Do moods have intentional objects? If so, what kinds of intentional objects might they have? Some theorists hold that moods are objectless affective states, not ‘about’ anything. Others argue that moods are directed toward a maximally general object like ‘the world’, and so they are about everything, in some sense. In this article, I advance a new theoretical account of the intentional object of moods. According to what I call the ‘present-situation view’, moods are directed toward, or about, the present (...) situation. In other words, a mood is essentially an interpretation of one’s current situational context. As such, our moods change over time in a way that tracks our changing sense of how things are going, here and now. This article aims to make the case that the present-situation view, so understood, offers unique theoretical resources to describe and explain how we experience moods and how they change over time, while also suggesting a helpful way to think about the functional role moods play in our broader cognitive architecture, and pointing toward promising directions for future research into the ways that moods can be experienced, managed, and shared. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a phenomenological account of social anxiety disorder (SAD) as a disturbance of lived time through an analysis of first-person accounts informed by Minkowski’s notion of disordered temporality. The core psychopathology of the patient, I argue, is a constricted sense of relational time. Instead of the ordinary sense of a taken-for-granted shared future, the patient experiences time as running a predetermined course toward their social death. This manifests itself in a relational life lived as if it (...) might end at any moment or has already done so. Patients describe the end of their current relationships as self-evident and struggle against it by attempting to evade its immediate occurrence and to postpone it into the less eminent future. At times, patients succumb to passivity and self-blame, revelatory of a sense of an entirely lacking relational future. This phenomenological conceptualization provides an alternative to the predominant cognitive-behavioral (CBT) account of SAD. The CBT approach conceptualizes the core disorder as a set of dysfunctional beliefs about other people’s opinion of the patient. The phenomenological account elucidates a part of the subjective background on which these beliefs come to make sense to the patient. Further, with its concept of social death, the phenomenological account captures the existential contexts, which makes the intensity of the patient’s fear of rejection comprehensible. This way of understanding the patient and their psychopathology has important implications for diagnostic and psychotherapeutic practice. (shrink)

Although Arendt is widely cited as an early proponent of what is sometimes called “forward-looking” or “future-looking” responsibility, scholars have not dwelled at length on Arendt’s claim that th...

Unpleasant emotions can be strongly “propulsive,” spurring us to make changes to our situation, perspective, values, and commitments. These changes are often positive, even crucial to our pursuit of the good life. But under what conditions are unpleasant emotions strongly propulsive? I argue that the source of affective propulsion should not be located in the mere unpleasantness of a given emotion, but, rather, in the emotional context in which the emotion arises. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s comparative analysis of “shallow” and (...) “deep” boredom, I claim that the propulsive quality of an emotion arises not from its intrinsic properties but from the ambivalence generated when two affective states simultaneously influence our sense-making activity in opposing ways. (shrink)

In this article, we illuminate the affective phenomenon of loneliness by exploring the question of how it relates to love and other forms of friendship. We reflect in particular on the question of how different forms of loneliness are relevant to human existence. Distinguishing three forms of loneliness, we first introduce two border cases of loneliness: unfelt loneliness in which one’s individuality is denied and one therefore cannot feel lonely; and existential loneliness in which the possibility of intimacy and existential (...) communication are denied and one therefore cannot but feel lonely. We then turn to loneliness that occurs within intimate friendships—even the most intimate ones. In our analysis, we pay attention especially to the role of communication. In order to do so, we repeatedly turn to poetic expressions of loneliness. We argue that loneliness cannot reflect only the absence or partial failure of communication but also the inherent limits of communication. These limits in turn point back to the nature of human existence and love itself. (shrink)

Hope is often seen as at once valuable and dangerous: it can fuel our motivation in the face of challenges, but can also distract us from reality and lead us to irrationality. How can we learn to “hope well,” and what does “hoping well” involve? Contemporary philosophers disagree on such normative questions about hope and also on how to define hope as a mental state. This article explores recent philosophical debates surrounding the concept of hope and the norms governing hope. (...) It also underlies hope's significance for the philosophy of emotion and the ethics of interpersonal relations. (shrink)

