Interspatiality and Intersubjectivity: Agoraphobia and the Other more

Interspatiality and Intersubjectivity Agoraphobia and the Other (Draft paper, presented at Embodiment and Intersubjectivity: Volkswagen Foundation joint group meeting: Berlin, June 22nd 2011) Introduction In this paper, I want to think about how our experience of others is affected by our experience of space, and how in turn our experience of spatiality is affected by others. It seems to me that many of our everyday experiences of places are pre-reflectively shaped by the presence or absence of others. And in this paper, I would like to explore this relation between intersubjectivity and what I will term “interspatiality.”I will do so via the mood of agoraphobia. What is agoraphobia? What is agoraphobia? Let me begin by giving a broad overview of the agoraphobic condition. Marked by an intense anxiety brought on by being in particular places, especially those in which the urge to flee would prove difficult, the condition has moved from a simple fear of public places to the more complex anxiety surrounding places that are in some sense unfamiliar or unhomely. In such conditions, the attack can include sensations ranging from heart palpations, shortness of breath, vertigo, tunnel vision, nausea, and, at its most severe, add an abiding sense of impending doom. Because of this anxiety, the agoraphobe’s experience of the environment tends to be characterised by a series of invisible boundaries and borders that separate familiar or homely places from unfamiliar or unhomely places. As to the underlying anxiety that takes places in the agoraphobe’s experience, writing at the close of the 19th century, Freud’s claim that “the recollection of an anxiety attack” is at the heart of agoraphobia’s powers retains a legitimacy (Freud 2001, 81). At its core, agoraphobia is an anxiety disorder rather than a fear of places qua places. In their highly sensitised mode of being in the world, agoraphobic people tend to interpret their bodily response to the environment through a filter of apocalyptic doom. The formula invariably adheres to the following structure: “If I don’t get out of here immediately, then X will happen,” where “X” might include heart attack, fainting, or vomiting. Because of this catastrophic bodily interpretation, constant supervision of the body’s sensations as well as a “superstitious avoidance behaviour” accompanies all experience, with an unflinching vigilance directed toward any unfamiliar or uncomfortable sensations (Chambless and Goldstein 1982, 3). Once detected, those bodily sensations urge the agoraphobe to flee the scene immediately, in the process reinforcing the sense that particular places are marked by the potential of danger. 1 To give you some sense of the sheer visceral intensity of the agoraphobic condition, consider here the report from American composer, Shawn Allen. Standing at an empty road, he writes: [W]hen I got halfway down this empty road, I would freeze in place and balk at continuing, exactly like a dog who freezes at the door to the veterinarian’s office or a horse who refuses to walk over a rotten bridge. I couldn’t be convinced 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. The physical reactions included my becoming short of breath and beginning to breathe rapidly (in fact to pant like a dog), feeling my heart beat at 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). I will return to this journey later on. Why Agoraphobia? With a provisional sense of agoraphobia established, let me pose the question: why agoraphobia? There are at least two reasons. 1. Agoraphobia draws our attention to the intersubjective formation of space, and in particular to our embodied experience of that social space. That the etymology of “agora” in agoraphobia refers not only to the place of political assembly, but also the assembly gathered there underscores agoraphobia’s relationship to the social world. 2. Agoraphobia disturbs our taken-for-granted experience of the world, in the process altering us to the contingency of inter-subjective relations within that world. The result of this disturbance is that agoraphobia makes a series of overlooked themes present. Such themes include: the development of home, bodily ownership, and the contingency of borders between self and other. What’s the Space? This project remains complicit with an emphasis on phenomenological space. Indeed, the type of space I am investigating is the phenomenological experience of space. What do I mean by this? Philosophical thinking on the topic of place tends to adopt one of two perspectives. First, place is thought of as an empirical idea, which has a reality independent of human life. Such a view tends to be marked by a scientific outlook on the environment, in which the totality of place is reduced to its parts. For these thinkers, the coherence and identity of place has a reality quite apart from the way in which it is experienced by human beings. Second, place is thought of 2 as a constructive product of human experience, such that without human involvement, place would lose definition. In this model, place is basically reducible to a set of contingent socio-political circumstances. Neither of these approaches—the realist and the constructivist—are complete in themselves. Experiencing place is not reducible