Line Ingerslev

The study of traumatic experiences led Freud to investigate what he termed a compulsion to repeat. The present paper takes up the idea of a tendency to repeat something that reinforces psychic pain and asks which kind of agency is possible in the light of traumatic repetitions. First, the experiential roots of repetitive doings induced by trauma are investigated. Might a compulsion to repeat belong to the sphere of the kind of tendencies which Husserl terms “generally unconscious”? And if so, does this sphere bring us to the limit of phenomenology where we might need to cooperate with psychoanalysis to make sense of the manifestations of such an unconscious sphere? This is proposed in section two. In section three, Freud’s notion of the compulsion to repeat is discussed. At this point, the repetitive activity of the mind is investigated as the traumatized person’s ongoing struggle to survive with the trauma and as a struggle to understand what survival in this case even means. In section four, an attempt is made to describe the kind of agency involved in the repetitive activity of the mind. The paper concludes that weak agency is possible in traumatic repetition when understood as the person’s ongoing attempt to compose a future for what has been lost.

This volume explores the phenomenology of broken habits and their affective, social, and involuntary dimensions. It shows how disruptive experiences impact self-understanding and social embeddedness. The chapters in this volume investigate the epistemic and existential relevance of breakdown of habits and the corresponding kinds of self-understanding available to the agent. The first part focuses on the double-sidedness of habitual life. On the one hand, habits allow us to arrange and navigate in a familiar home world; on the other hand, habits can take hold of us in such a way that we lose our sense of autonomy. The contributors argue that habitual agency is structurally carried by a dynamic that entails both freedom and necessity. As habits enable us to inhabit and thus acquire a world, they also affectively provide a texture and a background for our feeling at home in the world. The chapters in Part 2 focus on the breakdowns of our habitual social and technological life forms and the phenomenology of their affective texture. History and habitual learning are sedimented in our body memory and in our language, and these sedimented layers are partly out of our direct control. Part 3 focuses on the structural openness of habits in relating to one's past and one's traumatic experiences. Part 4 reflects on the ways in which we might become aware of and thus transform or appropriate our culturally given habits. Phenomenology of Broken Habits will appeal to researchers and advanced students working in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of psychology.

Sigmund Freud’s reflections on transience left him surprised that someone could revolt against the process of mourning. In Jonathan Lear’s interpretation of transience, the revolt is not simply a passing struggle of the mind, but a response to a difficulty of reality, that is, an existential struggle. Central to the experience of transience, according to Lear, is the disbelief in the existence of an afterlife. How might we understand the idea of an afterlife philosophically? I first consider three different philosophical conceptions of the afterlife that—in different ways—underline the relation between collective memory and the process of mourning. These reflections make it clearer which aspects of the afterlife play a role in the existential struggle that Lear describes. However, a further analysis of the temporality at stake in the denial of an afterlife is needed. I therefore look at two psychoanalytic interpretations of the refusal to mourn. The first considers the refusal to mourn as a way to deny change. The second interpretation sees the refusal as a realisation of meaninglessness that prevents the flow of time. I end the paper by arguing that the afterlife can be understood as a practice of articulation, which allows a shared time to flow. Such a practice will commit us anew to a shared world in which we survive with the wounding difficulties of reality.

ABSTRACT In this comment, I argue that transformative experiences such as experiences of grief often imply a break in one's coherent, non-fictional and biographical narratives and practical identities. The nature of these breaks is of a certain kind, as they interrupt even the process of narration. To insist that the process of narration as well as the narratives themselves belong to one and the same process of adjustment in transformative experiences such as grief might overlook the importance of such breaks, namely that the contain a moment of refusal and revolting against mourning. The tension involved in such breaks might not allow to be circumscribed into narratives nor do they fit into the process of narration as a destabilizing moment; the breaks insist on the incomprehensibility of each loss and they remain part of what it means to survive and to undergo transformative experiences.

