Abstract

At a colloquium in Bonneval, Lacan criticized Merleau-Ponty for his inability to account for the unconscious. For this reason he concluded the latter’s philosophy was fundamentally incompatible with psychoanalysis. This argument set the tone for scholars who studied the relationship between phenomenology and psychoanalysis. J. B. Pontalis, for example, famously argues that Merleau-Ponty misuses the term unconscious. According to Pontalis, Merleau-Ponty equates the unconscious with a “horizon” of possible experience: a moment of experience that is currently in shadow but can be brought to light.1 Psychoanalytic therapy does, in part, treat the unconscious as a territory that can be colonized by language...