Fuchs

"The linkage between body, self, and other also characterizes the phenomenology of moods; it is a common understanding in phenomenology that moods are not inner states, but permeate and tinge the whole field of experience. Thus, moods are atmospheric in nature, radiating through the environment like warmth or cold, and conferring corresponding expressive qualities on the whole situation. It is no coincidence that we often use words taken from weather such as ‘bright’, ‘sunny’, ‘gloomy’, ‘clouded’, or ‘dark’ to denote mood states as well as the atmosphere of situations. On the other hand, moods also include background feelings of the body, such as feelings of lightness and freshness in elation, or of heaviness and weariness in depression. The phenomenology of moods is well expressed in the German notion of Stimmung which implies metaphors of attunement, concordance, and orchestration. Moods may be said to ‘tune’ body, self, and environment to a common chord, similar to a tonality linking a series of notes and chords to the major or minor key. Thus they tend to establish a consonance of bodily feeling, emotion, and environmental atmosphere.3 Moreover, moods link the background feeling of the body to the potentialities of a given life situation. ‘The mood has already disclosed, in every case, Being-in-the-world as a whole, and makes it possible first of all to direct oneself towards something’ (Heidegger, 1962, p. 176). Moods are thus both feelings of the body and ways of finding oneself in the world. They indicate ‘how things stand’ in our life and how we are disposed to react to the present situation. Such feelings do not only include typical moods such as elation, serenity, sadness, or melancholy, but also what Ratcliffe (2008) has termed existential feelings: feelings of wideness or restriction, freedom or imprisonment, vulnerability or protection, familiarity or estrangement, reality or unreality, feeling alive or feeling dead. However, it seems important to note that all these background feelings are not just related to an anonymous world, but to the world that we share with others, or to the interpersonal world. They are existential feelings of being-with. It is primarily in our coexistence with others that we feel close or distant, familiar or alienated, open or restricted, and even real. 224 T. FUCHS [3] Of course it may occur that one’s mood is in contrast to the atmosphere one encounters in the environment, as when a sad person enters a cheerful party, but usually there is at least a tendency of mood and surrounding atmosphere to converge. Thus, interaffectivity is not merely a particular section or application of our emotional endowment. Rather, it is the encompassing sphere in which our emotional life is embedded from birth on. This sphere has its centre in the lived body: through its affectability and resonance it mediates our participation in a shared space of affective attunement. To summarize: in contrast to the common cognitivist picture in which our mental states and emotions are located within our head, phenomenology regards feelings as residing in between individuals. Human beings do not have moods or emotions independent of their embodied relations and interactions with their fellow human beings. Emotions are ways of being in the world, emerging on the basis of a pre-reflective attunement with others, indicating the current state of our relations, interests, and conflicts, and manifesting themselves as attitudes and expressions of the body. This view appears to be quite common among cultural anthropologists as well: numerous ethnographic studies, particularly in the Pacific and Africa, have noted that emotions are a primary idiom for defining and negotiating relations of self-with-others in a moral order (see Lutz and White, 1986, and Lindholm, 2007, for an overview). In these studies, emotions emerge as socially shaped and regulated; they are less construed as inner states, as conceived by western psychology, but result from people’s engagements with others. Similarly, in these cultures, the source of emotional disturbance, imbalance, or illness is assumed to lie primarily in the social world".

Thomas Fuchs

''The depressive patient experiences a local or general oppression, anxiety, and constriction (e.g. a feeling of an armour or tyre around the chest, of a pressure in the head, etc.). The materiality, density, and weight of the body, otherwise suspended and unnoticed in everyday performance, now come to the fore and are felt painfully. In this respect, depression closely resembles somatic illnesses such as infections which affect one’s overall bodily state. Corresponding reports from patients may well be elicited provided that the interviewer takes their bodily experience seriously; they will complain about feelings of fatigue, exhaustion, paralysis, aches, sickness, nausea, numbness, etc. of body and environment is blocked, drive and impulse are exhausted. Sense perception and movement are weakened and finally walled in by the general rigidity which is also visible in the patient’s gaze, face, or gestures. In order to act, the patients have to overcome their psychomotor inhibition and to push themselves to even minor tasks. With growing inhibition, sensorimotor space is restricted to the nearest environment, culminating in depressive stupor. In sum, depression may be described as a reification or corporealization of the lived body (Fuchs, 2005).4 The constriction and encapsulation of the body corresponds to the psychosocial experiences that typically lead to depression. These are experiences of a disruption of relations and bonds, including the loss of relevant others or of important social roles, furthermore situations of a backlog in one’s duties, falling short of one’s aspirations, or social defeat (Tellenbach, 1980; Bjorkqvist, 2001). In terms of temporality, one may speak of a social desynchronization (Fuchs, 2001): the movement of life is blocked and the person is unable to keep pace with others. These situations of social separation or defeat are perceived as particularly threatening since the patients feel they do not have the necessary resources for coping (‘learned helplessness’, Seligman, 1975). Depression is the consequent psychophysiological reaction: at the biological level, it involves a pattern of neurobiological, metabolic, immunological, biorhythmic, and other organismic dysfunctions which are equivalent to a partial decoupling or separation between organism and environment.5 These dysfunctions are experienced as a loss of drive and interest (anhedonia), psychomotor inhibition, bodily constriction, and depressive mood''.

Thomas Fuchs

"Since the affective contact to the environment is also essential for our basic sense of reality and belonging to the world, a loss of body resonance always results in a certain degree of derealization and depersonalization. Therefore affective depersonalization is a core feature of severe depressive episodes (Kraus, 2002; Stanghellini, 2004). However, there is a special kind of melancholic depression in which depersonalization is the prominent symptom; in German psychopathology it is called ‘Entfremdungsdepression’ (depersonalized depression; Petrilowitsch, 1956). Here the emotional quality of perception is lost completely, objects look blunt or dead, and space seems hollowed out, as it were''.

Thomas Fuchs