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Depression, Guilt and Emotional Depth

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 53; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0020174x.2010.526324

1502-3923

Matthew Ratcliffe,

Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment

Abstract It is generally maintained that emotions consist of intentional states and /or bodily feelings. This paper offers a phenomenological analysis of guilt in severe depression, in order to illustrate how such conceptions fail to adequately accommodate a way in which some emotional experiences are said to be deeper than others. Many emotions are intentional states. However, I propose that the deepest emotions are not intentional but pre-intentional, meaning that they determine which kinds of intentional state are possible. I go on to suggest that pre-intentional emotions are at the same time feelings. In so doing, I reject the distinction that is often made between bodily feelings and the world-oriented aspects of emotion. Notes 1. Cataldi (Citation1993) and Pugmire (Citation2005) similarly suggest that not enough attention has been paid to the topic of emotional depth. 2. In fact, the entire phenomenological tradition acknowledges this aspect of experience (see, for example, Husserl, Citation1973; Heidegger, Citation1962; Merleau-Ponty, Citation1962). 3. Several philosophers have recently argued that emotions involve perceiving things to be significant. See, for example, de Sousa (Citation1990, Ch. 7), Deonna (Citation2006) and Goldie (Citation2007). 4. I adopt a phenomenological conception of intentionality throughout, treating it as a directedness that is integral to experience. In recent years, intentionality has been reinvented by some philosophers as a non-phenomenological relation of "aboutness". There is no philosophical disagreement here; it is just a terminological matter. I am using the term in its traditional sense and they are using it to talk about something else. 5. See also Strasser (Citation1977, Ch. 7) for a distinction between "pre-intentional" and "intentional" feelings. Accepting this distinction does not require rejecting the view that intentionality is the "mark of the mental". The pre-intentional can be construed as part of the structure of intentionality. 6. See, for example, Stocker and Hegeman (Citation1996, p. 285) for the claim that guilt involves attribution of responsibility whereas shame need not. 7. There are also more mundane cases of irrational guilt. For example, Elster (Citation1999, p. 151) says that he feels guilty when friends travel a long distance to see him and it rains throughout their stay. 8. See Stocker (Citation2007) for a comprehensive discussion of the various criteria that have been proposed for distinguishing guilt from shame. He concludes that they all fail but retains the view that shame and guilt are importantly different, maintaining that the relevant criteria have yet to be found. 9. See Ratcliffe (Citation2008, Ch. 1) for a survey of recent accounts of emotion that appeal to intentional states, bodily feelings or a combination of the two. 10. I do not wish to suggest that this kind of guilt occurs in every diagnosed case of melancholia or that it is specific to melancholia. All my argument requires is that this kind of experience does sometimes occur in depression. 11. See also Fuchs (Citation2003) for a good discussion of the experience of guilt in depression. 12. However, see Radden (Citation2009, Ch. 9) for the view that the prominence of guilt symptoms is historically and culturally variable. 13. There is the methodological concern that most such narratives are written after an episode of depression rather than during it. Hence testimony may be unreliable. However, many accounts incorporate letters or other writings that were composed while depressed. One might also worry that people with depression have cognitive impairments that make self-reports unreliable. However, the fact that descriptions offered during an episode of depression and following recovery are generally consistent counts against this objection too. 14. The term "anhedonia" is often used to refer to this. However, happiness encompasses more than just hedonic pleasure. 15. Although I accept that descriptions of depression are influenced by social and cultural factors, I very much doubt that the themes discussed here are just artefacts of a common literary heritage. In any case, they are certainly not exclusive to accounts by professional writers. Others report much the same thing. For example: "It was like being inside a very, very thick balloon and no matter how hard I pushed out, the momentum of the skin of the balloon would just push me back in. So I couldn't touch anybody, I couldn't touch anything. And I know in my head I loved my husband and kids but I couldn't feel anything at all. My emotions were completely dead. And I was just very frightened. It was the most frightening, terrifying experience, and it looked like it was an unending one." (Interview with a fifty-year-old woman on: healthtalkonline.org/mental_health/Depression, accessed 23/10/2008.) 