MP's 1950–51 account of the third-year crisis — transitivism "surpassed in the order of habitual life, but not in the order of feelings" — makes the failure of full identification *constitutive of individuation*, structurally prefiguring the late chiasm as "imminent and never realized"
ID: third-year-crisis-prefigures-chiasm-failure-of-identification Title: MP's 1950–51 account of the third-year crisis — transitivism "surpassed in the order of habitual life, but not in the order of feelings" — makes the failure of full identification constitutive of individuation, structurally prefiguring the late chiasm as "imminent and never realized" Status: candidate Confidence: speculative Claim type: structural-parallel Created: 2026-06-14 Updated: 2026-06-14 Sources: merleau-ponty-2010-child-psychology-pedagogy Wiki homes: chiasm, coexistence, transitivism
Claim
In the 1950–51 Sorbonne account of the third-year crisis (following Elsa Köhler), MP treats jealousy and stage-fright not as contingent psychological failures but as constitutive of individuation through the failure of full identification with the other: "Transitivism is surpassed in the order of habitual life, but not in the order of feelings" (CPP ch. 5 §V). This developmental structure — surpassing that pushes back without abolishing, leaving an irreducible non-coincidence in the affective register — is a structural parallel to the late MP's chiasm as "always imminent and never realized in fact" (V&I Ch 4, p. 147): both turn on the impossibility of complete identification / coincidence as itself the constitutive relational structure, not as a defect of it.
Evidence
- merleau-ponty-2010-child-psychology-pedagogy — ch. 5 §V (extraction-note Pass 2a item 7; raw line 3627, verified verbatim): "Transitivism is surpassed in the order of habitual life, but not in the order of feelings." Syncretism is "pushed back [repoussé] more than it is suppressed," surviving "in love, in the abandoned's refusal of dependence." The non-completion is constitutive, not residual.
- merleau-ponty-2010-child-psychology-pedagogy — extraction note Recurring Motifs / cross-source flag: the third-year-crisis formulation flagged as prefiguring the late "imminent and never realized" structure; homed under the corpus motif "failure of identification as constitutive."
- chiasm — late-leg anchor: chiasm as "a reversibility always imminent and never realized in fact" (V&I Ch 4, p. 147); the non-coincidence "is not an ontological void... it is the zero of pressure between two solids that makes them adhere to one another" (p. 148). The structural form (non-coincidence as constitutive of the relation, not its failure) is the same in both registers.
Counterpressure / Limits
Developmental claims are notoriously difficult to align with ontological claims; the parallel is suggestive but not yet textually anchored on the late-MP side from within the lectures — the Welsh lectures themselves never use chiasm vocabulary, and the alignment is the wiki's synthesis, not MP's stated continuity. The two registers differ: the third-year crisis is an affective/intersubjective non-coincidence between persons; the chiasm is a sensing/sensed non-coincidence within and across flesh. The shared "failure of identification as constitutive" form may be a genuine structural invariant in MP's thought or a homonymy the word "identification" invites. Single-source on the developmental leg; the late leg is cited but the bridge is unanchored — hence candidate, not live.
Payoff
If accepted, the chiasm's "imminent and never realized" structure gains a documented developmental antecedent fifteen years earlier, in MP's own teaching, rather than appearing as a late ontological invention. It reframes the third-year crisis on transitivism / coexistence not as a stage MP describes but as an early site of the structure that the late ontology will universalize: non-coincidence as the enabling condition of relation (the imminence is what permits communication; the never-realized is what prevents collapse). A reader could not see from the chiasm or transitivism pages alone that the same "surpassed-but-not-abolished / imminent-but-never-realized" form spans MP's developmental psychology and his late ontology.
Status History
- 2026-06-14 — created at candidate (audit v1.8 D4, non-cohort harvest walk); single-source on the developmental leg with an unanchored bridge to the late chiasm, so the live gate (Test 2: ≥2 anchored bullets from ≥2 distinct sources for the parallel itself) is not met. Both legs cite real passages, the claim is contestable, and counterpressure is recorded — adequate for candidate. Promotion to live would require a late-MP source page or extraction note that anchors the "failure of identification as constitutive" form on the V&I side independently of the wiki's synthesis.