Existential Feeling and Psychopathology

Matthew Ratcliffe

Abstract: Bodily feelings are often construed as experiences of internal bodily states. However, references to such feelings, both in everyday life and in the context of psychiatry, suggest that they also make a significant contribution to how things other than the body are experienced. This paper focuses on a class of feelings that I call existential feelings. They have neither the body nor an object or state of affairs outside of the body as their sole object. Rather, they are structures of relatedness between self and world, which comprise a changeable sense of reality, situatedness, locatedness, connectedness, significance, and so on. I suggest that reflection upon the phenomenology of touch can serve to illuminate how something can be both a bodily feeling and a way of experiencing the world. In so doing, I criticize the sharp bodyworld distinction that permeates discussion of feeling. I appeal to descriptions of various pathological and nonpathological experiences to suggest that we should be wary of double-counting when it comes to feelings of the body and experiences of things outside of the body. In the case of existential feelings at least, the two are not distinct, but inextricable aspects of the same unitary experiential structure. Some bodily feelings just are, I claim, ways in which the world appears. Keywords: bodily feeling, existential feeling, phenomenology, touch; unreality

Feeling and World Experience

e might think of bodily feelings as experiences of various states internal to the body. They are either intentional states that have the body or parts of it as their objects or, alternatively, they are not intentional at all and involve some kind of immediate awareness of ones bodily predicament. In either case, if I have a pain in my foot, feel my heart racing, or feel nauseous, what I am aware of is a state of my own body, rather than a state of affairs in the world outside of my body. Such a view is assumed by many authors writing on feelings and emotions, who argue that emotions cannot simply be feelings, given that the former are generally directed at states of affairs in the world, whereas the latter only concern occurrences internal to the body. As Ben-Zeev (2004, 253) puts it, despite the importance of feelings in emotions, equating the two is incorrect since emotions have an intentional component in addition to the feeling component. Feelings, he states, express our own state (2004, 2523).1 However, the term feeling is frequently employed to express experiences that are very closely associated with or perhaps even identical to ways of experiencing things external to the body. Nowhere is this more evident than in descriptions of

2009 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

180 PPP / Vol. 16, No. 2 / June 2009

various pathologies of experience. For example, Sass (2004, 127) notes that, in schizophrenia, affective abnormalities are closely bound up with the alterations of personhood or self-experience, and of the sense of reality. He uses the term affect in a fairly encompassing way, to include those states that are referred to as moods, emotions, and feelings. And he associates general diminution of affect, accompanied by increases in certain specific affective responses, with changes in the structure of world experience. Parnas and Sass similarly talk of an existential reorientation in schizophrenia, an altered sense of self, world, and the relationship between them. Again, they remark that this is related to diminished affect. Perception without affect is not lived but is more like a mechanical, purely receptive sensory process, unaccompanied by its feeling tone (2001, 105). The kinds of experiential changes that Sass and others associate with altered affect are not restricted to ways in which particular objects or situations are experienced. Instead, they are changes in the general structure of experience that affect the way in which everything is experienced, including oneself. In what follows, I explore the relationship between feeling and altered world experience. I argue that the relevant feelings are indeed bodily feelings. Certain feelings of the body do not have the body, in isolation from the world, as their object. Among these is a group of feelings that are not directed at specific objects or states of affairs within the world. Instead, they constitute a sense of relatedness between self and world, which shapes all experience. I refer to them as existential feelings, because they give us a changeable sense of reality and of belonging to the world (Ratcliffe, 2005, 2008). To understand cases of pathological existential feeling, I suggest that we also reflect on their role in more commonplace experiences. Unless we appreciate something of what the structure of experience is ordinarily like, we will not be in a good position to explain deviations from it. And the role of existential feeling in everyday experience is seldom recognized. Existential feelings have been neglected by philosophers, who have tended to focus on a standard list of emotions, including anger, joy, fear, and guilt, and to consider feelings

only insofar as they contribute to such states. As Campbell (1997, 6) notes, there is a tendency to restrict enquiry to a list of conceptually well behaved emotions, which are only a subset of feelings. However, although existential feelings do not appear in nice, tidy lists of emotions and feelings, they are often expressed by literary narratives. Consider the following passage from Sebastian Faulks The Girl at the Lion dOr:
She thought of the landscape of her childhood and the wooded slopes around the house where she was born. They seemed as alien to her now as these anonymous fields through which she passed. Since she felt she belonged to no part of it, she could make no sense of this material world, whether it was in the shape of natural phenomena, like woods and rivers, or in the guise of man-made things like houses, furniture and glass. Without the greeting of personal affection or association they were no more than collections of arbitrarily linked atoms that wriggled and chased each other into shapes that men had named. Although Anne didnt phrase her thoughts in such words, she felt her separation from the world. The fact that many of the patterns formed by random matter seemed quite beautiful made no difference; try as she might, she could dredge no meaning from the fertile hedgerows, no comfort from the pointless loveliness of the swelling woods and hills. (1990, 243)

The predicament that Faulks describes is not simply a way of experiencing self or world. It is an altered sense of relatedness between the two that affects the way in which both are experienced. A certain kind of feeling is at the same time a lack of connectedness to the world, an absence of warming familiarity, of significance, of belonging. And the scope of such feelings is not restricted to the relatedness between self and the inanimate world. In most if not all cases, they also encompass relations between self and others, as suggested by this passage from Sylvia Plaths The Bell Jar:
The two of them didnt even stop jitterbugging during the intervals. I felt myself shrinking to a small black dot against all those red and white rugs and that pinepanelling. I felt like a hole in the ground [. . . .] Its like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite directionevery second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel its really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that excitement at about a million miles an hour. (1966, 15)