16. See Wyllie (Citation2005) for a good survey of work on the phenomenological psychopathology of time. 17. This transformation can be interpreted in terms of what Heidegger calls "thrown projection" (geworfener Entwurf) (1962, §31, p. 188). According to Heidegger, we are thrown into the world, meaning that we find ourselves in a place that is not of our own making, where things present themselves as significant to us in a range of ways. Inextricable from this is the way in which we project ourselves towards some of the significant possibilities that the world offers, understanding both ourselves and the things around us in terms of possibilities that we seek to actualise. Depression, one might say, is a transformation in the structure of thrown projection, where various kinds of possibility are removed from the world into which one is thrown, along with the possibility of purposively pursuing anything at all. Passively waiting for some threat to be realised replaces the usual orientation towards future possibilities. See, for example, Tellenbach (Citation1980) for an account of severe depression that draws on Heidegger. 18. Given that deep guilt involves a loss of future possibilities, it is closely associated with a sense of deadness or of impending death (Fuchs, Citation2003). To be confronted with an irrevocable past and a future that consists only of an all-encompassing threat is characterised by many as the unpleasant feeling of being about to die. For instance, Solomon (Citation2001, p. 28) says that "what is happening to you in depression is horrible, but it seems to be very much wrapped up in what is about to happen to you. Amongst other things, you feel you are about to die" (Solomon, Citation2001, p. 28). Kaysen (Citation2001, p. 43) similarly describes depression as "a foretaste of death. It's a trip to the country of nothingness." Others report feeling as though they had died or even believed that they were dead: "I was certain, quite certain, that I was already dead. The actual dying part, the withering away of my physical body, was a mere formality" (Wurtzel, Citation1996, p. 19). 19. My position here is consistent with the more general view that "autobiographically past-directed emotions" consist of current emotional responses to remembered events rather than remembered emotions (Debus, Citation2007). One remembers one's past activities through the deep guilt, and therefore cannot summon past emotions that are incompatible with guilt. 20. One could define guilt in such a way as to exclude what I call deep guilt. But deep guilt is often referred to by people as a form of guilt, and is structurally similar to shallow guilt. So I continue to call it guilt. But denying its status as guilt would not affect my central argument: it is still a deep emotional state and therefore serves to illustrate my account of what gives an emotion its depth. 21. See also Fuchs (Citation2001) for the view that a sense of irrevocable guilt is bound up with changes in the structure of temporal experience. 22. Fuchs (Citation2003, p. 239) describes the predicament as follows: "The melancholic is so identified with his guilt that he is guilty per se; this corresponds to an archaic, undifferentiated self-perception. He feels like being the center of a 'guilt-world', in which everything becomes a sign of his omission. There is no forgiveness, no remorse or reparation in the future; being guilty comprises his total being." 23. The situation is analogous in some respects to the oft-cited example of the congenitally blind person's conception of the colour red. Seeing red is not part of her life, among her possibilities. 24. I conceive of emotional depth phenomenologically, and it is not a causal notion. What a person takes to be impossible is in fact possible, and apredicament that seems irrevocable can be altered. The depth of an emotional state is not an indicator of its degree of susceptibility to various kinds of causal influence. 25. The irrevocability of deep guilt is different from the certainty that might be associated with shallower guilt. In the latter case, one can entertain the possibility of one's not being guilty—one just knows that one is guilty. But, in the former case, one cannot entertain the possibility of any such alternative and so the sense of certainty arises in a different way. 26. Heidegger (Citation1962, Division Two, II) claims that guilt is an unavoidable correlate of our freedom. A being that directs itself towards the possible will inevitably fail to actualise certain possibilities; we are never all that we could be. What he calls the "call of conscience" reveals our guilt to us—our having failed to realise possibilities that are now lost. Heidegger's "guilt" does not correspond to any of the kinds of guilt I discuss here. It is the structure of experience that is presupposed by the possibility of feeling guilt about something. What I have called "deep guilt" is an alteration of that structure. 27. There is much controversy over whether depression should be a medical or a moral concern (see, for example, Graham, Citation1990; Martin, Citation1999). I associate the diagnosis of severe depression with a kind of existential predicament. But doing so is compatible with there being a biological complaint in some or all cases, and I do not deny that medical intervention can be appropriate. 28. See also Stanghellini (Citation2004) and Fuchs (Citation2005) for statements of this view. 29. See also Goldie (e.g., 2000, Citation2009) for the view that not all feelings are experiences of bodily states. 30. Acknowledgements: I am grateful to Peter Goldie, Jonathan Lowe, Nick Zangwill, two anonymous referees, and audiences at Durham University (March 2009) and a meeting of the International Society for Phenomenological Studies (July 2009) for very helpful feedback on earlier versions of this paper. My research was supported by a joint UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and German Research Foundation grant for the project "Emotional Experience in Depression: A Philosophical Study", and by a Durham University Christopherson-Knott Fellowship.