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Affect Disorders: An Husserlian Interpretation of Alexytimia, BPD and Narcissistic Traits

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Abstract

Affects and all its variants (affection, allure, affective force, etc.) represent our via regia to be alive and connected with our life-world. It is not the ego that constitutes the world we live in but the affections that allow us to become respectively objects of our life and subjects of our own choices. Affects are in fact main triggers of lower and higher feelings through which we become subjects and experience empathy with other people, intersubjectively connecting with them and making ethical choices that are hopefully considerate of ourselves and our community. Yet it might happen that our feelings are not capable of truly feeling what we are affected by. When this happens, what affects us remains with us but cannot be felt and accordingly processed. In this paper, I will first work on the term affect and its variants. I will then describe how this connects with feelings. To finally analyze what happens when we are not capable of feeling our affects as in the case of alexithymia; or when we feel our affects too much as in the case of BPD; or when we do not want to feel certain affects as in the case of NPD. The main conceptual reference of this analysis will be Husserl and his static and genetic phenomenology.

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Notes

  1. As Steinbock remarks, “if sense constitution did presuppose affection, would not the very constitution of sense somehow presuppose, paradoxically, that sense was already constituted so that it could exert an affective force on me in order to be constituted?” (Steinbock, 1995: 154).

  2. “The same holds true for the axiological role of feelings, as value-apprehension and value-judgments. Value-perception also presupposes a neutral perception, the presentation of an object as object. In a parallel or even simultaneous manner, this perception is accompanied by a sensual feeling caused by the object. Sensual feelings then give rise to value-apprehensions and value judgments, which lead to proper feelings like joy, disgust, or happiness as their effects. Proper feelings, like joy or disgust, are thus founded in value-apprehensive consciousness” (“im werterfassenden Bewusstsein”; Husserl, Ms. A VI 12 II/132a).

  3. Here, and in other Husserl manuscripts from the 1920s, Husserl often uses the expression, ‘I-Thou-relationship,’ which seems to closely point to Buber’s work, I and Thou, published in 1923. Yet, it seems that when Husserl used this expression in 1920, it was not influenced by Buber’s writing because Husserl did not seem to possess a copy of Buber’s work in his library (as Husserl’s collection of books shows at the Husserl archive in Leuven). In fact, Husserl and Buber met for the first time in 1928, when Buber visited Husserl in Freiburg.

  4. In fact, Stöker (1993) and Held (2007) defend Husserl from the attack of solipsism because the transcendental ego is a meditating stance ‘functioning for,’ and not just a solus ipse; it is, in fact, the original streaming of time in relation to which being comes to existence and it is the first ‘other’ through which we can experience this primal empathy (see Husserl, Paris Lectures, Sect. 44 and Husserl VI, 149, 150, 153) that allows us to encounter the radical other.

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  1. California State University, East Bay, Hayward, USA

    Susi Ferrarello

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Ferrarello, S. Affect Disorders: An Husserlian Interpretation of Alexytimia, BPD and Narcissistic Traits. Hum Stud (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-024-09712-x

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