Ratcliffe / Existential Feeling and Psychopathology

181

The protagonist is a nonparticipant spectator, watching two people dance. There are no others present in the room and the narrative conveys her sense of utter estrangement. She is in the room in a physical sense but not in a shared social situation. This feeling of detachment, of not being part of a situation, is both a way in which she feels and an absence of belonging that structures all experiences of self, other people, and impersonal objects. Existential feelings often feature in autobiographical accounts of psychiatric illness. Consider some of the descriptions offered by Renee, in Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl (Sechehaye 1970). Renee describes her experiences during different stages of the illness, making clear throughout her narrative the close connection between feeling, a sense of reality, and a sense of relatedness to the world. To begin with, we have a disturbing sense of unreality (p. 21); the schoolyard appeared limitless, unreal, mechanical and without meaning (p. 25). She also reports a loss of relatedness to other people, who seemed like puppets or mechanisms, rather than purposive agents interacting in a shared world: [I]t was as though reality, attenuated, had slipped away from all these things and these people (p. 26). Renee describes how, initially, she was drawn back into the world through practical activities and routines, which partially restored a sense of reality. But then she lost the feeling of practical things and sensed again the atmosphere of unreality (p. 29). She later describes herself as rejected by the world, on the outside of life, a spectator of a chaotic film unrolling ceaselessly before my eyes, in which I would never have a part (pp. 834). One possibility is that there is a normal, everyday way of encountering things, a consistent grasp of reality and of belonging to the world that most of us take for granted almost all of the time. However, certain remarks suggest that the manner in which we find ourselves in the world during the course of everyday life is actually quite variable. Although the existential shift is especially pronounced in Renees case, a diverse range of lesser changes in existential feeling are reported outside of psychiatric contexts. Maher (1999, 552) notes that people sometimes refer to a feeling

of awareness, mood, atmosphere, feeling of significance, feeling of conviction. But there are numerous other ways in which existential feelings are described and reference to them is commonplace. People talk of feeling conspicuous, alive, distant, dislodged, overwhelmed, cut off, lost, disconnected, out of sorts, out of touch with things, out of it, not quite with it, separate, detached, at one with the world, in harmony with things, and part of things. There are feelings of being, unreality, heightened reality, surreality, familiarity, unfamiliarity, strangeness, isolation, emptiness, belonging, being at home in the world, being at one with things, significance, and insignificance, and the list goes on. Such descriptions suggest general existential orientations, in conjunction with feelings. Some are quite mundane, such as feeling settled, at home, or part of things, whereas others, such as feeling estranged from everything, convey less frequent and sometimes pathological forms of experience. Once the variety of existential orientations that people express in everyday life is acknowledged, perhaps various reports of changed existential orientation in psychiatric illness will not seem quite so removed from certain everyday experiences, even though the existential changes involved in the former are much more pronounced. It might be the self, the world, a situation, other people, or the selfworld relation that is described as feeling a certain way. However, that different objects feature in descriptions need not imply that some such feelings concern self and not world and others world and not self. Descriptions can be changed without implying different kinds of experience. Consider the remark I feel strange. The same predicament might be conveyed by it feels strange or by everything feels strange. That there are numerous different descriptions of existential feeling does not imply that there are many such feelings. Perhaps different words are used to communicate similar phenomena, with strangeness amounting to the same thing as unfamiliarity, which might amount to much the same thing as a diminished sense of reality. Although I will not offer a taxonomy of existential feelings here, I will at least suggest that they are indeed many and diverse.2

182 PPP / Vol. 16, No. 2 / June 2009

My primary aim in this paper is to sketch a way of thinking about existential feeling. There are two aspects to this. First, I suggest that not all bodily feelings have the body as their object and that existential feelings are among those that do not. Then I make clear the distinctive way in which existential feelings contribute to experience, distinguishing them from specific experiential contents and also showing why their experiential role cannot be conveyed in terms of propositional attitudes. Before turning to these tasks, some terminological clarification is required. Where I use the term feeling, others, such as Sass (e.g., 2004), use affect. One problem with affect is that different people mean quite different things by it. For example, Hobson (2002) takes it to be a feature of interpersonal relatedness. Solomon (1993), in contrast, is dismissive of mere affect, which he construes as an awareness of ones own bodily states. Affect can also be understood in a physiological rather than phenomenological sense. For example, Davies and colleagues (2001, 140) note, in the context of a discussion of monothematic delusions, that patients need not be aware of reduced affective response, which is a matter of unconscious affective processing (although they are at least aware that their experience is different in some way). I take existential feeling to be a phenomenological category. There is unlikely to be a reliable correlation between the level of physiological affect and the phenomenology of feeling. By analogy, consider the feeling of a numb arm that one has just slept on. The arm and especially the hand are conspicuous precisely insofar as they lack sensation. Once sensation returns, they become less conspicuous. Similarly, a pronounced existential feeling could arise through a lack of affect, rather than an excess. Hence, I think the term feeling is more appropriate when it comes to phenomenological description. There are other alternatives to the term feeling. Heidegger (1962) refers to these ways of finding ourselves in the world as moods (Stimmungen). One reason for adopting the term existential feeling rather than mood is that, as I argue in what follows, certain bodily feelings do indeed play the role of what Heidegger calls mood. Something

can be both a bodily feeling and a sense of belonging to the world. Another reason is that, in using the term mood (or the German term Stimmung, which has slightly different connotations) there is the risk of restricting ones enquiry to an overly limited range of feelings. There is a considerable variety of existential feelings. They can be (a) short lived, (b) sustained over a period of time, or (c) retained over the course of a life as habitual temperaments. But the English term mood only seems suited to (b). Feeling is more accommodating. Further, most of the phenomena that I call existential feelings are indeed referred to by people as feelings, rather than as moods or, for that matter, as emotions. A focus on the latter two terms therefore serves to distract attention from many of the existential predicaments that people attempt to express. The term emotion might invoke the usual list of states, such as anger, fear, happiness, sadness, shame, guilt, and regret. And mood might make one think of misery, elation, or boredom, or just of good and bad moods. But belonging, familiarity, completeness, estrangement, distance, separation, and homeliness are usually referred to as feelings. One can speak of the feeling of being or the feeling of reality, whereas the emotion or mood of being or reality sounds peculiar at best. I do not want to deny that certain states that are referred to as moods and emotions fall into the category of existential feeling. However, others do not. The emotion of intense grief might take the form of an all-enveloping alteration of relatedness to things. But fear of a particular entity is something that one experiences only when one already has a sense of belonging to a world. Similarly, although some moods are existential feelings, others are not. The term mood is employed quite loosely and can refer to other experiential predicaments that have specific objects. One can be in a bad mood with somebody or about something in particular. Such states do not seem to be allencompassing existential orientations. Setting aside such terminological concerns, the conception of existential feeling that I offer here owes much to Heideggers treatment of mood. Heidegger claims that mood constitutes a sense of belonging to the world that is phenomenologi-