An action is typically carried out over time, unified by an intention that is known to the agent under some description. In some of our habitual doings, however, we are often not aware of what or why we do as we do. Not knowing this, we must ask what kind of agency is at stake in these habitual doings, if any. This paper aims to show how habitual doings can still be considered actions of a subject even while they involve a sense of involuntariness and there is a temporal displacement in the self-understanding they afford. It turns out that in some forms of habitual agency, we do not have the relevant intentional description at hand when we are engaged in the process of doing what we so typically do; on the contrary, such a description can only be appropriated with effort and subsequent to the time of the action. I will focus on two approaches to habits, broadly construed; a phenomenological and an action theoretic one, and I will suggest that both approaches focus too narrowly on a synchronic relation between habitual action and self-understanding. I will suggest that we need a diachronic account of the potential for self-understanding required for agency that allows us to explain the experience of diminished control and alienation involved in certain of our habitual actions. The suggested perspective enables us to explain how some habits can be experienced as both momentarily involuntary and unconscious while at the same time they play a significant role for self-understanding.

Peter Goldie’s account of grief as a narrative process that unfolds over time allow us to address the structure of self-understanding in the experience of loss. Taking up the Goldie’s idea that narrativity plays a crucial role in grief, I will argue that the experience of desynchronization and an altered relation to language disrupt even of our ability to compose narratives and to think narratively. Further, I will argue that Goldie’s account of grief as a narratively structured process focus on the process having come to an end. By contrast, I will propose the idea that grief can be understood as an open-ended rehearsal of our capacity to be alone in the company of an absent other. This makes grief a relational activity that differs from composing narratives about one’s past and about one’s process of grieving. Thus, grief is not primarily a process of recollecting our past narratively; rather, it can be seen as a dedicational activity which involves a future-oriented and open-ended rehearsal of relatedness despite irrevocable absence.

In phenomenology the body is often referred to as the lived body which makes the world familiar to me. In this paper, however, I discuss bodily self-consciousness in terms of self-distance. Self-distance is the suggestion that bodily self-consciousness consist in a reflective stance where you conceive of your body as a physical thing, an object in the world as well as the subject of bodily experiences. I argue that we are bodily self-conscious because we experience our own body in more than one way and that these ways are not derivative of one another or hierarchically ordered. This latter claim conflicts with certain phenomenological readings of how the body is experienced, one of which I will refer to and discuss as the Familiarity Objection to my idea of self-distance. I end the paper with a discussion of why we need the conception of experienced objectification that is entailed in the notion of self-distance to account for both pathological and non-pathological bodily self-experiences. The notion of self-distance improves our understanding of how the body plays a central role in psychosis for the experience of distorted inter-subjective relations

We are grateful to René Rosfort for his comment on our target paper Clinical Response to Bodily Symptoms in Psychopathology. Rosfort’s remarks lead us here to specify an important point which our initial proposal may have left too implicit. Within the realm of clinical practice in psychopathology, we argue that bodily manifestations can be offered an expressive space and that they can be listened to in the clinical encounter as being part of the patient’s speech whereby she, by way of her bodily symptoms, addresses a demand to be attended to as a subject of communication. We detail the circumstances under which bodily manifestations may or may not be addressed to a person who is expected to respond, especially in a...

A phenomenological insight in the debate on empathy is that it is possible to directly perceive other people’s emotions in their expressive bodily behaviour. Contrary to what is suggested by many phenomenologists, namely that this perceptual skill is immediately available if one has vision, this paper argues that the perceptual skill for empathy is acquired. Such a skill requires that we have undergone certain emotional experiences ourselves and that we have had the experience of seeing the world differently, which is a form of pretence. By investigating how we retain knowledge of what is real while pretending, that is, how we anchor the experience of pretence in something that is not pretended, the paper argues that we split our experiential perspective into a double perspective, which differs from the cognitive act of understanding what a perspective is. With this notion in hand, we can return to the debate on empathy. It is argued that in order to have the capacity for direct empathic perception, one must have undergone experiences involving a double perspective.

In what sense can bodily manifestations in psychopathology be conceived of as modes of speaking? In which ways can a patient be listened to and responded to? In this paper, we consider these questions in the framework both of phenomenology and psychoanalysis. On the one hand, a phenomenological approach helps considering the body as expressive, but, we argue, more refinement is needed, and in particular, expression ought to be differentiated from communication, in the aim of better capturing the phenomenon of body language. On the other hand, a psychoanalytic approach helps considering the clinical strength of an encounter where the only vehicle is the speech one addresses another, but, we argue, this should not...