Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
moods, which are so to say still “free fl oating”: that is, which have not yet
taken hold of the subject. Fuchs views depression as a
loss
of bodily resonance
(2000: 104), which makes the person no longer responsive to the call of the
world and thus leads to a failure of transcendence, a being locked in. The
lived body is
korporifi ziert
in depression, it is alienated as a stiffened, heavy
thing, which no longer vibrates and opens up the mood-space necessary for
a full-fl edged, homelike being-in-the-world.
The obvious associations to music, which are present in Heidegger's
discussions of moods, and which are further strengthened by Fuchs's notion
of bodily resonance, should not only be taken metaphorically, I believe, but
rather as a reference to the most adequate vocabulary available in developing
a phenomenology of moods. The closest we might come to describing what
it means to be attuned is captured in the experience of how a piece of music
sucks us into a pervasive mood, which colors our entire being-in-the-world.
This is not to say that vision, smell and sense are not part of the experience
of becoming and being mooded, the attunement of human being-in-the-
world rests on a bodily scheme in which the separate sense modalities have
not yet been singled out, but work together in a primal unity. Continuing
Fuchs's analysis I would like to suggest that the lived body could become
not only
devoid
of resonance, but also differently tuned in the sense of being
more or less
sensitive
to different moods. In cases of anxiety disorders and
depression one might describe this condition as a being out of tune, or a
being tuned in minor, in the sense of only picking up the anxious, boring
and sad tune qualities of the world. This would allow us to elaborate on a
spectrum, stretching from a normal resonance of the lived body (the body
being able to pick up a wide spectra of different moods), continuing over
different kinds of sensitivities, preferences and idiosyncrasies, which might
favor certain moods over others (the melancholic or joyful person), to the
cases which we would label pathologies, since the body is severely out of
tune, or devoid of tune as a tool of resonance.
Grief and guilt
The phenomenological rendering of the lived body as a tool of resonance,
indeed, is not only compatible with, but also seems to support, the view
that systematic alterations of the physiological organism (as the blocking
of serotonin reuptake) could change the attunement of the person and thus
also her being-in-the-world. The alien quality of depressed and anxious
embodiment fi ts well with the idea of a disease process conquering the
healthy organism. But the homelikeness or unhomelikeness of our being-in-
the-world is certainly not only dependent upon what happens in our bodies
- it is also dependent upon what happens in the world around us. Anxiety
attacks and periods of depression are often triggered by specifi c events in
the world, which may or may not have something to do with the person's
biography. Two of the main characteristics of depression are the feelings of