to a set of objective properties. But nor does the experience of place depend wholly on a socio-political context. Instead, a third way can be mapped out, in which attention is drawn to the existential significance of place. This is the approach that is implicit in this paper. If one were to characterise this approach, then in broad terms one could say that phenomenological treatment of place is a commitment to the belief that lived spatiality is not a container that can be measured in objective terms, but an expression of our being-in-the-world. For Merleau-Ponty, we find an “organic relation between subject and space” (Merleau-Ponty 2006, 293). Spatiality is not something we are inserted into, as though it existed all along and were waiting for the subject’s arrival. Rather, being-in-the-world means being placed. At all times, we find ourselves located in a particular place, specific to the bodily subject experiencing that place. We are forever in the here, and it is from that here that our experiences take place. Given this, our orientation and experience of place is never truly epistemic in character but fundamentally affective. When Merleau-Ponty finds himself journeying through Paris—“the cafés, people’s faces, the poplars along the quays, the bends of the Seine”—then what he experiences is united in the “city’s whole being [which] Paris possesses” (328). For him, the identity of Paris is not reducible to the parts that objectively constitute the city. Rather, “there is present a latent significance diffused through the landscape or the city” (328). The reason for this is that the perception of lived space Is not a particular class of ‘state of consciousness’ or acts. Its modalities are always an expression of the total life of the subject, the energy with which he tends toward a future through his body and his world (330). Such a definition I would like to keep in the background for my account of the agoraphobic experience of space. Interspatiality What can agoraphobia tell us about us intersubjectivity? I want to focus on one issue in response to this question. 1. For many agoraphobic people, the condition is controlled to some extent by being accompanied in the world by the presence of a trusted companion. What this will show us is how other people become enmeshed in the material world, indeed, they become the material world. 3 I will unpack this claim in turn. Before I do this, I want to briefly characterise the “normal” experience of inter-spatiality and intersubjectivity. Ordinarily, we begin our lives as children who are able to recognise the gestures of others in a pre-reflective way. As Merleau-Ponty tells us, when a baby is born, the baby will smile if smiled at by another. Likewise, when hearing the cries of another baby, another baby will also cry. All of this takes place on a prepersonal and prereflective way. The baby does not contrive these gestures, but experiences the body of the other baby as being incorporated into his own self. As we grow older, this lack of independence is replaced with a self-conscious distance between ourselves and others. The body becomes an object, at once separating and distinguishing self and other. Yet despite the independence that maturity confers upon us, our bodies remain pre-personally bound with other bodies. This prereflective bodily reciprocity between ourselves and others, originally experienced in childhood, retains a presence in our ability to recognise ourselves in others. Because of this dialogical structure, it becomes possible to “place” ourselves in the experiential perspective of the other’s bodily experience. When we witness someone in shock, then we do so not as detached observers, but as bodily subjects who share in that shock. We feel the other person’s shock through our own bodies, as though their bodily experiences were reverberating through us. This we are able to do because the body has a potentiality that enables us to project ourselves beyond the limits of our flesh. In this way, having a body means necessarily being open to the experiences of others. It means, sharing in the world of the other, a world that is taken up in the materiality of the lived environment. Given that our bodily experience is fundamentally intersubjective in structure, affected at all times by the body of the other, it thus becomes possible to map out in a provisional way how intersubjectivity becomes an issue of interspatiality. Consider these examples. 1. When we are distant from those we love and our dear to us, such as when loved ones die or are far from us, then this experience of distance is not limited to an ache we experience in our hearts. Rather, the distance breaches the walls of our bodies, and reaches into the world itself. In the absence of those loved ones, the world and others become distant, and thus impregnated with a level of unfamiliarity that parallels our own estrangement from the world. 2. If it happens that we are riding the metro, and a person near to us begins behaving in a peculiar fashion, perhaps muttering to himself or gesturing widely, then the entire space takes on a threatening atmosphere. We might feel trapped or claustrophobic, even though nothing objectively has changed in the materiality of the metro. 