This short article from the Journal of Administrative Radiology is a philosophically oriented discussion of mood (befindlichkeit) for the psychologist interested in the work of Martin Heidegger and  phenomenological psychology. Since the article is short, I have made the questions at the end a little more involved. If the article tweeks your interest,  you will probably want to cruise the reference list at the end. I have added a commentary and Amazon hyperlinks to each reference.  As always, if you would like more information feel free to e-mail me at mstaples@sbcglobal.net.
 

Befindlichkeit is a term my German speaking friends often poke fun at me for using. "If you really spoke German," they tell me, "you’d know how old fashion you sound." Luckily, my German is so bad I don’t have to worry. And old fashion or not, this term expresses something extraordinarily important that we all "know" at some deep level of Being. And there probably isn’t a better term to be found, if for no other reason than because it is old fashion or lives in a language perhaps not of one’s own. This is to its advantage, for in both cases one is given pause to think about its meaning, discouraging any glossing over its surface indications. One is forced to dwell, at least for a while, in its presence.

Befindlichkeit is a technical term used by Martin Heidegger who may have been one of the most important philosophers of the 20th Century. It means something like "how you happen to find yourself," as one might greet another by asking "How do you find yourself today?" Psychologically, it as been described as "moodedness" or "affect" or "feeling." None of these are quite right. But before I go too far with this, I would like to take a short detour, backing up a few millennia, to explore very briefly the way we think about things... including affect and feeling. This will be important to the presentation of Befindlichkeit and how the term appropriates the issues of listening and hearing.
 
 

Its around 450 BC, the so called "Golden Age" in Greece, and Plato is hunkering over his version of a wordprocessor, thinking seriously about things. I mean this literally. He is thinking about "things" in a way that will change the entire western experience of reality. His predecessors, Parmenades and Heraclitus, took a different approach to reality.¹ Their answers to the big question of Being -- "What is reality?" -- still hovered round a thinking that used verbs. With Plato the question changed and so, because our answers are always guided by our questions, the answers changed as well. The question changed from "What is reality?" with its focus on the "is" of "is," to "What are the things that are real?" And with this subtle alteration from the verbal to the nominal, came the seeds of a mindset that was to frame the entire western metaphysical understanding of the reality.²

Looking at this more closely one might see that inside Plato’s question lurked an assortment of metaphysical monsters. This business of "real"-ness, for instance, pounced quickly. Plato looked around and saw that things came and went... a tree came into existence, then died and was gone. It was a thing for a while, then it was nothing again. But while it was a thing it seemed to exhibit a kind of essential design, an order that defined it’s "tree"-ness. And it was this design, this essence that Plato saw as something really real, standing behind (and apart from) the particular occurrence of the tree perceived. With this, Plato split Being in two. One side of Being housed a world of physical matter (the occurrence of the particular tree), and the other side housed a world of abstraction. The world of the physical was the world of the object. The world of the mind’s abstractions were the world of the subject (who perceived the really real).

Now lets jump ahead in time, skipping over the 2,500 years of iterations involving this so-called "Platonic Dualism." We go now to Rene Descartes in the 17th Century. Europe is emerging from the Middle Ages. Galileo is turning the solar system inside out. Newton is demonstrating what he can do with apples.  Rene Descartes is again asking the question about the really real nature of things. Through his system of doubting, he is coming to or, perhaps better, reiterating the same conclusions about the split between mind and matter (this time as 'Cartesian' dualism). Here we begin our Modern Age, with Descartes providing the philosophical platform from which all subsequent theoretical formulations will be launched.

Cartesian Dualism redefined in modern terms Plato’s distinctions between mind and matter. This was picked up by British philosopher John Locke who suggested that reality was divided into "primary" and "secondary" qualities. Primary qualities were those of objective matter. Taking the example of the tree used earlier, the primary qualities associated with the tree would be its physical features. This is objective stuff. It is moveable, touchable... physical. The green color of the trees leaves, the smell of its pine cones, the feel of its bark would be secondary qualities. They are non-objective, relative to the perceiving subject. One can see in this the division here, clearly enumerated by Locke. It is the splitting of the world again into those things that belong to the realm of objects, and those things that belong to the realm of subjects who know them.³

Returning now to Befindlichkeit, which I defined more or less as "feeling" or "moodedness," we note that in the Cartesian paradigm, the phenomenon of befindliches fall squarely to the side of things belonging to the world of the subject. Oh, there might be an objective component of some sort, a hormone here... a synapse there, but the feeling itself associated with that objective component is in dualistic terms (whether Plato’s, Descartes’ or Locke’s) subjective. It is relative to the observer, and traditionally thought of as being untrustworthy when approaching the things of the really real.

