Valeria Bizzari

In this contribution I will attempt to sketch a phenomenology of dreaming in what appear to be its most important characterisations: for example, a specific (a)temporality, an essential ineffability, its relation to the waking world and a particular causality. In order to do this, I will be guided by two authors – Maria Zambrano and Maurice Merleau-Ponty – who seems to be apparently distant but who share a vision of dreaming as a life-world in continuity with the waking world, which is comprehensible only by adopting a non-rational gaze, such as that offered by poetry and myth. The final aim will be to rehabilitate the dreaming experience as a lived one, able to express deep subjective meanings.

What does it mean “playing music together”? Is this action guided by cognitive or pre-inferential skills? The aim of this paper is to unveil the different components that are implied in a collective action such as “playing music together”. The idea which will be supported is that embodiment and temporality are the main important structures that guide the subject. In the first part, we will emphasize the centrality of corporeality in the development of self-awareness and intercorporeal understanding. In particular, drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s work, we will argue that the cognitive layer of our consciousness and the pre-inferential one are simply the product of our being embodied. Another central structure for the development of selfhood and intersubjectivity is temporality: as we will show, our selfhood and our attunement with the world can be also described in terms of rhythm, whereby implicit body memory allows for the sedimentation of habits, and synchrony, when my bodily and temporalized self is able to automatically tune in with others. In the second part, we will show how these components are at stake in an action like “playing music together”: attending music therapy sessions with patients who suffer indeed from an (inter)corporeal detachment allowed us to observe the centrality of those components described in the first part of our work, that is, to show how pre-reflective features (such as implicit body memory, intercorporeality, rhythm and synchrony) are necessary for the development of higher social (and cognitive) abilities.In fact, first person reports collected through a qualitative interview applied to patients allow to support the priority of the pre-reflective, affective and (inter)bodily components over the reflective ones.