Abstract

The essay rereads the pages that Maurice Merleau-Ponty dedicated to hallucinations in his Phenomenology of Perception, pages that effectively illustrate the phenomenological approach to a psychiatric symptom. Phenomenology was successful in the psychiatric field—especially in continental Europe—throughout the twentieth century. The essay’s analysis of hallucinations, however, shows the philosophical limits of the phenomenological approach to psychiatry in particular and to subjectivity in general. The essay also drafts a deconstruction of phenomenological discourse that questions the deep sense of phenomenological psychiatry and its theoretical assumptions.

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