Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of Reality

Abstract

Feelings of Being is a philosophical study of the nature, role and variety of existential feelings in psychiatric illness and in everyday life. There has been a great deal of recent interdisciplinary discussion of emotional feelings. However, many of the feelings that people express do not appear on standard inventories of emotions. For example, people sometimes talk of feelings of unreality, heightened existence, surreality, familiarity, unfamiliarity, estrangement, strangeness, isolation, emptiness, belonging, being at home in the world, being at one with things, significance, insignificance, and the list goes on. Ratcliffe proposes that such feelings form a distinctive group in virtue of three characteristics: they are bodily feelings, they constitute ways of relating to the world as a whole, and they are responsible for our sense of reality. He refers to them as ‘existential’ because they comprise a changeable sense of being part of a world. Existential feelings have not been systematically explored until now, despite the important role that they play in our lives and the devastating effects that disturbances of existential feeling can have in psychiatric illness. Hence Feelings of Being, in offering a detailed phenomenological analysis of existential feelings, is the first book of its kind. The book explains how something can be a bodily feeling and, at the same time, a sense of reality and belonging. It then explores the role of anomalous feeling in psychiatric illness, showing how a phenomenological account of existential feeling can help us to understand experiential changes that occur in a range of conditions, including depression, circumscribed delusions, depersonalisation and schizophrenia. It also addresses the contribution made by existential feelings to religious experience and to philosophical thought.