CHAPTER FOUR
[She] never has suffered from any other fear so great as that of getting lost or turned around in bed; in every strange place this fear keeps her awake; she has always been haunted with fear that she should lose her way from school and go off in the wrong direction, although the ground was very familiar; the fear of getting the wrong classroom always haunts her; she can never enter the smallest forest, and can never turn a corner or curve without fearing it is wrong and painfully fixing the angles in her mind.
(CITED IN HALL 1897)
The forest
Winter has come and you are alone in a forest. Before you, an avenue of trees cramps together, forming a series of erratic patterns in the road ahead. Their branches hang perilously above the ground, dangling towards the floor of the forest, forming a shadow in the path you tread. Within this dense space, you are able to locate the origin of the forest; that place from where you began your journey. The beginning of the forest is visible, but also felt within your flesh, and if you were to suddenly decide that the forest assumed an oppressive presence, then you would easily be able to retreat from this enclosed world. A small inroad breaks off from the surrounding environment, and the forest begins to thicken in its density. You are in the midst of this thickness, yet you remain a centre of existence. All around you, you see not only where the forest begins but also where it might end. On this cold afternoon, the forest reveals itself to you as a world of potential. Here, you see a pathway leading to a river; there, the forest gives way to a small clearing. Sections of trees – stray wood, old branches, fallen leaves – compel themselves to be grasped, sensed and grappled with. Your hand rummages through a pile of leaves, you feel them cracking upon touch. With another hand, you prod the moist ground with a piece of bark. Light shines in from above, and the forest gains the quality of a world removed from the commotion of urban existence.
Night draws its murky presence over the forest ground. Shards of the fragmented moonlight puncture the heights of the treetops, casting ominous shapes on the floor below. You are caught up in those shadows, as if watched by a force above, unseen but nevertheless present. In turn, the obscurity of the night conceals the clarity of the forest, disorienting you from your point of beginning and smothering you in the thickness of trees. You feel the trees press down upon you, as if they were shifting in the thick ground, swerving into your body and disorienting your already tremulous sense of location. In response, you glance at your phone. In the oceanic darkness of the forest, the light of the phone serves as a beacon of familiarity. You raise it to the night’s sky, but its underpowered beam is not sufficiently bright enough to light the way. Too thick in this world, the phone is no longer able to receive the network, which connects it and you to the surrounding world. As such, its function as a source of navigation is useless. In the midst of this experience, the memory of being lost comes back to you. As a child, you were once separated from your home. Unable to find your way back, you mistook a stranger’s home from that of your own. Yet again, another memory returns to you. Once, you fell asleep on a train and missed your stop. When you awoke, the entire world had become defined by an absolute unfamiliarity, such that even the people surrounding you assumed a strange aura. These memories reappear for you in the forest as that unknowable dimension of the world that is ordinarily masked in our waking hours but which is illuminated in all its clarity in the forest at night.
Your heart is beginning to palpitate, and just as you feel an urge of paroxysm in your body, you spot what looks like the edge of the forest in the treeline ahead. You run to the clearing. As you get closer and closer to the boundary line, the horizon of the forest spreads itself in space, expanding the closer you get to it. The same trees that appeared to offer freedom from this enclave have undergone a transformation, becoming a series of homogeneous units, with no distinguishing features to orient you. Each tree is a clone of the other, each marked by the same configuration of branches and moss rising up the trunk. In the absence of the sun, the moon offers no respite for this disorientation. It is remote and alien, and serves less to place you in the world and more to displace you from your surroundings. Despite the receding horizon, you are compelled to run in any direction, to break free of this relentless homogeneity and to discover within this primal anxiety a landmark, no matter how insignificant, that can orient you. Against this spatial marker, you would be able to cultivate a sense of place, thus forging a new sense of beginning from which to depart from this insufferable realm. Until then, you remain lost in the forest. Your inability to find your way home is not only a spatial disorientation, however. More than this, it is disorientation with respect to the notion of being itself.
FIGURE 4.1 Forêt du Maïdo, La Réunion.
The real dwelling plight
In everyday experience, we generally know where we are. Familiar objects and markers clothed with a personal meaning ensure that we are always already located in the world in a habitual and integrated way. As we move through the world, we retain a sense of being at the centre of things, even if on an objective level, we know this is counter-intuitive. When confronted with an unfamiliar place, our attention might be heightened to novel features in the landscape, such that we are able to get placed. To know where one is thus to know on a bodily and prereflective sense how (and where) one finds their way in the world. To be lost, on the other hand, is not only an atypical experience; it is also a radical departure from our everyday experience of being-in-the-world.
Where am I? Such is the question one typically asks when confronted with the prospect of being lost. In response to this question, spatial cognition and an abstract understanding of where we are is not a guarantee of recovering our sense of familiarity and orientation. For Freud, the experience of being lost in the woods is registered as a specific instance of the uncanny, which defies intellectual comprehension: ‘One may, for instance, have lost one’s way in the woods, perhaps after being overtaken by fog, and, despite all one’s efforts to find a marked or familiar path, one comes back again and again to the same spot, which one recognised by a particular physical feature’ (Freud 2003, 144). To be lost means being surrounded on all sides by the indistinction of space, and it is only when the homogeneity of space is broken that we can get re-placed. A discernible object in the landscape – a broken tree, a telephone mast or a discarded set of books – punctuates space, creating a pivot around which perspective is regained. In the midst of the forest, we pause in our tracks when confronted with fog. The fog is a presence that smothers us, as the night does, denying us of our identity, as we become part of the elements. In all this, the fog gets under our skin, enclosing itself upon us, deforming the very boundary line that allows us to return to the place from whence we came.