Ratcliffe / Existential Feeling and Psychopathology

183

cally prior to explicit thought and activity, and also prior to any distinction we might impose between self and world or internal and external: a mood assails us. It comes neither from outside nor from inside, but arises out of Being-in-theworld, as a way of such Being (1962, 176). Thus, moods do not have specific intentional objects and neither do they simply envelop the world as a whole, construed as a collection of objects. Rather, they are modes of being-in-the-world, where the world is a context to which we belong and not an object of experience. There is, as Heidegger says, a tendency to pass over this world and focus instead on objects as they are presented to a detached observer (1962, 128). However, Heideggers account is, I think, lacking in three central respects. First, he restricts his discussion to only a few variants of mood, focusing on the contrast between a mundane sense of practical belonging and the mood of anxiety (Angst), which wholly eradicates that sense of belonging.3 Second, some of the moods that Heidegger does discuss are arguably more nuanced than he acknowledges, requiring further subdivision. Consider anxiety, for example. Heidegger characterizes this as a complete absence of everyday practical familiarity, an apprehension of having altogether lost an ordinarily taken-for-granted sense of practical, purposive connectedness to things. However, it is arguable that his descriptions of anxiety apply to a range of subtly different experiences. For example, Glas (2003) describes a number of what he calls fundamental, basic, or existential anxieties, all of which he regards as ways of being in the world, rather than a specifically focused intentional states. One form of anxiety he describes is a feeling of disconnectedness from the world:
What prevails is a tormenting feeling of distance, the awareness of an unbridgeable gap. This feeling can amount to the awareness that one lives in a vacuum and is about to suffocate, or that one lives in an unreal world in which things [are not] what they seem to be and in which attempts to connect fail as if there were a glassy wall between the person and the surrounding world. (Glas 2003, 238)

guishes it from several other kinds of existential anxiety, including anxiety concerning meaningless, anxiety in the face of death and anxiety before existence itself, any one of which might be plausibly identified with Heideggers anxiety. A third weakness in Heideggers account of mood is that it does not address the role played by the body in experience. He does remark that his moods have been referred to by others as feelings: the phenomena have long been wellknown ontically under the terms affects and feelings and have always been under consideration in philosophy (1962, 178). But he does not tell us whether moods are in any sense feelings and, at one point, he contrasts moods as existential modes with degrees of feeling-tones (1962, 181). So a puzzle remains as to whether and how these moods, once they have been salvaged from a history of misinterpretation, relate to the feeling body. Without some further account of what moods are, we are left with the conclusion that a mood is simply whatever it is that plays the relevant phenomenological role. Heidegger does acknowledge his neglect of the body: this bodily nature hides a whole problematic of its own, though we shall not treat it here (1962, 143). In his later Zollikon Seminars, he recalls this remark and goes on to discuss the phenomenology of the body (2001, 8092). However, he does not explicitly relate the body to mood, and it is unclear how he understands the relationship between mood and our bodily phenomenology. Thus, a puzzle remains as to whether and how these moods, once they have been salvaged from misinterpretation, can still be bodily feelings or at least incorporate bodily feelings. I suggest that this can be solved by modeling our understanding of existential feeling on an appreciation of our tactile phenomenology.

Touch and Relatedness

I want to suggest that manybut perhaps not allof the phenomena referred to as bodily feelings are not simply perceptions of bodily states, distinct from the perception of ones surroundings. The tendency to think that they are stems in part, I suspect, from the emphasis that is almost always placed upon visual perception, which is some-

This looks fairly close to the kind of predicament that Heidegger describes. But Glas distin-

184 PPP / Vol. 16, No. 2 / June 2009

times characterized in a curiously disembodied fashion. Several authors have commented on the privileged experiential role often assigned to disembodied vision. For example, Heidegger (1962, 215) notes the remarkable priority of seeing in philosophical enquiry, conceived of as a pure beholding of objects that is abstracted from our bodily, practical situatedness in the world. This, he says, is not a recent trend, but something that has been engrained in philosophical thought from the beginning onwards (1962, 187). And, as noted by Merleau-Ponty (1962, 316), vision is more objectifying than, say, touch. A visual scene can be presented from a distance as simply there, seemingly uncorrupted by the influence of ones own body. Thus, there is a tendency to separate subject from object, internal from the external, the body from the rest of the world.4 However, if we approach the phenomenology of perception by starting from touch, the neat divide between subject and object, which might be thought to characterize at least some cases of visual perception, does not apply: as the subject of touch, I cannot flatter myself that I am everywhere and nowhere; I cannot forget in this case that it is through my body that I go to the world (MerleauPonty 1962, 316). According to Merleau-Ponty, the presupposition of a subjectobject model hinders enquiry into the structure of experience by setting us apart from the world. What it fails to recognize is that all experience incorporates a sense of belonging to the world, of relatedness to it, which cannot be cleanly partitioned into perception of subject and perception of object:
[Objective thinking emphasizes] visual qualities, because these give the impression of being autonomous, and because they are less directly linked to our body and present us with an object rather than introducing us into an atmosphere. But in reality all things are concretions of a setting, and any explicit perception of a thing survives in virtue of a previous communication with a certain atmosphere. (1962, 320)

philosophy. To my knowledge, the two authors who have addressed the topic in most depth of late are OShaughnessy (1989, 1995, 2000) and Martin (1992, 1993, 1995). Both focus on the phenomenology of touch. I suggest that both accounts are phenomenologically inaccurate, insofar as they impose too clear a distinction between experience of body and of world. OShaughnessy acknowledges that touch and proprioception or body sense are intimately connected. Indeed, he describes them as mirror image senses, with one sense leading us outwards beyond ourselves, the other taking us backwards into ourselves (2000, 674). So, in the case of touch, perception of bodily position and movement informs perception of things external to the body obtained via tactile sensation, and vice versa. But touch and proprioception are, he claims, distinct senses. In the case of proprioception, only the body is perceived, whereas via touch we perceive things outside the body. I think that this distinction is unsustainable. Consider the varieties of tactile experience. There is a difference between actively touching something and being passively touched by it. As Merleau-Ponty notes of passive touch:
[It] tells us hardly anything but the state of our own body and almost nothing about the object. Even on the most sensitive parts of our tactile surface, pressure without movement produces a scarcely identifiable phenomenon. (1962, 315)

The way in which the body provides such a setting and in which bodily feelings contribute to it is, I suggest, better illustrated by touch than by vision (even though I will admit that bodily feelings are equally implicated in vision). Very little work has been done on touch in recent Anglophone

Active tactile exploration, in contrast, can involve a range of different feelings, such as feelings of softness, hardness, roughness, oiliness, and sharpness. These are not assemblies of synchronic, tactile atoms that are combined to form complex perceptions. A feeling of roughness, smoothness, wetness, or oiliness depends on patterns of bodily activity, rather than being a sequence of perceptual snapshots. Smoothness, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, is not a collection of similar pressures, but the way in which a surface utilizes the time occupied by our tactile exploration or modulates the movement of our hand (1962, 315). Touch without proprioception would thus be stripped of most of the phenomenological discriminations that are integral to touch. There would be no distinction between passive and active

