 Merleau-Ponty’s lifelong interest in the philosophical status of perception is already reflected in his successful 1933 application for a subvention to study the nature of perception, where he proposes to synthesize recent findings in experimental psychology (especially Gestalt psychology) and neurology to develop an alternative to dominant intellectualist accounts of perception inspired by critical (Kantian) philosophy. Interestingly, this early proposal emphasizes the significance of the perception of one’s own body for distinguishing between the “universe of perception” and its intellectual reconstructions, and it gestures toward the “realist philosophers of England and America” (presumably William James and A. N. Whitehead, as presented in Jean Wahl’s 1932 Vers le concret) for their insights into the irreducibility of the sensory and the concrete to intellectual relations. While this initial proposal makes no mention of phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty’s subsequent 1934 report on the year’s research, noting the limitations of approaching the philosophical study of perception through empirical research alone, emphasizes the promise of Husserlian phenomenology for providing a distinctively philosophical framework for the investigation of psychology. In particular, Merleau-Ponty mentions the distinction between the natural and transcendental attitudes and the intentionality of consciousness as valuable for “revising the very notions of consciousness and sensation” (NP: 192/78). He also cites approvingly Aron Gurwitsch’s claim that Husserl’s analyses “lead to the threshold of Gestaltpsychologie”, the second area of focus in this early study. The Gestalt is “a spontaneous organization of the sensory field” in which there are “only organizations, more or less stable, more or less articulated” (NP: 193/79). Merleau-Ponty’s brief summary of Gestalt psychology, anticipating research presented in his first two books, emphasizes the figure-ground structure of perception, the phenomena of depth and movement, and the syncretic perception of children. Nevertheless, Merleau-Ponty concludes—again citing Gurwitsch—that the epistemological framework of Gestalt psychology remains Kantian, requiring that one look “in a very different direction, for a very different solution” to the problem of the relation between the world described naturalistically and the world as perceived (NP: 198/82).