We emphasize as fundamental the repercussion of Goldstein\'s thoughts in Merleau-Ponty\'s, which has contributed with an integrationist conception of organism present mainly in Merleau-Ponty\'s first work (The Structure of Behavior) and also with the notion of \"coming to terms\", that is, how an organism and its environment come to a mutual agreement. We also turn ourselves to Canguilhem, as much for his affinity with the philosopher\'s thoughts as for the meaningful position of this notion of life we argue inside medicine\'s history. In a second moment, we develop a more detailed analysis of psychopathology\'s notion that appears in Phenomenology of Perception and Sorbonne courses\' discussions on embodiment developed from the examination of illness cases, such as Schneider\'s brain damage, the aphonic lady, the phantom member, schizophrenic hallucinations and verbal hallucinations. We emphasize the interlocutions between the philosopher and Sartre, Minkowski, Politzer and Freudian\'s thought. At last, we discuss the proposal of understanding madness as a creative potentiality, an indirect implication for our theme present in Merleau-Ponty\'s issue on Cézanne, published in 1948 as Cézanne\'s Doubt. (FAPESP) (AU)