The Sleeping Subject Merleau-Ponty on Dreaming James Morley NORTH EAST WALES INSTITUTE, WREXHAM AbstrAct this paper presents the place of dreaming in Merleau-Ponty’s thought It elicits the view of dreaming developed in three seminal texts: Phenomenology of Perception, the passivity fragment from the Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France, and The Visible and the Invisible In each of these texts, Merleau-Ponty releases dreaming from the secondary status conventionally granted to it in relation to waking perception, and maintains, instead, the integrity of the phenomenon as an authentic mode of experience At the same time, he insists upon the interrelatedness of dreaming and waking by positing for both the lived body as a common ground that precludes dichotomization Merleau-Ponty’s elevation of the imaginary in general, and dreaming in particular, is especially relevant to contemporary psychology in its quest for theoretical foundations that will accommodate the full spectrum of psychological phenomena Key Words: dreaming, imaginary, Merleau-Ponty, ontology, perception the neglect of Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to our understanding of dreaming and to the psychology of the imagination in general is perhaps due to the fact that, despite the importance of the imaginary in his corpus, imagination and dreaming are rarely thematic or focal to his discussion His thesis of the primacy of perception and his introduction of the lived body as a resolution to the dilemma of cartesian dualism are well known; however, what is less known is the theory of the imaginary contained within his understanding of perception It remains for us to cull this nascent theory of the imaginary in general, and of dreaming in particular, from the corpus of his writings this paper will examine the phenomenon of dreaming as part of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the imaginary and will examine this phenomenon in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception and to psychological inquiry more generally the philosophical context for Merleau-Ponty’s approach to dreaming is his understanding of the relation between the imaginary and the real, itself grounded in the thesis now familiarly referred to as ‘the primacy of perception’ this thesis, contained in his magnum opus, Phenomenology of Perception (1945/1962), is summarized in the following words: ‘the perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence’ (1947/1964a, p 13) For Merleau-Ponty, the perceived world pre-exists any attempt to understand it: it is experienced prior to intellectual relection or scientiic explanation The perceived world is lived out before we can think it ‘Perception’ is the lived-out experience of the world the primacy of perception means that perception itself is the starting point of metaphysical inquiry, not to be analysed in terms of causality All external metaphysical explanations for the perceived world are based upon, anterior to, or derivative of the primary reality: that perceived world itself In terms of the self-world relation and to distinguish it from the empiricist principle of ‘experience’ that originated from Locke, the thesis of the primacy of perception can be said to privilege neither the interior psychological self nor the external physical world; rather it treats as paramount the ‘relation’ between the perceiving self and the perceived world the pivot of the ‘relation’ between the perceiver and the perceived is what Merleau-Ponty calls the ‘corps propre’ in Phenomenology of Perception (body proper or lived body), later reformulated, in The Visible and the Invisible (1964/1968), into the term ‘chair du monde’ (lesh of the world) or chiasm (crossing point) Merleau-Ponty explicates the lived body not as a physiological mechanism, but as the very means by which a self and world are possible the lived body is inseparable from perception itself, from the processes both of perceiving and of being perceived In the lived human body we ind the missing link between consciousness and nature, or, better still, we ind the consciousness of nature: ‘[W]e must think of the human body (and not consciousness) as that which perceives nature which it also inhabits’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968/1970, p 128) Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the lived body offers a resolution, particularly relevant to psychologists, of the problem of dualism that has haunted western thought the traditional presupposition, across cultures, of an interior mind separate from an exterior body, or, equivalently, of a self separate from a world, is a style of thinking that is still habitual to us Psychological phenomena, however, cannot be contained within the discrete antithetical categories (mind and body, self and world, subject and object) set up by this dualistic style of thinking; these phenomena embody a fusion of such categories which exists prior to any categorial divisions by understanding the lived body as pre-categorial ground, we can treat psychological phenomena as phenomena; rather than looking to atomizing causal explanations, we respect the integrity of the phenomenon as a meaningful whole the understanding of meaning replaces the quest for cause: Merleau-Ponty’s term is ‘sens’, which is at once both meaning and sense experience In