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Sense of ownership and sense of agency during trauma

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Abstract

This paper seeks to describe and analyze the traumatic experience through an examination of the sense of agency—the sense of controlling one’s body, and sense of ownership—the sense that it is my body that undergoes experiences. It appears that there exist (at least) two levels of traumatic experience: on the first level one loses the sense of agency but retains the sense of ownership, whilst on the second one loses both of these, with symptoms becoming progressively more severe. A comparison of the traumatic experience with various modulations of the senses of agency and ownership, from cases involving prostheses to tools requiring greater or lesser extents of control, suggests that the harsher the traumatic event, the greater the damage is to the sense of ownership, resulting in the increasing sense of the body as a tool rather than an original organism. Likewise, the long-term ramifications become more severe according to the significance of the damage to the sense of ownership.

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  1. The estimated prevalence of lifetime PTSD was 7.8 % in the general population of America. Among women the rate is estimated at 10.4 %, and among men 5 % (Keane et al. 2009; Yehuda 2002). However, while between 6.6 % and 35 % of subjects exposed to terror attacks will develop PTSD (Bleich et al. 2003; Njenga et al. 2004), about 91 % (!) of survivors of torture will develop the disorder (Wenzel et al. 2000). On the basis of this one example (and there are many more) it is clear that we cannot limit trauma to one kind of experience; rather each traumatic experience has its own unique features and symptoms.

  2. For instance, although paralysis and OBE are both defined broadly as dissociative experiences, the bodily experience in each of these cases differs fundamentally.

  3. The reverse, namely using the traumatic experience to improve our understanding of the sense of body ownership and sense of agency, is also possible. However, this is not the aim of this paper.

  4. As de Vignemont (2011) asks: “Am I a body, or do I own this body?” (p. 231). In James’s (1890) words, “And our bodies themselves, are they simply ours, or are they us?” (p. 291)

  5. It should be noted, however, that “the exact relation between agency and body-ownership remains unknown” (Tsakiris et al. 2010, p. 740). Furthermore, some researchers claim that sense of agency and sense of ownership do not work according to the same mechanisms (Sato and Yasuda 2005). Others even claim that sense of agency and sense of ownership are rooted in different kinds of neural activity (Chaminade and Decety 2002; Farrer et al. 2003; Tsakiris et al. 2010).

  6. The use of the term non-existent does not suggest that bodily experience does not occur during perception. Rather, while perceiving (X) one experiences direct connection with the object that is being perceived (for more on this issue see Legrand 2007, 2006).

  7. Because the sense of body ownership is a matter of degree (de Vignemont 2010), the experience of being detached from the world is also flexible; there are different levels of derealization and detachment from the world.

  8. Indeed, “Political prisoners who are aware of the methods of coercive control devote particular attention to maintaining their sense of autonomy. One form of resistance is refusing to comply with petty demands or to accept rewards. The hunger strike is the ultimate expression of this resistance. Because the prisoner voluntarily subjects himself to greater deprivation than that willed by his captor, he affirms his sense of integrity and self-control. The psychologist Joel Dimsdale describes a woman prisoner in the Nazi concentration camps who fasted on Yom Kippur in order to prove that her captors had not defeated her. Political prisoner Natan Sharansky describes the psychological effect of active resistance: ‘As soon as I announced my hunger strike I got rid of the feeling of despair and helplessness, and the humiliation at being forced to tolerate the KGB’s tyranny…The bitterness and angry determination that had been building up during the past nine months now gave way to a kind of strange relief; at long last I was actively defending myself and my world from them’.” (Herman 1992, p. 79).

  9. However it is important to note that, according to Head (1920) and Merleau-Ponty (2002), a blind man’s cane functions transparently and yet will never become part of the organism. In the end a blind man perceives the world through his cane and as such experiences the world differently to a person who is not blind; when perceiving through the cane, the fabric of the world, its sense and richness differ. The reason for this is clear: the world is perceived through a (second order) mediator, a tool that is not part of the organism. Hence, even though blind people can feel that the cane is part of their body—the cane “tells” the blind person what is in front of him just as the eyes tell a person who can see what is in front of him—this is in fact an intermediate situation, between tool and prosthesis. A cane is indeed transparent, and it is even part of who I am, but it will never be part of the real body.

  10. It may be that in this situation one experiences disownership of the body. Indeed, we saw that sense of ownership is not projected onto a tool (de Vignemont 2010). Furthermore, the above statement is very similar to testimonies of subjects who suffer from the alien hand syndrome (somatoparaphrenia), in which one may experience disownership of one’s hand (Sacks 1985). For instance, AR (Bisiach et al. 1991) responds to the question “whose arm is this?” with the answer: “it’s not mine…I found it in my bed…” (p. 1030). In the future we should focus on different levels of sense of disownership toward one’s body during trauma—see for instance Lucy B’s testimony in “I get terrified, trapped in my own alienlike body” (Luci B 2009). It is possible that a lack of sense of ownership is not similar to the sense of disownership and, in addition, the symptoms may differ.

  11. The case of IW can illuminate this issue further: IW suffers from differentiation; he has lost the sense of touch and proprioception below the neck (Cole and Paillard 1995; Gallagher and Cole 1995). More specifically, he does not feel his posture, as well as his sense of movements, and the location of his limbs. Nevertheless, by relying exclusively on his visual and cognitive control IW can carry out actions, for instance walking and driving. It seems that IW controls his body like one controls a very good NASA robot.

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Acknowledgment

I would like to thank Prof. Yemima Ben-Menachem for reading the first draft of this paper and for her useful comments along the way. A version of this paper was presented the 2013 “Phenomenology and Cognitive Science Conference” held at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and I am indebted to a number of respondents from the audience for their comments and observations. I am especially grateful to Prof. Dan Zahavi and Dr. Michael Roubach for their remarks. I would like to thank Prof. Shaun Gallagher for his careful reading, endless patience, and countless insightful comments. In addition, I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their comments which helped to shape the final form of this paper.

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Ataria, Y. Sense of ownership and sense of agency during trauma. Phenom Cogn Sci 14, 199–212 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-013-9334-y

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