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what the touched hand recognizes when it becomes a touching hand, is nothing other thanthe flesh and its reflexive power. The body that I am is a “field of Being,” solelythinkable from the point of view of the flesh. If I feel space and, in that feeling, find thepeculiar mark of my inhabiting it, this always happens in a place of mysteriousinterchange, where (and by which) the traditional meanings of interiority and exteriorityare subverted. Only the source experience, 56 or -- retrieving a Husserlian terminology --“donation in flesh,” can help us elucidate in what measure space lodges itself between thefolds of my body, and my body between the folds of the world. 57 In this context ofreciprocal encroachment, the phenomenon of the dream appears to Merleau-Ponty as aprivileged mode of comprehending that mysterious corporeal interchange that shapes thevery enigma of space. Already in the Phénoménologie he states this, when he writes: “IfI wanted to describe perceptual experience accurately, I would say that it is perceived inme and not that I perceive. Every sensation contains a seed of dreaming.” 58 Merleau-Ponty’s work in 1945 could not exhaust the subject of the dream, yet the reference isnonetheless significant. By juxtaposing feeling with the phenomenon of the dream, in thecontext of that chiasmatic interchange which takes place inside of the sensible, we are ableto meditate upon the irreflected of the body in terms of an unconscious of the body inspace and an unconscious of space in the body.Throughout Merleau-Ponty’s work, the issue of the dream is, in a broad context,framed by the relation between psychoanalysis and phenomenology. In fact, the Frenchphilosopher never ceased to insist upon the need to shed light on “the true meaning ofpsychoanalysis,” 59 in which meaning he saw an inescapable way of criticizing intellectualisticconceptions of consciousness. In effect, if well analyzed, i.e., meditated uponoutside of the dangers of substantialism, psychoanalysis does confirm the teachings ofphenomenology, in that it unveils a “consciousness which, rather than knowledge orrepresentation, is investment.” 60 This possibility was already touched upon and broughtcloser in the debate initiated in the Phénoménologie on the subject of desire, as this isparticularly suitable for expressing the “inner intentionality of Being.” 61 Thus, thequestion of the dream or feeling is placed within the investigation of what is external inthe interior, and of what is interior in the external. 62 However, this possibility implies are-reading of Freudian psychoanalysis, i.e., a reading which is capable of regarding thelibido not just as a sex drive, but as a constitutive mode of being body in the world, andthe unconscious not just as a place for representation, ruled by determinate laws, butrather as a “global and universal power of incorporation.” 63 Once these theoretical linesare rectified, we may finally conclude that “the unconscious is feeling (in itself), becausefeeling is not our intellectual possession of ‘what’ is being felt, but rather our divestingourselves in its favor, an openness to what we do not have to think in order to know.” 64Such are the possibilities opened up to us by a body henceforth understood as a “naturalsymbolism.” 65 Given that “my own body” is both sensible (in the philosophical meaning)56Ibid., 209. Cf. Renaud Barbaras, Le tournant de l’expérience – Recherches sur la philosophie deMerleau-Ponty (Paris: Vrin, 1998), 83.57Cf. Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, 317.58Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie, 249.59Renaud Barbaras, De l’être du phénomène. Sur l’ontologie de Merleau-Ponty (Grenoble: Millon,1991), 313. Cf. Merleau-Ponty, Résumés, 69-70.60Barbaras, De l’être, 313.61Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, 298.62Merleau-Ponty, Résumés, 178.63Ibid.64Ibid., 179.65Ibid., 180.122