psychology, moreover, the dualistic habit of thinking is extended to a separation of the imaginary and the real, or between the sleeping, imagining mind and the waking, rational mind As a corollary, a hierarchical relation is implicit in that separation, where the imaginary is construed as secondary to or derivative of the real, thus raising questions for psychologists even today the imaginary is a major focus of psychological research and practice, yet a strong theoretical framework which will allow us to approach the imaginary on its own terms would still appear to be lacking Merleau-Ponty’s thought offers the possibility of such a framework As the thesis of the primacy of perception and its foundation, the lived body, reformulate the distinction between the subject and object, in their wake, the relation between the imaginary and the real is also reconceived by granting primacy to the lived-out experience of the world, Merleau-Ponty implicitly grants validity to all modes of that experience In particular, the hierarchy of relation between ‘rear and ‘imaginary’ experience is collapsed Dreaming, no less than waking, experience exempliies his foundational thesis of the primacy of perception and its ground: the lived body Drcaming in Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty irst refers extensively to dreaming in Phenomenology of Perception (1945/1962), in which he argues that a pre-personal possession of the world exists prior to any cleavage between the dream world and the waking world the dream and waking worlds are distinguished from one another as different modes of experience, but both are grounded in a general being that is common to all human experience In his understanding of dreaming in Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty leans on the work of Ludwig binswanger (1930/1986), who writes, ‘the dream is nothing other than a particular mode of human existence in general’ (p 102).1 According to Binswanger, ‘Dreaming, man … “is” “life function”; waking, he creates “life-history’” (p 102) What we are looking at here is the relation between ‘is’ and ‘creates’ ‘Function’ relates to that domain of existence where conditions are out of the control of the subject, in contrast to ‘history’, which is authored in a voluntary manner Function ‘is’ and history ‘is created’, so that the distinction between dreaming, as ‘life-function’, and waking, as ‘life-history’, is a distinction between passivity and activity: It is not possible—no matter how often the attempt is made—to reduce both parts of the distinction between life-function and inner life-history to a common denominator because life considered as function is not the same as life considered as history And yet, both have a common foundation: existence (binswanger, 1930/1986, p 102) binswanger’s use of the verb ‘considered’ presents dreaming and waking as two different standpoints, hath having a common ground in existence He says, ‘to dream means: I don’t know what is happening to me’ (p 102) the state of dreaming is one of passive or unrelective participation in existence, while the waking state is one of active control—both are different modes of existing binswanger’s positing of a common foundation in existence for the different modes of dreaming and waking is applied by Merleau-Ponty to his analysis at corporeal spatiality in Phenomenology of Perception In the chapter on ‘space’ in Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty modiies Binswanger’ s notion at existence as primal ground to argue that the body of the perceiver is the common primal position that makes space possible; it is the anchor of all forms of perception He establishes this by turning from our habitual relations with objects around us, in which space is taken for granted, to the conditions in which a breakdown occurs in the familiar organization of objects the abnormal or breakdown condition brought about, for instance, by the effects of psychedelic drugs or schizophrenia enables us to capture the body-subject s role in the active constitution of space, frequently passed over or neglected in the natural or naïve attitude of everyday life (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/1962, p, 281) the drug-user’s or schizophrenic’s nightmarish experience of empty space is a ‘dislocation’ which occurs because ‘one’s own body has ceased to be a knowing body, and has ceased to draw together all objects in its one grip’ (pp 282-283); this schizophrenic collapse of space is also coupled with a collapse of time the main idea here is that it is binswanger’s article ‘dream and existence’ (1930/1986) was itself an application of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927/1962), recently published at that time, to the psychology of dreaming by ‘existence’, binswanger is referring to Heidegger’s concept of Dasein (literally ‘there-being’), typically translated as ‘being-in-the-world’ Heidegger’s concept is that of a historically situated existence that is aware of itself as existing in a inite temporal horizon, that is, towards death In contrast to Husserl’s earlier phenomenology of transcendental subjectivity, Heidegger’s Dasein is always already ‘in and of’ the world Hence, in existential phenomenology, human existence is adhered to the world, neither an internality nor an externality, subject nor object, but a spatia-temporal openness