Matthew Ratcliffe
University of York
Matthew Ratcliffe is a philosophy professor at the University of York, UK. Before moving to York, he taught at the University College Cork, Durham University, and the University of Vienna. He currently resides in Tynemouth, Great Britain with his wife, Beth, and their children, Thomas and Samuel. He has written on grief, loss, trauma, trust, hope, self, emotion regulation, emotional scaffolding, and the experience of possibility.
Difficulty Level: Moderate
It may at times be slow going without some basic study of existential philosophy and neurology, but still quite worthwhile. It’s probably aimed somewhere around the cusp between undergraduate and graduate school.
309 pages
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Table of Contents
Part I: The Structure of Existential Feeling
C1. Emotions and Bodily Feelings
C2. Existential Feelings
C3. The Phenomenology of Touch
Part II: Varieties of Existential Feelings in Psychiatric Illness
C4. Body and World
C5. Feelings and Belief in the Capgras Delusion
C6. Feelings of Deadness and Depersonalization
C7. Existential Feelings in Schizophrenia
Part III. Existential Feelings and Philosophical Thoughts
C8. What William James Really Said
C9. Stance, Feeling and Belief
C10. Pathologies of Existential Feelings
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The aim of this book is to examine how humans experience themselves as physical beings with emotions being the royal road into that experience. This experience might be termed, rather than embodiment, the feeling of being which includes emotional feelings that most people find hard to verbalize because they are body-related and not formally recognized in the pantheon of everyday emotions. Feelings of being include feelings of being solid, of being real, belonging, and being at home as well as the darker feelings of unreality, feeling at a loss, feeling that the world is strange and surreal and feelings of isolation, loneliness, and emptiness. These are feelings of existence because they give us a changing sense of being part of a changing world. Existential feelings are not formally recognized by mainstream psychology and reside mainly in the literature of existential philosophy especially in instances of emotional crisis[1].
Feelings of Being is the first philosophical examinations of the feelings which make us conscious of existing as embodied beings. Existential feelings of being are integral to mood disorder, delusions, depersonalization, and schizophrenia as well as religious and spiritual epiphanies. Ratcliffe proposes that existential feelings form a distinctive group based on three characteristics:
- they are bodily feelings
- they are ways of relating to the world as a whole
- they give us our sense of reality
People sometimes talk of feeling alive, dead, distant, detached, dislodged, estranged, isolated, otherworldly, indifferent to everything, overwhelmed, suffocated, cut off, lost, disconnected, out of sorts, not oneself, out of touch with things, out of it, not quite with it, separate, in harmony with things, at peace with things or part of things. People sometimes feel that “There’s something wrong, but I can’t put my finger on it,” or “I’m just not with it today and don’t know why,” or “I just disconnected from everything right now.”
While we each have just the one existential feeling, there are variety of possible existential feelings, and which one we have can change over time. Ratcliffe calls such a change an existential change. In existential change, the possibility space is reconfigured. It is as such a reconfiguration that Ratcliffe interprets depression. He argues that depression is a shift in that meaningful events or desires are denied or lost.
Ratcliffe’s discussion is informed by historical and contemporary phenomenology—a systematic method of philosophical analysis aimed at defining the absolute essence of a phenomenon–along with philosophies of mind and emotion as well as psychiatry and psychology, so the serious reader may be inspired to dig deeper with further background reading.
In all, the interested somatic practitioner will engage in a discussion of somatic reality with a special focus on the experience of depression of the body and soul.
Paul Shane, Ph.D., LMT
Director, Academic Content
References
Ratcliffe, M. (2008). Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry, and the Sense of Reality. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
[1] One of the earliest philosophers of existentialism was Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) who attempted to dramatize the feelings of existing in a work of fiction: Nausea.