Home > Author > Maurice Merleau-Ponty >

" Posit the unconscious not as a first consciousness to be masked, i.e., forgotten adequation...but as indirect consciousness or without exactitude or thinking for itself...according to a system of signs weakly articulated...As a result, the ego and its 'defense mechanisms' are also to be conceived in these terms: their avoidance of the repressed is not knowledge of the unconscious but indirect consciousness as well; that which is to be avoided is not denied (which would be to say known) but bypassed--the ego as official, thetic, recognized domain...Through this reform, one will no longer have causality of the id or causality of the ego--one will have a relationship that is not face to face--a relationship of infrastructure to superstructure, i.e., the sexual = the Soil that supports life. "

Maurice Merleau-Ponty , The Possibility of Philosophy: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1959–1961


Image for Quotes

Maurice Merleau-Ponty quote : Posit the unconscious not as a first consciousness to be masked, i.e., forgotten adequation...but as indirect consciousness or without exactitude or thinking for itself...according to a system of signs weakly articulated...As a result, the ego and its 'defense mechanisms' are also to be conceived in these terms: their avoidance of the repressed is not knowledge of the unconscious but indirect consciousness as well; that which is to be avoided is not denied (which would be to say known) but bypassed--the ego as official, thetic, recognized domain...Through this reform, one will no longer have causality of the id or causality of the ego--one will have a relationship that is not face to face--a relationship of infrastructure to superstructure, i.e., the sexual = the Soil that supports life.