This article explores self-esteem as an episodic self-conscious emotion. Episodic self-esteem is first distinguished from trait self-esteem, which is described as an enduring state related to the subject’s sense of self-worth. Episodic self-esteem is further compared with pride by claiming that the two attitudes differ in crucial respects. Importantly, episodic self-esteem—but not pride—is a function of social esteem: in episodic self-esteem, the subject evaluates herself in the same way in which others evaluate her. Furthermore, social esteem elicits episodic self-esteem if (...) the values at the basis of the others’ evaluation are shared by the subject. Such sharing of values suggests that only the evaluations of those others that the subject frames as her in-group members are relevant to episodic self-esteem. (shrink)

After describing the disorder of psychopathy, I examine the theories and the evidence concerning the psychopaths’ deficient moral capacities. I first examine whether or not psychopaths can pass tests of moral knowledge. Most of the evidence suggests that they can. If there is a lack of moral understanding, then it has to be due to an incapacity that affects not their declarative knowledge of moral norms, but their deeper understanding of them. I then examine two suggestions: it is their deficient (...) practical reason or their stunted emotions that are at fault. The evidence supports both explanations. I conclude with an overview of the debate concerning whether they are morally or legally responsible for their actions. (shrink)

Being in a mood—such as an anxious, irritable, depressed, tranquil, or cheerful mood—tends to alter the way we react emotionally to the particular objects we encounter. But how, exactly, do moods alter the way we experience particular objects? Perceptualism, a popular approach to understanding affective experiences, holds that moods function like "colored lenses," altering the way we perceive the evaluative properties of the objects we encounter. In this essay, I offer a phenomenological analysis of the experience of being in a (...) mood that illustrates the limitations of the colored lens metaphor and demonstrates the basic inadequacy of the perceptualist account of moods. I argue that when we are in a mood, it is common to experience a kind of "emotional disconnection" in which we perceive evaluative properties that would normally elicit strong emotional reactions from us, but nonetheless we find that, in our present mood, we remain emotionally numb to these perceptions. Such experiences of "seeing but not feeling" are difficult to understand from within the perceptualist paradigm. Building on the work of Martin Heidegger, I sketch an alternative, phenomenological analysis of moods that can better account for experiences of emotional disconnection. On this alternative account, being in a mood does not merely alter the content of our perceptions but, rather, alters the way we interpret the overall significance of what we perceive, relative to a certain situational context. (shrink)

This dissertation is a contribution to the contemporary field of phenomenological psychopathology, or the phenomenological study of psychiatric disorders. The work proceeds with two major aims. The first is to show how a phenomenological approach can clarify and illuminate the nature of psychopathology—specifically those conditions typically labeled as major depressive disorder and bipolar disorder. The second is to show how engaging with psychopathological conditions can challenge and undermine many phenomenological presuppositions, especially phenomenology’s status as a transcendental philosophy and its corresponding (...) anti-naturalistic outlook. In the opening chapter, I articulate the three layers of the subject matter of phenomenological research—what I refer to as “existentials,” “modes,” and “prejudices.” As I argue, while each layer contributes to what we might call the “structure” of human existence, they do not do so in the same way, or to the same degree. Because phenomenological psychopathology—and applied phenomenology in general—aims to characterize how the structure of human existence can change and alter, it is paramount that these layers be adequately delineated and defined before investigating these changes. In chapters two through five, I conduct hermeneutic and phenomenological investigations of psychopathological phenomena typically labeled as major depressive disorder or bipolar disorder. These investigations address the affective aspects of depression and mania, and the embodied aspects of depression. In addition to clearly articulating the nature of these phenomena, I show how certain psychopathological conditions involve changes in the deepest or most fundamental layer of human existence—what I refer to as existentials. As I argue, many of the classical phenomenologists (including Husserl and Heidegger) believed that these structural features were necessary, unchanging, and universal. However, this presupposition is challenged through the examination of psychopathological and neuropathological conditions, undermining the status of phenomenology as a transcendental philosophy. While this challenge to classical phenomenology is only sketched in the early chapters, in chapters six and seven I develop it in more detail in order to achieve two distinct ends. In chapter six I argue that psychopathology and neuropathology not only challenge phenomenology’s status as a transcendental philosophy, but also supply a key to developing a phenomenological naturalism (which I contrast with a naturalized phenomenology). Phenomenological naturalism, as I articulate it, is a position in which phenomenology is not subsumed by the metaphysical and methodological framework of the natural sciences, but nonetheless maintains the capacity to investigate how the natural world stands independent of human subjectivity (and how events in the natural world can bring about changes in the most fundamental structures of human existence). In the seventh chapter I argue that a phenomenology in which existentials are contingent and variable rather than necessary and unchanging allows phenomenologists to contribute to new dimensional approaches to psychiatric classification. Rather than begin from distinct categories of disorder, these approaches begin from distinct core features of human existence. These features, referred to as either dimensions or constructs, can vary in degree and are studied in both normal and pathological forms. (shrink)

