The Child's Relation with Others, Merleau-Ponty & Langdridge:

Contents
The Child's Relation with Others, Merleau-Ponty & Langdridge: Rob Thomson Lifespan presentation    1
What the papers says    1

Justification for our agency in perception    1

Childs relation with others    2

Relevance to existential-phenomenological therapists    3

Langridge    4

What it was like to read and present it    4

Discussion about the paper    4


 

What the papers says

MP sees the relation with others as being what constitutes our affective life. He sites our affective life as not being subordinate to that of understanding, i.e. causal, scientific thinking. Rather both arise on the basis of our pre-reflective embodied relation with the world, that constitutes our situation that enables our perception which in turn enables affect and perception. Thus it is central to MP's position to show how we create our environment our situation and how it is not objectively given in the way science would like us to believe.

Justification for our agency in perception

Tests were made on psychologically rigid people, i.e. people who think in black and white, e.g. someone is good or bad, there's a right and a wrong way to do something, and they showed that psychologically rigid people were also perceptually rigid. This was shown with a series of tests which implied a certain method of solving them, then a similar test to the previous ones which was best solved with a new method was shown. The rigid people always went to the previous method to solve this new test, as they were reluctant to see the newness of the situation. MP sees that the way we are open to the world is a factor in its construction, but it is one aspect amongst others. These others would the fact that perception has a received component and that we are born into a pre-existing world of language, society and custom. Thus there is a relation between self and environment, where the self takes a position on what is environmentally given, which both constitutes the environment and the self.
Our perception is heavily entwined with language, some would argue that language demarcates perception. When we perceive we have words for everything we perceive. MP shows that one of the factors of language acquisition is our affective relations with others. Thus if a child has no relation with language speakers during the first 2 years of their life they never fully acquire language. Likewise there is a strong correlation between the understanding of the imperfect tense and a child's experience of change. When a child experiences the birth of a new sibling their position in the family order changes. When this happens several things can be seen. Firstly a regression to previous modes of behaviour as the child identifies with the neonate. Secondly there can be the acquisition of the imperfect tense as the child starts to understand how the present changes into the past and what they were in absolute terms, the only child now changes into the eldest.

Childs relation with others

Classical psychology posits the psyche as private thing, only I can know my psyche and I have to infer the psyche of the others through comparing their behaviour, linguistic or motoric and mine to understand what is in their psyche.
A small child is sensitive to a smile, and responds to it as a benevolent feeling but how could they perform the complicated operation that classical psychology requires? Indeed a small child has an insignificant appreciation of their body as a visual object in comparison to the introceptive and cenasthesic experience of it.
Classical psychology can't explain a child's mimicry or his understanding of the behaviour of his care givers. MP sees consciousness as a way of comporting yourself towards the world, the actions of others have meaning because they represent possible ways of me to behave. Thus as an adult smile and is benevolent the child learns about benevolent behaviour. The child therefore doesn't separate between himself and that of the other. There are faces that do certain things and there is a link between his behaviour and the faces. Thus a child mimics as he sees his smile in the smile of the other.
MP sees that introceptive and extroceptive experiences are reciprocal experiences that form a meaningful system, what I experience internally is entwined with what I experience externally. Likewise the conduct that I have in the world forms a system with the behaviour of the other. In the early stages of life my possible conduct is learnt by the conduct of the other.
For MP then child development happens first by an original indistinction between self and others, an anonymous collective group life. The indistinction between self and others is known as syncretism, i.e. combination of different aspect and can be seen with infants, where one will cry another will cry. The idea being here that my intentions span the other, and the others intentions span me. So if there is crying in a room it is mine as well so I cry. It is only later that subjectivity and alterity develops. This happens through an objectification of the body, the difference with others and the mirror stage.
The child feels that he is in the others body as much as he is in the specular image. It is this syncretism between self and others that is the basis for projection and introjection. Thus there is a system which establishes itself within the child between their visual body, the other and their introceptive body. As adults you can still see the personal investment that we have in images, the painting of a person's face that moves us, our personal image, and the way in which if there is a picture of a face on the floor we would always move around it and not step on it, unless we are aggressively inclined then we might step on it.
As soon as the child learns to identify with the specular image he learns that a view can be taken on him. It is this that forms the basis of the collection of futural projections for the person, their ideality, their or shoulds and wants. It is also the basis of his view of what other people think of him, so his self-consciousness, his confidence, his nervousness.

 
In the moment that the specular image both enables and symbolises, then we get the split between the lived me and the imaginary me. It is the movement from subject to object. It is also the paradigm for our adult relations with others where we relate our objectified self to the other, i.e. to relate to them as the objectified other.
The living relation with others, its reciprocity is the support the stimulus for what we call intelligence. It is through others that we learn about our world and ourselves. It is through others that we learn to objectify, reflect that forms the basis of intelligence.

 

Relevance to existential-phenomenological therapists

If we accept MP's position that our primordial state is an indistinction with the other and that the difference that is subjectivity only develops later then several things can happen.
Firstly as existential therapists we are taught phenomenology and to bracket our own thoughts\feelings\values to allow the others to show. However there is the sense that I am my client are one, we form a system and in the room I see my intentions in them and they see their intentions in me. So I would wonder whether bracketing makes most sense as opposed to an articulation of this unity. Bracketing presupposes the absolute difference I have with the other, whereas MP suggest the original unity of me and the other.
How would this articulation work in practice? Well firstly there is the articulation of the emotions of the other. In psychoanalysis they call it transference when I feel the emotions of the other. MP might call this syncretic sociability, so when a client tells a story that makes me feel sad there is a sense that I am articulating the sadness of the other.
Secondly there is the articulation of the relationship. To make explicit the feelings that are going on between therapist and client. Thus if the client seems angry with the therapist then this should be named. Contrariwise, whilst I feel this is slightly dangerous territory as my feelings for the client my be precipitated by my feelings for other people and not just them, then the therapist should do likewise.
As the client talks about other people then they really are talking about themselves. If they talk about how their girlfriend is needy and they just cant stand it, then there is the projective sense that they are needy themselves they cant own this and it is projected into the other, thus there is a description that can be made of their own relation to neediness, how it functions in their life.
The final point in this space is that empathy is possible. The other is not a hidden psyche from me, but rather someone I emerged through. Thus the ability to feel the other is possible and shouldn't be shied away from. The ability for a true intimacy, a deep connection between client and therapist is possible as it is our primal state.
The other major thing for therapists that we should look at is the distinction between the felt life of the subject and the objective life of ideality. As soon as we talk about what we want to do, should do etc etc, then we are looking through the eyes of the other. There seems mileage to also describe what the life of the subject is like, the felt experience of being, the pre-reflective engagement with the world, where you are totally absorbed within your situation.

Langridge

Langridges paper sees MP's mimicry as the primal enabler as meaning that we can then use non linguistic ways of doing therapy. Whilst he doesn't want to encroach on the area of Gestalt, he sees role play as being a way to use the body schema and its mimicking ability as a useful way to get a client to understand themselves in a non-linguistic way.

What it was like to read and present it

The paper was inspiring to read but I struggled to know whether or not to put in all the stuff about child development and the mirror stage. I didn't but wonder if it is an omission. I felt slightly constrained to have to read 50 pages and pull out a precey of only 3 pages. Some of MP's justifications I didn't find conclusive, I'm still not sure on the primordial syncretic sociability, I want to believe it but don't fully feel justified. Indeed to put theory onto child development always feels slightly awkward as you can't fully test it in a way that I can do a phenomenological reduction on my own perception and feel safe in that knowledge as I can feel it, taste it and touch it

Discussion about the paper

• Do we really have an original indistinction with the other
• As adults should our primal connection with others be our prime understanding of the other, or do we treat the others as others, we after all learnt from our immediate society constructed our worldview, then take this with us when we meet the new other
• Is the subjective\objective self-justified, is our objective self-viewed through the eyes of the other
• Can the mimicry ability of neonates be justified by their intersubjectivity. For a child to imitate a smile how can that be when they must relate the lips on the position of the others face to their face which they cannot see
• Has role play a place in therapy

How can Nietzsche's understanding of values inform psychotherapy?