To be lost in this way – in the fog, in the forest – is to invoke primal anxieties over being removed from home. Left vulnerable, the experience of being lost is forced upon us in a movement of oppression. But let us not discount that other modes of being lost are framed by an element of pleasure and seduction. To be lost in the world of aesthetic discourse is to wilfully submit oneself to the rapture of losing one’s bearings. Intoxicating and overwhelming, the ‘sacrifice of subjectivity’ (to use Mikel Dufrenne’s expression) involved in the aesthetic experience of the sublime entails a partial dissolution of one’s sense of subjectivity (Dufrenne 1989, 61). In place of subjectivity, a collusion forms with that of the object, be it an unbound ocean, a deserted landscape or an ominous mountain. A moment emerges, where the subject of experience is pushed to the brink of a boundary, without that boundary ever fully dissolving. This ‘beginning of terror that we are barely able to endure’ does not threaten to annihilate us, but instead situates us at the centre of an ordered disorientation (Rilke 2009, 3). To be lost in the sublime is thus to know in advance that a return from the sublime remains intact.
For agoraphobes, this sense of being lost in a limitless place is especially pertinent, and time and again, we often read of patients who experience themselves as being disorientated, or otherwise ‘caught in the middle of nowhere’, as though a fog were encircling them (cf. Sadowsky 1997). At stake in these episodes is a sense of being lost not simply in geometrical terms, but in the more fundamental sense of being lost to the world. We would like in this chapter to consider the phenomenological implications of being lost in place. We would like, moreover, to phrase this experience of being lost in place as central to the precarious relation the agoraphobe has to home. As we will see, to be lost to the world is to be exposed to the sense of never again being able to return to the world. For agoraphobes, there exists a fundamental discord between the body and the surrounding environment. Space is problematic, and ‘dwelling’ is achieved only in the most marginal and restrictive of ways, as one of Westphal’s patients has it: ‘He cannot visit the zoo in Charlottenburg, because there are no houses’ (Knapp 1988, 60).
With this mention of dwelling, we are invariably drawn to Heidegger and the ‘real dwelling plight’ (Heidegger 1977, 339). As he will present it in ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, this plight ‘lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the essence of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell’ (339). We shall remain with Heidegger, finding within this essay the means to frame our analysis of agoraphobia and its relationship to homelessness. Written in the context of post-war housing shortages, Heidegger’s remarks are directed against the idea that ‘man’s homelessness’ can be resolved in material terms alone. For him, the ‘real plight of dwelling does not lie merely in a lack of houses’, but instead involves a relation to those houses ‘that calls mortals into their dwelling’ (339). Although ‘home’ is seldom mentioned in the lecture, the relationship between home and dwelling is tacit throughout. When the issue of home and homelessness is mentioned, then it is all the more striking, as when he writes, ‘What if man’s homelessness consisted in this, that man still does not even think of the real plight of dwelling as the plight?’ (339). For Heidegger, thinking is not the inward expression of dwelling, but the very basis of dwelling. Thinking belongs to dwelling, as he has it, insofar as it serves to remind us of our homelessness. To give thought to our relationship to dwelling is to remember that relationship in a new light, and in the process to rediscover what it is to be at home.
Today, the production of prefabricated houses, with their lack of origins, built in what are increasingly homogenized towns and cities appears to stand in direct contrast to the Heideggerian idea of dwelling, with its association of eighteenth-century farmhouses set against the backdrop of Germanic forests. Indeed, much of what Heidegger says in this lecture, which was written in 1951, is lost in the context of contemporary culture. Yet Heidegger’s lecture is not an invitation to mourn a lost past, even if a tone of lamentation and nostalgia permeates his writing. At stake in the attempt to think of home is not a plea for a specific mode of architecture, but a call to (re)think our relation to home in the first instance. Here, Heidegger’s question is critical: ‘Do the houses in themselves hold any guarantee that dwelling occurs in them?’ (324). That Heidegger responds to this question in the negative testifies to the complexity of dwelling. To dwell – that is, to be at home – means more than occupying space: it means not only being at home in the locality of the house, but being at home in the world more broadly.