Merleau-Ponty’s contribution was to tighten the concept of Dasein through an existential-phenomenological rehabilitation of the human body through the body that time and space are anchored the body (what binswanger calls ‘existence’) grounds space and time, so that these are not irst of all atomized states of consciousness On the contrary, space, like time, is the means through which we are bodily ‘implanted’ (p 283) in the world by refusing the segmentation of space and time into discrete psychological categories, Merleau-Ponty is able to comprehend them as variations of a single common fabric: a continuum of positions woven together through the spatio-temporalizing power of the lived body ‘Once the experience of spatiality is related to our implantation in the world,’ Merlcau-Ponty (1945/1962) argues, it follows necessarily that ‘there will always be a primary spatiality for each modality of this implantation’ (p, 283); ‘primary’ because it is the precondition for our relations with things dreams illuminate this primary spatiality even in waking experience, under the condition of darkness, we have a ‘spatiality without things’ (p, 283), but it is in sleeping that external nature almost completely disappears, so that ‘the phantasms of dreams reveal still more effectively that general spatiality within which clear space and observable objects are embedded’ (p, 284) by ‘primary spatiality’ and ‘general spatiality’, MerleauPonty refers to that which grounds space itself, that is, the body dreams reveal this primal ground or ‘essential structure’ (p 284) As examples, Merleau-Ponty considers the common dream phenomena of rising and falling, which are known to be emblematic of respiration and sexuality It is the body which, as primal ground, makes meaningful such emblematic links (between rising and falling in dreams and the physiological processes of respiration or sexuality): We must understand how respiratory or sexual events, which have a place in objective space, are drawn away from it in the dream state, and settled in a different theatre but we shall not succeed in doing so unless we endow the body, even in the waking state, with an emblematic value… the movement upwards as a direction in physical space, and that of desire towards its objective, are mutually symbolical, because they both express the same essential structure of our being… the phantasms of dreaming, of mythology, the favorite images of each man or indeed poetic imagery, arc not linked to their meaning by a relation of sign to signiicance, like the one existing between a telephone number and the name of the subscriber; they really contain their meaning, which is not a notional meaning, but a direction of our existence (pp 284-285; emphasis added) From the above, the phenomenon of dreaming is focal to Merleau-Ponty’ s assertion of a primal ground the body is present pre-thematically (prior to conscious knowing) to dreams, as it is to waking experience the emblematic value of that primal ground, as evidenced in dreams, must, because it is primal, be shared by both dreaming and waking; dreaming is the most transparent indication of the emblematic value that the body has, less transparently, even in the waking state the conception of the human body as endowed with emblematic value even in the waking state carries with it a renewed conception of dreaming Given the emblematic value of the body, we must reject any notion of the dream as a secondary or degraded perception, a mere ‘representation’ of something separate or external to itself As with myth, which ‘holds the essence “within” the appearance’ so that ‘the mythical phenomenon is not a representation, but a genuine presence’ (Merleau -Ponty, 1945/1962, p 290), the dream is also a ‘genuine presence’ there are no ‘apparitions’ in dreams; dream phantasms are incarnate beings endowed with ‘physiognomic characteristics’ (p 290) dreamed space, like perceived space, is not a geometrical or intellectually abstracted zone or sector, a space apart from the experiencing subject the subject’s prethematic bodily anchor binds the various modes of experience though Merleau-Ponty never equates dreaming with waking perception, he understands dreaming as proximate to, and inherently linked with, perception: Mythical or dream-like consciousness, insanity and perception are not, in so far as they are different, hermetically sealed within themselves: they are not small islands of experience cut off from each other, and from which there is no escape (p 292) by insisting that the mythical or dream-like consciousness is never isolated or severed from ordinary perception, Merleau-Ponty posits a passage between the different modes of experience and, by implication, precludes a dichotomy between them More then two decades later, Merleau-Ponty returns to the topic of dreaming in his Collège de France lecture notes (1968/1970) titled ‘the Problem of Passivity’ the term ‘passivity’ in this writing fragment refers equally to sleep, the unconscious and memory such passive phenomena, typically negated or passed over in conventional theories of perception, must, according to Merleau-Ponty, not only be included within, but treated as integral to, the understanding of perception as a totality In particular, he insists, radically, that ‘sleep is a modality of perceptual activity’ (p 47) As a modality of perception, sleep