Matthew Ratcliffe: Experiences of Depression: A Study in Phenomenology Robert D. Stolorow Human Studies A Journal for Philosophy and the Social Sciences ISSN 0163-8548 Hum Stud DOI 10.1007/s10746-015-9364-2 1 23 Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Science +Business Media Dordrecht. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be selfarchived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com”. 1 23 Author's personal copy Hum Stud DOI 10.1007/s10746-015-9364-2 REVIEW ESSAY Matthew Ratcliffe: Experiences of Depression: A Study in Phenomenology Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 2015, x + 305 pp + index, $59.95 Robert D. Stolorow1  Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015 You who are immaculate, you pure perceivers…. Behind a god’s mask you hide from yourselves, in your ‘‘purity’’.—Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language.—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. Reading Experiences of Depression was a somewhat maddening experience. On one hand, Ratcliffe presents a masterful and highly valuable account of the emotional phenomenology of existential change—of shifts in our experience of belonging to a shared world of possibilities. On the other hand, embedded in this account are commitments to two frameworks that are actually extraneous and inimical to his project and that perpetuate remnants of Cartesian isolated-mind thinking— Husserlian ‘‘pure phenomenology’’ and traditional diagnostic psychiatry. Here I wish both to affirm Ratcliffe’s contributions to emotional phenomenology and to cleanse them of his Cartesian commitments. Drawing on Husserl’s (1960 [1931]) book with the telling title Cartesian Meditations, Ratcliffe appears to ground his phenomenological method in Husserl’s conception of the phenomenological reduction or epoche—the bracketing or suspension of the ‘‘natural attitude’’ or belief in the real (consciousness-transcendent) existence of an external world. In certain contexts, Husserl expands the epoche into Radicalizing Ratcliffe: The writing of this review essay benefited greatly from incisive input from my friend and close collaborator George Atwood. He and I have for more than three decades been seeking to rethink psychoanalysis as a form of phenomenological inquiry (Atwood and Stolorow 2014). & Robert D. Stolorow robertdstolorow@gmail.com 1 Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles, CA, USA 123 Author's personal copy R. D. Stolorow an ideal of pure, presuppositionless phenomenological inquiry entailing ‘‘freedom from [all] metaphysical, scientific and psychological presuppositions’’ (2001 [1913]: 99), enabling the phenomenologist to gaze directly and with Cartesian certainty upon the ‘‘eidetic essences’’ of consciousness itself. Like post-Husserlian phenomenologists Heidegger, Gadamer, and Merleau-Ponty, Ratcliffe rejects the possibility of presuppositionless inquiry; yet he retains the notion of a phenomenological reduction, redefining it to suit his purposes. In Radcliffe’s hands, the reduction or phenomenological attitude is relationalized, becoming a laudable openness to differences in how experiential worlds are organized, an openness that can undergird empathic understanding of others. Nevertheless, the term retains the Cartesian baggage from its origins in Husserl’s pure or transcendental phenomenology. These critical remarks notwithstanding, Ratcliffe’s openness to difference is a source of his valuable contributions to emotional phenomenology. Central to his perspective is a conception of the experiential world as a space of possibilities. Again showing his allegiance to Husserl, he attributes this conception to Husserl’s notion of perceptual horizons–horizons of perceptual possibility. Ratcliffe could have found a more compelling grounding for his ideas in the work of Heidegger (1962 [1927]), who radicalized Husserl’s phenomenology, moving from a phenomenology of consciousness to a phenomenology of existence, of Being-in-the-world. For Heidegger, the experiential world is a space of possibilities for being, rather than just for perceiving. Central to Ratcliffe’s investigation is the distinction between intentional feelings—those that are about a particular intentional object—and pre-intentional feelings—those that indicate the kinds of intentional states that are possible within an experiential world. The latter, which Ratcliffe also calls existential feelings (see also Ratcliffe 2008), disclose the existential structure of experience, one’s preintentional ways of finding oneself in the world. Ratcliffe’s book—and here is its highly valuable contribution—is a study of changes in existential feeling—shifts and disturbances in the kinds of possibility that experience incorporates. His particular focus is the loss or diminution of kinds of possibility. One such loss that figures prominently in Ratcliffe’s analysis is the loss of existential hope—the loss of a sense of the future as a domain of possible meaningful change for the better. Such pre-intentional existential hopelessness entails loss of the very basis