If the materiality of the house is itself not a sufficient condition of being at home, then what else is involved in the act of finding home? Here, a series of sub-questions emerge. Where in the world is home? To what extent is the materiality of the world implicated in the home? How is the home as a place different from the non-home? Already in earlier chapters, we have seen how home delineates a place in a subject’s world, which carries with it a sense of ownership, intimacy and an irreducible link to the mood of the body, such that in the absence of the home, the bodily experience of the world shifts accordingly. In this chapter, we will give attention to the home, not only as a place within the world, but also as a mood that is enacted throughout the surrounding world. We will see that the place of the home has its origins in the body, such that home cannot be considered apart from the body, and, likewise, the body cannot be considered apart from the home. From this foundation, we will consider the home as a centre. Instead of being a single monolithic centre, home involves several mutually entwined aspects, which together constitute a complex and dynamic whole. We will give attention to two such centres: an ontological and worldly centre. This distinction can also be rephrased as a centre of reality in the first case, and a centre of familiarity in the second case. Each of these aspects is not autonomous from one another, but instead constitutes a union, with each aspect forming an inseparable whole.
To take these distinctions in concrete terms, consider how the centre of the home is what allows us to journey into the world in the first place, and without that centre, defining a journey as a journey would be impossible. In this respect, one has a centre insofar as one has a place to go to. The centre of the home is the original place, and thus instrumental in establishing a sense of familiarity and directionality in the world. Consider also the sentiment, ‘the centre grounds you’. In some sense, this is true. The centre is not a metaphorical device used to elevate the home to an idyllic fantasy. Rather, it is the source of our relationship to the ground and the Earth, a bearer of meaning, and for these reasons, a condition of being in place. Without the centre, we would not only be lost, we would be placeless. To speak of the centre in such a way does not mean that the centre is reducible to the materiality of the home. The home as a centre is the principle manifestation of value and familiarity in a contingent world. At the centre of our world, the home is at once a reassuring source of familiarity or a stifling reminder of our habitual existence. In each case, home and centre coexist on the same plane, with each marking a condition of the stability of selfhood in the first instance.
‘Shadows dancing on the dark walls’
Let us proceed by getting back into place, to use Edward Casey’s memorable phrase (Casey 1993). Phenomenology’s attention to the body, in its depth and richness, is rivalled only by its focus on spatiality. In its focus on the dimensional and lived aspects of spatiality, phenomenology has revealed to us that far from the ‘milieu (real or logical) in which things are laid out, [space is] the means by which the position of things becomes possible’ (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 253–254). Spatiality, as understood in this way, is not the backdrop, but is rather the ground upon which the distinction between background and foreground can be established. It is thanks to the primordiality of spatiality that we are able to have a relationship with the world, as both abstract and concrete possibilities (a relational dimension that both empiricism and intellectualism overlook). As we know from his analysis of the body, for Merleau-Ponty, perception is an act of synthesis, both spatial and temporal, which apprehends things as a totality, prior to those things being understood in their parts. ‘Space’, he writes, ‘is essentially always “already constituted”’ (262). As such, we can never understand the nature of space by withdrawing from it, given that ‘being is synonymous with being situated’ (263). This understanding of spatiality as being informed and structured by a primordial spatiality means that a dimension such as depth is framed from the outset in terms of a ‘primordial depth’, which gives sense to an abstract comprehension of depth (278). Our spatiality, therefore, is tied up not only with the primordial and non-thetic consciousness; it is also rooted in the lived and affective experience of being-in-the-world (293).
We have already seen in earlier chapters how bodily subjectivity is constituted at all times by our intersubjective and interspatial relations. This ‘inherence in the world’ is stipulated on the world presenting itself to me as a set of affordances, which is given dynamically (293). The dynamic character of spatiality is a theme pursued incisively in the work of Edward Casey, for whom the ‘body continually takes me into place. It is at once agent and vehicle, articulator and witness of being-in-place’ (Casey 1993, 48). The twofold role of the body serves to both structure and give content to our experience of being placed. Thus, if the body puts us in place, providing us with a sense of orientation, then it also gives life to place as it is lived. At stake in this twofold role is the co-constitution of body and place. To have a body means being in place; likewise, to be in place means having a body. This relationship between the body and place is not homogeneous, but instead involves a complex arrangement of different influences, all of which alter the body’s presence in the environment.
Consider how we tend to think of some places such as airports as disorientating the body, and thus putting us out of place. During the experience of interstitial places, we rely less on our intuitive bodily navigation – less, that is, on our footing – and more on a series of signs directing us where and where not to go. In other places, such as those we are intimately familiar with, our bodies tend to cohere with the environment, affording us a seamless continuity between the materiality of the place and the materiality of our bodies, as Casey writes: ‘Body and landscape present themselves as coeval epicentres around which particular places pivot and radiate’ (29). Throughout, body and place remain in a co-constitutive relationship with one another. Even where the environment disorients and displaces us, the primordial act of being placed is never entirely dissolved.
In the place of the home, this close rapport between body and place is given an especially vivid expression. One obvious reason for this privileging of the home is that our fluid relationship with place is often predicated on the experience of intimacy. With the experience of intimacy, our bodies relax into the environment, such that body and place form a union. In the absence of intimacy, by contrast, we become more aware of our bodies as being ‘inserted’ into the environment, as though occupying an arbitrary position in the world, and thus assuming a more present point of focus (cf. Leder 1990, 34). Traditionally, it is the home that is thought of as a centre of intimacy in our spatial lives, and thus a place where the body has a special relation.