Ratcliffe / Existential Feeling and Psychopathology

185

touch, because the ability to make this distinction involves a sense of what ones body is doing. And, in the absence of proprioception, all the more subtle differences between kinds of tactile feeling would be lost. Now, OShaughnessy (2000, 30) does emphasize that touch and proprioception each in different ways depend inextricably upon the existence of the other, but he states that they are not to be identified with each other, because not all proprioception relates to touch. However, one can accept that all touch incorporates proprioception without also accepting that the role of proprioception is exhausted by its contribution to touch. Unlike OShaughnessy, Martin (1992, 1993, 1995) claims that the bodily and non-bodily sides of touch are inextricable aspects of a unitary perception. In touching, it is ones body that one is aware of: ones own body is the proper object of such awareness in that anything which one feels in this way is taken to be part of ones body (1992, 201-202). But touch involves perception of bodily boundaries and thus has a double-aspect structure, given that perception of what is happening at a boundary tells one something about the external forces that are acting upon that boundary. So, by touching, we explore things in the world through the ways in which they affect us at our boundaries. Touch is a unitary perception of boundaries, which has bodily and worldly aspects to it. We can, Martin claims, focus our attention on either of these aspects:
One can attend to it as a bodily sensationin which case its spatial character reveals the location of sensation or attend to it as tactual perception of something lying beyond the body but in contact with it. (1992, 204)

the act of perceiving. If my left hand is touching my right hand, and if I should suddenly wish to apprehend with my right hand the work of my left hand as it touches, this reflection of the body upon itself always miscarries at the last moment: the moment I feel my left hand with my right hand, I correspondingly cease touching my right hand with my left hand. (1968, 9)

What Martin does not acknowledge is that the bodily and non-bodily sides of touch can be experienced in very different ways, depending, in part, on the extent to which they occupy the foreground of awareness. Consider the case of touching ones own body. In several writings, Merleau-Ponty employs the example of one hand touching the other, in part to illustrate the dual role of the body in touch, as both subject and object:
the moment perception comes my body effaces itself before it and never does the perception grasp the body in

When I touch one hand with the other, one hand feels and the other hand is felt. The hand that does the touching is not an object of perception but, rather, that through which I perceive. But what happens if I make the touching hand an object of reflection, while touching with it? It ceases to be the perceiver and becomes the perceived; the roles of toucher and touched are reversed. The perceiving body can only play the perceptual role that it does in so far as it is not perceived as an object. Touch is not just a matter of different aspects, but also of those aspects contributing to the experience in different ways. Hence, importantly, the term bodily feeling is equivocal. It can mean either (a) a feeling that has the body or part of it as an object or (b) a feeling done by the body, which may or may not have the body as an object. Phenomenological reflection must respect this difference.5 The touching hand is phenomenologically accessible precisely as a touching hand. It is part of the experience but it is not an object of experience. Any act of reflection that takes it as an object in order to reflect upon it changes the structure of the experience. In touching, the way in which the hand feels consists precisely in its not being felt in an object-like way and the way in which the hand feels is inseparable from the way in which the object of touch is felt. However, it would be premature to settle for the view that touch always involves two identifiable aspects, a touching and a touched. This may well be the case in certain instances of active touch, where a part of ones body disappears into the activity and becomes a perceiver, rather than something that is perceived. But other instances of touching do not incorporate such a clear perceiverperceived distinction, a foreground perceptual object and a background perceiving. In contrast with Merleau-Pontys example of one hand actively touching the other, consider the case of putting your palms together, as if to pray. There

186 PPP / Vol. 16, No. 2 / June 2009

is no clear feelingfelt structure here, just a feeling of touching that is not attributable to one hand or to the other. And there is no sharp sense of the boundaries between the two hands, just the touch that unites them. Martin (1992, 1993, 1995) insists that touch is always a perception of boundaries: awareness of ones body as ones body involves a sense of its being a bounded object within a larger space, and that just is to locate it within a space of tactual objects (1993, 213). But many tactile experiences do not include a clear sense of a boundary or of a bodyobject. Touch is a whole body phenomenon, rather than a sense that is exclusive to the hands. The lack of boundaries is especially apparent in various instances of passive touch that involve other parts of the body. Ihde (1983) offers the example of resting on a comfortable couch for a prolonged period and notes that the feeling of touching the couch does not take the form of a perceived boundary between self and object. Rather, there is a loss of boundaries, a gradual dissipation of any clear sense of where the body ends and the couch begins:
I find that the cloud-like couch-me experience is so vague that not even any clear distinction between me and where I end and couch is capable of being made. Inner and outer, subject and object are here not at all clear and distinct. (1983, 97)

physical contact with the biological body. Ihde offers the example of holding a pencil in ones hand and sliding it across a rough surface:
by conscious effort you can . . . make this finger-pencil aspect of the experience stand out. But when it does, the pencil-desk aspect tends to fade and vice-versa. While both aspects are present one tends to stand in the centre of the [f]ocus while the other fades to a fringe awareness. (1983, 95)

Other examples include a blind person perceiving with a cane, a doctor feeling for organs, and feeling the cobbles under ones feet when wearing shoes. And consider the feeling of having ones hair caressed. The touch is not simply felt to occur at the skin, where the hair follicle is, but in a zone that lacks clear boundaries and extends beyond the surface of the skin. In summary, touch has the following characteristics:
1. What feels need not be what is felt. Thus, a feeling of the body need not have the body as its object. 2. A feeling is a relation between body and world, rather than a perception of one in isolation from the other. 3. One or the other side of this relation might take up the foreground of awareness, to varying degrees and in different ways. 4. Bodily and worldly aspects of feeling do not respect a clear subjectobject distinction. The relatedness between the two need not involve a boundary between them. 5. The object of feeling need not be in physical contact with the body.