4 3. Last but not least, when we find ourselves in a public square or a train station devoid of people, then we tend to feel a sense of the uncanny, as though something is lurking beneath the absence. Such a powerful sensation testifies to our tacit expectation, that where there are built places, then there are people. In all three of these examples, our relation to the world is mediated by our relation with others, such that being-in-the-world means being-with-others. Seen in this way, intersubjectivity is at the heart and essence of our being-in-the-world. Indeed, if it was the case that the world was simply full of “things,” then there would be no such thing as subjectivity. Agoraphobic Intersubjectivity: The Trusted Other How does the agoraphobic person accommodate (or fail to) intersubjectivity? Let me preface my response to this question by saying that it is important to note that the presence or absence of others is not one thing among many in the spectrum of agoraphobia. Indeed, the agoraphobic condition is less oriented toward the objective aspects of space, and more to the public eye that is embedded in that space. As such, the look of the other is felt in an especially visceral way. This is clear in two ways. 1. Given the agoraphobe’s catastrophic interpretation of unwanted or undesirable bodily sensations, in the view of the look of the other, these sensations are heightened. As Sartre shows us repeatedly, moods such as shame only have a legitimacy to them in terms of being ashamed before somebody. If I experience shame before somebody, my body will undergo modification in terms of how it is experienced. My body becomes less the experiential absence in my lifeworld and more the objectified presence in my field of perception. To be an object in this way means to be an object for another, as he puts it: “I grasp the Other’s look at the very centre of my act as the solidification and alienation of my own possibilities” (Sartre 1998, 263). For the agoraphobic subject, this relation between the other and selfestrangement is mediated by a highly sensitised body, which contributes to the disturbed relation to others. 2. As highly self-conscious, the look of the other accents the objective being of the agoraphobic subject. Sartre writes: “By the mere appearance of the Other, I am put in the position of passing judgment on myself as an object, for it is as an object that I appear to the Other” (222). To varying extents, the concern over being looked is an experience shared by all bodily subjects. In the face of the other, I am in a position to be judged by how I phenomenally appear in the world. If I identify myself as being what R.D. Laing would term an “ontologically secure” person, then much of intersubjective life can be taken for granted in a pre-reflective life (Laing 1965, 42). For the agoraphobic 5 subject, this security quality is lacking. In its place, the agoraphobic subject finds trouble in being at home in the world, and thus cannot be at home with others. As evidence of this, let me now turn to the issue of the trusted companion, which I mentioned above. To flesh this idea out, I also want to return to Shawn Allen, who we remember had difficultly crossing the empty road. As we go on to find out, what enables him to complete this journey are what he terms “safety items” (118). These include a paper bag, Xanax (largely unused), a cell phone, and a bottle of ginger ale, the latter of which he describes as offering “maternal comfort” (118). Alongside these aids, Shawn is also accompanied by a friend, of whom, so he writes, “tried to coax me, offered a kiss as a reward, promised not to leave me stranded” (118). There are a number of ways or responding to this key gesture: 1. The companion can be seen as a buffer to the outside world, thus reinforcing the sense of the agoraphobe as relying on a “maternal comfort” in order to face the world. In such a view, the companion would have the effect of familiarising an alien and hostile world, thus disowning the responsibility for the agoraphobe to establish his own “place” in the world. The problem with this view is that it supposes a sharp division between self and other, with the other relegated to a category of the intra-psychic life of the agoraphobe. In this case, the mother. 2. We can see the companion not as a static entity slotted into the empty road that Shawn is crossing—a sort of talisman used to fend off the phobic response—but as a constituent of that road, which is experienced as a whole. In this way, Shawn’s companion becomes infused in the materiality of the landscape itself, indeed becomes the materiality. The result of this is that the environment assumes a less unwelcoming aura than were the companion absent. In the anecdotal evidence, time and again we see how the trusted companion of the agoraphobe becomes enmeshed in the spatial and material experience of being-inthe-world. Here is a report from 1884, not long after the term agoraphobia was coined. Of one agoraphobic subject, we read how: Companionship relieves the feeling of loneliness and fear produced by the thought of taking a holiday in a part of the country new to him. The presence of a cart, even a stick or umbrella in the hand, persons, or trees, gives a sense of confidence when walking an unknown road. Cheerful and lively conversation, with a congenial companion, will always ward off the attacks (White 1884, 1140). In