'The Child's Relations with Others': Merleau-Ponty, Embodiment and Psychotherapy
By Darren Langdridge. Existential Analysis: Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis, 2005
169 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In The Child's Relations with Others Merleau-Ponty (1964) criticises extant theories of child development and proposes a phenomenological alternative based on an embodied intersubjective development. Through this phenomenological examination of early child development Merleau-Ponty provides a profound challenge to classical dualist theories. Merleau-Ponty, following Wallon, argues that knowledge of ourselves, and others, is given through our interconnectedness. This paper seeks to outline and discuss Merleau-Ponty's developmental theory and argue that, not only do these insights challenge existing theories of child development, but they also provide a strong argument for further examination of the role of embodiment in psychotherapeutic theory and practice. In particular, I will suggest that, in the light of these arguments, existential-phenomenological practice fails to adequately account for the notion of the body-subject and needs to consider incorporating methods of enactment within the therapeutic process.
Subfields: Cultural Studies, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Philosophy
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/64127c81ae8d3695f9e3c45c0ad315bbbcd7bf75
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In Cultural Studies
In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
In Philosophy
Citations in the corpus
- Loving and knowing: reflections for an engaged epistemology (2019, unknown): “Take watching a soccer game (Merleau-Ponty 1960).”
- The phenomenology and development of social perspectives (2013, background): “…has its full meaning only when the child uses it not as an individual sign to designate his own person – a sign that would be assigned once for all to himself and to nobody else – but when he understands that each person is an ‘I’ for himself and a ‘you’ for others” (Merleau-Ponty 2000, p. 150).”