An Agoraphobic Hermeneutics

(Face to Face, 1976. Bergman)

In my previous post, I suggested that agoraphobic “symptoms” have an internal coherence to them if they are situated within the context of an agoraphobic mood. If this is the case, then why do those same sensations assume an uncanny appearance, as though possessed by an inhuman agency? The question points to the hermeneutics of phobia: how can we understand the context against which particular bodily sensations occur? Central to this question is the dissonance between cognitive and bodily experiences of the same environment. Let me return to Allen Shawn on the empty road. Standing at the frontier to the empty road, Allen Shawn’s body belies his rational appraisal of the situation, with physical reactions including “feeling my heart beat twice the normal rate, getting extremely warm and sweaty and feeling like discarding my coat and jacket, finding my vision growing dark and blurred, feeling my face grow cold, and my legs tremulous, weak, and then extraordinarily stiff” (117). The itinerary of bodily sensations should indicate that what is dreadful to the phobic’s experience is less the sensations themselves, but more their irrational placement in the circumstantial scheme of things. Despite being in the midst of the experience, the agoraphobe’s ability to understand the logic of the experience is undermined by the fact that the core of any phobic reaction takes place in the pre-reflective body, of which abstract thought has limited access.

To make sense of the mood of phobia, must we interpret a teleology working behind the scenes, and if so, does this mean making recourse to psychoanalysis? Ultimately, psychoanalysis is of little help in our understanding of the world of the agoraphobe. At stake is not the damaged psycho-biography of an individual’s history, but what Merleau-Ponty speaks of in relation to space as an “expression of the total life of the subject, the energy with which he tends towards a future through his body and his world” (330). Even if the agoraphobe is alienated from his bodily sensations, then those same sensations are nevertheless constitutive of his total being. The agoraphobe’s body is always already in the world long before the self-conscious “I” inhabits that same terrain.

How to interpret the language of the agoraphobe’s body if the “I” has disappeared? This question can be asked within the context of everyday embodiment. If I experience overwhelming lethargy each time I am obligated to meet a friend from my past, then there is nothing mechanical in this response. Lethargy is a physiological experience that carries with it an evaluative framework. Indeed, the accompanying sensations of tiredness and indifference are structured by an intentionality that is directed toward the old friend. If I experience a withdrawing of my body in the company of this person, then this is also a withdrawing of my world from this person. If this person attempts to rouse me from a state of indifference, then I experience this as a violation of a boundary that I have constructed in my bodily being. My body’s refusal to engage with this person is the means by which this relationship works in the first place. Thus, if I am walking or sitting with this person, then I will do so with certain restrictions and limitations, so as to avoid establishing a reciprocal space between us. At all times, the relationship is mediated by an asymmetry in our bodily comportments. In this way, the body is the principle manifestation for values in the inter-subjective/inter-corporeal world. The body is a sensing and thinking organ: in its flesh, values manifest themselves. Indeed, it is only through the body that the felt experience of value is possible.

The transparency underscoring this relation between value and embodiment is disarmed in the agoraphobic situation, given that the agoraphobe can rationally appraise an environment as being unthreatening and yet maintain disbelief that reason is absolute. The inclusion of the eponymous “and yet” points to the need to constantly revaluate what lies beneath the contingency of appearances. That there is such a hesitancy in the movement of the agoraphobe, as though possessed by some foreign body, reinforces not only a lack of trust in the materiality of the world, but also a lack of trust in the body. Because of this, the phobic response causes a rupture in the unity of selfhood, marking a dissent from the classical phenomenological subject as grounded in “one’s own body.” The language of the agoraphobic mood is ultimately unhomely, uncanny, ill at ease in the world of logic and reason. It is a language constituted by spectres and apparitions, a phantom language that alerts us to the shadows and drones that are ordinarily visible only at dark.

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.