another report, we are told how: 6 Many totally avoid being alone, while others require a companion only when venturing beyond their ‘”safety zones.” The comfort provided by the companion may be complete; that is, the agoraphobic person’s activities are unrestricted while in the companion’s presence …. Some agoraphobic’s requite the presence of one particular person, usually a family member, but others are less selective and may be reassured by even the company of a pet (Chambless and Goldstein 1982, 2). In each case, the affective experience of space is augmented in the presence of an other, in whom familiarity and, arguably, homliness are manifest. Not only are these qualities manifest in the trusted companion, but, to paraphrase Merleau-Ponty, they are also incorporated into the bodily schema of the agoraphobic person. That the second report tells us of “unrestricted” activities testify to this incorporation of the other, with their non-agoraphobic way of being-in-the-world seemingly reexperienced in the flesh of the agoraphobic person. Such is the power invested in this relationship, that in some situations the anxiety of the agoraphobic person is alleviated simply in knowing that the trusted companion has at some point in the past experienced a particular place where the agoraphobe should presently find himself. At stake here is a colonization of familiarity that takes place in proxy. Sensing the presence of the companion in their absence, the agoraphobic person is aided in the world by a trust that not only belongs to the companion, but now finds its way into the lived environment. R.D. Laing offers us an illustration of the structure of this thought. Of an agoraphobic named Mrs. R, he writes: If she is not in the actual presence of another person who knows her, or if she cannot succeed in evoking this person’s presence in his absence, her sense of her own identity drains away from her. Her panic is at the fading away of her being (Laing 1990, 54). What is of note here is the mention of “evoking” a person’s presence. What this act of evocation indicates is that the physical presence of the trusted companion is only one condition of being present for the agoraphobe. Beyond the physical realm, the evocation of the other demonstrates the persistence of the trusted companion through the incorporation of the other into bodily schema of the agoraphobe. As when babies experience the body of other through a series of gestures, so the agoraphobe’s relationship to the trusted companion involves a bodily dialogue that has the potential to be re-enacted in the absence of that companion. Contributions to Psychiatry A final word on the possible contributions a phenomenological approach to agoraphobia can make to psychiatry. Three points. 7 1. Far from the concern of the intra-psychic consciousness, a phenomenology of agoraphobia reveals the intersubjective structure of anxiety. This is clear enough in that for the agoraphobe, it is not enough simply to leave one’s home. Rather, the condition points to broader questions of being at home in the world and with others. 2. Because of this intersubjective structure, the agoraphobic condition cannot be approached without considering the surrounding context of the agoraphobic’s lifeworld. For example, to think of agoraphobia only as a series of related symptoms would be to overlook the relational nature of those symptoms. As one psychiatrist puts it, curing for agoraphobia is sometimes possible if the patient comes to the “realization that they have been bluffed by physical feelings” (Weeks 1973, 470). This model of pain and feeling conceives of these affects has something disconnected to the experiencing subject. This is an error that phenomenology can address. 3. Understanding the spatial aspect of agoraphobia means recognising space as fluid and dynamic rather than fixed and static. Space—not least home—is not a set of pre-arranged properties placed in the world and thus independent of the subject. Rather, spatiality is created in the experience of the subject in a meaningful fashion, the value of which is fundamentally existential in character. Dylan Trigg Centre de Recherche en Épistémologie Appliquée, ENSTA - 32, boulevard Victor, 75015, Paris, France (dylan.trigg@poly.polytechnique.fr) 8 Works Cited Chambless, Dianne and Goldstein, Alan. 1982. Agoraphobia: Multiple Perspectives on Theory and Treatment Chichester: Wiley and Sons. Knapp, Terry. 1988. Westphal’s “Die Agoraphobie” with Commentary: The Beginnings of Agoraphobia. Trans. Michael T. Schumacher. Lanham: University Press of America. Laing, R.D. 1965. The Divided Self. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Freud, Sigmund. 2001. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume III. Trans. James Strachey. London: Vintage. Laing, R.D. 1990. The Divided Self. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. The Primacy of Perception. James M. Edie (Ed). Trans. William Cobb. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1998. Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. London: Routledge. Shawn, Allen. 2007. Wish I Could be There: Notes from a Phobic Life. New York: Viking Press. Vincent. 1919. “Confessions of an Agoraphobic Victim.” The American Journal of Psychology 30: 295-299. White, Prosser. 1884. “Agoraphobia.” The Lancet 124: 1140-1141. 9