Abstract
This essay considers the role of depersonalization in the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. While there has been a modest amount of interest in depersonalization from a phenomenological perspective, a critical exploration of the theme of depersonalization in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking itself remains overlooked (cf. Varga (Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology, 19:2, 103-113, 2012); Colombetti and Ratcliffe (Emotion Review, 4:2, 145-250, 2012). This is an oddity, given that the theme of depersonalization proves instructive in Merleau-Ponty’s account of the constitution of the subject, and appears within Phenomenology of Perception at key points in his thinking (Merleau-Ponty 2012). This paper serves as a critical exposition of the role of depersonalization in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. I proceed in three ways. In the first instance, I provide an overview of depersonalization, addressing its salient characteristics, which includes: a feeling of disturbed bodily subjectivity; a diminishment of affective feeling; and a corresponding and overarching sense of unreality, carrying with it a sense of estrangement. In the main part of the paper, I consider the articulation of depersonalization in Merleau-Ponty, especially as it figures in Phenomenology of Perception. My claim is that depersonalization can be best captured as an expression of Merleau-Ponty’s idea of ambiguity. I conclude by considering to what extent Merleau-Ponty’s account of depersonalization corresponds with the medical understanding of the condition.
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Notes
These symptoms are based upon Sierra’s findings, which include four dimensions: Anomalous Body Experience; Emotional Numbing; Anomalous Subjective Recall, and Alienation from Surroundings (Sierra et al. 2005). I have not included anomalous subjective recall in the present paper owing to constraints of space.
One of the most striking “case studies” of derealization does not come from a patient of psychoanalysis, but from a psychoanalyst himself: Freud. In a late text from 1936 called “A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis,” Freud recalls a trip to the Acropolis (Freud 2005, 237). Standing on the Acropolis, a “curious thought” comes to him: “So this all really does exist, just as we learned from school!” (237). Faced with the ruins, Freud is confronted with a strange ambiguity between realness and unrealness. For Freud, what is involved is a moment of disbelief. The disbelief does not simply come about due to being overwhelmed but instead points to a disbelief in that what I am seeing is in some sense real (240).
I owe this distinction between being alienated from and alienated by to Dorothée Legrand.
Building on Jaspers, Radovic and Radovic formulate the notion of unreality in terms of an atypical entity (Radovic and Radovic 2002, 275). In this sense, what is real is what serves to reinforce and integrate an already established experience of one’s own bodily subjectivity, and thus one’s experience of spatiality, temporality, and intersubjectivity. What Radovic and Radovic tend to underplay is that from an experiential perspective, the experience of unreality does not take its point of departure from an abstract reflection on an atypical entity. Rather, the experience itself is presented as an affective dimension; namely, that our experience of the world is rendered “real” insofar as it is saturated with a mood of reality, involving both a subjective and intersubjective aspect. Notably, Varga helpfully adds to the debate on depersonalization and unreality by underscoring precisely this intersubjective dimension (Varga 2012, 110). Drawing on Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, Varga posits that “intersubjectivity must be a part of a perceptual experience,” given that the world presents itself not as on object delimited by my perception, but exposed at all times to a “plurality of aspects,” which can only be understood in terms of “possible perceptions that others could have had at the same time” (110). The upshot of this is that the experience of realness is such only insofar as it is situated within “an apperceptive horizon of possible experience for others” (111). This conceptual claim is supported by clinical evidence, and there is growing evidence that depersonalized subjects are socially alienated from others (cf. Michal et al. 2006; Simeon et al. 2001).
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by a Marie Curie grant (FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IOF 624968), which is herein gratefully acknowledged. My thanks to Dorothée Legrand and Emma Louise-Jay for their comments on this paper. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy annual conference in Atlanta, Georgia in October 2015. My thanks especially to Eran Dorfman for his incisive questions during this session. My thanks also to the anonymous reviewers of the article; their comments have proved instructive.
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Trigg, D. On the role of depersonalization in Merleau-Ponty. Phenom Cogn Sci 16, 275–289 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-015-9451-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-015-9451-x