The libidinous structure of body schema : Psychoanalysis and Intercorporeity

Abstract

The aim of this project is to investigate the genesis and development of Merleau-Ponty's reflections on the libidinal structure of the body schema, based on the analysis of the author's incursion into the psychoanalytic field, with emphasis on the dialogue with Freud and Schilder's thoughts. In the philosopher's work, the idea of a libidinal or desiring structure of the body schema appears in his publications from the 1950s and its maturation culminates in the appearance of the notion of "interbody", more explicitly developed in his final thought. Relying on psychoanalytic references, Merleau-Ponty resorts to the formulation of a libidinal or desiring structure of our corporeality in order to highlight the necessary intersubjective, relational, or interpersonal composition of our embodied existence. Under this new prism, there emerges the hypothesis that our corporal scheme would be modulated by the relation with other bodies, so that intersubjectivity will be, primarily, intercorporeality. In it's general structure, this research might be divided into two stages. The first stage consists of examining the problem of the body schema in works that precede his mentions of the libidinal structure of the body. In these works, the role of the body schema as a means of understanding our pre-reflexive, motor and meaningful immersion in the world emerges. In the second stage, we will devote ourselves to demarcating the conceptual elements that allow the emergence and development of the problem of the desiring or interpersonal constitution of the body schema. With this demarcation, we intend to circumscribe the conceptual movement that enables the author to widen the theory of the corporal schema into a theory of the interbody schema in the intermediate and final periods of his thought