In this paper I offer an alternative phenomenological account of depression as consisting of a degradation of the degree to which one is situated in and attuned to the world. This account contrasts with recent accounts of depression offered by Matthew Ratcliffe and others. Ratcliffe develops an account in which depression is understood in terms of deep moods, or existential feelings, such as guilt or hopelessness. Such moods are capable of limiting the kinds of significance and meaning that one can (...) come across in the world. I argue that Ratcliffe’s account is unnecessarily constrained, making sense of the experience of depression by appealing only to changes in the mode of human existence. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s critique of traditional transcendental phenomenology, I show that many cases of severe psychiatric disorders are best understood as changes in the very structure of human existence, rather than changes in the mode of human existence. Working in this vein, I argue that we can make better sense of many first-person reports of the experience of depression by appealing to a loss or degradation of the degree to which one is situated in and attuned to the world, rather than attempting to make sense of depression as a particular mode of being situated and attuned. Finally, I argue that drawing distinctions between disorders of structure and mode will allow us to improve upon the currently heterogeneous categories of disorder offered in the DSM-5. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a phenomenological description of lived autonomy and describe possible alterations of lived autonomy associated with chronic depression as they relate to specific psychopathological symptoms. I will distinguish between two types of lived autonomy, a pre-reflective type and a reflective type, which differ with respect to the explicitness of the action that is willed into existence; and I will relate these types to the classical distinction between freedom of intentional action and freedom of the will. I (...) will then describe how a chronically depressed person habitually discloses her experiential workspace with an impaired scope of perceivable action-properties, and pre-reflectively values many of these perceived action-properties as demanding or devalues these properties as well as her own abilities and drive to perform the respective actions. These alterations, typically experienced in a passive manner, imply an impairment of both types of lived autonomy. Drawing on first-hand accounts, I will then argue that small islands of lived autonomy, even of the reflective type, are possible if the afflicted identifies with at least some of her ‘depressive disabilities’. Lastly, I will compare this manner of life-conduct with the constellation of includence, as described by Tellenbach, and discuss the limitations of this study. (shrink)

This article explores affectivity, temporality, and their interrelation in patients who contracted COVID-19 during the first wave of the pandemic in Sweden and with symptoms indicative of post-COVID-19 Condition (PCC) that remained one year after the infection. It offers a qualitative phenomenological philosophy analysis, showing how being ill with acute COVID-19 and with symptoms indicative of PCC can entail a radically altered self-world relation. We identify two examples of pre-intentional (existential) feelings: that of listlessness and that of not being able (...) to sense what is real and not real, both of which, in different ways, imply a changed self-world relation. We offer an analysis of intentional feelings: how the fear of not “returning” to one’s previous self and the hope of such a return weave together the present and the absent, as well as the past and the future, in ways that make the future appear as constricted, disquieting, or lost. We argue that a phenomenological differentiation among experiences of living with symptoms indicative of PCC—through attention to the way intentional affectivity and pre-intentional affectivity help shape the embodied self’s attunement to the world—is apt to yield a better understanding of the variations within these experiences and contribute to clinical practice. (shrink)