is a ‘global or prepersonal relation to the world’ (p 47; emphasis added) the use of the term ‘relation’ deliberately distinguishes between absence and distance with respect to the world As a ‘relation’, sleep, though distant from, is yet anchored to, the world through the sleeping body the idea of ‘distance’ invokes a spatial parameter that allows for a gradation precluded in the morc absolute binary parameters of presence and absence typical to Merleau-Ponty’s style as a thinker, antitheses—the two halves of a binary or dualistic pairing—are not seen as severed from each other, but are recast in terms of a continuum Whether waking or sleeping, the subject is always more or less in relation to the world, never absolutely present or absent In other words, the world is never missing from the sleeper’s awareness in the absolute sense that the dualistic language of conscious/unconscious or even waking/sleeping imposes on us In the way in which we mark our place in a book, Merleau-Ponty asserts that our place in the world is ‘marked by the body with which a minimum of contact is maintained that makes it possible to wake up’ (p 47) the waking world remains a cnlcial constituent of sleeping experience As in the temporal and spatial relations of waking perception, the body continues as the somatic reference point to which sleeping perception is tethered Furthermore, the body-mark is what makes possible our passage back into waking life, just as much as it is what allows us to slip back into sleep sleeping and waking swing across a common pivot or hinge Accordmg to Merleau-Ponty, philosophies of consciousness, by which he means the whole of traditional european thought, distort the sleeping-waking relation by construing sleep as a negation of the real world, a state in which the real world is replaced by an autonomous imaginary world free of external controls such a view overlooks how the seeming negation of the world in sleep is equally a way of upholding the world As revealed by the practice of dream interpretation, sleeping consciousness is ‘cluttered with the debris of the past and present; it plays among it’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968/1970, p 48) Contrary to the conventional understanding, therefore, and relecting the greater appreciation of the continuity of waking and sleep that has developed in recent years, Merleau-Ponty argues that dreaming is not a purely solipsistic activity the dream is different from the process of ‘conscious imagination’, daydreaming or phantasy hecause it is not a pure invention (p 48).2 For instance, the reliving of childhood experiences in adult dreams attests to a relation that dreaming bears to our past experience, and so establishes that it is not solipsistically disengaged from the waking world, but is, on the contrary, a phenomenon that has weight or meaning to describe that dimension of meaningful experience to which dreaming belongs, Merleau-Ponty uses the term ‘oneiric’ as an alternative to the more loaded terminology for passive phenomena, such as ‘unconscious’ or even ‘imaginary’, which evoke the ‘conscious’ or ‘real’ as antitheses through the phenomenon of dreaming, we are made aware of the reality of the oneiric as well as the oneiric character of the real the distinction between the real and the oneiric cannot be identical with the simple distinction between consciousness illed with meaning and consciousness given up to its own void The two modalities impinge on one another Our waking relations with objects and others especially have an oneiric character as a matter of principle: others are present to us in the way that dreams are, the way myths are, and this is enough to question the cleavage between the real and the imaginary (Merleau-Ponty, 1968/1970, p.48) the oneiric comprehends not only what we think of conventionally as ‘imaginary’, but also our intersubjective relations Merleau-Ponty’s striking observation that ‘others are present to us in the way dreams are’, ‘the way myths are’, asserts that our intcrsubjective relations have an oneiric dimension that links them to our experience of dreaming Our knowledge of other minds, like our dreams, is not objectively (factually or materially) veriiable, but we believe in others as we believe our dreams while we are dreaming them In this respect, our relations with others have an oneiric character, but such relations are nonetheless very much part of waking perception If others who are ‘real’ are nonetheless present to us in the manner of dreams and myths, this itself is suficient to undermine any attempt to dichotomize the real and the imaginary The oneiric is a dimension of all experience, whether waking or sleeping Merleau-Ponty supports his discussion of sleep as a modality of perception, and of waking perception as having an oneiric dimension, by a rethinking of the conventional understanding of the unconscious He begins by reiterating a standard criticism of the Freudian unconscious, that it postulates ‘a second thinking subject whose creations are simply received by the irst’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968/1970, p 49) In philosophical terms, the Freudian unconscious is derivative of the rational waking mind such a postulate is inadequate because it ‘leads to a monopoly of consciousness’ (p 49) that implicitly denigrates the unconscious to a