And consider the touch of ones clothes or of someone elses hand that has been held for a prolonged period. In many cases, the experience does not incorporate clear boundaries between body and world or between self and other; certain touches are forms of relatedness that do not cleanly distinguish the two sides of the relation. There are many varieties of touching. Both sides of the relation can be conspicuous to different degrees and in different ways. A surface may feel rough, smooth, or sharp. And ones hand may feel awkward, numb, under pressure, weak, or clammy. But, in many other cases, the difference between foreground and background is not so pronounced and there is a comparative lack of differentiation. (See Ratcliffe [2008, Ch. 3], for a more detailed discussion of the varieties of touch.) It is also worth noting that what is perceived through touch need not be something that is in

I suggest that touch shares some or all of these characteristics with many other states that are referred to as feelings. If it is admitted that tactile feelings do not respect a sharp bodyworld divide, why assume that other kinds of feeling do, given that phenomenological reflection, everyday discourse, and reports of altered experience in psychiatric illness all suggest otherwise? There are plenty of examples to indicate that the imposition of a clear division between perception of the body and perception of the non-bodily misrepresents a variety of bodily feelings. Feelings can of course be described as perceptions of the body. For example:
The state of affairs that a feeling alerts us to is most immediately a state of the self. Consulting our feelings

Ratcliffe / Existential Feeling and Psychopathology

187

is a good way to find out if we are tired, sick, thirsty and so on. (Sizer 2006, 122)

However, they are not just perceptions of the body. I may well be aware of my tiredness, my sickness, or my fatigue as states of myself. But I may equally be aware of them as states of the world. The unengaging, distant world may be what solicits sleep in the case of extreme tiredness. Thirst may be most conspicuous as the perceptual salience of a running stream. And various perturbations in the way the world appears might partly constitute the experience of illness. As Scheler (1992, 82) notes:
In the feeling of fatigue there is a warning that may be expressed in the language of common sense as stop working or go to sleep. The vertigo we experience when we stand before an abyss urges us to step back.

apparent from a range of clinical and everyday descriptions. For example, van den Berg (1972) presents a phenomenological study of a typical psychiatric patient, abstracted from many different cases. He notes that the patient generally does not complain of psychological changes but of changed bodily feelings and, at the same time, a sense of the world being different. He proposes that these seemingly distinct symptoms are actually different ways of expressing the same phenomenon. A changed sense of ones body is also a changed sense of world and one can describe the experience by emphasizing one or the other side of the unitary selfworld relation:
His world is collapsing. Is he not saying the same thing when he states that his legs are failing him and he feels he is losing his sense of equilibrium! World and body are interrelated. Then the customary distinction of world and body is probably much too definite. (1972, 56)

It should not simply be assumed that, in such cases, bodily feelings come first and experience of things outside the body afterwards. What applies to touch applies more generally. There is just the one feeling, which can be described in different ways. Consider Sartres example of reading whilst having tired, sore eyes:
this pain can itself be indicated by objects of the world; i.e., by the book which I read. It is with more difficulty that the words are detached from the undifferentiated ground which they constitute; they may tremble, quiver; their meaning can be derived only with effort. (1989, 332)

Before one reflects on the eye strain as an object of perception, the feeling of eye strain just is the way in which the words on the page appear. One can describe the experience as a feeling of ones eyes or as an experience of words quivering on a page. However, whichever aspect one emphasizes, we have a unitary experience. The point applies to existential feelings too. They are not experiences of both the bodily and the non-bodily. Like touches, they are feelings of the body that do not have the body in isolation from the world or the world in isolation from the body as an object. They constitute a variable sense of belonging, a relation that will not be understood so long as a distinction between perception of the body and perception of everything else is imposed in advance of phenomenological enquiry. This is

van den Berg goes so far as to suggest that to be ill means first and foremost that the surroundings have changed (1972, 45). An appreciation of the relational nature of feeling indicates how this can be so; a unitary self-world relation is experientially prior to a sense of either of them in isolation from the other. But one need not appeal to psychiatric cases and technical phenomenological descriptions to appreciate the intimacy of bodily feeling and world experience. For example, a colleague of mine, when I recently asked how he was feeling, reported that he had an ear infection and that this had enhanced his day, by constituting an all-encompassing and oddly pleasant feeling of being dislodged from things that made the large pile of work he was facing seem somehow less intimidating. The analogy between existential and tactile feeling also suggests that there will be a range of existential feelings. There are many kinds of tactile experience. Furthermore, it might well be that certain tactile feelings contribute to existential feeling. Perhaps it is no accident that we often express our relationship with the world by invoking the language of touch, such as things seeming intangible, feeling out of touch with the world and losing ones grip on things.6 As with touch, existential feelings have a dynamic structure; they are inseparable from activi-

188 PPP / Vol. 16, No. 2 / June 2009

ties and dispositions to act. When I type, my hands are what feel rather than what is felt. That mode of feeling is indissociable from a smooth context of ongoing bodily activity. As my hands tire and enter the foreground of awareness, the difference in feeling is at the same time a difference in the structure of my activity and in my bodily dispositions to act in certain ways. Likewise, existential feelings need not be synchronic occurrences. It is often in walking around and interacting with the world that the strangeness of things is most pronounced, perhaps when things do not solicit bodily responses in the usual fashion. It is the whole context of practical relatedness that has changed, rather than either a state of ones body or ones experience of objects and events outside of the body. The main reason why touch provides a better starting point for the exploration of existential feeling than vision is that touch, unlike vision (and the other senses), involves routine reversibility; bodily and worldly sides oscillate between foreground and background, between perceiver and perceived. The phenomenological structure of feeling is made salient through reflection on the transition between feeling and felt. Nevertheless, visual perception involves bodily feeling too. Work in psychopathology and psychiatry routinely implicates affect or feeling in changed visual experience. For example, recent accounts of the Capgras and Cotard delusions all acknowledge that lowered affect contributes to altered visual experience (Ratcliffe 2004, 2008). And authors such as Sass (2004) emphasize the role of affect in the visual phenomenology of schizophrenic patients.7 However, a difference between vision and touch is that vision is more fixed in its orientation, with the bodily side almost always taking on a background role, thus rendering the role of bodily feeling less accessible to phenomenological reflection.

Being and Belonging

So far, I have argued that existential feelings are indeed bodily feelings, but I have not distinguished them from a variety of other bodily feelings that might also be implicated in perception of things other than the body. My aim in this section is to make clear the distinctive experiential role that existential feelings play.