for particular intentional hopes. Particular hopes and aspirations themselves become unintelligible, as the world is emptied of significance. Existential hopelessness emerges in Ratcliffe’s analysis as a richly variegated, multidimensional unity. It can include a sense of eternal incarceration and irrevocable guilt. The sense of freedom of will and personal agency is often diminished or lost, and there is an accompanying alteration in the felt bodily ‘‘I can’’. Perhaps most important, existential hopelessness entails a profound alteration of temporality, the lived experience of time. Instead of being a linear unfolding toward an open future marked by possibility, time is felt to be circular, with a closed future characterized by endless repetition. Lastly, there is a feeling of profound alienation from others deriving from a sense of living in a reality different from that inhabited by everyone else. Ratcliffe’s analysis of the unity of existential hopelessness is quite elegant and very valuable. Would that he had stopped with that, rather than linking it with 123 Author's personal copy Matthew Ratcliffe: Experiences of Depression: A Study in… traditional psychiatric diagnosing! But no, he presents it to us as a phenomenological account of ‘‘experiences of depression,’’ the unfortunate title of his book. But what is this ‘‘depression,’’ the phenomenology of whose experiences he gives us? At several points he acknowledges that the word refers to something that is very heterogeneous and of questionable empirical validity. Correspondingly, he cautions against associating specific forms of experience with specific diagnostic categories. It does not help to claim that depression is an ‘‘ideal type,’’ as Ratcliffe does, because he continues to refer to it as if it were a psychiatric entity or illness (he does the same with schizophrenia), a condition with particular symptoms from which it can be diagnosed. Ratcliffe does with psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) something similar to what he does with Husserl’s term bracketing; after commenting on its inadequacy and questionable validity, he proceeds to use two of its categories—‘‘major depressive episode’’ and ‘‘major depressive disorder’’—as the organizing psychiatric framework for his studies. Recent research has called into question the most recent DSM’s creation of new diagnostic entities and categories that are scientifically unsubstantiated and that over-pathologize vulnerable populations such as young children, the elderly, and the traumatically bereaved. More fundamentally, the DSM is a pseudo-scientific manual for diagnosing sick Cartesian isolated minds. As such, it completely overlooks the exquisite context-sensitivity and radical context-dependence of human emotional life and of all forms of emotional disturbance. Against the DSM, Atwood and I (Atwood and Stolorow 2014) have contended that all emotional disturbances are constituted in a context of human interrelatedness. One such traumatizing context is characterized by relentless invalidation of emotional experience, coupled with an objectification of the child as being intrinsically defective. Ratcliffe elaborates a phenomenological account of existential hopelessness that invites exploration and appreciation of its contextembeddedness, but he encases it in an objectifying psychiatric diagnostic language that negates this very embeddedness! Ratcliffe notes briefly certain parallels between his conception of existential feelings and Heidegger’s (1962 [1927]) account of moods, or what I (2014a) have suggested would be more aptly termed disclosive affectivity, in disclosing our worldly situatedness. He notes in particular a similarity between his own characterization of existential hopelessness and Heidegger’s phenomenological description of existential anxiety (Angst), in which the everyday world becomes devoid of practical significance. In Heidegger’s ontological account of anxiety, which Ratcliffe does not discuss, the central features of its phenomenology—the collapse of everyday significance and the resulting feeling of uncanniness—are claimed to be grounded in what he called authentic (nonevasively owned) Beingtoward-death. Death, in this account, is a distinctive possibility that is constitutive of our existence—of our intelligibility to ourselves in our futurity and our finitude. In my own work (Stolorow 2007, 2011), I have contended that emotional trauma produces an affective state whose features bear a close similarity to the central elements in Heidegger’s existential interpretation of anxiety and that it accomplishes this by plunging the traumatized person into a form of authentic Beingtoward-death. Trauma shatters the illusions of everyday life that evade and cover up 123 Author's personal copy R. D. Stolorow the finitude, contingency, and embeddedness of our existence and the indefiniteness of its certain extinction. Such shattering exposes what had been heretofore concealed, thereby plunging the traumatized person into a form of authentic Beingtoward-death and into the anxiety—the loss of significance, the