 
Contents
Introduction    1
Popular values    2

Nietzsche's values    2

Summary of Nietzschean critique of values    2

Nietzsche's understanding of Values    3

Will to Power    3

Transmission of Values    4

Freewill    4

Good/Bad Men    5

Nietzsche's value in psychotherapy    5

Freewill    5

Non-Universability of values\morality    6

Will to Power    6

Good/Bad Men    7

Conclusion    7

Bibliography    7


 

Introduction

In this paper I will first attempt a description of the popular understanding of values by way of placing a context for an exploration of Nietzsche's understanding of human agency, will to power and values. I will then look at the application of these ideas in the therapeutic context.
It must be noted that when I talk about Nietzsche's position, this must be taken as a short hand to say one of Nietzsche's position. Nietzsche is the great anti-systematist and there is no such as thing as what Nietzsche thinks if you are looking for a unitary idea within his thought. Nietzsche sees that the whole of logic is built on a fundamental error, that of identity as it is nonsensical to think that a=a, the same is true for his philosophy the law of identity doesn't hold. As Nietzsche says in some lost outpost of his oeuvre it is the sign of a noble spirit the more contradiction they can maintain inside themselves!

Popular values

To say that value is the worth of something is tautological and presupposes what the word 'worth' is. However what this does show is that value can be applied to the worth of many things.
The value that I want to concentrate on in this essay is related to human values which either are shown by intention or action or both. So I might value generosity and this means that I intend under certain circumstances to be generous. If I am generous then I will feel a warm glow of happiness as I achieved my value, and contrariwise I may feel bad if I am not generous. The values that I have of working hard and being polite appear to me to be nothing but values that have been handed down to me from my parents and from society. Indeed to work hard can be seen to be part of the value of the Protestants. At this point there can the relation of your own values to others. Some values you have, say not to kill, may well be attributed to others, so if they kill you're unhappy and contrariwise you may be happy if they don't kill. Some other values such as enjoying foods of certain types, you may less want to foist this value on other people, where if they don't eat the same food as you, you don't feel unhappiness, merely a certain weariness at their slovenly diet.
Thus values seem to form a spectrum from on one side things that you mildly value to those that you greatly do and this is co-extensive with how much affect you get on them being performed or not and how much you would apply these values to the actions of others.
On a societal level the strong values at the moral end of the scale transform the feelings of happiness and unhappiness at their presence or absence into punishment and reward. The robber who steals is punished, the man who works hard is rewarded. Thus there is a strong relation with value with the notions of free will\responsibility\punishment and reward.

Nietzsche's values

 

Summary of Nietzschean critique of values

Nietzsche attacks the standard understanding of value and morality for the following reasons

1. Freewill
   1. He sees the notion of free will as being nonsensical
   2. He sees the notion of will to be a complex activity which includes the consciousness but isn't dominated by it
2. Universality of value/morality
   1. What's good for one depends on their spatio/temporal context and cannot be applied to another
   2. Values are passed on through the generation but all you get is the emotional feeling given, not the rational justification that is required to make use of it
3. Will to power
   1. Values that affirm life are those that accord to the will to power, those that are degenerate deny life.
   2. The will to power is perpetual becoming, perpetual overcoming, thus is unique and transitory
4. Good/Bad men
   1. He sees morality as being originally those things that produced useful consequences, this then turned into the things in themselves being good, then in turn the person that did them being good.

 

Nietzsche's understanding of Values

Nietzsche's views on values are that they "represent the experiences of men of earlier times as to what they supposed useful and harmful" [D P18]. In other words what a man finds useful he makes a positive value something to be achieved and what is harmful something to be avoided. This value then is passed down from father to son. This still begs the question of what is valuable, what is harmful or useful. "A table of values hangs over every people. Behold it is the table of its overcomings [...] the voice of its will to power" [Z p223]. Thus what is deemed useful is when the will to power overcomes something. So what then is the will to power?

Will to Power

To explain then the will to power: It is the desire to overcome resistance that enhances the feeling of power to enhance future resistances. "Whatever I created and however much I love it-soon I have to oppose it and my love: thus my will have it" [Z2 Of Self Overcoming]. In other words whatever you create, whatever ideas you have at some point you will tire of them and seek to replace them with better ones.

What must be pointed out is this Will, is not the unitary Will of people who believe in freewill, it is the energic thrust of all being. Within the human there are many competing drives, all of which have Will. Hunger, sexuality, creation, destruction are all drives within humans that can compete and these are just at a low level, at a higher level, you have desires such as love, hate that have Will. Likewise in rationality ideas have Will such that they form part of a discourse that seeks to overcome, master competing theories. Maybe the creationists and the big bang theorists might be good exemplars of this. Likewise in the world ice competes against hot water for dominance as wind competes against the leaves that hang onto a tree.

Nietzsche sees the will-to-truth as closely linked with the will to power, where the will to truth seeks to exert its dominance of interpretation by trying to reify this interpretation into a concrete fact. "The real philosophers are commanders and lawgivers. They say 'It shall be so!' [..] Their knowing is creating, is lawgiving, and their Will-to-Truth is Will-to-Power"[BGE 211]. Thus whilst we talk about fact, what we are saying is that someone\some group has deemed it so. As all facts, well most facts are overthrown, we can see that all we are left with is a perspectivism, and truth is defined by the winning perspective.

For Nietzsche then there is no transcendent world, there are no transcendent values thus we create the world of our truths, our values.

Thus values are co-extensive with a human's overcomings, as I value generosity, I have overcome my needs for abundance so I can be superabundant, within the act of giving, I am affirmed in my superiority over the person who needs my help.

The will to power is a dynamic theory any overcoming must itself be overcome. Thus the set of values that exist for one person cannot be transferred to another.

Transmission of Values

The problem with values is that they "are transmitted in this way: children observe in adult's inclinations for and aversions to certain actions and, as born apes, imitate these" [D p25].

So all values start life in a person as introjects from their parents, however what is introjected is the feeling not the rationale for it "thoughts are not hereditary, only feelings" [D P23], so what a person does is when they are full of these introjects at some point establishes a rationale for them, which is not the true rationale for the moralities origin, which was the original will-to-power of the person who use that morality to overcome resistance.

Thus what the noble spirit should do is to both re-evaluate their existing values to establish if they are still beneficial to them, and to create their own values that support their life.

                                

Freewill

It must also be noted some irony in the above dictates to the noble spirit. For Nietzsche the will as has been said is not the unitary ego of Freud's consciousness as there is a "ridiculous overestimation and misunderstanding of consciousness" [GS 11] , "By far the greatest part of our spirits activity, remains unconscious and unfelt"[GS 333] . Again taking the primacy away from consciousness Nietzsche would see the sense of human's freewill as also affected. Thus when I go into my kitchen to make tea it happens and I think I willed it, but on closer inspection that didn't happen, I didn't command my legs to move to the kitchen, nor did I command my hands to find the cup, nor did I have to recall the memory of how to make tea, rather it just happened, and my feeling of power that was manifested in its success I then called my agency.                    
For Nietzsche freewill is a nonsensical idea as it depends on the concept causa-sui, i.e. self-caused, something which started life originally as a description of god! However if you think this idea through just a little it falls apart as it seeks to pull itself up by its bootstraps.
So I have freewill as I choose to drink this cup of coffee. I am self-caused, nothing caused me to want coffee, thus I had the idea, but did I choose to have that idea, then did I choose to have that choice, which goes on ad-nauseum. As Nietzsche has said a thought appears when it wants to not when we will it.
Nietzsche argues [BGE 19] that the will is a complex event, it is the sensation of going from one condition to another, it is the sense of commanding and being victorious over something else, and indeed it is only used when the outcome of the victory is certain, it also presuppose the synthetic unity of the I, which again is a fabrication.
For Nietzsche "Everything is necessity[..]Everything innocence and knowledge is the path to insight into this innocence" [HA 107]. As freewill is torn apart then the only other option is necessity, the same necessity that we see as the lighting strikes. His determinism is slightly more complex than standard determinism which would deem human agency, human will determined, as he has seen that Will is not a unitary thing, but rather the outcomes of human agency are determined by the inter play of the drives that constitute humans.

 

Good/Bad Men

"First of all, one calls individual actions good or bad [...] solely on account of their useful [...] consequences. Soon, however, one [...] believes that the quality [...] is inherent in the action [...] Then one consigns the being of good [...] to the motives [...]One goes further and accords the predicate [..] to the whole nature of man" [HA 39]
For Nietzsche the scope of value and morality has moved from where it should be. It started off as an indicator for actions which produce useful outcomes, then it fell back on the actions being good irrespective of their outcomes, then it became people who were good or bad.

