Individuals suffering from depression consistently report experiencing a lack of connectedness with others. David Karp (2017, 73), in his memoir and study of depression, has gone so far to describe depression as “an illness of isolation, a disease of disconnectedness”. It has become common, in phenomenological circles, to attribute this social impairment to the depressed individual experiencing their body as corporealized, acting as a barrier between them and the world around them (Fuchs 2005, 2016). In this paper, I offer an (...) alternative view of the experience of social disconnectedness in depression, suggesting that rather than necessarily experiencing their body as object-like, the depressed individual’s bodily is saturated with experiences of lethargy, tiredness, heaviness, sadness, hopelessness and so on, to the exclusion of being able to bodily connect to others. I suggest that depression does not involve a complete social impairment but a specific impairment of affective forms of interpersonal experience. (shrink)

In this paper, I seek to challenge some contemporary accounts of collective affective intentionality by arguing for irreducibility of ontological autonomy of individual affective experiences. By elaborating on several requirements for reciprocal affective responses, I propose that instead of endorsing tendency of experiential unification, phenomenal fusion and token identity accounts and conceiving of single body of collectivity in terms of extended self, as the ontological bearer of affective intentionality, one has to maintain at least minimal asymmetry of self and other. (...) Moreover, I discuss the role of embodied interaffectivity and mutual incorporation accounts for collective affective experiences. (shrink)