For Bachelard, ‘[t]he house is a refuge, a place of retreat, a center’ (Bachelard 2011, 75). As a retreat, the home is a place marked by privacy and protection from the outside world. In entering another person’s home, it is customary to first be invited, and, having entered, the guest is then expected to respect the tacit norms and rules of the household. In this way, inviting another person into one’s home is to expose the home to a level of vulnerability that is not often associated with public space. This vulnerability does not only belong to the spatiality of the house as a place in which one lives and thus occupies a history, it is also bodily in structure.
On a similar note to Bachelard, Kirsten Jacobson describes the home as a ‘second body’ (Jacobson 2009). Invoking Merleau-Ponty, Jacobson suggests that the home assumes this secondary role by dint of its ability to ‘ground the “absolute here” of our body insofar as it allows the body a settled territory in which it finds itself … in its “here-ness”’ (361). This emphasis on the ‘absolute here’ of the home means that the ‘always retreating “there”’ is held in abeyance, forever deferred. The anchoring role of the home is thus not only a spatial notion. Instead, the here-ness of the home orients us, such that we are able to find our way in the world in the first instance. But how convincing is the distinction between a first and second body? After all, if we are able to talk of a ‘home-body’, then how do we draw a distinction between each body? Just as bodies are porous in their experience of the world, so too are the homes in which those bodies dwell. In material terms, bodies and homes interact and entwine, flecks of skin and flesh peel off into the surface of the home, giving the home an organic composition to it. Equally, the physicality of the home becomes inscribed in the habits of the body, giving the body an identity that is co-constituted by the world of the home. Consider here Bachelard’s well-known account of the ‘first stairway’ as an example of how the home is ‘physical inscribed in us’:
After twenty years, in spite of all the other anonymous stairways; we would recapture the reflexes of the ‘first stairway’ … We would push the door that creaks with the same gesture, we would find our way in the dark to the distant attic. The feel of the tiniest latch has remained in our hands. (Bachelard 1994, 14–15)
Bachelard’s notion of ‘organic habits’ refers less to motorized memories mechanically reproduced by external stimuli, and more to the symbiotic union of home and body, which in turn, co-constitute each other. Home and body each retain their identity through housing a memorial relationship with one another, with each aspect establishing a ‘passionate liaison of our bodies … with an unforgettable house’ (15). Against this backdrop, Bachelard performs a phenomenological study of the house, finding within it a series of invariant structures that orient us conceptually and thematically. Accordingly, the house is divided into a horizontal and vertical plane, with the cellar and the attic marking the principal poles of the home’s material existence between darkness and light, anxiety and reason (18). This vertical division etched into the home’s structure is important, insofar as it allows Bachelard to domesticate the uncultivated aspect of dwelling. Indeed, for Bachelard, the cellar is the site of the unconscious. This literal domestication of the unconscious brings home the central function of the unconscious as a structure in both our psychic and spatial existence, with no clear divide between them. Never simply a geometrical unity, spatiality for Bachelard is the means in and through which time is compressed and memories are retained, as he says in a haunting formulation: ‘The finest specimens of fossilized duration concretized as a result of long sojourn, are to be found in and through space. The unconscious abides. Memories are motionless, and the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are’ (9. Emphasis added).
FIGURE 4.2 Rue de Birague, Paris.
As the unconscious abides, it thus finds itself ‘housed’ (10). True to Bachelard’s felicitous orientation, he breaks away from psychoanalysis in phrasing the unconscious in a ‘space of happiness’, writing how the ‘normal unconscious knows how to make itself at home everywhere, and psychoanalysis comes to the assistance of the ousted unconscious, of the unconscious that has been roughly or insidiously dislodged’ (10). This distinction between a psychoanalytical idea of the unconscious as the site of division and the ‘normal’ unconscious as the nexus of stability necessitates Bachelard to split the home into a vertical and horizontal plane of being, assigning to the role of the cellar the ‘dark entity’ of the home, the ‘one that partakes of subterranean forces’ (18). Up above, meanwhile, Bachelard demarcates the ‘upper’ zones of the home – those of the attic especially – with the space of reason and ‘intellectualized projects’ (18). If fear exists in the attic, then it does so with the potential to be mastered by the dweller (rats scamper into corners upon their master’s arrival, so Bachelard reminds us). The cellar, meanwhile, becomes imbued with an irrational and terrifying force. That this domestic depth constitutes a space of unconsciousness means that it departs from the ‘normal unconscious’ that is otherwise a space of repose (19). In the cellar, the fears and anxieties easily repressed in the attic return to the surface:
In the attic, the day’s experiences can always efface the fears of the night. In the cellar, darkness prevails both day and night, and even when we are carrying a lighted candle, we see shadows dancing on the dark walls … the unconscious cannot be civilized. It takes a candle when it goes to the cellar. (19)
Bachelard’s rigid delineation between the upper and lower parts of the home reinforces the underlying topophobia in the midst of his topophilia. The distinction also carries with it implications for our understanding of agoraphobia. As we know, the home of the agoraphobe assumes an unrivalled centrality, such that places outside of the homeworld are characterized as not only deficient, but also anxiety inducing. Having considered how Bachelard divides the space of the home into different levels and layers, we wish to now consider how this management of the ‘dark entity’ is played out in the world more generally. We find evidence of Bachelard’s ‘dark entity’ in the case of agoraphobia, and our study will revolve around the manifold disturbances that both distort but also reinforce the centrality of the home for the phobic subject.