The assumption that there is a clear phenomenological division, with body or self on one side and world on the other, is often accompanied by (a) an overemphasis on propositional attitudes and (b) an impoverished conception of experience, both of which serve to obscure the nature and role of existential feeling. In this final section, I show what is wrong with (a) and (b), and then offer an alternative way of thinking about experience, drawn from the work of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. This both accommodates existential feelings and serves to further make clear their bodily nature. Most recent work on the topic of intentionality emphasizes propositional attitudes, of the form x believes that p, where p can be any coherent proposition, such as it is raining, cats are nice, or Santa Claus is coming tonight. But existential feelings are not intentional states with specific propositional contents. The world looks strange does not express a propositional content, which includes an object (the world) that is experienced as being a certain way (strange). Although the car looks blue and the world looks strange have the same linguistic form, the predicaments that they express are quite different. The world, as the term is employed here, is not an intentional object at all, like a cup or a table, but much bigger. Rather, it is something that is presupposed by experiences of specific objects. One already has a sense of belonging to the world, of being part of it, before one encounters a particular object. Relating to the world, in this sense, is quite unlike experiencing an object. A sense of belonging to the world is presupposed by the possibility of adopting a propositional attitude. Consider the propositional attitude of believing that there is a cat on the table, where one takes a particular state of affairs (there is a cat on the table) to be the case. One might instead believe that there is not a cat on the table, that there might be a cat on the table, that there is most likely a cat on the table, that there is something on the table which might be a cat, and so on. But, to adopt any such attitude, one must already have a sense of what it is for something to be the case. And this cannot take the form of a belief, construed in propositional attitude terms, given

Ratcliffe / Existential Feeling and Psychopathology

189

that the distinction between being and not being the case is presupposed by the possibility of belief. Even if we believe that x is not the case, we must at least have a sense of what it would mean for x to be the case, in order to adopt such an attitude. But what is this sense of being, of existence, of reality, that is presupposed by belief? A changeable sense of reality is integral to experience; it is not constituted by propositional attitudes. When one enters a room and sees a cat on the table, one does not need to infer that there really is a cat present. It appears as here, in the world, situated in the same room as me, and, in most cases, it is simply taken for granted that the cat is real, that it exists. Experience is not merely an input into a belief system. It also incorporates a background sense of belonging to a world through which all specific experiences, beliefs, and thoughts are structured. Disturbances in this background reshape the modalities of belief, the sense of what it is for something to be or not be. Consider some of Renees remarks in Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl. She reports that she firmly believed that the world was about to be destroyed but that she did not believe the world would be destroyed as [she] believed in real facts (p. 34). This is not a matter of her believing that p, believing that not p, or even believing that possibly p. The structure of belief has changed. The sense of conviction, of what it is for something to be or not be, has been transformed. The diversity of existential feelings is such as to suggest that we do not have just the one ordinarily constant sense of existence, reality, or being, which is subject to varying degrees of erosion in psychiatric illness. Rather, there is a range of subtly different existential orientations and imposition of a unitary is of existence may eclipse the variety of ways in which we can find ourselves in the world, as may the idea that there is a single sense of reality. Here is another description offered by Renee:
When . . . I looked at a chair or a jug, I thought not of their use or functiona jug not as something to hold water and milk, a chair not as something to sit inbut as having lost their names, their functions and meanings; they became things and began to take on life, to exist. (pp. 556)

The experience of existence is contrasted with a more familiar appreciation of the reality of things. A sense of objects as existing amounts to a loss of practical connectedness to them, an absence of the usual sense of their availability, utility, tangibility and familiarity. (See also, Sass [1992, Ch. 2], for a detailed phenomenological discussion of Renee.) Renees altered relatedness to things is at the same time a change in the modalities of being, a loss of the is of familiar things, constituted by ones relations with them, which is replaced by a different sense of the is; things appear as just present in some strange, detached way, stripped of all practical significance. There is no single, simple sense of existence or reality, which we either have or do not have. Hence Renee can refer to things existing, in conjunction with their unreality. A sense of reality is an orientation that varies in structure, usually in subtle ways, but sometimes in quite an extreme fashion. The term reality is no doubt used in all sorts of other ways as well. But we can at least say that a sense of reality, in the context of existential feeling, does not concern a posited object. It is a changeable sense of belonging. We do not take the world to be real in any of the senses in which we might take a particular object to be real. There is a tendency in philosophical psychology to treat experience as an input system that presents some perceptual content that we can, through the subsequent formation of beliefs, either accept or not accept as veridical. What is not acknowledged is that experience also incorporates a sense of being and belonging. To offer just one of many possible examples, Radovic and Radovic (2002), in an interesting and informative article, explore the phenomenology of depersonalization (a condition where the patient describes the self, world, or body as feeling unreal, but has no delusions and retains intact reality testing). They draw together various autobiographical descriptions, which include feeling detached from body and world, feeling like a spectator, feelings of unreality and strangeness, self-estrangement, and loss of affect. Such descriptions suggest that a sense of unreality is closely associated with feeling cut off from things, which seem remote or detached. Thus, reality is tied to relatedness and to feeling. In addition, it is not clear that different referents,

190 PPP / Vol. 16, No. 2 / June 2009

such as self, world, and body, indicate different objects of experience. As Radovic and Radovic (2002, 274) note, the feelings of unreality merge and the patient may not be able to say which aspect of the self or the world it is that feels unreal. Hence it seems plausible to suggest that the feelings reported in depersonalization are what I call existential feelings. They are modifications of the selfworld relation and, in describing them, either side of that relation might be emphasized. Radovic and Radovic (2002, 275) attempt to clarify what is meant by a feeling of unreality. They propose that the term unreal has three principal uses:
1. nonexistent; merely imagined 2. fake; artificial 3. not genuine, as in not a real friend; atypical or not optimal

They go on to suggest that feel has different senses too. It may refer to a belief-like state, where something is taken not to be real. This would relate to (1) and perhaps also (2). Alternatively, it can refer to an unusual way of experiencing, where things appear not quite right, thus complementing (3); it is a specific kind of quasi sensory experience, which is neither simply a belief in the non-existence of something nor just any atypical feeling (2002, 276). Hence a feeling of unreality can refer to one or the other of the following:
a. Changed experience of self or world. b. A belief that something (perhaps self or world) either does not exist or is fake.

Radovic and Radovic propose that both of these play a role in certain cases of depersonalization, given that (b) might be inferred on the basis of (a). Something is judged to be unreal because it is experienced in a strange way. Although such attempts at conceptual clarification are highly illuminating, there isI suggesta tendency to take too much of the selfworld relation for granted, resulting in a misleading distinction between strange experience and belief in unreality or non-existence. Experience does not just present us with specific contents that we then judge to be real or not real. It also incorporates a background sense of belonging that determines the manner in which both self and world are experienced. The