Research in phenomenology and philosophy of psychiatry has suggested that psychopathological disturbances of experience often involve an alteration of one's ‘sense of possibility’, dependent upon the presence of specific ‘existential feelings’ (Ratcliffe 2012). In this paper I provide an extended account of how the engagement with certain narratives can lead to a transformation of one's sense of possibility by eliciting affective experiences that are not consonant with the person's existential feelings. More precisely, I claim that, even when the experience of (...) some types of emotion is generally precluded by a restricted sense of possibility, such emotions may be aroused by particular self-narratives, and I explore how this dynamic can give rise to enduring and wide-ranging affective changes. (shrink)

Major depression is a prevalent mental disorder that leads to persistent negative mood and tremendous suffering in affected individuals. However, the biological realization of this disorder and associated symptom clusters remain poorly understood. Recently, phenomenological accounts of major depressive disorder and contributions to the emerging predictive processing account have provided valuable insights into the phenomenological and neuro-functional components that lead to manifestations of major depressive episodes. The purpose of this paper is to weave together these different strands of research to (...) develop a predictive processing account of major depressive disorder. In doing so, I will relate personal-level descriptions of associated phenomenal experiences to a sub-personal-level predictive processing account of the functional realization of major depression. I will argue that pervasive symptoms of the disorder, which include a diminished sense of agency, fatigue, social withdrawal, and rumination, are integrated by existential feelings of loss and impossibility. These phenomenal experiences, I will argue, are associated with dysfunctional processes of prediction error minimization, which are characterized by an overall decrease of the causal contributions of active inference and by distorted precision estimates. The emerging account promises to contribute to a better understanding of the complex processes that give rise to depressive experiences. (shrink)

This paper utilizes the enactivist notion of ‘sense-making’ to discuss the nature of depression and examine some implications for treatment. As I understand it, sensemaking is fully embodied, fundamentally affective, and thoroughly embedded in a social environment. I begin by presenting an enactivist conceptualization of affective intentionality and describing how this general mode of intentional directedness to the world is disrupted in cases of major depressive disorder. Next, I utilize this enactivist framework to unpack the notion of ‘temporal desituatedness,’ and (...) maintain that the characteristic symptoms of depression result from a disruption to the future-directed structure of affective intentionality. This can be conceptualized as a loss of “online intelligence” and a shrinking of the field of affordances. Then, I argue that two of the standard modes of treatments for depression, medication and cognitive behavioral therapy, are not fully sufficient means of restoring online intelligence, and that these limitations stem partly from the approaches’ implicit commitment to a brain-bound, overly cognitivist view of the mind. I recommend expressive arts interventions such as dance-movement therapy and music therapy as important supplementary treatment methods that deserve further consideration. Insofar as they revitalize subjects’ bodies and emotions, cultivate an openness to the future, and promote self-insight and social synchrony, these treatment modes not only reflect key insights of enactivism, but also offer great potential for lasting healing. (shrink)

Among the characteristic features of depression is a diminishment in or lack of action and motivation. In this paper, I consider a dominant philosophical account which purports to explain this lack of action or motivation. This approach comes in different versions but a common theme is, I argue, an over reliance on psychologistic assumptions about action–explanation and the nature of motivation. As a corrective I consider an alternative view that gives a prominent place to the body in motivation. Central to (...) the experience of depression are changes to how a person is motivated to act and, also as central, are changes to bodily feelings and capacities. I argue that broadly characterizing motivation in terms of bodily capacities can, in particular, provide a more compelling account of depressive motivational pathology. (shrink)

