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turned these psychic mechanisms from “mental operations” to “modalities of the activity of the body,” one’s access between interior and exterior (Merleau-Ponty, 1964b, p. 319). In this later work in the 1950s, Merleau-Ponty’s view of the unconscious and the field changed further from a perceptual field that is not seen to a structure of experience where the reciprocity between inside and outside, between self and other is experienced in embodied responsiveness. Projection and introjection are not just part of the more pliable and less differentiated structures of the young child but are universalized as a dimension of adult experience, something that Merleau-Ponty saw as Freud’s “most interesting insight” (Phillips, 1999, p. 77). Merleau-Ponty and Lacan both draw from Freud’s (1915) work on reversals and the negative. “Transivitism” refers to the substitutions that occur between self and other. A 3- year-old knocks her leg and doesn’t react, while her little friend cries in response to this knock and rubs his own leg. Although contemporary research has challenged the view of the undifferentiated infant, these transpositions are still readily found in experience and become a new way of conceiving unconscious process. In this reciprocity, Merleau-Ponty (1968) saw the quality of dreaming in waking life where, on the level of bodily experience, separateness and differentiation recede into the permeability of sensation, of our receptivity to others where we find ourselves in others and others in ourselves. Our waking relations with objects and others especially have an oneiric character as a matter of principle: others are present to us in the way that dreams are, the way myths are, and this is enough to question the cleavage between the real and imaginary (p. 48). Rather than finding the unconscious behind consciousness, the unconscious is the dreaming aspect of all waking consciousness that makes relationships possible (Phillips, 1999, p. 79). Phillips (1999, p. 80) referred to a wonderful quotation by Merleau-Ponty published posthumously that captures this last vision of the unconscious: “One always talks of the problem of “the other,” of “intersubjectivity,” etc. . . . In fact, what has to be understood is, beyond the “persons,” the existentials according to which we comprehend them, and which are the sedimented meaning of all our voluntary and involuntary experiences. This unconscious is to be sought not at the bottom of ourselves, behind the back of our “consciousness,” but in front of us, as articulations of our field. It is “unconscious” by the fact that it is not an object, but it is that through which objects are possible, it is the constellation wherein our future is read—It is between them as the interval of the trees between the trees or as their common level” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964b/1968, p. 180). In this formulation, the unconscious is the field of “existentials” that transcend our individuality, structures of signification lived rather than known, “like all structures, between our acts and our aims and not behind them” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964b/1968, p. 232). This “between” is an unknown “invisible” significative matrix, Merleau-Ponty’s sense that self and other are part of a superordinate structure where unconscious process is part of the sedimented structure of language and symbol, not limited to the bounds of our separateness. The visible field is held together by an invisible structure of meaning. Subjectivity is fundamentally expressed in this structure that organizes in the interwoven relationship of subjects (not simply reduced to their interaction). ‘The structure of a gestalt’ where the whole (the unconscious
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