The Contributions of Merleau Ponty's notion of Body for the experience of the use and abuse of Chemical Substances

Abstract

Chemical substances are a historical theme of humanity and increasingly contemporary, and Merleau Ponty's lens is to understand this use and abuse of substances globally. This research aims to make connections with Merleau Ponty's notion of the body and the experience of using chemical substances. The work is qualitative in nature, typified as exploratory and methodologically structured as a bibliographical research and aims to understand the field of chemical dependencies in contemporary times, from the perspective of Merleau-Ponty's existential Phenomenology. To this end, an exploratory bibliographical research was carried out searching for relevant texts for the theoretical support of the study and related to Merleau-Ponty's assumptions through his phenomenological perspective, offering valuable guidance for therapists and contributing to the development of clinical psychology as a discipline.  It is concluded that the conception of the body, as discussed by Merleau-Ponty, offers a valuable perspective on how individuals relate to the consumption of chemical substances, making it necessary to explore the subjective life, historicity and possibilities of existence of the subject, who is not only influenced by the world around him, but also constitutes it, thus making the problem of the abusive use of chemical substances not only an individual phenomenon, but a social and political one in society.