secondary status in the conscious-unconscious pairing.3 Merleau-Ponty seeks to salvage the unconscious from Freud’s implicit rationalism and to amplify its philosophical signiicance beyond what is granted to by the same argument, the distinction between dreaming and daydreaming or phantasy would also apply to lucid dreaming, which must equally be identiied as ‘conscious imagination’, because of its self-conscious or consciously inventive aspect We can say that a lucid dream is, so to speak, a sleeping daydream Merleau-Ponty is responding here to an especially sartrian interpretation of Freud where the unconscious is relegated to the position of self-deception or bad faith (see, especially, the chapter on existential psychoanalysis in Being and Nothingness [Sartre 1943/l956, pp 557-575]) and the chapter ‘The Imaginary Life’ in The Psychology of Imagination [Sartre 1940/l948, pp 177-255J) it by Freud It is important to recognize that Merleau-Ponty both criticizes and applauds Freud’s conception of the unconscious: he criticizes the binary terminology that implies a categorical separation of conscious and unconscious, but applauds the whole thrust of Freud’s thought, which, by questioning the primacy of the rational mind, actually undoes exactly that separation The waking (conscious or rational) subject is uniied with the sleeping or unconscious subject through Freud’s essential insight: that dreams are linked to waking life through a common subject of desire, the ‘ wish’ Furthermore, the wish, equally present to waking and sleeping, is oneiric, thus conirming Merleau-Ponty’s view of the oneiric dimension of all experience the wishing subject which grounds dreaming and waking is viewed by Merleau-Ponty as akin to his own articulation of the precategorically lived body so grounded, the unconscious is not cut off from, but participates in, the process of perception Merleau-Ponty inds that ‘[i]n Freud’s Science of Dreams there is a complete description of oneiric consciousness’, a description that indicates that ‘the unconscious is a perceiving consciousness’ Where Freud’s term ‘unconscious’ suggests a non-participation in the process of perception, Merleau-Ponty’s ‘oneiric’ removes that suggestion; it is a holistic or integral term, without the negating reference to consciousness by calling the unconscious ‘oneiric’, Merleau-Ponty brings out the full import of Freud’s thesis, that the unconscious is not a different reality beneath appearances, but is part of the ‘several layers of signiication’ of a ‘mixed life’ Freud’s contribution is not to have revealed quite another reality beneath appearances, but that the analysis of given behavior always discovers several layers of signiication, each with its own truth, and that the plurality of possible interpretations is the discursive expression of a mixed life in which every choice always has several meanings, it being impossible to say which of them is the only true one (Merleau-Ponty, 1968/1970, p 50) Merleau-Ponty’s ‘laycrs of signiication’ and ‘plurality of possible interpretations’ evokes, like Freud’s ‘interpretation’, a model of language; for both, the analysis of human behavior yields a relation between behavior and its meaning analagous to the linguistic relation between language and meaning Unlike Freud, however, Merleau-Ponty’s more sophisticated view of that relation rules out a linear correspondence between sign and signiication, because ‘every choice always has several meanings’ What Merleau-Ponty offers us here is a composite model of truth or reality: the unconscious does not reveal an absolute or true reality that we are cut off from by appearances, but appearances themselves participate in the reality of which the unconscious reveals another layer or level of signiication The insistence on distinction or difference (‘layers’) without separation accommodates the integrity of the various modes of perception (here, conscious and unconscious), without falling into an absolute open-endedness At a later stage in my discussion I will show that the commonalty between the oneiric and the perceptual precludes both the absolutist language of monism and relativistic language of pluralism In his Preface to Hesnard’s book on psychoanalysis, Merleau-Ponty (1960/1969) writes: ‘Phenomenology and psychoanalysis are not parallel; much better they are aiming towards the same latency’ (p 87) the phenomenology latent in Freud’s thought liberates his insights from the constraints ofthe metapsycho]ogy explicated in The Interpretation of Dreams, which severs material from psychical reality Merleau-Ponty’s more radical departure from dualistic metaphysics provides, in its resistance to binary categorizations, a irmer theoretical foundation for that aspect of dreaming to which Freud (1900/1965) alludes when he writes: ‘there is at least one spot in every dream at which it is unplumbable—a navel, as it were, that is its point of contact with the unknown’ (p 143n) Dreaming in the Final Work Dreaming is crucial to the central argument of Merleau-Ponty’s inal text, The Visible and the Invisible (1964/1968) the explication of perceptual faith, his most enduring theme in this work, is presented within the context of the relation between waking perception and dreaming Perception relates not to an objective or external universe, but rather to a belief in the reality or truth