‘A black sky of horrible intensity’
Our being-in-the-world is structured at all times by the experience of place as a constellation of interconnected meaning and affordances. As Heidegger demonstrated, the world reveals and conceals itself according to the pre-cognitive way in which we comport ourselves to the world (Heidegger 1996). Objects of all sorts, from vast columns lit by the moon to domestic appliances marked by childhood memories, present themselves within the context of an entire world. Each thing, each object protrudes or recedes from us depending to any number of circumstances. Let us consider here the wakefulness of depression.
A human being is unable to rise in the morning, their body is tied up with the weight of lassitude, and their desire to emerge into the world is partly destroyed. They remain motionless in the bed, waiting for time to pass, but unable to sculpt that time into the work of productivity. Daylight is an affront to their existence, and the long stretch of time from dusk till dawn is marked by an irreducible emptiness. The knowledge of the world outside the room does nothing to spur the person to action, but only reinforces their felt inability to exist within an exterior space. Into this vast space, the human subject lacks all potentialities and all motivation to fill in these pockets with time with their own being. It is a time of longevity, a longevity without potential. The immediacy of the person’s surroundings are oppressive in their familiarity, and every object that is situated within this space seems to express the same apathetic atmosphere felt at the core of the body. The room becomes a flat horizon, a landscape with no definable features, except for the singular quality of total homogeneity, in which subject and room form an uneasy and unwelcome composite.
To give a full description of an experience such as depression, one would indeed require not simply an analysis of the depressed person’s experience of their own body and their relations to others. More than this, an intervention would need to be made into their relation to things, specific and discernible objects in the world, each of which expresses the core of their depression (cf. Ratcliffe 2015). The spatiality of the depressed person is a spatiality removed and isolated from that of the world. It is a world, as with the world of illness more generally, from which others enter the horizon of the depressed subject rather than the depressed subject entering the broader horizon. A different spatiality can be described for the anorexic subject, for the schizophrenic subject, for the neurotic subject and so forth. In the case of the schizophrenic patient, J. H. van den Berg speaks of patients hearing ‘that a revolution is about to come … in the voices of people, in the blowing of the wind’ (van den Berg 2001, 46). Likewise, in a report from Jaspers, we read of various distortions in space. One patient’s bed ‘became longer, wider and so did the room, stretching into infinity’ (Jaspers 1997, 81). This quality of space becoming infinite reappears again in other patients: ‘I still saw the room. Space seemed to stretch and go on into infinity, completely empty’ (81). In one especially striking illustration, we read of a total inversion of spatiality:
Suddenly the landscape was removed from me by a strange power. In my mind’s eye I thought I saw below the pale blue evening sky a black sky of horrible intensity. Everything became limitless, engulfing … I knew that the autumn landscape was pervaded by a second space, so fine, so invisible, though it was dark, empty and ghastly. Sometimes one space seemed to move, sometimes both got mixed up … It is wrong to speak only of space because something took place in myself; it was a continuous questioning of myself. (81)
FIGURE 4.3 Rue des Ursins, Paris.
Is this ‘second space’ not that level of spatiality, which is beneath the subject, and which can never be fully possessed by the subject? This second space is marked as the nauseous, constantly shifting and always-slimy spatiality witnessed in Sartre. As the patient indicates, the second space is not a static backdrop, but is instead a dynamic realm, which crosses over into other spaces, and in doing so, forces the patient to question his own boundaries. We are reminded of the interdependent and impenetrable alliance between body and world. The partial dissolution of spatial form does not take place in abstraction, but instead aligns with what Merleau-Ponty termed the ‘intentional arc’ (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 137). We are now witnessing the lived dysfunction of the arc, as personal – and personalized – existence loses its orientation in the world. Against this lack of primordial orientation, what remains is an abstract understanding of space. A schizophrenic patient cited by Merleau-Ponty offers striking evidence of this failure to apprehend the world except as a set of discrete events: ‘A bird is chirping in the garden. I hear the bird, and I know that it is chirping, but that this is a bird and that it chirps are two things so far removed from each other … there is an abyss, as if the bird and the chirping had nothing to do with each other’ (295). The patient’s failure to synthesize events in the world (itself, a strange philosophical victory, in the sense of demonstrating a radical version of Hume’s critique of causality) leaves those events stranded in a non-relational impasse. Thereafter, the spatiality of the world ceases to function as meaningful so long as the ‘knowing body’ that prehends our existence is reduced to a body of abstraction, incapable of instituting the intentional arc, which gives meaning through a non-thetic intentionality.
