This book explores Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s provocative claim that “the unconscious is feeling itself,” reframing the unconscious as a fundamentally relational phenomenon rather than a private repository of repressed content. Drawing on clinical insights from Françoise Dolto, Pierre Marty, Didier Anzieu, and René Kaës, Stefan Kristensen bridges psychoanalysis and phenomenology to show how bodily manifestations of unconscious processes shape selfhood and social bonds. The book traces the development of the self through speech and body, examines psychosomatic illnesses as symbolic interactions, and investigates the unconscious dynamics of power relations within groups. By articulating the interplay between corporeality, relationality, and symbolic structures, Kristensen offers a groundbreaking perspective on the unconscious as an intercorporeal linking force essential to the integrity of the self. This work will appeal to psychoanalysts, philosophers, and scholars of clinical psychology seeking to understand the political and ontological dimensions of unconscious life.

Stefan Kristensen is Professor of Aesthetics and Art Theory at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Strasbourg, France