Abstract
The Husserlian project of a genetic phenomenology has not yet received the continuation it deserved, despite the inherent interest of the questions that no doubt could have been raised, and this in opposition to transcendental phenomenology itself. Yet, according to Husserl, in it would be found “the long-familiar problems concerning the psychological origin of the ‘idea of space,’ the ‘idea of time,’ the ‘idea of a physical thing,’ and so forth … as problems of intentionality, which have their places among the problems of a universal genesis.”1 Our object here is to take a few steps in the direction of a genetic phenomenology of space2 by way of a discussion of Piaget’s genetic psychology. In this discussion we shall be led in many instances to seek the assistance of psychoanalysis, for it seems of prime importance that a phenomenology of space be concerned with the experience of space in the multiplicity of its intentional aspects, and not solely with those aspects directly related to the construction of a representation of space.
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Notes
Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorian Cairns (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973), p. 76.
As a result of its expressed intention, this work is situated on the level of a “phenomenological psychology.”
These two concepts, which come from genetic psychology, are to be understood in the following way: “assimilation” is a mental activity of the child by means of which an external situation is perceived or processed in such a way as to allow it to be incl’ ied within an existing schema; “accommodation” is a mental activity which serves to change an initial schema so as to adapt to a new situation.
J. Piaget, La psychologie de l’enfant (Paris: P.U.F., 1966), p. 10.
Because of its insertion from the outset within a network of interhuman relations charged with meaningful and symbolic dimensions, there is never with respect to the infant a “pure physiology” nor, as a result, anything that is purely “adaptive.”
Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, p. 82.
See R. A. Spitz, Le non et le oui — La genèse de la communication humaine, trans. A. M. Rocheblave-Spenle (Paris: P.U?F., 1962), especially chapter 8: “Un cas de non-investissement de la zone orale.” Spitz’s thesis has received support in the case of Monica W., who in the first few months of life was unable to receive any food through the mouth and who, at 23 months, had not yet acquired any form of language (in any case, oral language or that employing gestures of the head). “This,” Spitz continues, “agrees with our hypothesis concerning the critical role of the oral zone and anaclitic object-relations in the acquisition of human semantic communication. In Monica’s case, when the nutrition process was moved from the mouth to the abdominal fistula, neither the mouth nor the head were specifically involved in relations satisfying a need. As a result, she had not even acquired head movements intended for semantic communication, all the more reason for her to be unable to use her mouth for verbalization.”
J. Piaget and B. Inhelder, La phychologie de l’enfant (Paris: P.U.F., 1964), p. 10.
Ibid.
See in this regard D. W. Winnicott, in Jeu et réalité — L’espace potentiel, trans. C. Monod and J. B. Pontalis (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), especially chapter 1, “Objets transitionnels et phénomènes transitionnels.”
See C. Trevarthen, “L’action dans l’espace et la perception de l’espace: Mécanismes cérébraux de base,” in De l’espace corporel à l’espace écologique (Paris: P.U.F., 1974).
Cf. Cobliner (W. Godfrey), “L’école genevoise de psychologie génétique et la psychanalyse: analogies et dissemblances,” published in appendix to Spitz’s De la naissance à la parole (Paris: P.U.F., 1968), p. 255.
Cf. Baudelaire, “Un hémisphère dans une chevelure” in Petits poèmes en prose (Paris: Pléiade), p. 252.
As Bachelard stated in his own fashion in La psychanalyse du Feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), p. 44: “We can study only what we first dreamed about.”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Bulletin de Psychologie, no. 236 (1964): 177.
Cf., for example, Erwin Strauss, Vom Sinn der Sinne.
See E. Vurpillot, “Les débuts de la construction de l’espace chez l’enfant,” in De l’espace corporel à l’espace écologique (Paris: P.U.F., 1974), p. 108.
Piaget and Inhelder, La psychologie de l’enfant, p. 15.
H. Maldiney, Regard parole espace (Lausanne: l’Age d’Homme, 1973), p. 16.
Let me emphasize that even from the perspective of experimental psychology, there is something lacking in Piaget concerning a psychology of vision and a psychology of perception in general.
