The Mood of Agoraphobia

If Heidegger is right to think of mood as a given of experience that lies between being and world, then where does the body fit into this relation? Heidegger tends to speak of the affective character of mood in broadly immaterial terms, as though the body were a backdrop to the disclosure of the world. Indeed, when speaking about the “place” of mood, then Heidegger hints at this backdrop without naming it: “[Mood] comes neither from ‘without’ nor from ‘within,’ but rises from being-in-the-world as a mode of that being” (129). In other words, mood is neither solely the province of the psyche nor of the world. It is somewhere in-between, existing in a relational dynamic. The in-between status of mood invites the body to the foreground. Yet that invitation is never accepted in Heidegger.

In the case of mood’s that accent the materiality of the world, this omission of the body’s mood is all the more apparent. Thinking through the phenomenology of the agoraphobe’s experience of the environment, as I am presently doing on this hot Tuesday afternoon, the need to address the role of the body in shaping and affecting the experience of the world becomes an urgent issue. Why? Because the experience of agoraphobia presents us with a clear illustration of how the world can become augmented in accordance with the interpretive mood of the body’s being. The world becomes a phobic environment, with each discernable object transformed through the body’s prepersonal intentionality. Detailing the genesis of this agoraphobic world requires addressing the structure of the body’s moods.

In the memoirs of his multi-phobic history, composer Allen Shawn give an account of walking down an empty road: “I couldn’t be convinced," so he writes, “that I could continue to walk despite whatever symptoms I felt and that if I did so, I would in fact get to the end of the road and still be the person I was four-tenths of a mile back” (117). How is an innocuous environment interpreted in such a way so as to present a threat of total destruction? This is not a causal question of what lies “beyond” the mood of agoraphobia. Rather, it is a question of how this particular mode of being-in-the-world is opened up the agoraphobe—a world that is seemingly at odds with a rational assessment of how it is manifest: i.e., as non-threatening. The phobic dimension of this episode emerges from lack of tangible threat in the environment. The empty road comes alive, and yet there is no agency animating it. The body of the phobic falters at some invisible threshold, like a “horse who refuses to walk over a rotten bridge” (117). Where does the threat exist: in a fault in perception or in a perception of something that is ordinarily silent?

Merleau-Ponty gives us a clue: “The body is the vehicle of being in the world, and having a body is, for a living creature, to be intervolved with a definite environment, to identify oneself with certain projects and be continually committed to them” (94). As the vehicle of our being-in-the-world, the body is the material reality of our values. At no point is the body an empty, homogenous vessel deprived of an affective and interpretive structure. In its instincts, habits, and desires, the body’s being only has a reality in relation to the world. And the same is true in reverse: the materiality of the world—its particular affective tone—is only animated in light of the body. Each aspect gives the other their life, and this life is given context by the body’s mood.

The mistake in approaching phobic responses to the world is to treat the phobia as a deviation or a rupture from the self, as though the “symptoms” were a mechanical response to the world, and thus somehow alien. Turning back to Shawn’s account of walking down an empty road, then what we find is that a particular localised part of the body—in this case, the legs—becomes the focal point of an existential struggle: “I couldn’t seem to get past the point at which I would be closer to the destination than to the point of origin …. I was convinced that when I reached the midpoint, my legs would not move at all and that I would be trapped in place there. I had a vivid picture of myself standing at the centre of emptiness, screaming” (118-119). This focused intentionality—what Merleau-Ponty calls “pain-infested space”—is only possible against a larger backdrop, of which mood is the foundation (107). Mood is the context in which the phobic’s bodily sensations are able to take place, and those sensations spring from the pervasive grip the mood has upon lived experience.