 

Nietzsche's value in psychotherapy

Nietzsche's contribution to psychotherapy from ideas that are raised in this paper can be summarised as

Freewill

For Nietzsche there is no freewill rather the battle of different aspects of the will to power. In this manner consciousness is reduced in importance, where it is usually held as the locus of freewill.
In this manner then when working with clients then this can help with meta-emotions. By meta-emotions then I mean emotions about emotions, such that I am unhappy, then I become angry that I'm unhappy and then maybe depressed because I am unhappy and angry. Now I wouldn't want to go so far as to say that there is a primary emotion but rather that there certainly is a layering of emotions.
If we take consciousness as one factor amongst many that decide action and indeed some of these other factors are to in our consciousness then this will reduce the amount of meta-emotions. Whilst it is impossible to have a blanket statement about the cause of meta-emotions certainly one aspect is that they are the outcome of ego pain. The ego, the consciousness, the identity, the locus of freewill call it what you will is displaying a gap between how it should be and how it is. Thus if the first emotion was unhappiness as I didn't get the promotion at work, then I become depressed because I really want that promotion, I'm the sort of person that works as a manager rather than a nobody. There is a lot of hurt that is caused between the discrepancy between how you see yourself and how you are.
With the Nietzschean model things change. The 'I' is a synthetic totality that is actually the arena where a variety of drives, of which consciousness is one compete to result in action. Thus the therapist's job can become two fold, firstly to help the client to be more aware of the non-conscious aspects of an action and the therapist can also help the client meet themselves through their action.
Therapy then becomes something more of a clearing of conscious obstacles to the development of the will to power that emerges through the individual conscious. Therapy becomes something of a process of introducing the client to themselves and reducing maybe the sense that the conscious I will, is the sole determinant in action, but rather is a part of the process.
Whilst the weakening of the freewill will move towards it, the ultimate goal for the client\therapist relationship would be for the client to believe in determinism. To take this position would bring on a new found innocence in their world. If they were wronged, they would react to it with the standard sullen disdain they do when they get caught in the rain. I didn't like it, but its not my fault it rained, I don't feel bad about myself. Of course on the other side they may lose the feelings of pride when they win the race, or the promotion, but then they would get the same pleasure as when it was a sunny day.
I realise that to get a client to the position of determinism may well be a jump too far, but I think it is worth including here as a worthwhile goal of weakening notions of freewill.

Non-Universability of values\morality

For Nietzsche values are specific to an individual and represent their bookmark to themselves of their overcomings. We are given values through introjecting them from our parents whereby we introject the moral feeling, the guilt the pride and the like but not the rationale for them, nor can we as they aren't ours. Later we pull in our own justification for them.
So one of the techniques here for the therapeutic relationship is to make sure that the clients values work for them and to make them explicit. So when a client says, "well you know, that's what you should do ", the should holds a value for them, and indeed a hidden person who is saying it, so again there is work to be done in terms of opening up the clients value, and to try to cache them out in terms of do living by these values give you the good feeling you want, the life you want.

Will to Power

Nietzsche's will to power, is an un-owned, constitutive power that will see its development in Foucault's theory of power. As mentioned above in the section on freewill, then part of the therapeutic work in this space is clearing the way for the development of the will to power, moving the conscious obstacles and brakes out of the way.
In this way there is the sense of expanding the client's consciousness of who they are. This understanding can come from 'internal' and 'external splits' (apostrophes due to this is a false dichotomy). Internally then it's a question of taking more awareness of your bodies desires, the emotions and intelligence that are stored within their, to take in to fuller awareness your desires for your actions. Thus my client is beaming full of pride as he has just helped an old lady to her feet who had fallen down he revels in his altruism and big heart, thus useful interventions here would be to get him to open up his feelings as he stood their seeing the old lady lying in front of him, one of the less acceptable aspects of this may well come out that part of him feels entirely superior to this old woman, and his helping her is a way of showing this.
For 'external' things, then again it's a question of seeing the 'I' as the clearing where the battles rage, between the gym manufacturers and the doughnut manufacturers, between the capitalists and the communists, between the early birds and the night owls. Here client work can look to open up their inclusion in groups, their influence by various parties and to look at the calls upon them these are making and the other conflicting calls that are made on them. Often clients understand these 'external' battles as part of themselves again to locate these outside of themselves can free up their meta-emotions and also look at it from a different angle. So in my case, on one hand I have highly well-developed doughnut gluttony and a desire to get super fit down at the gym. Whilst this war rages inside me, this is part of a battle that exists at a simplistic level between the doughnut manufacturers and the gym manufacturers.
Within the will to power, there is a challenge to the sense of a transcendent world. There is no world to be found, rather there is only a world to be created. The desire for truth is rather to demarcate the world in a way that suits you. As such then the call here is to create the world that suits you, there are effectively no requirements on you by notions of truth to conform to the world in any way that displeases you, indeed the notion of truth is just the call of the other to behave in a certain way. This then leads onto to an encouragement to the client to whenever they are ready to re-evaluate their values, to continually see if they work for them. Values are unique and temporary aspects that should only be held if they support the client in their life.

Good/Bad Men

Many clients think badly of themselves, I'm useless, I'm a failure. Taking Nietzsche's ideas this would be a fundamental error as they have morphed the outcome of an action onto themselves. Whilst its classic CBT the approach here would be to move from the rigid phrase I'm a failure as I've just failed an exam, to sometimes I can succeed sometimes I can fail but neither of these defines me.

Conclusion

Bibliography

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Quotes needed

1. The I is an untenable synthesis

Sartre/Laing Self and Other

Contents
Introduction    1
Sartre    1

Sartre's Self    1

Sartre's Other    2

Sartre's intersubjectivity    2

Why Sartre is silly    2

Laing    2

Laing's Self and Other    2

Construction    2

Maintenance    2

Aspects of self    2

Comparing Sartre and Laing    2

Philosophical Differences    2

Philosophical agreement    2

Psychological agreement    2

Bibliography    2


 

Introduction

Sartre

Sartre's Self

Hmm to understand Sartre's self we need a little bit of his ontology. Ok, so there is consciousness. This consciousness is of a situation that we find ourselves, sitting in a café. Consciousness is fully absorbed in the positionality of this scene, the relation of waiter, to table, to plate, to fork. There is nothing to consciousness apart from immanence of the being of this situation and it does at the same time have a non-positional consciousness of this engagement. Any posited Ego in this situation, that it is I who is conscious, is a reflection back on the consciousness. Thus there are two aspects of consciousness in the café. Firstly there is the pre-reflective consciousness: There is consciousness of the café situation, then derivatively of this consciousness there is the fact that it is my consciousness of the café situation.
Within the café scene then is a combination of facticity and transcendence. The objects that there is consciousness of are facts, in-itself structures, whose being is fully given in their appearance, who essence precedes their existence. This facticity is also wider than the mere objects in the café situation but also includes the language, culture, and personal past of this situation. All these aspects are fully given in consciousness.
There also exists a transcendence a for itself. Consciousness transcends itself to reach an object, its intention. This spontaneous transcendence of the pre-reflective consciousness also accounts for the negation that is part of consciousness's transcendence. In any situation there is activity of consciousness in so far as it negates the in-itself on the way to its original project.
Thus as I sit at the café with my desires, thus I transform the situation in which I sit, I may catch the eyes of one of the other clients, I may move the cup to my mouth and drink its contents or break the silence by humming a gentle tune. In short consciousness is activity\desire\negation and seeks to negate any situation in light of this.
The original project that motivates desire, is the sense that consciousness\the for-itself wants to realise its existence its being, its self-identity through its actions. Or in more poetic terms, the nothingness that I am seeks to be something, which whilst it can't fully realise is motivated towards.

Sartre's Other

As I sit in the café I am aware of sitting there, I reflect on my experience. At the same time as I take ownership of the pre-reflective consciousness there arises the you, the experience of the other, who partakes in this definition of I. As I reflect on this experience as mine, then I use language, the language that I was given, the language wherein the other exists. As soon as I reflect on my experience I objectify it, turn it to an in itself, who existence is solidified by the other. It is only through the other that I can make rules as I would never know if I had broken a rule without the other, thus my original project to make something out of nothing is co-extensive with the other.
As I reflect on an experience as mine, I reflect in the eyes of the other, who is there in this reflection however they exist as transcendental subject, as nihilating consciousness.
Thus my freedom which is manifest through my original project is at the same time curtailed by the facticity of the freedom of the other, which will negate me and my project.
As I sit there gently humming, the waiter comes close to me and gives me a dirty look which I think is due to my humming. I feel shame and guilt reduced to the object that shouldn't hum. Feeling this, I realise that I am the customer and he is the mere waiter and I look at him as such, reducing him to my servant and he shuffles away.
As I receive the look from the other then I am aware of objectifying gaze of the subject of the other. I encounter his freedom in so far as this is manifest by curtailing mine.
The meeting of the other, my being with others, is a bodily event. It is as I'm embodied as being in the world with the aforementioned facticity of language and culture that I meet the other. Thus the feelings of the gaze are essentially a bodily aspect, the shame of embarrassment is the shame of the body, the redness of my embarrassed cheeks.

