MERLEAU-PONTY, THE UNCONSCIOUS AND ART

a reading of the work of the artists of Engenho de Dentro

Abstract

Our objective is to explain the importance of psychoanalysis for Merleau-Ponty through his use of the notion of the unconscious in the so-called “ontology of the flesh”, present in the work The Visible and the Invisible. It is from psychoanalysis incorporated into ontology, as a dispossession of the subject towards a more primitive contact with the world, that art has preeminence as an expression of the Being crude in its ambiguity between the unconscious and the conscious. In this way, we seek to apply Merleau-Ponty’s psychoanalytic ontology in reading the work of the psychiatric interns of Engenho de Dentro, tutored by Nise da Silveira, in order to interpret, in artistic expression as a cure, the intertwining of the unconscious and the conscious. We conclude that Merleau-Ponty allows, in the composition of his ontology in close relationship with psychoanalysis, an opening to the experience of schizophrenic subjects who have their perception and expression often excluded from philosophy and culture.