Home as ontological centre
If a schizophrenic experience of spatiality is marked by a spatiality of persecution, taking place within a paranoiac landscape, then for the agoraphobe, the experience is conditioned at all times by a troubled relation to the home, either in its proximity or in its distance. This tendency is evident in van den Berg’s central patient, who is described as daring not ‘to leave the house during the daytime’ (van den Berg 2001, 8). In the face of the outside world, the patient reports that ‘the street seemed very wide and that houses appeared colorless, gray and so old and dilapidated that they seemed about to collapse’ (9). When outside his home, it is notable that other homes belong in a certain sense to a different order of reality, thus van den Berg tells us that for the patient, other houses were ‘closed up …’
[A]s if all the windows were shuttered, although he could see this was not so. He had an impression of closed citadels. And, looking up, he saw the houses leaning over toward the street, so that the strip of sky between the roofs was narrower than the street on which he walked. On the square, he was struck by an expanse that far exceeded the width of the square. He knew for certain that he would not be able to cross it. An attempt to do so would, he felt, end in so extensive a realization of emptiness, width, rareness and abandonment that his legs would fail him. He would collapse. (9)
With this account, we are introduced to the first principal feature of the home as a centre: its function as securing a felt sense of reality. Let us introduce a nuance here in our understanding of what is meant by felt reality. To phrase the phenomenology of home as involving the felt experience of realness is to make a distinction from that of reality itself. We are not concerned with reality, if we take this term in the objective and positivistic sense of what is real. Rather, our concern falls to the sense of realness, insofar as it is constituted in a relational manner. In this manner, we find at least two variations of the experience of realness. In the first case, we have the experience of realness as that which reinforces the subject’s place in the world. What is real is that which engenders a sense of continuity, unity and integration within the subject, and thus reinstates what was already established within a given horizon of experience. A phenomenological analysis of agoraphobia situates this understanding of realness within proximity to the home, and thus, for want of a better term, is marked as the really real.
In contradistinction, the felt experience of realness beyond the confines of the home (and thus in the midst of either burgeoning or paroxysmal anxiety) is what we term the unreal real. In speaking of the unreal real, we wish to draw a distinction from the experience of place as being not real, so long as we understand ‘not real’ to mean the absence of reality. In fact, the felt sense of reality as unreal is amplified rather than diminished during anxiety. Outside the home, the landscape bends and contorts, as though imposing itself upon the subject. Spatiality is not only distorted, but also disintegrating. This uneven and unpredictable world offsets the patient’s experience of reality within the home, such that the world beyond the home is marked in its unreality. At no point in this dizzying realness is the reality of the world put into question, and this experience of an unreal reality is not the product of imagination, nor a delusion: ‘A reality defined his actions’, as van den Berg continues to remark:
The objects of his world were frightening and ominous, and when he tried to establish that the house, the street, the square and the fields would have reasonably retained their former shape and nature, and that, therefore, his perceptions must have provided him with a falsification of reality, this correction, in which he wanted to believe, if only for a moment, seemed unreal and artificial to him. It was more unreal than the direct, incorrect observation which was so frightening that it drove him back to his room. (10)
Here, van den Berg’s patient gives us exceptional insight into the fabric of the unreal real as a distinct kind of reality. In the attempt to enforce a rational if not ‘true’ perception of reality upon the world, the patient is only more alienated from what is intuitively real to him; namely, the world as anxiety inducing and terrifying. Even with the knowledge that his perception of the world as toppling over is, objectively speaking, a ‘false’ perception, this abstract knowledge imparts no significance upon his experience. What is ‘artificial’ is the reconstruction of a reality from the basis of an error in perception. Time and again, this inability to rationalize the spatiality of the world into a really real locus of orientation falters for agoraphobic subjects.
FIGURE 4.4 Bibliothèque Forney, Paris.
Further evidence of this relation between home and realness can be sourced from Westphal’s patient. We recall that for Mr P, crossing the street and entering an open space, there emerges ‘a feeling of uneasiness [which] occurs in his heart region as if one were terrified’ (Knapp 1988, 70). Alongside this uneasiness, the materiality of the world assumes a parallel presence to this inward state, such that ‘he perceives the cobble stones melting together’ (70). Keeping with our theme of unreal realness, let us pause to consider the meaning of melting cobble stones. There are at least two ways in which we can understand why the patient experiences the cobble stones as melting. First, we can understand the melting of the world as a ‘side effect’ of the patient’s anxiety. According to this line of thought, the melting cobble stones would be nothing more than an expression of the agoraphobe’s insecurity causing a more generalized instability in the world, with the cobble stones becoming an extension of the patient’s anxious body. This interpretation captures the entwinement between the body and the materiality of the world, with each folding into the same atmospheric mood. Persuasive though this interpretation might be, what it does not give credit to is the actual experience of the world as unreal. After all, to suggest that that melting cobbling stones are a ‘symptom’ of the agoraphobe’s anxiety is to underplay the lived experience of the world as unreal and real quite apart from the aetiology of those symptoms.
FIGURE 4.5 Square Vermenouze, Paris.
Much will depend here on our understanding of symptoms. A phenomenological approach to psychopathology serves to remind us that a symptom is not an isolated object, but instead a gestalt that is situated within a much larger context. Let us think of the melting cobble stones as a phenomenal experience of the world as a gestalt. To think in this way involves the totality of the subject rather than treating symptoms as if they were independent of the subject. A world that is melting is a world that lacks a constant foundation to stand on; lacks, that is to say, the ‘absolute here’ of the body. For this reason, the felt experience of the world as ontologically stable depends upon the body’s placement in the world. For the agoraphobic patient, body and place only synthesize harmoniously in the context of home. In the absence of this anchoring device, the outside world becomes a dizzying, melting spatiality. A melting world is a world that encompasses an entire relational context in its fundamental instability. It is a world that slips away from us, exceeding the control we have over it, and dissolving the image we confer upon it. The result is that the habitual sense of the really real is augmented with an appeal to the unreal real.
