“L’uomo delle ventiquattro ore”. Per un’apologia del sogno in Bachelard, Binswanger e Merleau-Ponty

Abstract

The paper investigates the convergence of Gaston Bachelard, Ludwig Binswanger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on dreaming. Despite their differing aims, these perspectives exhibit an elective affinity, rather than a deliberate convergence, in marking a significant epistemological rupture with the mainstream psychoanalytic approach. Through a comparative assessment of Binswanger’s existential analysis, Bachelard’s material imagination and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological perspective, the article reconstructs the lines of mutual cross-fertilization, demonstrating how these authors’ efforts converge towards a reappraisal of the oneiric experience. The dream thus emerges as a bearer of immanent significance, that cannot be confined to the psychoanalytic dichotomy of manifest and latent content. In an almost complete reversal, far from being a mere disruption of consciousness, the dream is rediscovered as site of primordial expressivity, a privileged experience in which existence appears to itself, revealing the interdependence of feeling, image and movement.