The following text explains a bit about the use of the verb 'thematize'.

HTH

Sheila




Merleau-Ponty's philsophy is much richer than I can do justice to here. But one application is to understand the psychoanalytic unconscious from a phenomenological perspective. As we've seen, for Merleau-Ponty, lived experience is prior to abstract reflection; it is pre-thematic. We live it, but don't explicitly think about and calculate what we are doing. When I am most typically engaged in a task, I do not reflect on the task, and this mode of ready-to-hand engagement is the primordial, experiential ground which makes reflection possible. Whenever we reflect intellectually on experience, we have to go back to the lived world of our experience prior to that reflection. This is a way to think about the unconscious without necessarily buying into a Freudian meta-psychology. From this perspective, the unconscious can be viewed as the pre-thematic, pre-objective, lived, concrete, latent experience of our engagement with the world (with others and alongside things) prior to reflection. It is what we live out but do not speak or think. When we thematize it, bring it to reflection, we make it thematic or "conscious." From here, we can understand repression as a lived, pre-reflective and motivated refusal to ***thematize*** or reflect on that lived experience (Sartre called this "bad faith.").

Robert Romanyshyn gives an excellent example of this. He gives an example of a woman who is walking down the street. Whenever a man walks by her, she unreflectively pulls her coat across her breasts in order to hide her breasts. She is not reflectively aware of doing this, but at a bodily, lived level of engagement, this is an intentional, meaningful act, even if pre-reflective. Now, suppose someone notices this and calls it to her attention. She may then, perhaps even with suprise, note that she was not aware of this act. Yet if she explored this, she would likely discover that this pre-reflective act is meaningful and has a history. One can imagine that the woman sees men as sexual predators who objectify her body and are a threat. The act of covering her breasts is an act which disallows her breasts to be objectified by the gaze of those men.

If we explored further with this woman, we may find that she had been raped in the past and that the man who raped her had stared at her breasts prior to violating her. All of this history is contained in that lived, embodied, pre-reflective act of covering her breasts as she walks down the street. Merleau-Ponty would say that our history becomes "sedimented" in our bodily gestures, contained there as latent and unreflected upon even though it is meaningful and lived out in the world. ***To make these meanings thematic and subject to reflection is the process of, in a sense, making the "unconscious" "conscious"--or making the pre-thematic thematic***. There is a kind of freedom in this: in freeing her lived, prereflective experience to the level of thematic reflection, what had previously been lived prereflectively can then be subject to a choice. The woman may choose to no longer fear men, to move beyond her aweful past, and to cease her previously latent act of covering her breasts, if she wishes to do so. This is at least one way to view a phenomenologically-oriented psychotherapy, without resorting to Freudian meta-psychology. With this phenomenological understanding of the unconscious, we can understand the unconscious as a "lateral depth."