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psychoanalysis should not be understood to consist in phenomenology’s saying clearly what psychoanalysis said obscurely. On the contrary, it is by what phenomenology implies or unveils as its limits—by its latent content or its unconscious—that it is in consonance with psychoanalysis. … Phenomenology and psychoanalysis are not parallel; much better, they are aiming toward the same latency” (p. 71). It is interesting to note that he used the figure-ground concept (i.e., the concept of the field) to articulate formulations of unconscious process. In order to know ourselves we need a certain distance that we are not able to take by ourselves. “It is not a matter of an unconscious that would play tricks on us; the problem of mystification stems from the fact that all consciousness is privileged consciousness of a ‘figure’ and tends to forget the ‘ground’ without which it has no meaning (cf. Gestalt theory). We do not know the ground although it is lived by us. … For knowledge to progress . . . it is necessary for what was ground to become figure” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964a, p. 113; trans. Phillips, 1999, p. 71). At this point of his thinking, Merleau-Ponty understood the unconscious as referring to an “unseen ground,” to perceptual processes where there is a failure to distinguish between figure and ground, a failure to recognize the ground that discloses the figure and gives it meaning (Phillips, 1999, p. 71). Thus, for example, repressed traumatic experience is not perceived due to the insistence of a familiar field, a context within which the traumatic has no form. “Traumatic experience does not subsist as a representation in the mode of objective consciousness. … Rather, its nature is to survive only as a style of being and only to a certain degree of generality” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2012, p. 85). The trauma is felt bodily as generalized anxiety but is not known in any specificity, as there is a perseverative insistent attending to the familiar contours of a nontraumatic field. Merleau-Ponty’s frame in relation to psychoanalysis took a new turn in his Sorbonne Lectures (1950/2010) and Lectures from the College de France (1968) where he was increasingly interested in intersubjective process, and where his conception of the phenomenal field emphasized “transitivism” and then “reversibility” in his final work. These concepts will only be touched upon below, but they are crucial in clarifying a radicalization of Merleau- Ponty’s view on the field, one that emphasizes interpenetration. In these lectures, he examined psychoanalytic concepts in light of phenomenology, emphasizing the reciprocal movement between self and other: “A connection exists between relations with others and the relation with oneself. … The relations with others pass through the relation with oneself” (Merleau- Ponty, 1950, p. 267). He saw Melanie Klein’s use of projection and introjection as seminal in this process, situating their action in the body in his reading of Klein: “The distinction between the fantasized and the real is less sharp. Between corporeal activity (sucking, swallowing) and introjection there are no longer well-established boundaries” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964a, 1964b, p. 368; trans. Phillips, 1999, p. 76). Phillips shows how Merleau-Ponty finds in Klein a different field. Through Klein, psychoanalytic concepts can be understood “in terms of corporeality taken as itself the search for the outside in the inside and of the inside in the outside, that is, as a global and universal power of incorporation” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 130). Merleau-Ponty
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