FEELINGS OF BEING:PHENOMEN PSYCHIA SENSE REALITY IPPP PAPER: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of Reality

by Matthew Ratcliffe

There is a great deal of current philosophical and scientific interest in emotional feelings. However, many of the feelings that people struggle to express in their everyday lives do not appear on standard lists of emotions. For example, there are feelings of unreality, heightened existence, surreality, familiarity, unfamiliarity, estrangement, strangeness, isolation, emptiness, belonging, being at home in the world, being at one with things, significance, insignificance, and the list goes on. Such feelings might be referred to as 'existential' because they comprise a changeable sense of being part of a world. Existential feelings have not been systematically explored until now, despite the important role that they play in our lives and the devastating effects that disturbances of existential feeling can have in psychiatric illness.

Feelings of Being is the first ever philosophical account of the nature, role and variety of existential feelings in psychiatric illness and in everyday life. In this book, Matthew Ratcliffe proposes that existential feelings form a distinctive group by virtue of three characteristics: they are bodily feelings, they constitute ways of relating to the world as a whole, and they are responsible for our sense of reality. The book explains how something can be a bodily feeling and, at the same time, a sense of reality and belonging. It then explores the role of changed feeling in psychiatric illness, showing how an account of existential feeling can help us to understand experiential changes that occur in a range of conditions, including depression, circumscribed delusions, depersonalisation and schizophrenia. The book also addresses the contribution made by existential feelings to religious experience and to philosophical thought.

Written in a clear, non-technical style throughout, it will be valuable for philosophers, clinicians, students, and researchers working in a wide range of disciplines.

Genres: Psychology, Philosophy, Psychiatry, Emotion, Nonfiction

309 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2008

Reviews

[bejo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Matthew Ratcliffe, THE GOAT. Bringing phenomenology back to the English speaking philosophy world one banger of a book at a time.

[Kayla Neumeyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those books that deeply changed the way I think / thought about embodied human experience, reality & how the deeply flawed theoretical basis of psychiatry doesn't actually hold explanatory power for many people with mental illness.

[Toby Newton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lots of things to say about this wonderful book. Here's one:

Feelings make a philosophical commitment possible – and we are all philosophers. To have any sustained views on how the world works, what is at play in its dynamics, what we can expect of people, is to make one a philosopher. From this we see that our existential feelings, the Heideggerian 'mood' we are in (a combination of our germinal complex, RIGs, noöforms, and, duly spun, our ongoing personal experience) allows or disallows a particular orientation to the expectable world, i.e., constitutes our own assumptive worlds, which may or may not be happily commensurate with the empirically expectable world.

Therefore, it is the quality of each person's assumptive world that matters, because this will act not only as a filter through which individual experience is refracted, but as the very ground of being that founds what the person is set up and able to perceive. For example, someone must be made capable of perceiving the trustworthy before they can trust.