Stefan Kristensen

This book explores Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s provocative claim that “the unconscious is feeling itself,” reframing the unconscious as a fundamentally relational phenomenon rather than a private repository of repressed content. Drawing on clinical insights from Françoise Dolto, Pierre Marty, Didier Anzieu, and René Kaës, Stefan Kristensen bridges psychoanalysis and phenomenology to show how bodily manifestations of unconscious processes shape selfhood and social bonds. The book traces the development of the self through speech and body, examines psychosomatic illnesses as symbolic interactions, and investigates the unconscious dynamics of power relations within groups. By articulating the interplay between corporeality, relationality, and symbolic structures, Kristensen offers a groundbreaking perspective on the unconscious as an intercorporeal linking force essential to the integrity of the self. This work will appeal to psychoanalysts, philosophers, and scholars of clinical psychology seeking to understand the political and ontological dimensions of unconscious life.

The question of space in the philosophy of the late Merleau-Ponty is intimately tied to the one of time; in fact, space is defined in terms of the forms of movement. But the structure of this peculiar temporality is yet to be described in relation to the body schema. In this paper I argue that this structure has to do with the process of mourning. This is because the body-subject is the invisible ground of perception, and because the content of perception is always already lost in the act of reflection. The works of the artist Ana Mendieta allow for a better understanding of both what is at stake in Merleau-Ponty’s conception of phenomenal space and thus an understanding of the meaning of mourning as disruption of lived space