various phenomenological descriptions offered by Radovic and Radovic seem to indicate that this is what is affected in depersonalization. It is neither a matter of a specific experiential content nor of a belief acquired on the basis of some such content. An all-pervasive sense of unreality is not a belief in the unreality of some or all things but a shift in existential orientation, a transformation of the modal structure of belief, of the is and the is not. And those quasi-sensory experiences that encompass the selfworld relation as a whole are not just a matter of having certain things appear in certain ways. They cannot be accommodated by any approach that cleanly carves off bodily feeling from world experience and world experience from belief. Propositional attitude approaches that construe experience as an input system feeding into belief generation mechanisms fail to accommodate existential feelings. However, the distinctive nature and role of these feelings can, I suggest, be characterized if we adopt an alternative conceptual framework, incorporating the phenomenological concept of a horizon (Husserl, 1960, 1989, 2001; Merleau-Ponty, 1962).8 As Husserl observes, experiencing an object, such as a table, is not merely a matter of perceiving what actually appears. One sees the table from a certain angle. However, the experience also involves a sense of other possible perceptions of the same object. One could walk round it and see it from another angle or look at it from above and reveal its hidden aspects. These possibilities are not inferred from what is actually perceived. Rather, they are integral to the experience. As Husserl puts it, in what is actually experienced, there is included a determinate directive for all further experiences of the object in question (1989, 38). What one experiences is an object appearing in a certain way, rather than just an appearance. And experience of something as an object consists in both its actual appearance from a certain perspective and the co-included space of possible appearances. The set of interrelated possibilities that surround an object are referred to by Husserl as its horizon; everywhere, apprehension includes in itself, by the mediation of a sense, empty horizons of possible perceptions (1989, 42). Importantly, he also notes that horizons are

Ratcliffe / Existential Feeling and Psychopathology

191

not restricted to particular sensory modalities. In other words, when one perceives something visually, the possible perceptions that participate in the experience include perceptions by means of other senses, including touch. Horizons include salient possibilities for tactile manipulation, for practical engagement with an entity (1989, 423). Hence, they should not be conceived of exclusively or even primarily as a matter of how things are experienced visually; any object presented to one sense calls upon itself the concordant operation of all the others (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, 318). However, experience is not just a matter of those horizons that are specific to particular objects or types of object. Experience also has a general horizonal structure, an all-encompassing shape. As both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty observe, there is a kind of inarticulate background that delimits the possible forms that experiences can take. The world is, as Husserl puts it, a universal horizon (1970, 281). Belonging to a world, in this sense, is not a matter of standing in relation to some specific thing. Rather, it is a pre-reflective and all-pervasive sense of practical belonging that structures all experience, thought, and belief. It is the world as universal horizon that I suggest existential feelings comprise. Husserl (1960, 1989, 2001) explicitly states that salient bodily dispositions and activities constitute the horizonal structure of experience. The possibilities are, as he puts it, predelineated in a way that reflects potential activities of ones own body and the bodies of others. A table is experienced as something that can be accessed from another vantage point, moved, or touched in various ways. It is something upon which one might rest ones arms or perhaps place a plate. Integral to the experience is a sense of I can and do, but I can also do otherwise than I am doing (1960, 45). Things appear as what they are through a kind of bodily connectedness to them, a non-conceptual, practical, habitual receptivity. So the body is not just an object that is perceived, but also that through which we perceive. Its dispositions are reflected in the things perceived: The Body [Leib] is, in the first place, the medium of all perception; it is the organ of perception and is necessarily involved in all perception (1989, 61). Horizons

are not systems of possibilities to which we are indifferent. The thing, as Husserl says, calls out to us (2001, 41); it has an affective pull (2001, 98). He distinguishes between possibilities that are open and others that are enticing, acknowledging that there is a continuum between the two. An object may call forth an activity, present it as an especially salient option, or simply accommodate its possibility. The extent to which a possibility is enticing is a matter of bodily feeling; it is through the feeling body that things show up as salient. The possibilities that structure perception are felt bodily potentialities. Both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty acknowledge that the contribution made by the body to experience is not restricted to how we experience specific objects; it applies equally to the universal horizon. As Merleau-Ponty (1962, 326) puts it:
To have a body is to possess a universal setting, a scheme of all types of perceptual unfolding and all those intersensory correspondences which lie beyond the segment of the world which we are actually perceiving.

Ones bodily dispositions comprise a changeable background orientation in which all experiences, thoughts and activities are embedded. The world, as Merleau-Ponty says, is the horizon of all horizons and its counterpart within me is the given, general and pre-personal existence of my sensory functions (1962, 330). Thus phenomenological writings and certain descriptions of pathological experience both suggest that changed bodily feeling can at the same time be a changed selfworld relation and an altered sense of the being of things. But is the term feeling warranted here? I think it is. The relevant bodily dispositions are, according to Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, phenomenologically accessible, although not as objects of perception. We can think of them as modes of the feeling, rather than the felt, body. In summary, problems faced when exploring existential feeling stem from a range of popular philosophical assumptions, including (a) the assumption that a clear distinction between subjective and objective or bodily and non-bodily can be imposed upon all our experiences, (b) a tendency to construe all feelings as reports of internal bodily states and thus to fail to appreciate

192 PPP / Vol. 16, No. 2 / June 2009

their dual nature, (c) an impoverished conception of experience as an input into a belief system, and (d) an emphasis on propositional attitudes, which presuppose the modalities of being and cannot account for them. If such assumptions are cast aside, we can make sense of the idea, hinted at by everyday discourse, literature, and psychopathology, that all experience involves a touch-like sense of belonging. This, like touch, varies in structure in ways that are sometime mundane and, on other occasions remarkable or pathological.

Acknowledgments
The author thanks Matthew Broome, Simon James, two anonymous referees, and an audience at a conference in Bonn (2006) for comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes
1. Prinz (2004), in contrast, claims that bodily feelings can have intentional objects that are not bodily states. However, he employs a conception of intentionality that distinguishes intentional directedness from the structure of experience, whereas, following phenomenologists such as Husserl (1960, 1989), I adopt a phenomenological conception that construes intentionality as inextricable from the structure of experience. I want to show that a bodily feeling can, at the same time, be a way in which the world is experienced. Goldie (2000) adopts a slightly different approach. He distinguishes between bodily feelings and feelings towards, the latter being directed at objects outside of the body. However, I argue that these two feelings are actually inseparable aspects of the same unitary feeling (Ratcliffe, 2005, 2008). 2. See Ratcliffe (2008, Ch. 7) for a characterization of some of the variants of existential feeling that arise in psychiatric illness and in everyday life. See Sass (e.g., 1992, 2004) for a detailed phenomenological account of some of the changes in the structure of world experience that can occur in schizophrenia, in part owing to altered affect. For example, he refers to unworlding (a loss of the practical significance of things), bodily alienation (a sense of being removed from ones own body and its activities), and subjectivization (a solipsistic retreat to a delusional world; Sass 2004). I am wholly sympathetic to Sasss association between changed affect and changes in the overall structure of experience. However, as he acknowledges, his account does not amount to a complete catalogue of the existential changes that can occur in schizophrenia and in psychiatric illness more generally.