Against this melting backdrop, the home presents itself as an image of solidity and fortification. ‘In a sense, a phobia’, so writes Allen Shawn, an American composer and agoraphobia sufferer whom we shall discover more about in the following section, ‘can be seen as a kind of fissure in reality, opened up by a reaction that is either out of sync with what stimulates it or, as with the fear of open spaces and heights, overly sympathetic to it’ (Shawn 2007, 124). In the face of this fissure in reality, the intimacy, interiority and insularity of the home is welcomed as a restoration of reality. The result is that the division between home and non-home becomes a divisive distinction rather than a mutually beneficial one, with the non-home marking a threat against the stability of the home. Shawn finds a counterpart in Bachelard, for whom the elevation of the home carries with it a diminishment of the value of the outside world, as he has it: ‘Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home’ (Bachelard 1994, 6). Never having the same value as the home, the outside world thus plays not only a less central role for both Bachelard and the agoraphobic patient, but also a less real presence.
Home as world centre
The analysis we are in the midst of consists of describing the multi-centred structure of the home. If the home serves to define and restore the felt experience of realness for the subject, then let us now consider how journeying beyond the home expands upon this dimension. The thematic experience we are concerned with is that of familiarity and unfamiliarity. As we have seen, for the agoraphobic person, the home is a definite, localized place, set in the materiality of the world. He does not carry the home with him, as a bodily practice that unfolds in each new place he finds himself. Rather, the home is left behind, sealed at the door and rigidly affixed to a specific location in the world. Unable to carry home with him, the home becomes materialized and statically emplaced in the most concrete way. All of which is a way of saying that the home is a centre of the world, insofar as it orientates him at all times. At stake in this relation between being at home and being orientated is the role of the home as able to confer a sense of familiarity upon the world.
What role does the home play in orientating us in the world? To answer this question we need to journey beyond the home, since it is only when we are removed from the home that the value of the home as a point of world orientation becomes clear. Usually – that is to say, in non-agoraphobic instances – we proceed from the domain of the home before making our way in the world. There, we move from place to place without needing recourse to the locality of the home as an anchoring point that we must refer to time and again. Instead, the home falls into the background of our everyday experience. Forming a silent context against which our security in the world is grounded, the home allows us to move between places, to journey in the world without any ontological or existential risk of self-fragmentation. Trusting our bodies thus means placing a trust in the world.
For the agoraphobe, the point of departure for leaving the home and journeying into the world is altogether different. As we have seen, the agoraphobic patient’s relationship to home is divisive rather than harmonious. The home serves to entrap rather than free him into the world, and thus an unhealthy reliance on the home as a beacon of stability in a contingent world is established. Together, this combination of dependency and anxiety means that the home is not only the guarantor of reality; it is also the spatial centre around which the unfamiliar world revolves. This mention of unfamiliarity is vital. For the agoraphobe, journeying through the world is generally characterized by the repetition of patterns and familiar routes, with any deviations from these patterns liable to produce anxiety or the urge to flee (cf. Marks 1987). Being able to predict what lies beyond the home in a mode of anticipatory anxiety is the principal way in which the unfamiliarity of the world is repressed, therefore allowing the agoraphobe to journey into the world, albeit with severe restriction.
To spell out the relation between unfamiliarity and the home as a world centre, let us turn to the memoir of Allen Shawn. We join Shawn as he is discussing his experience of driving and journeying beyond the familiar homeworld of his Manhattan streets. Consistent with the agoraphobe’s need to anticipate the world beyond the home, Shawn admits that he will often ‘rehearse the drive first to see if I can handle it’ (Shawn 2007, 126). This act of familiarizing himself with the journey ahead is not simply a question of knowing how to get from place to place. Rather, the act of venturing into the unfamiliar world is a ‘test’ of the very reality of that world in the first place. Such an idea of testing the outside world points back to the sense that outside world is somehow less real than that of the home. To test the outside world means at-testing to both the materiality of the world and to how the lived body will respond to this uncertain world. ‘Sometimes’, so Shawn writes, ‘I have to try a ride many times before I get past the point where I am stuck, a stretch of steep mountain, say, bounded on all sides by layered slabs of rock … or the beginning of a bridge whose length I can’t judge from the available view …’ (126). This lack of trust in both the materiality of the world and the materiality of the body – for it is, after all, a body that could give way at any moment – leads to a different relationship to home and non-home. Now, the non-home becomes something that must be verified before it can be taken as having a reality of its own.