Sartre's intersubjectivity

The for-itselfs nature is to nihilate in terms of the original project, thus as I encounter the other so I must nihilate them to achieve my project, I must treat them as object to satisfy my freedom as subject, thus the relations between people are sadistic where I objectify the other, or masochistic where I allow the other to objectify me.
The notion of love between people is an impossibility if love is to be the merging of two consciousnesses. The other in their freedom reduces me to object, yet in love wants to merge with me in my freedom, for my freedom to merge with theirs must reduce them to an in-itself, capable of being a determinate entity to merge with. Alternatively I can submit to their pure objectification, take the free choice to be their object, but then I still don't engage with them in their freedom, I am merely the outcome of their freedom, likewise the same failure of meeting exists within its contrary masochism.

Why Sartre is silly

• He takes the in-itself as pre-existing, but how can I recognise the plate as a plate unless I am already aware of it, is not consciousness embodied? In other words how can I assume a correspondence between consciousness of the in itself and the in itself. The for-itself and in-itself are unwarranted abstractions from experience for more details see being-in-the-world
• Nothingness which underpins the for-itself, is not a negation of being, of the in-itself. To be what I am not, is to replace what I am with another plenitude
• The in-itself is not an independent structure, but only exists in so far as it is a project of the for-itself, thus the table is made by man to put cups on etc, thus the in-itself is dependent on its being for the for-itself and has no fixed being
• The gaze does not reduce me to an in-itself like a table, but rather a factical restriction of the for itself. The gaze is actually me taking the eyes of the other, as I have no idea what they actually think, thus it is me restricting my for itself, through the eyes of the other. Maybe I am just an object of thought to the other, so they look at me as this sort of person at this sort of time but don't restrict me to thinking that's all I can be. Indeed doesn't the feeling of shame talk more about you doing something that you are not proud of, so the for itself choosing something it shouldn't, isn't the other merely a short cut to our view of freedom of our self, our looking at one of our choices and being appalled by it, thus it almost more speaks of a surprise and a disgust that our for itself could take us this way
• If the other is encountered through his objectifying gaze, as to have something in consciousness is to objectify it, then how can I be aware of myself as for itself, as to be conscious I must objectify but that would turn the for-itself into an in-itself

Laing

Laing's Self and Other

For Laing there is no metaphysically real self only "One's self-identity is the story one tells one's self of who one is" [Laing 1990 P93]. This self is deeply fabricated on assumptions of inner and outer, mind and body and the scope of our efficacy, i.e. when we act what our domain of effects are. This self is constructed by our interaction with others. Indeed our primary carers make the first and most significant effect in this area "We learn to be whom we are told we are" [Laing 1990 P95]. Thus the non-being of the self is not far away: "Man is always between being and non-being [..]this term is used to denote the insecurity inescapably within the heart of man's finite being" [Laing 1990 P51].
Thus for Laing self-identity is a dynamic insubstantial aspect that we must preserve for fear of descending into the madness of non-being.
Self-identity is both constructed by interaction with the other and also maintained by this.

 

Construction

The necessary element of any aspect self-identity always involves the other. "Emptiness and futility can arise when a person has put himself into his acts [..] if he is accorded no recognition by the other" [Laing 1990 P83]. Self-identity provides meaning and value to an individual, however meaning and value can only be attained if there is acknowledgement of this meaning and value by the other. This is almost of necessity as if the other gave the notion of self-identity in the first place, it is the other that controls value and meaning.
Likewise there is also a sense of defining oneself in terms of role, your mothers son, your friend's friend, the company employ and the like. Here in interaction with the other or with the group the self-identity is defined. The other here may be a person, the mother, or a group such as the company. If the latter then there is a nexus, the element that connects the group together and it will be this that defines the sense of self identity that is received.

 

Maintenance

As the self needs to be dynamically constructed by behaviour and intention, ie if I consider myself to be a generous person then this is dynamically constructed by being generous, then the other is needed to validate this position. When I meet the other, then I get confirmation that I exist, I also get confirmation that I exist as a certain person. This type of argument is underpinned by the Wittengenstinian notion that you cannot follow a rule without another person as you would never know that you broke the rule unless another told you. Another way of looking at this is meaning is a shared entity, what clever/generous etc is, is a definition made by a group, therefore something that is confirmed by the other.

Aspects of self

There are different aspects of self.

1. What I think I am
2. What I would like to be
3. What the other(s) want me to be

There is also an interaction with the other that impacts on my self-identity

1. What I need the other to be to maintain my self-identity (If I think I am generous I need another person to receive from me)

What I would like to be functions across, conscious and unconscious levels. I may be conscious that I would like to be clever, so actively work to achieve this, I may be unconscious about this and act in ways that a clever person may act without realising that I am doing it

Comparing Sartre and Laing

Sartre and Laing come from different discourses, Sartre a philosopher who produces psychological outcomes, Laing a psychologist who uses philosophical ideas, so direct contrast is difficult.

Philosophical Differences

Sartre is a dualist with the self being a separate entity to the other. Laing is a co-creationist with self and the other mutually constructing each other.
Sartre sees the self as defining the self by negating the in-itself and the other, Laing sees the other as constituting the self, thus Laing sees the other as more significant in the construction of the self than does Sartre who considers the negation of the in-itself to be as significant.

 

Philosophical agreement

They both agree that the self is nothing and needs to be continually constructed.

Psychological agreement

Their main agreement is in the non-existence of the unconscious as a an entity in the Freudian sense that is a certain type of substance. Sartre dismisses this as he sees the logical flaw in the notion of repression which would have to be conscious of that which it makes unconscious and therefore it would be conscious of the unconscious material.
Laing sees that unconscious is a term that is used to get out of the difficulties of defining reality against the polarities of inner\outer, mind\body, self\others and the like and sees the unconscious as what we do not communicate to ourselves or others.

 

Bibliography

RD Laing Self and Others Penguin 1990
The world of existentialism Friedman Humanity 1999
Four phenomenological philosophers Christopher Macann Routledge 1993