Paul Ricoeur, in La Métaphore Vive (Paris: Seuil, 1975), p. 316, on the subject of P. Wheelwright#x2019;s Mètaphor and Reality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968).
M. Merleau-Ponty, L’oeil et l’esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1976).
Cf. Piaget, La construction du réel chez l’enfant (Neuchátel: Delachaux, 1963), p. 25.
Ibid., p. 23.
Cf. Piaget, La construction du réel chez l’enfant, p. 79: “the child counts only on the repetition of his accommodation movements to realize his desire, and in the event of failure, on the effectiveness of his passion and his anger."
Pierre Kaufmann in L’expérience émotionnelle de l’espace (1967), p. 60. Further, continuing his analysis of anger, Kaufmann writes, “But if anger is the anger of the subject, if it arises out of an unheeded call to others, where identity is founded…” (p. 62; my italics).
E. H. Gombrich, based on psychological data, points out in his Meditations on a Hobby Horse of the Roots of Artistic Form (London: Phaidon Press, 1971): “Our whole perceptual apparatus is somehow hypersensitized in this direction of physiognomy vision and the merest hint suffices for us to create an expressive physiognomy that ‘looks’ at us with surprising intensity. In a heightened state of emotion, in the dark, or in a feverish spell, the looseness of this trigger may assume pathological forms” (p. 6).
See in this regard Liliane LurÇat’s recent work, L’enfant et l’espace (le rôle du corps) (Paris: P.U.F., 1976). The author writes, “the corporeal schema, far from being a primitive canvas on which later acquisitions would be added, is the result of connections which are established between postural space and ambient space. These connections are made through the activity of the subject, including the activities involved in pegging locations” (pp. 31-32).
I am referring here to the notion of “transitional” and “potential” in D. W. Winnicott.
For the discussion of this notion of “interval,” see Pierre Fedida, “L’objeu — objet, jeu et enfance/l’espace psychothérapeutique,” Psychanalyse à l’université 1, no. 3 (1976).
This notion of “body image” contributes to that of corporeal schema (which designates the interiorized counterpart to the activities of orientation, lateralization, and even of practical spatialization in general) an imaginary component, whose somatic impact can nonetheless be quite real. It corresponds to the habitation, the imaginary and “symbolic” obsession of the lived body experience, understanding that this experience is that of a “sexual” body. With regard to the tie between body image and spatial experience in psychosis, as well as the “symbolizing function of ‘the body image,’” see the works of Gisela Pankow, L’homme et sa psychose (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1973) and Structure familiale et psychose (Paris; Aubier-Montaigne, 1977).
See J. Guillaumin, “Psychanalyse, épreuve de la ‘réalité psychique,’” Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse, no. 12 (Autumn 1975), p. 183: “The point that seems decisive to me is that the instrument of the experience of reality has always been for Freud the motor character of relations, and, in general, action.”
Cf. Piaget and Inhelder, La psychologie de l’enfant, p. 15.
Bruno Bettelheim, Psychanalyse des contes de fées (Paris: Laffont, 1976).
Roland Kuhn, “Daseinanalytische Studie Über-die Bedeutung von Grenzen im Wahn,” in Monatschift fÜr die Psychiatrie und Neurologie (1951), quoted by H. Maldiney in Regard Parole Espace.
The poet evokes this once in the following terms: “I dreamt of my sweet birth-space” ("Frost at Midnight,” w. 27—28). Let me recall that along with this “memory” the figure of the poet’s father should also be associated, and this nuances (and corrects) the expression, cited below, regarding “communion with the maternal world.”
On Coleridge, see Christian La Cassagnère, introduction to Coleridge-Poèmes (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1975).
See ibid., p. 78. The poems concerned are “The hour when we shall meet again” and “A day dream.”
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Da Villela-Petit, M.P. (1986). Toward a Genetic Phenomenology of Space Through a Critical Approach to Piaget. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Phenomenology of man and of the Human Condition. The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research, vol 21. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-4596-8_11
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