of the world such a belief is a prerequisite for perception the prerequisite of belief, which is a wellknown and widely accepted constituent of dreaming, is not in fact conined to dreaming, but extends to all perception In the earlier writings, Merleau-Ponty has already arrived at an insight of the interrelatedness of the different modes of expenence, but here, in The Visible and the Invisible, the awareness of this interrelatedness catalyses a shift in his theoretical focus from epistemology to ontology and suggests a new beginning for theoretical inquiry … the difference between perception and dream not being absolute, one is justiied in counting them both among ‘our experiences,’ and it is above perception itself that we must seek the guarantee and the sense of its ontological function, (Merleau-Ponty, 1964/1968, p 6) the argument of The Visible and the Invisible opens with dreaming and clearly illustrates the manner in which MerleauPonty’s attention to the phenomenon shapes the direction of his philosophical endeavor from the early to the later writ5 ings In The Visible and the Invisible, he does not reject the conclusions of Phenomenology, but afirms the ‘[n]ecessity of bringing them to ontological explication’ (p 183) It is from the recognition that the difference between perception and dreaming is not absolute that Merleau-Ponty arrives at the most important departure of his inal work, that the starting point of metaphysical inquiry cannot be perception, but must be ‘above perception itself’ by implication, psychological theory cannot conine itself to epistemological questions; epistemological insights must be developed alid extended into ontological inquiry The signiicance of dreaming to The Visible and the Invisible, and to Merleau-Ponty’s thought in general, further emerges when we scrutinize a working note to this book, written ive months before his death in June 1961 This note, labeled ‘Dream, Imaginary’, reiterates the ontological weight of dreaming in his inal writings Here, Merleau·Ponty critiques the ‘philosophy that adds the imaginary to the real’, where ‘adding’ refers, again, to the relegation of dreaming to a secondary or derivative status with reference to waking perception to understand how the imaginary and the real are of the ‘same consciousness’, we must ‘understand the dream [as] starting from the body: as being in [and of] the world’ The dream starts from the lived body, just as waking perception does the imaginary must be understood not as ‘a nihilation … but as the true Stiftung [foundation] of Being’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964/1968, p 262) The understanding of the imaginary as foundational to being asserts the ontological validity of the imaginary the reference to sartre’s term ‘nihilation’ makes it clear that it is against sartre’s (1940/1948) conception of imagination as a pathological negation of the perceptual world that Merleau·Ponty is arguing here the nole goes on to address the question, —what remains of the chiasm in the dream? the dream is the inside in the sense that the jutemal double of the external sensible is inside, it is on the side of the sensible wherever the world is not-this is that ‘stage,’ that ‘theatre’ of which Freud speaks, that place of our oneiric beliefs—and not ‘the consciousness’ and its image-making folly (Merleau·Ponty, 1964/1968, p 262) the interrelation between waking and sleeping is now articulated in terms of the ontological concept, focal to the argument of The Visible and the Invisible, of ‘chiasm’: the perceiver and the perceived world in a circular, co-constituting, that is, reversible, relation In this fragmcnt of writing, Merleau-Ponty characteristically challenges the conventional understanding of the dream as an ‘inside’, relating, by implication, to a truer or more real ‘outside’ rather the ‘inside’ or interiority of dreaming brings it into a structural parity with waking perception by applying the chiasmatic structure of the waking world to the dream world, Merleau-Ponty rejects the formulation of a consciousness that degenerates, in dreaming, to ‘folly’ the ‘subject’ of the dream (and of anguish and of all life) is the one—i.e the body as enclosure (enceinte).4 (p 263) the note develops, then, the earlier insight of Phenomenology; ‘In dreaming as in myth we learn where the phenomenon is to be found, by feeling that towards which our desire goes out, what our hearts dread, on what our life depends even in waking life things are no different’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/1962, p 285) the body or the ‘one’, which is the perceptual ground in Phenomenology, becomes, in the late work, the ontological or chiasmatic ground.5 Signiicantly, Merleau-Ponty is engaging with the phenomenon of dreaming in the midst of his formulation of the thesis of reversibility of self and world, a thesis closely associated with the concept of ‘chiasm’ the reversibility thesis is the subject of the working note dated November 16, 1960, which succeeds the note on dreaming written in the same month the note on reversibility explicitly connects the two concepts of chiasm and reversibility—‘thc chiasm is that: the reversibility’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964/1968, p 263)—and, like the previous note on dreaming, obviously pertains to the composition of the chiasm chapter