Abstract
Like his colleague and friend Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty rejected the idea that the unconscious is radically separate from our conscious experience. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology elucidates how many aspects of experience are “unconscious” insofar as they resist categorization through “cultural schemas”—i.e., traditional cultural and scientific models. Such elements of experience are not barred from becoming conscious; they are not buried deep within our psyches. Rather, they form our perceptual experience, hidden by our linguistic and cultural norms. In this paper, I take up Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of childhood drawing. Alongside Tony O’Connor’s work on Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the unconscious and ambiguity, I demonstrate that childhood drawing shows how deeply cultural schemas can limit our representations of perceptual experience.
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- 1.
“It [phenomenology] has been long on the way, and its adherents have discovered it in every quarter, certainly in Hegel and Kierkegaard, but equally in Marx, Nietzsche and Freud” (Merleau-Ponty 1996, p. viii).
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Merleau-Ponty held a professorship in child psychology and pedagogy at the Sorbonne from 1949 to 1952 (Merleau-Ponty, 2010).
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Sophie Morgenstern, a child psychoanalyst, wrote on the relevance of childhood drawing and other creative acts. Merleau-Ponty writes, “As a means of considering the psychoanalytic exploration of drawings, let us consider Sophie Morgenstern’s (1937) Psychanalyse infantile; symbolisme et valeur clinique des creations imaginatives chez l’enfant. Morgenstern’s interpretation of children’s drawings stems from her observation of a particular child whom she could explore by no other means. The boy was mute and quite reticent and was capable of expressing himself only through the drawings which he produced. The doctor would interpret these drawings while the child nodded or shook his head at the interpretations provided. Morgenstern cites some of the child’s productions to include: birds, tall animals, stick figures with hats, individuals with three arms, with a pipe, with a knife, men in the moon, wolfmen, parents without heads, etc.” (2010, p. 174).
- 4.
Merleau-Ponty continues, “If someone dreams a house, they are not dreaming of sexual organs; they are thinking directly of the house which is immediately a sexual expression” (p. 175).
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Merleau-Ponty continues by citing a Marxist example of the over-determination of cultural experience, “thus, certain Marxists would see the child’s non-figurative drawings as stemming strictly from the influence of the bourgeois cultural milieu” (p. 163).
- 6.
Georges Henri Luquet (1972) wrote an influential text on the relevance of childhood drawing. In Merleau-Ponty’s view, “Luquet contradicts himself by stating on the one hand that the child draws according to an internal model, and on the other hand that the child’s drawings are not schematic or idealist” (p. 167).
- 7.
Kurt Koffka (1886–1941) was an early Gestalt psychologist who worked with Wertheimer and Köhler. His text Principles of Gestalt Psychology (1935) is often cited by Merleau-Ponty.
- 8.
“In conclusion, we find that according to classical psychology the thing (perceived by the subject) is wholly intelligible for it is the intellection of certain functional relations to variables. According to Gestalt theory, the thing has a pre-intellectual unity. It can be defined for perception as a certain style. For classical psychology, a circle is a law conceived by me while producing this figure. For Gestalt theory, a circle is a certain physiognomy, a certain curvature. We learn to see the unity of things. For example, the yellow of a lemon in connection with its acidity reveals a structural community which renders the particular aspects (yellow, acidity) synonymous. Thus, all of this confirms the fact that the infant’s experience does not begin as chaos, but as a world already underway [un monde déjà] of which only the structure is filled with lacuna” (p. 148).
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Merleau-Ponty is famous for his assertion that Husserl himself did not think a complete reduction possible. He writes “The most important lesson which the reduction teaches us is the impossibility of a complete reduction” (Merleau-Ponty 1996, p. xiv).
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Welsh, T. (2012). Merleau-Ponty on Cultural Schemas and Childhood Drawing. In: Halsall, F., Jansen, J., Murphy, S. (eds) Critical Communities and Aesthetic Practices. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 64. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1509-7_4
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