God and subjectivity

God and subjectivity

 
God has been a short cut to thought. In ancient times, whatever couldn't be explained spawned a god, the God of the Sun, the Sea and all other elements. Indeed the future could be assuaged by a sacrifice and a God would ensure the future was as was wanted.
As emerging talent and skill arrived so the gods departed, and was replaced by singular Gods of Christianity, Islam and the like. Here the difficult questions were still answered those of the purpose of life, of morality and the future and personal power. Isn't prayer a great thing?
God died in the seventeenth century, slain unwittingly by Kant's transcendental arguments, that were then picked up by later thinkers. As much as God was being driven out of the temple by post Kantians so Science came along to put a nail in its coffin.
Science still has some deific tendencies, with its presumption to explain everything in terms of the true, even if we haven't yet got there, it even attempted to provide some purpose for humanity in terms of genetics and evolutionary theory which both put a mild purposeful direction on human life.
God and to some extent now science provided answers to the individual, to the self, to make life more certain and to remove the effort that would be needed to reinterpret everything. God then stood as the inversion of the self, everything that was needed within the self, together they were beautiful.
With God came morality, its foundation and its tablets, that would instruct humans in the good life. Much happiness was derived from this as the good was achieved and the heart was warmed. Now as science takes it place, the science of utility and creation, now consuming, and owning become things that we worship and give us the good feeling that a pious life once yielded.
The self then is the necessary correlate of God, the biological self the necessary correlate of science. But as God is dead shouldn't we bury the self in the same motion?
Oh that that were the case. As a large rock falling into a pond has many ripples so has god, it has been impossible to reduce him to nothingness as his impact has been so widespread.
Within psychotherapy we can see him alive, within existential subjectivism we can see him alive. The authentic self, be it by end point or by process, is the rediscovery of God. For the self to find its true authentic self, or to be involved in its true authentic process, is a spectacular collapse of the intricacies, the ambiguity and indistinction that colour life. It reinstates the certainty that god provided, truth.
Whilst language is going to hold me back to a subjectivist view point, we are embedded in the world in a complex horizon that encompasses everything, all other people and all other things. Whilst there might be a unique perspective on this, there is no definitive end point that can be arrived at. The myriad of colours and shades and textures that illuminate this relationship make it so. It is a difficult thing to engage with as it has no definitive answer. To think that there is an end point is an easy shortcut to this difficulty and a reinstatement of God.
Likewise in psychotherapy an end point can be assumed. Notions of empathy, I You relationships trade in this space, that there is in some sense a fixed place where the other is, that with some magical projection, or bracketing of myself that I can access and together we can be. The most the therapist can offer is as a tool for the client to unpick and explore their world. The most the therapist can offer is a care of the unique perspective that the client may find, in the full knowledge that this is an unrelenting dynamic thing.
CBT offers the scientific equivalent. The client has objective distortion that with the therapist they will correct to get to the true position. Thus through believing the mantra of the independence of thought, emotion, behaviour and situation and their relatedness you will have a solid life.
There are certain key things that are tied up with the ego which can be responsible and therefore available to punishment and reward. Without values the ego would wither as there would be no point to it. As we say good and bad, then we can say pride and shame, and we can talk about punishment and reward. The ego thrives on this structure and some people can seek to be very good to further their individuation and some can be very bad to do likewise. The prisons are full of people who have made a bad name for themselves, Charles Bronson being one.
As much as values support the self, so does meaning. Frankl was right that it is meaning that constitute the life of the self. We are inveterate meaning makers, requiring personalised number plates, looking for patterns in random strings of numbers that we put there in the first place and conjecturing\requiring there to be alien life forms as a universe without meaning would be a scary place to be. The ability to find meaning, is that which underpins purpose, and purpose is the end point of action, which the self is responsible for. Take meaning away and action becomes pointless, and the self withers further as it cannot act and be praised or blamed.
Without the self there would be no psychotherapy. The common malaises are sicknesses of the self, depression, anxiety and psychosis. The self is depressed, through having suffered and seeing nothing else. The self is anxious through the fear of I know not what to itself. The self is psychotic and sees things that no-one else sees.
I fear that most strains of psychotherapy are merely a confessional to reinstate the holes in the armour of the self that have been left since God died. Is there another way?
I think there is but it's not pretty and I'm not sure the NHS is going to pay for it. It can arrive from many of the thinkers that underpin the existential tradition who take subjectivity as a start that gets dissolved into inter-subjectivity, into a unique perspective of the interconnected whole that we are part of. I dare say this will not be useful or make people feel better in the short term due to how embedded we are in individuation, but in time my friend, in time....

 

Merleau-Ponty, Theatre and Dance

Merleau-Ponty, Theatre and Dance

 
Contents
Introduction    1
The popular understanding of the world    2

Problems with Objectivist Thought    3

Merleau-Ponty's Thoughts    3

Primary of Perception    3

The nature of phenomena    4

Consciousness    5

Motor intentionality    6

Intersubjectivity    6

Lived Space    7

Sex    8

Dance/Theatre    9

Didactic ideas    9

Thematic Ideas    9

Summary    10

Bibliography    10

Contact    10


 

Introduction

To talk of theatre or of dance, is to say nothing more than to talk of politics. They are arenas, discourses which encompass many differing and conflicting approaches.
To lay my stall out: my theatre and dance is predominantly that which enhances my life, which moves it on, which enriches my engagement with myself and the world. Theatre at its best is the embodiment of idea; it is a real book which touches all of your senses. Dance at its best is the enriching of my body, my conduit to and my construction of the world.
Merleau-Ponty seems highly relevant to the world of theatre and dance for the following reasons:

1. The world is primarily accessed via perception which is an embodied event. Rational reflection, that creates the world of science is derivative of this
2. Perception is motor-intentional, i.e. the object of perception is action. We perceive and that perception holds within it a call to action, which we may act on or ignore
3. Consciousness is not external, but in the world, embodied. Thus to perceive is to see myself
4. As we perceive then we connect in that perception to the totality of the world, which includes myself and the world
   
    

In this paper then I will begin with a refutation of the popular held belief of the world which is called Objectivist thought, then I will flesh out the banner headlines of Merleau-Ponty's thought then I will attempt to put this into application in theatre and dance. Although hopefully Merleau-Ponty's thoughts will stimulate your ideas in the arts, to greater heights.
I worry that some of my prose may be awkward, I worry that some of the ideas won't be justified, but what I can assure you of is there are some diamonds in there.

The popular understanding of the world

I'll start at the beginning, like all good stories do, however this is an assumed beginning. My assumption is that the currently held belief of the nature of the world and perception is something like this. I'll describe it as Objectivist Thought and shorten it to OT when it seems right.
We live in geometrical space. So if we could see from Gods eye view, then there would be this big box called the universe in which there is the earth, every place has a dot, which is a co-ordinate in space. At any moment in the box there is a scene, called now. Now changes and when it is now no longer, we call it past, and there is also the now not yet that the current now will change into, called the future. Hope this sounds familiar.
So in this great box are subjects and objects. The subjects, hell lets call them humans, have minds which contain mental substance which is where thoughts\emotions and images lie. Then there is physical substance which is what a humans body is made of, and what the rest of the world is made of.
Science is held to give us best knowledge in the box, is the biggest tool you can have, it gives you power and status and all sorts of good stuff. Indeed some would see science as being the new god.
The model of scientific perception is two fold. The world is distinct, measurable and true, and if we make error in our perception, then the error is within us. The mode of scientific knowledge is to abstract from perception and to break things down into atomic facts\aspects and then to relate them causally.
Science attempts to give a theory of everything starting with the big bang (pop!) and taking us through time with the theory of evolution which attempts to give some mild purpose to the process.
We experience the world which is at different co-ordinates within the box by rays of light bouncing off them and creating ideas in our heads. These ideas generally represent the thing that they bounced off, but really, if we think about it, we can't be certain, as we only have our ideas not the objects themselves. Maybe we could pop outside the box and have a look, oh no we can't that's only for God, and he's sort of been killed off really
Science aims to explain everything, in the way god did before it, it aims to explain our beginnings, our middles and our ends, in short Science aims at omniscience.

Problems with Objectivist Thought

What are the alternatives? What are the fallacies in this approach? Hmm well, to start off with science attempts at universality, true for all time and all situations. So what it does is to take the scientist's experience, abstract all subjectivity out of that, then try to make an objective proposition. So the first point is the raw material for objective beliefs are subjective experiences, perceptions.
Secondly whilst science is undoubtedly useful, its abstractions don't describe human experience . As we are engaged with the world there is a two stage process one of being aware, or using and engaging with the world, which can be called the pre-reflective, the second stage is the reflective where I think of myself as having these experiences. Human arts should encompass the first motion, Science the latter.
So a refutation of Objectivist Thought within a paragraph will be a bit tricky but let's give it a go. Maybe 2 paragraphs...
So firstly there is incredible weakness in the model that has the notion of idea mapping out onto an object in the box. How could you ever tell that you had a true representation? In this space, how do you ever recognise something as something. So you see a rabbit, and the OT's model would be all the light rays come onto your retina and then you see it as a rabbit. But how would you recognise it as a rabbit, unless you already knew what a rabbit looked like. Then that leaves how did you recognise your first rabbit. I suppose the killer blow to OT's is that there are certain things that are assumed but never seen. The geometric box for one thing, causality and the notion of subject and object. If you just focus on the phenomena as received none of these exist, they are theorised. As i focus on my dear rabbit, all there is seen as rabbit, the whole of consciousness can be fully immersed in his floopy ears and button nose. Sure afterwards I can think of myself seeing the rabbit, but at the time all there is is flopsey.