This paper addresses the phenomenology of hopelessness. I distinguish two broad kinds of predicament that are easily confused: ‘loss of hopes’ and ‘loss of hope’. I argue that not all hope can be characterised as an intentional state of the form ‘I hope that p’. It is possible to lose all hopes of that kind and yet retain another kind of hope. The hope that remains is not an intentional state or a non-intentional bodily feeling. Rather, it is a ‘pre-intentional’ (...) orientation or ‘existential feeling’, by which I mean something in the context of which certain kinds of intentional state, including intentional hope, are intelligible. I go on to discuss severe depression, lack of aspiration, demoralisation and loss of trust in the world, in order to distinguish some qualitatively different forms that loss of hope can take. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper investigates from a phenomenological perspective the origins of self-illness ambiguity. Drawing on phenomenological theories of affectivity and selfhood, I argue that, as a phenomenon which concerns primarily the ‘personal self’, self-illness ambiguity is dependent on distinct alterations of affective background orientations. I start by illustrating how personhood is anchored in the experience of a specific set of non-intentional affects – i.e. moods or existential feelings – alterations of which are often present in mental ill-health. Also through the (...) exploration of the phenomenology of acute and long-term anxiety, I suggest that self-illness ambiguity originates in the presence of moods or existential feelings that are in tension with the ones that structure the person’s experience prior to the onset of the illness or when its symptoms are not experienced. More specifically, I claim that due to their ability to ‘block’ or ‘suspend’ some of the person’s affective and cognitive responses, such affective orientations may unsettle one’s self-defining evaluative perspective, leading to uncertainty and doubting about one’s personal self. (shrink)

In the contemporary phenomenological literature it has been argued that it is possible to distinguish between two forms of selfhood: the “minimal” and “narrative” self. This paper discusses a claim which is central to this account, namely that the minimal and narrative self complement each other but are fundamentally distinct dimensions. In particular, I challenge the idea that while the presence of a minimal self is a condition of possibility for the emergence of a narrative self, the dynamics which characterise (...) narrative selfhood do not have a structuring effect on minimal self-experience. I do so by drawing on both classical and contemporary phenomenological literature to show that at least certain forms of affective experience are complex phenomena in which minimal and narrative forms of selfhood are deeply entwined. More specifically, I claim that, due to their evaluative character, intentional and non-intentional affective states convey a pre-reflective experience of constitutive aspects of the narrative self. This enables me to argue that minimal and narrative selfhood are phenomenologically inextricable. (shrink)

In this study I explore from a phenomenological perspective the relationship between affectivity and narrative self-understanding in depression. Phenomenological accounts often conceive of the disorder as involving disturbances of the narrative self and suggest that these disturbances are related to the alterations of emotions and moods typical of the illness. In this paper I expand these accounts by advancing two sets of claims. In the first place, I suggest that, due to the loss of feeling characteristic of the illness, the (...) narratives with which the patients identified prior to the onset of depression are altered in various ways, thus leading to the weakening or abandonment of the narratives themselves. I then move to show that these autobiographical narratives are replaced by new stories which possess a distinctive structure and I argue that this is dependent upon specific configurations of affective experience, such as existential feelings of guilt, hopelessness, and isolation, and particular forms of temporal and spatial experience. (shrink)

In this paper, I review recent contributions of phenomenology to a variety of disciplines, including the cognitive sciences and psychiatry, and explore (1) controversies about phenomenological methods and naturalization; (2) relations between phenomenology and the enactive and extended mind approaches; and (3) the promise of phenomenology for addressing a number of controversial philosophical issues.

