Do animals or humans “perceive” behind them?

In the 'Appendix to Chapter VI' of “A Process Model” (APM), there is a section titled “f-3) Perception behind one's back”:

Merleau‑Ponty pointed out that we perceive and feel the space behind us even without hearing or seeing anything directly. (Gendlin, 1997/2018, p. 106)

The same is discussed in his earlier writing, written in 1980s:

You can physically feel the space behind you. If there is someone following you on the street at night, your body-sense includes what might happen and the possible ways you might act. (Gendlin, 1986, p. 143)

However, he did not specify its source. I suspect that he is probably referring to the following statement in Merleau-Ponty's “Phenomenology of Perception” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962), one of his representative works:

...the real objects which are not part of our visual field can be present to us only as images, and that is why they are no more than ‘permanent possibilities of sensations’. If we abandon the empiricist postulate of the priority of contents, we are free to recognize the strange mode of existence enjoyed by the object behind our back. (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 25; cf. 1945, p. 35)

What is Gendlin really trying to say by citing Merleau-Ponty? Let me start with the conclusion of my view:

At first glance, Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on the “primacy of perception” seems at odds with Gendlin’s insistence on “interaction prior to the perception of the five senses.” But from Gendlin’s point of view, Merleau-Ponty is more concerned with “we perceive and feel the space behind us even without hearing or seeing anything directly” in the sense that he was very close to Gendlin’s view of interaction prior to the perception of the five senses. At the time, however, there was no conceptual device for this. By not assigning the concept of “perception” in the usual sense to feelings about the back, he was trying to say something new. His paper from the early 1990s, "The primacy of the body, not the primacy of perception" (Gendlin, 1992), seems to say more about this than APM:

Merleau-Ponty widens the understanding of perception toward including interaction and the body. But in giving the primacy to "perception" he encourages a reading that seems to retain a traditional problem. (Gendlin, 1992, p. 343)

Merleau-Ponty says, for example, that we sense the space behind our backs. Please notice for a moment that this is true; you can sense the space behind your back. Is that still to be called "perception?" It is not vision, hearing, or touch, nor is it just the togetherness of the five senses. Is it only some prior work done by the body, to make perception possible? Is it something that is found only in vision and in touch, only as latent in them? No, it is rather a direct bodily sense that you have and use all the time. If we still call this sensing "perception," we must make it clear how far we exceed the usual meaning of the word. (Gendlin, 1992, p. 346)

I stay close to Merleau-Ponty, but I move further in the direction in which he already moves: He greatly enriches and enlarges what can be meant by "perception." He finds the body's interaction and intentionality prior and presupposed in perception. I move further in these directions. (Gendlin, 1992, p. 342)

It can be said that APM is a reexamination of this issue from the animal level, going back to the evolutionary stage before humans:

Say the animal saw or smelled a predator a while ago, and is now running away. It has not yet run far enough that it can relax. The predator is now being perceived—not in the usual sense but certainly in our sense. ... Obviously the felt and perceived behavior space includes much that is not the “perception” of the five senses. (Gendlin, 1997/2018, p. 106)

In (f) above we took up how a situation (a behavior context) includes objects perceived and felt behind the body as much as in front. Behavior space includes the predator behind the escaping animal. Behavior space does not consist of bits of color and smell, but of the bodily implied behaviors and their objects. (Gendlin, 1997/2018, p. 112)

The above corresponds to the following argument in another section of “m) Kination: Imagination and felt sense” in APM:

The traditional theory is wrong, that the five senses are originally separate and related only by association. What we “only” see is formed already crossed with what we hear, taste, smell, touch, and with how we live and act in situations. (Gendlin, 1986, p. 151)

The old scheme is wrong, that only the five senses (separately or in sum) tell about a situation. In fact, one would be hard-put to describe any human situation just in bits of tactile roughness, color, sound and smell, put together by some rational unities. (Gendlin, 1991, p. 81)

Our bodies are interaction in the environment; they interact as bodies, not just through what comes with the five senses. Our bodies don't lurk in isolation behind the five peepholes of perception. (Gendlin, 1992, p. 344)

In physiology and current philosophy the body is–mistakenly–assumed to have information about the world only through the five senses. ... The most common ancient and modern assumption has been that we cannot know anything that doesn't come through our senses. ... the body, at any rate, isn't supposed to have information other than through the five senses. (Gendlin, 1993, pp. 24–5)

The whole body is an interaction with the environment. In traditional Western philosophy the whole body was ignored. Experience had to be built out of receptions by the five sense‑organs. In order to think of those as the source of experience, one had to jump from colors and smells to the experience of objects, things, and situations. One was not supposed to notice that even the simplest situation cannot be thought of as bits of color and smell. (Gendlin, 1997/2018, p. 112)

Without denying the fact observed by Merleau-Ponty, Gendlin could have attempted to redefine and reformulate the broader scope of events appropriately.

References

Gendlin, E.T. (1986). Let your body interpret your dreams. Chiron.

Gendlin, E. T. (1991). Thinking beyond patterns: body, language and situations. In B. den Ouden, & M. Moen (Eds.), The Presence of Feeling in Thought (pp. 21–151). Peter Lang.

Gendlin, E.T. (1992). The primacy of the body, not the primacy of perception. Man and World, 25(3-4), 341-353.

Gendlin, E.T. (1993). Three assertions about the body.The Folio, 12(1), 21-33.

Gendlin, E.T. (1997/2018). A process model. Northwestern University Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception (C. Smith, trans.). Humanities Press. Originally published as Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945). Phénoménologie de la perception. Gallimard.