3. Heidegger also mentions some varieties of fear, such as dread for example, which he takes to be a fear of the unfamiliar. He also mentions elation (1962, 182). In a later work, he offers a detailed phenomenological description of the varieties of boredom (Heidegger, 1983). 4. See also Jonas (1954) for a discussion of how philosophers have long regarded sight as the most excellent of the senses (p. 507). Some have argued that this emphasis on disembodied, objectifying vision is androcentric, serving to marginalize certain more feminine approaches to philosophical and scientific enquiry. See, for example, Young (2005, 6396) and Keller and Grontowski (1996) for discussions. 5. The same point applies to proprioception or body sense more generally. The body can feature in experience without its being an object of experience (MerleauPonty 1962; Gallagher 2005; Ratcliffe 2008). 6. It is an open question as to which bodily states contribute to existential feeling and what the relevant physiology is. However, I think it is safe to assume that bodily states and the ways in which they are experienced are sufficiently diverse to allow many subtly different existential feelings. See Ratcliffe (2008, Ch. 4) for further discussion of this issue. 7. The contribution made by affect to vision is better appreciated if vision is regarded not as a matter of passively registering things, but as an active process that involves the various sensory and motor dispositions that constitute our sense of belonging to the world. Merleau-Ponty contrasts the exploratory gaze of true vision with perception of a dazzling light. The latter involves a reversal that is analogous to touch but rare in vision, where the organ of sight becomes an object of perception. This reversal, he suggests, amounts to a breakdown of the practical orientation that ordinarily structures visual perception (1962, 315). No (2004) similarly emphasizes the point that vision is not a matter of passively registering events outside the body but of practical exploratory activity, much closer in its structure to touch than is usually acknowledged. His account draws on Gibson (1979), among others. 8. Sass and others have also referred to changed horizons in describing global changes in the structure of experience that occur in schizophrenia and other conditions (e.g., Sass, 2001, 259; Parnas and Sass, 2001, 113).

References
Ben-Zeev, A. 2004. Emotion as a subtle mental state. In Thinking about feeling: Contemporary philosophers on emotions, ed. R. Solomon, 25068. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Campbell, S. 1997. Interpreting the personal: Expression and the formation of feelings. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Ratcliffe / Existential Feeling and Psychopathology

193

Davies, M, M. Coltheart, R. Langdon, and N. Breen. 2001. Monothematic delusions: Towards a twofactor account. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 8, no. 2/3:13358. Faulks, S. 1990. The girl at the Lion dOr. London: Vintage. Gallagher, S. 2005. How the body shapes the mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gibson, J. J. 1979. The ecological approach to visual perception. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Glas, G. 2003. Anxietyanimal reactions and the embodiment of meaning. In Nature and narrative: An introduction to the new philosophy of psychiatry, ed. K. W. M. Fulford, K. Morris, J. Sadler, and G. Stanghellini, 23149. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goldie, P. 2000. The emotions: A philosophical exploration. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Heidegger, M. 1962. Being and time, trans. J. Macquarrie, and E. Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell. . 1983. The fundamental concepts of metaphysics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. . 2001. Zollikon seminars: Protocolsconversationsletters, ed. M. Boss, trans. F. Mayr, and R. Askay. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Hobson, P. 2002. The cradle of thought. London: Macmillan. Husserl, E. 1960. Cartesian meditations: An introduction to phenomenology, trans. D. Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. . 1970. The Vienna lecture. In The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology, trans. D. Carr, 26999. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. . 1989. Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy: Second book, trans. R. Rojcewicz, and A. Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer. . 2001. Analyses concerning passive and active synthesis: Lectures on transcendental logic, trans. A. J. Steinbock. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Ihde, D. 1983. Sense and significance. Atlantic Highlands.: Humanities Press. Jonas, H. 1954. The nobility of sight. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 14:50719. Keller, E. F., and C. R. Grontowski. 1996. The minds eye. In Feminism and science. ed. E. F. Keller, and H. E. Longino, 187202. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maher, B. 1999. Anomalous experience in everyday life: Its significance for psychopathology. Monist 82:54770. Martin, M. 1992. Sight and touch. In The contents of experience, ed. T. Crane, 196215. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

. 1993. Sense modalities and spatial properties. In Spatial representation: Problems in philosophy and psychology, ed. N. Eilan, R. McCarthy, and B. Brewer, 20618. Oxford: Blackwell. . 1995. Bodily awareness: A sense of ownership. In The body and the self, ed. J. L. Bermdez, A. Marcel, and N. Eilan, 26789. Cambridge: MIT Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1962. Phenomenology of perception, trans. C. Smith. London: Routledge. . 1968. The visible and the invisible, trans. A. Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. No, A. 2004. Action in perception. Cambridge: MIT Press. OShaughnessy, B. 1989. The sense of touch. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 67:3758. . 1995. Proprioception and the body image. In The body and the self, ed. J. L. Bermdez, A. Marcel, and N. Eilan, 175203. Cambridge: MIT Press. . 2000. Consciousness and the world. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Parnas, J., and L. A. Sass. 2001. Self, solipsism and schizophrenic delusions. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 8, no. 2/3:10120. Plath, S. 1966. The bell jar. London: Faber & Faber. Prinz, J. 2004. Gut reactions: A perceptual theory of emotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Radovic, F., and S. Radovic. 2002. Feelings of unreality: A conceptual and phenomenological analysis of the language of depersonalization. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9, no. 3:2719. Ratcliffe, M. 2004. Interpreting delusions. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 3:2548. . 2005. The feeling of being. Journal of Consciousness Studies 12, no. 810:4360. . 2008. Feelings of being: Phenomenology, psychiatry and the sense of reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sartre, J. P. 1989. Being and nothingness, trans. H. E. Barnes. London: Routledge. Sass, L. A. 1992. Madness and modernism: Insanity in the light of modern art, literature and thought. New York: Basic Books. . 2001. Self and world in schizophrenia: Three classic approaches. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 8, no. 4:25170. . 2004. Affectivity in schizophrenia: A phenomenological view. In Hidden resources: Classical perspectives on subjectivity, ed. D. Zahavi, 12747. Exeter: Imprint Academic. Scheler, M. 1992. On feeling, knowing and valuing, ed. H. J. Bershady. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sechehaye, M. 1970. Autobiography of a schizophrenic girl. New York: Signet. Sizer, L. 2006. What feelings cant do. Mind & Language 20:10835.

194 PPP / Vol. 16, No. 2 / June 2009

Solomon, R. 1993. The passions: Emotions and the meaning of life. Indianapolis: Hackett. van den Berg, J. H. 1972. A different existence: Principles of phenomenological psychopathology. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

Young, I. M. 2005. On female body experience: Throwing like a girl and other essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.