The aim of this study is to explore the relationship between affectivity and moral experience from a phenomenological perspective. I will start by showing how in a phenomenologically oriented account emotions can be conceived as intentional evaluative feelings which play a role in both moral epistemology and the motivation of moral behaviour. I will then move to discuss a particular kind of affect, "existential feelings" (Ratcliffe in Journal of Consciousness Studies 12(8–10), 43–60, 2005, 2008), which has not been considered so (...) far in the discourse on moral and affective experience. Relying on the notion of pre-intentionality through which Ratcliffe characterizes existential feelings (Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 53(6), 602–626, 2010) and on some insights into the relationship between affectivity and ethics developed by De Monticelli (2003, 2006), I suggest that key to the role played by existential feelings in moral experience is that they determine the kinds of evaluations that it is possible for us to make and the range of our possibilities of action. I then illustrate and further develop this idea through a phenomenological analysis of some forms of psychopathological experience. More specifically, by considering some experiential features of depression and borderline personality disorder, I claim that, by acquiring an existential character, emotions such as guilt, feelings of isolation, anger and shame can radically alter the structure of the individual evaluative perspective, having a deep impact on both moral judgements and behaviours. (shrink)

Abstract This paper proposes that adopting a ?phenomenological stance? enables a distinctive kind of empathy, which is required in order to understand forms of experience that occur in psychiatric illness and elsewhere. For the most part, we interpret other people's experiences against the backdrop of a shared world. Hence our attempts to appreciate interpersonal differences do not call into question a deeper level of commonality. A phenomenological stance involves suspending our habitual acceptance of that world. It thus allows us to (...) contemplate the possibility of structurally different ways of ?finding oneself in the world?. Such a stance, I suggest, can be incorporated into an empathetic appreciation of others' experiences, amounting to what we might call ?radical empathy? (shrink)

A debate persists over how to distinguish manic states from non-manic ones (such as depressions). A lacuna exists amongst these efforts, where a specifically agentive account of mania would sit. An agentive account centers the manic person’s view of practical reasons, rationalizing their actions in the same way that sympathetic understandings rationalize the actions of more neurotypical agents. In this paper, I argue that mania restructures our agency by creating a pervasive sense of urgency. This urgency changes the kind of (...) handling that our practical reasons seem to call out for. Whilst this can make us less reliable as agents, I argue that this does not undermine the basic capacities on which personal autonomy is founded. The greater threat to manic agents’ autonomy is nonrecognition of this restructured agency, undermining autonomy in its social dimensions. Without an agentive account, we will fail to recognize distinctly manic agency when we see it, limiting our understanding of autonomy, and withholding recognition, fundamental to autonomy in its social dimensions, from manic agents. (shrink)

Introduction to the special issue "The Bounds of Rationality".

This paper aims to provide an account of the relationship between self-esteem and moral experience. In particular, drawing on feminist and phenomenological accounts of affectivity and ethics, I argue that self-esteem has a primary role in moral epistemology and moral action. I start by providing a characterization of self-esteem, suggesting in particular that it can be best understood through the phenomenological notion of “existential feeling.” Examining the dynamics characteristic of the so-called “impostor phenomenon” and the experience of women who are (...) involved in abusive relationships, I then claim that self-esteem fundamentally shapes the way in which self and others are conceived, and the ethical demands and obligations to which they are considered to be subjected. More specifically, I argue that low self-esteem—which in the experience of women may be rooted in particular assumptions regarding gender roles and stereotyping—can hinder autonomy, make it difficult to question other people's evaluative perspectives and behaviors, and attribute to others responsibility for their actions. (shrink)

In this article, James Gibson’s influential notion of “perceptual affordances” is applied to the romantic realm. The core idea of Gibson’s view rests on the possible, meaningful actions that the perceptual environment offers the animal. In order to sustain this idea, Gibson posits two additional major characteristics of affordances: (a) affordances are perceived in a direct cognitive manner, and (b) affordances have a unique ontological status that is neither subjective nor objective. While I accept the core idea, I have doubts (...) as to whether the two other characteristics are necessary in other types of affordances, such as social and romantic affordances. The romantic realm offers an abundance of many enticing affordances. In this regard, I discuss phenomena like the availability of a romantic alternative, romantic ambivalence, choosing a romantic partner, sexual fantasies, the road not taken, reciprocity, playing hard to get, cultivating backup mates, romantic affordances in old age and in the digital realm. In light of the abundance and complexity of romantic affordances in our current romantic environment, knowing the nature of these affordances is most useful from both pragmatic and theoretical viewpoints. (shrink)

