Prolegomena to an Ecology of the Psyche

Steps to new Intersections between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis

Abstract

This paper compares psychoanalytic thought and contemporary French philosophy and it addresses the issue of the subject and of the processes of psychic individuation. The paper defines some basic axioms of philosophical ecology for a new theory of the subject. Every psychic subject is always in relation to the environment, the ecological postulate says. New perspectives in psychoanalysis and philosophy offer an ecology of the psyche to study the unconscious in a relational way. Starting with Jean Hyppolite’s lectures on existential psychoanalysis and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s conceptions of the body and the unconscious, the paper seeks an innovative way to overcome the “Death of Man”, Foucault said, and it offers a sentimental conception of the Cartesian cogito. Finally, the paper offers considerations on the melancholic subject of psychoanalysis and the philosophical “unhappiness of consciousness”.