 

Merleau-Ponty's Thoughts

 

Primary of Perception

The world as it confronts me is a combination of horizons and themes, or objects of focus. As I look at the desk in front of me, it stands out from the horizon of the room, which supports it, the horizon which I take my gaze away from to be aware of the desk. The 3 dimensions of the room are not given by geometry rather by my engagement with it, as I stand near the wall then I can see the back of the desk. If I stand in front of the desk, then I experience the desk having a back, as if I stood near the wall, even though I can't see the back of the desk. If geometrical space was to be believed, then I would experience anything out of sight as a void, a blackness, a cavern of nothingness, as there is nothing affecting my retina. However I don't and I give objects that I only partially see, the perspectives I have had of them, or imagine I would have from past experience.
Indeed at the edge of my field of vision objects get blurred and indistinct and my perceptual engagement of this is that there is a world outside my vision, that extends off in all directions. The world then that is perceived although absent is a dynamic one and expresses my current way of being in the world. Thus if stressed outside my field of vision is the room next door, that needs hovering and a hook hanging on the wall, and outside this is a street full of things that need to be attended to by someone. Whilst this is a simplistic example if you think of the world that exists outside your perceptual field then it will represent you in all your distinctness and ambiguity and current affective state.
As much as the horizons that I can perceive objects through are spatial so they are temporal. Any object that I perceive has a past and a future, even if I don't know what it is, known as pretention and retention. As with the world outside of my field of vision these are dynamic and again reflect my current being in the world.
The spatio-temporal horizons that I see are engaged with by two other key aspects : the body and the affects, i.e. emotion\mood\feeling etc.
As I perceive objects in a room, they are understood not in terms of concepts but in terms firstly of the body. The body is the conduit I have to the world. The desk that I see, I understand in terms of how my body engages with it, how my body knows it, how it would fall under and respond to my touch, I see the table in all of my senses, my ears, my nose . As I look at a glass I understand it through knowing the sound that it would make if it fell to the floor and broke, I know it by the taste of it as my tongue touches the rim and my hand holds the stem. In short I know it by the grasp that my body has had with it. We can see how the body operates in this fashion as we drive. A competent driver drives. They have no consciousness of the complex interactions of their hands and feet when they are a competent driver, rather their body drives. The only time this doesn't happen is when something goes wrong, the clutch is sticky, or they miss a gear, then consciousness and awareness of their action comes back.
Affective states are adverbs, how we act in the world, how we view the world. When I am happy the world looks differently to how it does when I am sad. When happy the objects within my world dance to my touch, when sad they appear slow and weighty. As much as my affective state colours the world and my interactions with it so does perceived actions of others as well as cultural phenomena. Thus when I see a person wronged, that would make me angry, then an aspect of my horizon can take on an angry hue. Likewise there are cultural events, such as an oncoming storm, or a birthday party that can give an affective hue to an environment. Of course I don't need to respond to what I see as a gloomy scene gloomily, but it is a factor in the overall affective state of me and the environment.

The nature of phenomena

So the thing about the objects of phenomena that we have is firstly they are given, secondly they are incomplete and thirdly they are ambiguous as their meaning comes out of the many horizons and affective states of which they take place....thank god I can't think of a fourthly or that would sentence would end up really cumbersome.
I've got to point out, if it is needed the stark difference to the objects of science. For science there are determinate objects, truth resides in objects and error resides in humans. Reminds me a lot about God really, God is objects (i.e. omnipresent) and true (i.e. omniscient), humans are consciousness and the source of error. Combined with the universality that requires God's eye view to validate the connection between idea and object, all I can say is praise be science, for it is God in different clothes!
For Merleau-Ponty error exists in phenomena, phenomena are real and incomplete, and are not representational of any world outside them. The incomplete and ambiguous nature of phenomena is due to the given-ness and their infinite relations with their current context their and their protentive\retentive chains.
The sense of perception being given to us in the pre-reflective space, all there is, is awareness of something giving and something receiving with a space between these points. There is no primacy here and to use subject/object terminology that isn't appropriate here, it's not certain whether the world thinks in us, or we think of the world. The giving and receiving is all there is, there is no primacy on either side.
The crazy aspect of this is that as we perceive the world with our affective states we see the world how we feel, as we give our objects of experience with protentive\retentive chains, as we fill in the gaps in our perception, the world that exists outside of our field of vision , the parts of objects we don't see, then what we have is the totality of our life. As we perceive so we see the world and ourselves in its entirety. To understand yourself its a question of looking out, not it.

 

Consciousness

The history of thought seems to have fallen foul of a technique the ancients used to use. Primitive animism saw spirits in all objects and through giving the spirit a name it freed it. Buddha, Socrates and Christ have all done this where they have named the soul/psyche. What they have done however is taken human experience away from its world, taken it from its corporeal reality. The strangest thing then in this space, is when we turn to look at ourselves, when we self reflect, in therapy or in the bath, we are actually taking a perspective of ourselves from a distance. We are thinking about ourselves as an object, an ego, which we are not, we are corporeally embedded in the world. We are reflecting on ourselves, so we are abstracting from our phenomenal roots in the world. It has often been said that the objects closest to us are the ones we know least well, I think there is some irony when you think about access to yourself.
When we do look at ourselves as an object, as something determinate like this we taken on the same qualities that objects have in the world, they arise from their horizontal background, they connect out to the rest of the world, they are ambiguous and incomplete. This view of human as object is in stark contrast to the ideas that the human sciences have where the human represents something that can be known causally and in time definitively.
There has within this view of the human psyche been a cost in making primary reflection rather than perception. It has spawned the duality of mind and body and the distance of subject and object, and these have come with a cost.
Embarrassment and shame are the emotional costs of denying the anonymous perception that is the body. These are the emotional tools that are used to individuate babies such that they move from their blissful unity in the world, to understand themselves as different from mother and father and the world around. Alienation, separateness and forlornness are the cost of the subject object split. With in-authentic lives being one of the costs of the mind/body split, as the mind is used to be the place that directs lives. The mind body split also leads to the freewill\determinist argument which again has led to some twisted lives. I couldn't help myself...I had to be free....etc. Indeed it is more than possible that our emotional life is directly tied up with our engagement with the world in terms of subject and object...I am depressed because I don't like myself, or Im not being treated well. Distress can in someways be seen as the gulf between how you want yourself to be and how the world is responding to you.
In Merleau-Ponty in phenomenal experience the mind and body are just two different necessary aspects of the same phenomena.

Motor intentionality

For Merelau-Ponty to perceive is to have the world call us to action and we will respond to that in some way. When we speak to a friend, then our discussion draws the words from us and quite literally the discussion speaks. Of course we may from time to time think before we speak, where we will talk to ourselves but generally and in fact even in this situation we find that as we are speaking our words are drawn forth. Likewise as I want to have a cup of tea, I may think this and as I enter the kitchen I see it as a place to make tea, and without thinking I move to the kettle and make tea. In other words the kitchen is not seen as a static place, but rather something that calls me in certain ways, dependent on how I see it.
When I play tennis, I don't see geometric space, rather I see opportunities arising in front of me to play the game. Indeed my body shapes itself to do this and responds naturally to its environment when things are going well. There is quite a strong aspect of the fact that tennis plays me, although this sounds quite an outlandish statement, it can be justified by thinking how the hours of practice effectively go into to show you how to perceive situations as opportunities to win tennis, and how your body has learnt this.

Intersubjectivity

Primal experience, perception before we start abstracting is a composite of the awareness of psyche and the body, it is anonymous, general embodied awareness. The body has knowledge, I can touch type, but yet I don't consciously know where the keys are, but my body does. Likewise the organist, who can learn on one organ, go to another and very quickly start playing it, even though it might be a different set up. The body is that which transforms ideas into things, it is embodied consciousness. When we start to see that our foremost being, our identity is the lived body then it puts a whole different slant on how can I know other people. Standardly the question is how can I know other people when I am myself because of my consciousness. With Merleau-Ponty the phenomenon on which we base our lives are anonymous and general. So the question here becomes how can I construct an identity out of this generality.
There is a word, it's not a pretty word but it's syncretic, which means indistinction of perspectives . The phenomenal space which is syncretic can be seen in babies. If you have many babies in a room and one starts crying the others will join in too, likewise you can smile at a baby and it can smile back, you can put your finger in your mouth and they will do the same. This mimesis ( mimicry) is testament to the fact that the baby is experiencing their world perceptually and they cannot distinguish between them having an experience and another. When a baby cries because another baby cries it thinks it is in pain, as it hears the cries knows that's what happens when it's in pain and then cries. The base phenomenal experience that we have explains the mimetic ability of babies.
The other amazing things that babies do with mimicry is to learn about the world, and to produce prehensile, i.e. knowledge how to grip objects, by watching others. As a baby watches a spoon being picked up it is without perspective, there is no ego or other here, there is merely the hand picking up the spoon, sometimes at a distance (the other), sometimes close up (mine). Thus the baby learns about the world from a distance at times, through not distinguishing its experience from the others.
The question then remains is why does a baby emerge from this blissful and complete state, why would they want to leave Eden? I don't think they do really, however the adults wants them to, it's through a series of failures in their world; the withdrawn breast, the sharp word, the being roughly handled. There are a series of type of events that start forging out the individual ego, the words of pride or shame from the significant carer, the mirror, where there is a gradual dawning of the relation between the body of the subject, and the body of the object, in other words to see the body in the mirror is to see an object, to form an ego is to also think of that as the subject. It is doubtful that the ego would emerge with purely the mirror, the interpretation of the adult is paramount, the pride and the shame that tells the baby what sort of baby they are is vital, as this provides a strong emotional cache, as the baby is chided for their faeces or congratulated for their eating.
Thus the crazy thing is that I am born through objectification, pride, shame and embarrassment, via the objectification of the other, that alienates me from myself and leaves me alone in the world. We originally were in communion with others as babies, our original experience in perception is in communion, and we have forgotten or ignored this fact, and then seek to retrieve them through football stadia, orgies, dance parties and the like.
It's a shocker, the whole nature of individuation, or people having characters, egos, psyches etc is an abstraction on primary experience. It is true that science is the same, which obviously has benefit, so I think with the human sciences whose results are not so determinate as the physical sciences, then we can see them as true, in so far as they are useful nothing more, and indeed a good deal of work could and should go into the phenomenal experience we have every day that makes us who we are, instead of focussing on the abstracted notions of experience.