Here we consider interpersonal experience in schizophrenia, melancholia, and mania. Our goal is to improve understanding of similarities and differences in how other people can be experienced in these disorders, through a review of first-person accounts and case examples and of contemporary and classic literature on the phenomenology of these disorders. We adopt a tripartite/dialectical structure: first we explore main differences as traditionally described; next we consider how the disorders may resemble each other; finally we discuss more subtle but perhaps (...) foundational ways in which the phenomenology of these disorders may nonetheless be differentiated. These involve disruptions of common sense and conventionality, abnormalities of empathy, distinct forms of paranoia and the sense of personal centrality, and altered perceptions of intentionality, deadness, and artificiality. We end by considering some neurocognitive research relevant to these abnormal forms of subjectivity, including work on theory of mind, experience of human movement, and perception of faces. (shrink)

The DSM characterizes major depressive disorder partly in temporal terms: the depressive mood must last for at least two weeks, and also must impact the subject "most of the day, nearly every day." However, from the standpoint of phenomenological psychopathology, the long-lasting quality of the condition hardly captures the distinctiveness of depression. While the DSM refers to objective time as measured by clocks and calendars, what is especially striking about depression is the distortions to lived time that it involves. But (...) is there any relation between a) these disruptions to temporal experience and b) the tendency for depressive symptoms to persist and endure? To explore the connection between lived time and objective time, I investigate the embodied and enactive nature of intentionality among subjects suffering from depression. What I call 'affective framing' is a spontaneous, pre-reflective way of filtering information that involves bodily attunement and allows subjects to focus their attention on what they feel is important. I will argue that affective framing ordinarily has a forward-looking temporal structure and a "teleological direction" that is rooted in our embodiment. However, depression involves a distortion in future-directed intentionality, so that a subject becomes temporally desituated and cut off from the future. This contributes to many of the characteristic features of depression, including apparent lack of motivation, inability to imagine future possibilities, alterations in lived time, and a sense that one is "stuck." To gain a better understanding of this disruption to the futuredirected structure of affective framing in cases of depression, I look to concepts from complex dynamic systems theory and the notion of 'habit.' My proposed account aims to shed light on how a disruption to future-directedness impacts bodily attunement and reinforces depression as a long-term condition. (shrink)

Matthew Ratcliffe has argued that existential feelings form a distinct class of bodily and non-conceptual feelings that pre-intentionally structure our intentional experience of others, the world, and ourselves. In this article, I will identify and discuss three interrelated areas of concern for Ratcliffe’s theory of existential feelings. First, the distinct senses in which existential feelings are felt as background bodily feelings and as spaces of possibility calls for further clarification. Second, the nature of the suggested bi-directional relationship between existential feelings (...) and intentional experience remains ambiguous. Third, viewed in light of existential guilt, the categorically non-conceptual nature of existential feelings may not be as definite as presumed. The aim of the article is to draw critical attention to aspects of the theory that would benefit from further development, and therefore, to advance the ongoing discussion about existential feelings. (shrink)

In light of the recent calls for integrating phenomenology and psychiatry, I will address the problem of heterogeneity in major depressive disorder (MDD) using the phenomenological account of depression put forth by Fernandez (Fernandez, 2014). I will first go over the distinction between two of the major specifiers of major depressive disorder, namely melancholic and atypical depression. Then, I review the account of depression developed by Fernandez, which considers some of the people diagnosed with MDD to have an erosion of (...) the capacity for the category of moods as opposed to a particular kind of mood. I will apply this conception to the diagnostic and statistical manual criteria for melancholic and atypical depression, and consider how reactive and unreactive depressed moods can be clarified using this conception. I argue that we can help our understanding of MDD by viewing melancholic depression as primarily characterized by structural erosion of the person’s situatedness (observed as a lack of mood reactivity) and atypical depression as a state in which the capacity for moods in general has not been eroded (hence, the retention of mood reactivity), with the psychopathology rooted only in the content of experience (the moods themselves). I discuss how this conception related to other phenomenological accounts of depression and why it can be useful in making sense of some clinical observations between the two specifiers, namely the differences in illness severity and symptoms of depersonalization and derealization, before concluding the work by considering its relationship with the operationalized approach of the DSM. (shrink)