in The Visible and the Invisible the allusion to the chiasm in the note on dreaming therefore becomes the link between Merleau-Ponty’s theory of dreaming and his formulation of reversibility I have already mentioned that the chiasmatic structure, according to Merleau-Ponty, is equally applicable to dreaming and waking perception this insight may be extended to argue that dreaming and waking together constitute a chiasmatic structure While Merleau-Ponty himself never explicitly posits a reversible relation between the two phenomena, he does posit a common pre-personal ground—‘the one’—from which we may infer the relation by this inference, the subject/dream-world chiasm serves as the ‘Le “sujet” du rêve (et de l’angoisse, et de toute vie), c’est on—i.e le corps comme enceinte—’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964b, p 316) the French word enceinte has a dual meaning of ‘enclosed (or encircled) space’ and ‘pregnancy’ Merleau-Ponty uses several terms to refer to the ontological ground or chiasm in The Visible and the Invisible: être sauvage (savage or wild being), être brut (brute or raw being), ecart (gap, dehiscence, opening), entrelac (interwovenness or interlacing), ‘chair du monde’ (lesh of the world), and so on background to the subject/waking-world chiasm and vice versa Conclusion Psychoanalytic theory is only one example that illustrates the prominence of dreaming in 20th-century thought; however, this prominence has always been merely implicit It is in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy that, for the irst time, the phenomenon of dreaming has been granted both epistemological and ontological status the theoretical reappraisal of dreaming carries with it a reassessment of all aspects of the imaginary, consistently referred to by Merleau-Ponty as the oneiric, the mythical, primordial symbolism, preobjective being, savage or brute being It is true that prior to Merleau-Ponty there is an existent phenomenological tradition, starting with William James, of recognizing a multiplicity of ontological provinces; what Gurwitsch (1957/1964) calls ‘orders of reality’, William James (l890/1950), imaginary ‘sub-universes’, and Schlitz (1962), inite ‘provinces of meaning’ Howcver, although each of these pluralisms acknowledges existence as a multiplicity of realities, waking perception, speciically the pragmatic world of adult working activity, is always the privileged reference point by contrast, Merleau-Ponty privileges no single reference point beyond the subject-world chiasm this allows him to look past the dichotomy of pluralism and monism: Philosophy is itself only if it refuses for itself the facilities of a world with one sole entry as well as the facilities of a world with multiple entries, all accessibJe to the philosopher Like the natural man, it abides at the point where the passage from the self into the world and into the other is effected, at the crossing of the avenues (Merleau-Ponty, 1964/l968 p 160) thus, it is neither ‘one sole entry’ nor ‘multiple entries’, but the phenomenon of ‘entry’ itself which is focal For Merleau-Ponty, it is at the crossing or opening of avenues that we can seek a stable and consistent ground of philosophical inquiry and, by implication, of psychological endeavor References binswanger L (1986) dream and existence Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry (pp 81·-105) (Special Issue, K Hadler, ed,), XIX(1) (Original work published 1930.) 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Schlitz, A (1962) On multiple realities In Collected papers (Vol 1) the Hague: Martinus Nijhoff JAMes MorLey is Senior Lecturer at the North East Wales Institute (University of Wales College, Wrexham), and former Chair of the Psychology Department at Saint Joseph College, connecticut since completing his doctorate at duquesne University in 1988, his teaching and publications have applied the thought of Merleau-Ponty to the psychology of imagination, human development, psychopathology and Indian yoga psychology He is a member of the Merleau-Ponty Circle and has co-edited with Dorothea Olkowski, a collection of essays titled Merleau-Ponty: Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World published by the State University of New York Press (1999); he is also currently editing a collection on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical contributions to psychology, psychoanalysis, and psychiatry He is actively involved in phenomenological psychology in the United States, Britain, and India ADDRESS: Department of Psychology, North East Wales Institute, Mold Road, Wrexham LI11 2AW, UK [email: J.Morley@newi.ac.uk] tHeory & PsycHoLoGy copyright © 1999 sAGe Publications VOL 9(1): 89-101 [0959-3543(199902)9:1;89-101;006923] ... the thesis of the primacy of perception and its foundation, the lived body, reformulate the distinction between the subject and object, in their wake, the relation between the imaginary and the. .. common subject of desire, the ‘ wish’ Furthermore, the wish, equally present to waking and sleeping, is oneiric, thus conirming Merleau- Ponty? ??s view of the oneiric dimension of all experience the. .. negation of the perceptual world that Merleau? ?Ponty is arguing here the nole goes on to address the question, —what remains of the chiasm in the dream? the dream is the inside in the sense that the