 

Lived Space

Merleau-Ponty's world is not geometrical rather it is a lived space. The world that we have around us, our living room, our street is composed out of a combination of all those ways that we can interact with the objects. Our bodies have this knowledge as it glided over the pavement and sits on the wall of our neighbours without worry. The space then becomes an existential space, which is engaged with dependent on the perspective of where I am, that is to say, my emotional state and my physical state as well as my perspective. If I have hurt my leg, then I see and engage with the world in a different way to when this is not the case. Strong emotional states can change what the world looks like inordinately, or to be more accurate what the world is.
There is another strange aspect to lived space, in that there is a major split between concrete space and abstract space. To illustrate and justify this, there is the case of a poor guy called Schneider. This guy was injured in the head, during the war I think. Anyway the outcome of this was that he could perform concrete movement, say blow his nose, but he couldn't point to it. The former being something concrete that is required in the current space, the latter being an abstract gesture, which can form part of the possibilities of space.
The idea out of this, is that the lived body constructs our space, by interpreting that which it finds into two aspects I can and I may, the former being concrete the latter abstract, both forms of spatial engagement\construction can through sedimentation, this is in other words, the body learning. Thus with concrete movements they become fluid after more practice, and likewise the abstract movements. In the case of Schneider, the damage to his body prevented his engagement with abstract space. He understood the words, that he must salute but the only way he could do this was via imagination and forcing himself to believe that an officer was in the room, however if an officer was in the room, he would salute with aplomb...
To bring this split between abstract and concrete ability again shows how abstract grows out of the concrete, reflection out of perception.

Sex

Here's a funny one, I think there is a general sense that we find people attractive and that is what raises our sexual temperature, in other words someone in the world, can produce a sexual response in me and therefore they are the production of my sexuality. Merleau-Ponty has another explanation of sex than this. Merleau Ponty sees sexuality not as an autonomous cycle but rather something bound up with our cognitive and bodily being. It is a way of being open to the world and not something found in the world.
Again with Schneider, he had no sexual desire, images, ideas could produce no sexual arousal, no engagements with people who he would find attractive or repulsive could trigger sexual attraction or revulsion. He had lost a way of being open to the world, and that was his sexual way of being open.
Sexuality is the way of being with the body of another, this subsumes desire, revulsion, control, submission, flirtation, passion, in fact as you roll it out it pretty much encompasses the basis drama of inter human life. Thus sexuality is the term for our basic opening to the co-existence of the other.
I've had problems with such statements before, when Freud says everything is sex, then surely nothing is, or everything is and it seems an empty statement. I think the way I got around this is to have sex as one aspect of sexuality, and to see that as we mould our world around us, the same passion and desire that sees us with this person, the same revulsion and hate that doesn't see us with that person, colours both the aspect of sex, and the aspect of our co-created world.
To quote Merleau-Ponty "The importance we attach to the body and the contradictions of love are, therefore, related to a more general drama which arises from the metaphysical structure of my body, which is both an object for others and a subject for myself"
There is a fusion between sexuality and existence, such that in any action it is impossible to label one thing sexual and one thing non-sexual, as has been said before in light of the multiplicity of meaning, there is an indeterminacy about existence.

Dance/Theatre

So all this is very well and good but how does it affect the worlds of theatre and dance? Hopefully some ideas have emerged automatically out of the above. However I suppose there are two approaches to this, one would be performance that didactically articulated the previous points, although I wonder if that would be rather pedestrian, and if you want to explain an idea probably better in a book or in a lecture theatre. Although theatre is a rich medium, and maybe direct speech is a good way to do that

Didactic ideas

If that was the case then to summarise then ideas that get me going are

1. Our communal existence
   1. One person shouts in anger, the other person thinks they are angry
2. Space as created by body, as non geometrical
3. Space as existential, a combination of I can and I may
4. The construction of individuals through pain, their loss of Eden
5. Knowledge\Reflection as abstraction.
6. The incomplete and ambiguous nature of phenomena
7. The multiplicity of horizons being the ground for phenomena
8. Mimicry, being part of our living outside ourselves
9. Motor intentionality
10. The externality of the self, given in its entirety in the world

Thematic Ideas

So how would Merleau Ponty emerge in a performance, what would it be like to see the space in which the performance happen, be created and changed by the performers? What would it be like for a horizon, or stage and performers allow themes to emerge and have this horizon graduate to another in an explicit way to show another theme?
What would it be like to see a person be led by the intermingling of their body and mind, indeed for a person's identity to exist in that space?
The general understanding of the world is the future is progress as is shown by science and technology. There is a space here that Merleau-Ponty opens up where to fully understand human experience it's a question of going back, back to our perceptual roots, back to the roots of our childhood and to open this space up.
I suppose again something I find quite striking is the sense of the cost and pain of creating the individual out of communion. I get an image of the blacksmiths hot iron forging. Again in terms of theme as you move from the communal to the individual there can be this concomitant cost
The other thing that I love and seems to have legs is the fact that our bodies are subject and object, immament and transcendent and that they hold knowledge and intention themselves. I suppose this goes straight to physical theatre, but again there is a sense in physical theatre of the physical being used instead of the verbal, there does seem some mileage in the bodily overcoming, or showing its independence from the conscious.

 

Summary

I hope I've stimulated you. Merleau-Ponty has some quite striking ideas, that I think fit very well into the physical performance that is theatre and dance. I have struggled to make the connection with dance and theatre, but I know its there, I feel it, and whilst I'm better skilled and experienced with philosophy than arts, I felt compelled to write something for you, as when you spoke in class it triggered loads of connections in me.

Bibliography

Romdenh-Romlucs: Merleau Ponty and the Phenomenology of perception (If youre going to read one book about MP read this one)
Dillon Merleau-Ponty's Ontology
Merleau Ponty Phenomenology of Perception

Contact

Rob Thomson:
thoughts@RobThomson.co.uk

Jung and Merleau-Ponty

Contents
Introduction 1
Jung's world 1
The shadow in therapy 2
Merleau-Ponty's emotional challenge 3
Anima and Animus in therapy 4
Merleau-Ponty's Other 4
Bibliography 5

Introduction

In this essay I will give a brief description of Jung's psychic topology. This will lay the ground work, for looking at some ways in which the Jungian concept of shadow and anima\animus can be used in therapy. Lastly I will look at how Merleau-Ponty (MP) can challenge Jung's thought.