Epistemic emotions – namely affective phenomena like curiosity, certainty, and doubt – have been claimed to play a key role in epistemic evaluation and motivation, and, relatedly, to be an integral aspect of the epistemic virtues. In this paper I argue that the experience of epistemic emotions is extensively shaped by self-trust. More specifically, I claim that the set of epistemic emotions that we can undergo, and how these unfold over time, is modulated by the level of trust in one’s (...) abilities as a knower. I do so by drawing on research on epistemic injustice, as well as through the exploration of some features of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and depression. I then argue that the connection between epistemic emotions and self-trust can be best accounted for by conceiving of self-trust, through the framework of philosophical phenomenology, as an affective background orientation which has a structuring role in our cognitive and affective experience. (shrink)

Psychedelics have shown promise as a treatment for depression. Although there is some debate, a popular view is that psychedelics produce their benefits in an experience-dependent manner. This is the view that a depressed person gets better, inter alia, because of the experience she has had on psychedelics. Among the various questions that treatment for depression with psychedelics raise, one of the most important is: By what mechanism do these drugs reduce symptoms? If the experience-dependent view is correct, the answer, (...) at least on the personal level of explanation, lies in the phenomenology. In this paper, borrowing mainly from Ratcliffe’s account of depression, I offer such an answer. I argue that psychedelic experiences involve a surge of existential feelings, which can revise the depressed person’s diminished sense of possibility and restore their ability to be affected by the world. I explain how this occurs via a change in the sense of reality linked to the subjective effects of psychedelics. This, I suggest, is the personal level mechanism or process behind psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy for depression. (shrink)

There is a paradox that lies at the heart of every investigation of normality, namely, its dependence on its other (e.g., deviation, break, difference). In this paper, I want to show that this paradox is the reason for the dynamism as well as fragility of normality. In this regard, I will not only argue that every normality is fragile, but also that normality can only be established because it is fragile. In the first part of this paper, I will present (...) and re-visit Husserl’s account of normality as concordant and optimal with regard to its dynamic or fragile aspects. In the second part of this paper, I will apply this account to recent findings in phenomenological pathology regarding schizophrenia and depression to show how Husserl’s account could be helpful for differentiating between different aspects (such as concordance and optimality) as well as genetic levels of (disturbances of) normality. (shrink)

Phenomenological descriptions of depressed mental life offer a profound understanding of depression from the first-person perspective. In this paper, such descriptions are developed by drawing on the work by Ludwig Binswanger and on the autobiographical report of depression by Piet C. Kuiper . I will argue that Binswanger’s central claim in his phenomenological description of the depressed state of mind fails due to crucial misunderstandings of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. Nonetheless, by drawing on Kuiper’s first-hand account, I will develop a phenomenological (...) description of depressed mental life, highlighting the altered manner of pre-reflective valuing in depression and introducing the concept of a ‘depressive habituality.’ This term refers to the acquisition of a new set of habitualisations, especially on the foundational levels of automatic mental life. It offers explanations for the fact that it is not easy to recover from depression and that people may more easily become depressed again. (shrink)

This paper unifies the disparate analyses in Heidegger's lecture course, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, in a single therapeutic and philosophical project. By taking seriously the text's claim to lead us towards authenticity, I show how Heidegger's analysis of boredom works together with his comparative analysis of man and animal to diagnose and lead us out of our contemporary complacency about being. This reading puts both analyses in a new light, reveals the hidden strategic unity of the (...) lecture course, and brings out the therapeutic dimension of Heidegger's phenomenology. (shrink)