Between Barthes and Merleau-Ponty

On the Possibility and Developments of a Phenomenological Psychopathology of Love

Abstract

This article proposes a phenomenological approach to the amorous experience through a dialogue between Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1977) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945)—moving beyond theories of love. Given the scarcity of phenomenological accounts that conceive of lived love as both origin and evidence of structure, expressed in the linguistic gesture, this study seeks to reconstitute the amorous discourse as a fundamental phenomenon of experience. Even without explicit ties to clinical practice, the authors, each in their own way, provide contributions toward a phenomenological psychopathology of enamoration—contributions that underpin the authorial concept of pathologies of love. Barthes, on the one hand, dramatizes the lover as a fragmented subject, caught in the tension of language, while Merleau-Ponty, on the other, categorizes the affective-sexual experience as an original mode of perception and embodied meaning. Building on this, a reorganization of Barthes’s figures is proposed according to the conditions of possibility of the amorous experience: intersubjectivity, corporeality, spatiality, temporality, and affectivity. Finally, a phenomenological therapeutics of love is outlined, grounded in intercorporeality and oriented toward the maximal phenomena of lived maturation, as a means of addressing the pathologies of love. This trajectory is condensed into a conceptual map—a reading guide for the article and a synthesis of the phenomenological conditions and developments of love.