Jung's world

Out of unconscious so we emerge. I want to chart Jung's psychic topology and to look at the development of the individual psyche and that of society. To do this I will have to be a tad circular to look at the mother raising the child and the child's psyche developing which will then show how the mothers psyche in turn was developed. During the child's life the development of their psyche will be looked at such that we can see how society develops to provide the context in which the child is borne. So all a bit circular but necessarily so.
The mother has union with a man. There is a guiding light to this relationship and that is the anima\animus aspect. The anima\us links the ego to the deepest layers of the psyche that is to the image and experience of self. "The natural function of the animus (as well as of in the anima) is to remain in place between individual consciousness and the collective unconscious" (Memories dreams and reflections p392) "As to the character of the anima, my experience confirms the rule that it is, by and large, complementary to the character of the persona. The anima usually contains all those common human qualities which the conscious attitude lacks" (Jung collected works Vol 6 par 804).
What then is the persona? The personas are the roles that the individual uses to engage with the world, they are social constructs so that you would get the policeman, the neighbour, the busy bee for instance.
The anima/us is then the unconscious part of us and can form a very strong driver for attraction to others, as what we are looking to do is to reclaim a lost part of ourselves. The child then can represent the unity of self for both adults.
As the mother brings up the child she does this through engagement with the archetypes of mother and child, the variety of personas which she adopts, e.g. carer, home organiser and her complexes. That would beg the question what are archetypes and what are complexes.
An archetype is a universal pattern of behaviour which can be encompassed in an archetypal image.
"Man possesses many things which he has never acquired but has inherited from his ancestors.. [..] he brings with him systems that are organized and ready to function in a specifically human way, and he owes to millions of years of human development. [..] These inherited systems correspond to the human situation that has existed since primeval times: [..]sons and daughters, father and mothers, mating, and so on. Only the individual consciousness experiences these things for the first time, but not the bodily system and the unconscious. For them they are only the habitual functioning of instincts that were performed long ago" (Jung Coll. Wks. Vol 4, par728)
Archetypes are handed down from generation to generation as are personas. Archetypes are unconscious whereas personas are conscious. Personas are far more dynamic than archetypes, changing through the ages whereas archetypes are far more solid, although unless you see an archetype as a necessary condition for consciousness, then they must have themselves developed as did personas. Archetypes however are primarily unconscious structures, with conscious representation
Complexes are unconscious structures. They are composed from repressed memories, fantasies, images, thoughts and symbols and contain a level of psychic charge within them. They are generally created by highly charged emotional events or traumas and are made unconscious as there is too much affect for the ego to deal with, such that the effects of a domineering mother maybe pushed into the unconscious as a complex, and any hint or reminder to this complex will mean that the ego can be flooded by the latent psychic energy in the complex.
As the child develops then he confronts the external world and is frustrated by it. Those frustrations that are small enough can be assimilated into his ego, those which can't be will form into complexes. Likewise as he grows up and becomes aware of value, those things that he is that are morally repugnant will form his shadow, the unconscious structure of all that I am, but that is unacceptable. As the child develops and interacts with archetypes and personas thus he affects them and provides the context in society into which their children will be born and influenced.

The shadow in therapy

The notion of shadow is useful to therapy. For Jung "there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole less good than he imagines himself [..]. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.[..]if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected, and is liable to burst forth suddenly in a moment of unawareness."(Psychology and Religion, CW, par 134)
Thus one aim for therapy is to make a person aware of their shadow such they can make choices about it and not be overwhelmed by it.
"Close examination of the dark characteristics – that is, the inferiorities constituting the shadow –reveals that they have an emotional nature, a kind of autonomy, and accordingly an obsessive, or better, passive quality. Emotion, incidentally, is not an activity of the individual but something that happens to him. Affects occur usually where adaptation is weaker, and at the same time, they reveal the reason for its weakness, namely a certain degree of inferiority and the existence of a lower level of personality. (The Shadow Aion CW 9 ii, par 15)
Here Jung is taking quite a radical stance, when we have emotions about ourselves, e.g. I'm happy that I finished my essay, then this is the indicator of shadow and the existence of a lower level of personality. Likewise when you have emotion about someone else, I'm annoyed because he's a greedy person having eaten all the pies, then this is a projection of the shadow onto the other.
To justify this, let's look at the two examples. I'm happy that I finished my essay, this could tie up with the following shadow aspects of myself;

1. The small boy who needs approval to feel good about themselves
2. An egotistical person, who now has achieved yet another thing, such that they can look down on the weakness of others

Likewise the feeling annoyed about him being a greedy person can show that really I am a greedy person but I cannot admit it to myself, otherwise looking at him eating all the pies, would be an emotional neutral event, such as looking at the desk in front of me.
The techniques in therapy to look at the shadow would be getting the client to investigate their emotional reactions and why they had them as opposed to neutral ones and also to look for other instances where they have shown the same behaviour they project onto another

Merleau-Ponty's emotional challenge

MP sees behaviour not as the outcome of conscious\unconscious causes but rather as a form of Gestalt, a relationship of significance or meaning. Thus behaviour is the result of the Gestalt that contains intentionality and phenomenal objects. He sees emotion as the structure of behaviour not the content of it. To understand an emotion, is "to ask oneself how it functions in human life and what purpose it serves" (SNS:53). There is a disruptive nature of emotions. Thus when a child is jealous at the arrival of the new born, he is rigidly attached "to the situation of the 'latest born' which was hitherto his own" (PrP:110). Likewise weeping for a lost one, symbolises ones struggle to adapt to the loss of a loved one, to move to a place where there is no more, or an acceptable attachment to the lost one.
"Anger, shame, hate and love are not psychic facts hidden at the bottom of another's consciousness: they are types of behaviour or styles of conduct that are visible from the outside" (SNS 52-3)
For MP then the example Jung gave of shadow is as follows:

1. Being happy that I have finished my essay
   1. This would move me to a new piece of work as I can get happiness out of writing essays, or it might move me to new projects as this one is done
2. Being annoyed at someone being greedy and eating all the pies
   1. This would move me to stop the person eating all the pies, or to restricting the amount of pies I eat, or others around me eat as I think there is an optimum amount of pies that should be eaten

Anima and Animus in therapy

These are our relations to the collective unconscious for Jung. Their effects can be via projection into people that we love or hate "when anima and animus meet. The animus draws his sword of power and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction. The outcome need not always be negative, singe the two are equally likely to fall in love" (The Essential Jung P112). Their effects can also be integrated into consciousness, the animus in Logos, the anima in Eros. Logos being the capacity for reflection, deliberation and self knowledge. Eros being the functions of relationship and relatedness.
Anima\Animus therefore provides two major aspects, energy and balance. The energy comes from the collective unconscious and the balance comes as the unconscious provides a balancing function to the ego.
"It is, in fact, one of the most important tasks of psychic hygiene to pay continual attention to the symptomatology of unconscious contents and processes, for the good reason that the conscious mind is always in danger of becoming one sided, of keeping to well-worn paths and stuck in blind alleys. The complementary and compensating functions of the unconscious ensure that these dangers, which are especially great in neurosis, can in some measure be avoided." (The Essential Jung P117)
Thus for Jung an engagement with the unconscious can provide energy and balance to a person's life. The access to this, to reintegrate, anima/animus to the ego, for the client is 3 fold

1. In projection, through seeing that your views of the other are yours and can differ from their behaviour
2. In dreams through looking at what the images with strong emotional content say to you

Merleau-Ponty's Other

Whilst Jung has the Other as the balancing representation for the unconscious via projection, he has self and other as independent entities, which can only be reunited by an engagement with the collective unconscious and a return to the Self. Jungs position is then of a world of independent objects of self and other, that have lost their primal relation which is defined in the Self.
For MP the self is something that I discover in the world.
"Of the consciousness which I discover by reflection [..]it cannot be said that this is myself. My self is arrayed before me like any other thing, and my consciousness constitutes it and is not enclosed within it" (PP p417)


He sees that there is an initial experience that is had within the world, this subjective experience is the raw material that science then uses to objectify. Our bodies are intentionally related to the world and are the interface, if you like between the subject of ego and the object of the world. This isn't the body that we see by looking in the mirror but rather the body that receives sensation, the body that receives sight and has a perspective in the world.
To move from experience to consciousness is to allow experience to show itself from its ground.This ground is multifarious, it is the ground of society, of language, of temporality and of other people. Society is something we are thrown into and in which we understand ourselves. Temporality is the history that informs our present and the future of our projected plans. Language is the tools we use to demarcate our experience as our other people. MP's position is that we have a pre-reflective engagement with these grounds such that we develop conscious out of our pre-reflective engagement with them.
Thus our engagement with the other is dual fold. They constitute me, thus
"The objection which my interlocutor raises to what I say draws from me thoughts which I had no idea I possessed" (PP 413)
Thus MP would challenge Jung's understanding of the ego as distinct from the other, seeing that the latter is a transcendental constituent of the former. Indeed as the prior quote implies, without this, the notion of therapy,where the Other can know me, where I can't, would be impossible
Theres more I would like to say on MP, but alas the shortness of this essay prevents me. I will leave you with two quotes from MP on the Other.
"We are collaborators for each other in consummate reciprocity" (PP p413)
"I borrow myself from others, I create others from my own thoughts" (Philosopher and his Shadow p 111)
In short self and other are transcendentally co-constituting in an ambiguous relationship.

Bibliography