Merleau-Ponty's body-subject and psychiatry

Abstract

The paper aims to shed philosophical light on the ways in which we can make sense of human behaviour, using some aspects of the thoughts of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961). The concept of ‘intentionality’ is introduced as a mark of human action, and a traditional philosophical distinction between the causal explanation of movements and the ‘empathetic’ understanding of intentional actions is examined. It is argued that this distinction creates difficulties for the explanation of mental disorder. Merleau-Ponty's concept of the ‘body-subject’ is argued to be a way of overcoming these difficulties, by proposing a form of non-eliminativist materialism. Mental disorder is to be seen as a deviant way of ‘being-in-the-world’, which can be ‘understood’, but only with difficulty, and where the deviance requires in addition a causal explanation, either in neurophysiological terms or in terms of early development. It is concluded that this offers a way of combining a humanistic approach to psychiatric disorder with full recognition of the role of physical treatments.