I have been reading Matthew Ratcliffe's work on existential feelings, and am feeling deeply inspired by his insights into phenomenologically understsanding different forms of mental illness. In this blog post, I want to explore some ramifications of Ratcliffe's findings, and apply them to psychosis.
I've only begun reading Ratcliffe, but I think I can hopefully offer some kind of definition of existential feelings. I suppose that my encounter with the notion of existential feelings reminded me of what Louis Sass has argued in his essay on Heidegger and schizophrenia - that some experiences of psychosis do not involve things within the world so much as the world itself, which is to say, not ontic differences but ontological differences. Existential feelings are not feelings about things that happen in the world - sadness, or anger, or joy, or love - but feelings related to a change in one's experience of the world itself. When I was psychotic, this was the constant feeling that attended psychosis, even if I could not articulate it then, and still have a very hard time articulating it now. It was the feeling that I was existing in a different world. And any attempt to bridge the gap between this world and the world that most people experience was impossible, which felt terrifying and extremely hopeless and impossible. I was a different world.
What do I mean when I say that psychosis meant that my world had changed? I want to talk about symptoms, but first let me provide an analogy from Heidegger, whose work I find pretty consistently helpful, like Ratcliffe's, for articulating this sense of existing within a changed world, of being a changed world. Heidegger talks in a fascinating way about the difference between, we could say, pre-reflective and reflective modes of being. When we are engaged in a pre-reflective mode of being, we are coping absorbedly with the world. We are hammering a nail, we are writing a blogpost, we are playing basketball, we are talking to a friend. We are not pulling back from that experience to reflect on that experience, though we might do that as well. But primarily we are absorbed in what we are doing, we are coping with the world, in the world. That's the pre-reflective, the kind of primary mode of our being in the world, as argued by Heidegger. (Even when other philosophers disagree - I believe Levinas argues that our enjoyment of the world is more primary than our coping with it - I still think Heidegger is more right.)
This pre-reflective mode of being discloses a world to us, and it is a world where certain things withdraw, and certain other things come to the fore. When I hammer a nail, I am not aware of the hammer, I am just hammering, to use Heidegger's famous example. When I play basketball, I am not aware of the color of the ball and the weight of it, so much as I am immersed in the game, the game itself comes to the fore, and various properties of the game withdraw. When I then reflect on the game, when I notice the color of the ball, when I listen more acutely to the calls from the stands, when I stop and think about the lyrics of the song that is playing overhead, then the game itself has withdrawn, and I am moving within a different world, a world that is being disclosed in a different way.
I am talking about reflective and pre-reflective ways of being, because the important thing is how a world is disclosed based on our way of being. But what happens when we are psychotic?
The world that is disclosed to us when we are psychotic is a different world, but it is not like the experience of the pre-reflective and reflective worlds, even if I think their difference in experience can teach us something about our experience of the world, and the notion of world more generally. How is the psychotic world different from the reflective and prereflective worlds? Here is where Ratcliffe comes in. The psychotic world, among other things, involves different sorts of existential feelings. When one is psychotic, there seem to be two different things that are happening, though this is hard to describe or explain.
Psychosis is a kind of trance, a state of mind that falls on one, that is very hard to sort of shake. It infiltrates us, it breaks our I. When we are psychotic, we are different people. This, in and of itself, is worth talking about. But the uncanny thing is that, in some hard to describe way, we are also lugging behind us our old historical selves. I see the world, not through psychosis, but as psychosis. I am, myself, psychosis. But where is the former me? Where is the person who was not psychotic, before I became psychotic? Is he completely eclipsed?
I don't think so. Why? Because I think that we can legitimately speak about the terror of psychosis, even if, when one is psychotic, one is not tuned in totally to that feeling. But I think, at some level, the person who we were before the psychosis is still inside us, and that person is terrified. Why, or how? I am not speaking of split personalities here, so it's hard to kind of conceptually tease out what I am trying to say. I don't really know if we can locate this terror in something called the "unconscious" - I guess I don't even know if the notion of "background" is helpful, the idea that being is or happens through a background of social practices. But how do we talk about psychosis, in the context of what happens to the person before the psychosis? The reasoning self? Where does it go?
I suppose we could say that that self withdraws. It does not disappear, because when we recover, we are in some strange way reinstated, gradually. But my point, I suppose, is that psychosis, in disclosing a different world, discloses a different self to us. When this self - who might be hallucinating, or experiencing delusions of reference - comes to the fore, our old reasoning self withdraws. As the psychotic self comes to the fore, the world we experience is different. It is Ratcliffe's existential feelings writ large. It is like moving between the prereflective and reflective, in the sense of how different worlds are then disclosed. The psychotic world is a move like that, a different way of being.
