Dorothée Legrand: The body. Another Phenomenological and Psychoanalytic perspectives

In this contribution, I will work together with both Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jacques Lacan. This will allow me to consider not only the body as a materiality structured by its finitude, not only the body as a locus of our lived experiences, not only the body as it anchors our actions, but also the body as it incarnates otherness. Otherness will here be considered as twofold: on the one hand, the body as a living organism is a generality and its functioning hosts a germ of depersonalisation; on the other hand, and at the same time, the body is that which keeps any other subject away from me, separated from me, irreducible to me. It thus appears that the body is both at once a concretion of alterity and of singularity. We will rely on such conceptualisation of the body to consider the possibility of designing a clinical practice informed both by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and by Jacques Lacan.