At stake here is a problematic relationship with orientation, which manifests itself in a form of travel sickness. Moving beyond the home means being confronted with the interstitial space between places. These are the spaces that join us to other places: motorways, elevators, squares, subways. What these spaces have in common is that they encourage movement more than rest. If the elevator ceases to move between floors or if a car stops on the highway, then these places become dysfunctional. This emphasis on motion and travel means that once a person enters the highway, they are then limited in their means to abandon their journey. Likewise with the elevator, to stop between floors would not be possible, except as a break from the really real: the elevator traveller is required to see the journey to its end. In each case, the problem with such spaces is not only the possibility of being stuck on the motorway, but of being lost in the world.
Part of the problem here is that, for the agoraphobic subject, the lack of heterogeneous features in the landscapes means that measuring the space from and to the home becomes impossible. A landscape disrupted by markers – a line of trees, a lone monument, an abandoned discotheque, a strip mall, a colossal stadium – is a world that can be navigated in terms of clearly delineated sectors. In the absence of such markers, the agoraphobe must rely on his felt experience of nearness and distance, and it is precisely this dependency on the body’s prereflective orientation in the world that cannot be called upon. The anxiety, then, is not a question of being lost in the geometrical sense. After all, in principle one could be lost in an elevator or even – especially perhaps – in one’s apartment. In a report from 1879, we read of a patient who ‘could never go the shortest distance across lots, no matter how plainly she could see across, without getting confused and turned around’(Hall 1897, 161). The loss involved is less geometrical and more ontological: more, that is to say, a loss of familiarity, orientation and, above all, of being lost to the world. As an example of this, consider Shawn’s method of ‘testing’ the outside world. He writes, ‘Sometimes I keep a log on a yellow pad next to me on the drive to a new place, to help me cope with the experience’ (126). On that notepad, Shawn will write down the places he passes by way of testifying to the very existence of those places. It is worth quoting them to get a sense of the specificity of the places in question:
Quail Hollow Inn …
Yankee Pet Supply (‘Got Pups? You bet’) …
Cold River Industrial Park …
Sign: ‘Corn’ …
Chuck’s Auto …
City Auto …
Tom and Dale’s Auto …
Church (sign: ‘“Everybody’s doing it” doesn’t make it right’)
Noise ‘R’ Us Fireworks …
Wendell Marsh … .
(126–127)
This extraordinary list is important for several reasons. First, the very act of recording the names of these ostensibly prosaic places certifies their existence in the form of written evidence. Given that the materiality of the world is not in itself a sufficient condition of stability or realness for the agoraphobe, documenting it becomes a necessary stage in ‘getting placed’. The act of making a note of the place names is the genesis of establishing familiarity in the world, thus implying that the list were somehow more real than the places itself. This entwinement of testimony and place underscores the second reason for composing the list: it not only situates the world in place, but also orientates Allen himself in the world of Tom and Dale’s Auto and Cold River Industrial Part, as he writes, ‘When I see these same signs on the return trip, I am deeply reassured and also surprised that everything has stayed put’ (127). This radical doubt places the world in a state of perpetual flux, a flux that can only be assuaged by comparing the notes written on the pad with that of the outside world. Such is the disquiet of the agoraphobe’s relation with the non-home that the existence of the outside world emerges as an affront to the very fabric of his existence, as Allen puts it: ‘The place-specific notations seem to demonstrate an effort to maintain a sense of reality and a sense of identity while in transit, as if my identity and sense of control were at risk …’ (127). In one clear sense, Allen’s identity is at risk, insofar as that identity is inextricably bound with the fixed locality and familiarity of the home. In the face of an unfamiliar world, the reality of the world decomposes, and in doing so, all means of bodily orientation are replaced with a strictly topographical understanding of where things are.
At this point, we can observe how the two aspects of the home centre converge: unfamiliarity coincides with unreality. For the agoraphobe, departure from the home carries with it a double threat. One, we discover a threat to the reality of the material world. Two, we notice a threat to the familiarity of the material world. These threats are not independent of one another, but instead are co-constitutive. Each centre converges in the lived experience of the agoraphobe’s homebody, which becomes the expressive organ of both unreality and unfamiliarity. But does this formulation of unfamiliarity coinciding with unreality mean the opposite; namely, that reality necessarily entails familiarity? The answer is clearly no. The reason being: the specificity of the agoraphobe’s body occupies a special relationship to the issue of unfamiliarity that assumes a less prevalent role in a non-agoraphobic subject. For the agoraphobe, unfamiliarity is not one phenomenological feature among many. Instead, unfamiliarity forms a direct correspondence with the appearance and disappearance of reality.
For Allen Shawn, the unfamiliarity of the open road or an ‘environment of wilderness’ leads to a Pascalian confrontation with ‘the eternal silence of infinite space’, which invokes a terrifying sense of disorientation and a ‘sensation of abandonment’ (123). This union of unreality and unfamiliarity points to a broader problem in the agoraphobe’s relation to home: no matter how much the agoraphobic patient ‘desensitises’ himself to the outside world by means of ‘testing’ it, the familiar reality of the world will forever elude him so long as he regards the physical site of his home as the centre of the world. The unfamiliarity of the world is thus not a problem of becoming acquainted to the world or of remembering the details of a particular route, etc. The world is unfamiliar insofar as it resists being dwelt in, and to this extent, is constitutionally unfamiliar so long as the locality of the home retains its fixed placement in the world.