uncanniness— through which authentic Being-toward-death is disclosed. My description of trauma’s impact in disrupting our experience of time and our connectedness with others is remarkably similar to the corresponding features that Ratcliffe attributes to existential hopelessness. Trauma, I contended, devastatingly disrupts the ordinary, average-everyday linearity of temporality, the sense of stretching-along from the past to an open future. Experiences of emotional trauma become freeze-framed into an eternal present in which one remains forever trapped or to which one is condemned to be perpetually returned. In the region of trauma, all duration or stretching along collapses, the traumatic past becomes present, and future loses all meaning other than endless repetition. Because trauma so profoundly modifies the universal or shared structure of temporality, I claimed, the traumatized person quite literally lives in another kind of reality, an experiential world felt to be incommensurable with those of others. This felt incommensurability, in turn, contributes to the sense of alienation and estrangement from other human beings that typically haunts the traumatized person. Experiences of severe emotional trauma are the contexts, concealed by Ratcliffe’s devotion to a decontextualizing psychiatric language, in which the existential feelings that he so beautifully elucidates take form. And not accidentally, these same contexts of severe trauma are those in which the emotional disturbances that are objectified by the DSM also take form (Atwood 2011). There are no psychiatric entities, only devastating contexts. Lastly, I wish to consider Ratcliffe’s conception of empathy, which he calls radical empathy, to which I had a mixed reaction (Is there a pattern here?). He conceives of empathy as a second-person process—a form of being with another person characterized by openness to phenomenological difference, certainly a laudable phenomenological stance. It is not clear to me, though, why such a proposal is ‘‘radical’’. Is it radical because it is such a major departure from the ‘‘theory theories’’ and ‘‘simulation theories’’ that prevail in contemporary philosophy of mind? Or is it radical because Ratcliffe falls into the Husserlian fallacy of presuppositionless inquiry, claiming that such an attitude of openness to difference entails a bracketing of one’s assumptions about a shared world so that one can gaze directly on the structures organizing the other’s world? Such a God’s-eye secondperson view is an impossibility. One can certainly reflect on phenomenological difference without putting an aspect of what one is reflecting upon out of commission! This criticism notwithstanding, I very much appreciated Ratcliffe’s suggestion that openness to difference can serve as a starting point for a collaborative dialogical process of exploration of second-person experience. In fact, I have myself (Stolorow 2014b) proposed that therapeutic inquiry—i.e., the process of arriving at empathic understanding—is a dialogical process in which each participant engages in reflection upon three interrelated domains: the structures pre-reflectively organizing one’s own experience, the structures pre-reflectively organizing the other’s 123 Author's personal copy Matthew Ratcliffe: Experiences of Depression: A Study in… experience, and the intersubjective system constituted by these interacting, differently organized experiential worlds. Empathic understanding evolves within a dialogical context in which pre-reflective experiential conjunctions and disjunctions can be brought into reflective awareness. Is this what Ratcliffe means by radical empathy? Such dialogue requires no Husserlian bracketing. References Atwood, G. E. (2011). The abyss of madness. New York: Routledge. Atwood, G. E., & Stolorow, R. D. (2014). Structures of subjectivity: Explorations in psychoanalytic phenomenology and contextualism (2nd ed.). London, New York: Routledge. Heidegger, M. (1962) [1927]. Being and time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). New York: Harper and Row. Husserl, E. (1960) [1931]. Cartesian meditations: An introduction to phenomenology (D. Cairns, Trans.). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (2001) [1913]. The shorter logical investigations. In D. Moran (Ed.). London, New York: Routledge. Ratcliffe, M. (2008). Feelings of being: Phenomenology, psychiatry and the sense of reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stolorow, R. D. (2007). Trauma and human existence: Autobiographical, psychoanalytic, and philosophical reflections. New York: Routledge. Stolorow, R. D. (2011). World, affectivity, trauma: Heidegger and post-Cartesian psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge. Stolorow, R. D. (2014a). Heidegger, mood, and the lived body: The ontical and the ontological. Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts, 13(2), 5–11. Stolorow, R. D. (2014b). Undergoing the situation: Emotional dwelling is more than empathic understanding. International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology, 9, 80–83. 123