Now there is one more important thread in this tapestry involving the notion of location. Consistent with the dualist view of the Universe is a distinction between "inner" and "outer." Those things that are "inner" are associated with the "subjective." Those things that are "outer," are associated with the "objective." So, here we have the elements of what is commonly referred to as the "Western Paradigm" that shapes our understanding of reality. It began with Plato, was modified somewhat by Aristotle, fit right in with the burgeoning Christianity of the middle ages through St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, was codified again by Descartes, explicated by Locke and Kant, and today provides the unseen scaffolding for our scientific viewpoints, from psychology to engineering, to medicine in all (or nearly all) its forms. So, what does this have to do with Befindlichkeit, and hearing one’s patients?
 
 

Psychology has much to say about the experience of listening and relating to others. For the most part, what psychology has to say is shaped by the philosophical backdrop just described. We hear words like "self," and "ego," and "feeling," and generally formulate these terms into thing-like concepts (what I meant earlier by indicating the shift in emphasis from verbs to nouns). Accordingly,  "A self or an ego is like a thing in the person. A person is a larger thing in which the ego or self, as a smaller thing, resides like a stone in a box. Perception is a stimulus-thing making a representation-thing inside the box. Personal interaction is a relation between two such boxes, each separate before they interact, like a stone and a pitcher. Feelings or affects are little things inside the box, sometimes within the self and sometimes in the rest of the box. People supposedly feel these inside feeling things directly, but can feel other people only by imagining an analogy with their own feelings."⁴ And yet, to view feelings, affects, and moods as Befindlichkeit differs from this usual view in the several important ways. First, the "moodedness" of Befindlichkeit, as opposed to the occurrence of a specific or particular mood, is anterior to any sort of Platonic or Cartesian splitting. It cannot be thought of as something existing "inside" a subject (an intrapsychic content). Nor can it be thought of as something "outside" a subject, as a thingified object in physical space. Befindlichkeit is prior to these yet encompasses both. Second, Befindlichkeit always already has its own understanding which is active, implicit, and not merely a perception or reception of what is happening to us.⁵
 
 

In his book Subjects of Analysis psychiatrist Thomas Ogden writes about a session with a patient with whom he had been working for several years.⁶ As he listens to his patient, his mind begins to wander. Instead of fighting this back, he lets it run. He notices that he is drawn to looking at an envelope on the table next to his chair. He begins to think about the way he had been using the envelope to jot down phone numbers and notes to himself, reflected upon the fact that, although the envelope had been in plain view for over a week, he had not noticed several vertical lines in its lower right corner until that moment in the session. Mind you now, this is all going on while his patient is talking, and could easily have been pushed away in favor of "paying attention" to the specific content of the patient’s story.

As Ogden noticed the lines on the envelope, he began to notice as well a strong feeling of disappointment. "I realized," he wrote, "I was feeling suspicious about the genuineness of the intimacy that the letter had seemed to convey. My fleeting fantasy that the letter had been part of a bulk mailing reflected a feeling that I had been duped. I felt that I had been naive and gullible, ready to believe that I was being entrusted with a special secret."⁷

As the account proceeds, Ogden begins to notice that the feelings he was experiencing during his attention shifts were somehow guiding his understanding of his patient’s situation. He began to see how listening to his own seemingly spontaneous and disconnected feelings were informing his interpretations of his client. Too easily dismissed as non-objective data by those of us who struggle to distance ourselves from ourselves to gain an "objective" position outside ourselves, Ogden’s experience was somewhat analogous to understanding one’s feeling into the remembering of a forgotten name. We may "know" the name we are looking for isn’t Pam, or Jill... but we sense the name exists somehow "in" the specific feeling we have. "If we, as it were, touch that ‘feel’ of the name over and over, ‘touch’ it with our attention, it may suddenly ‘open,’ so that the name appears. Then there is an unmistakable tension-release, a relief in the body, one exhales a long breath, whew... There is no doubt, then that this was indeed the name one had forgotten. there is an unmistakable continuity between the erstwhile ‘feel’ and this name."⁸ This is the "understanding" Befindlichkeit always already has.

Now I have to say at this point that Ogden’s interpretation of his experience is Cartesian. Framed by the "Object Relations" school of psychology, the traditional subject/object metaphysics is supplanted by a theoretical "third" thing required to bridge its own subject/object split. Befindlichkeit should not be interpreted in this way. Instead, Befindlichkeit assumes a shared background of experience common to us all in our awareness of human "Being-there." But that’s theory, not experience

From a practical standpoint what all this means is that we need to listen with more than our ears to really hear those with whom we dialogue. To do this, we need to allow our feelings to "presence" those feeling images, those befindliches, that call us to them in the shared clearing of Being. Once this presence is lighted up, it can be interpreted... guided by the moodedness that always already places before us exactly how we find ourselves in the world. This applies to hearing ourselves as well as our patients, our employees, our customers, or whomever. Of course we all know this, as I said, at some level of our intrinsic understanding of being in the world. But as modern scientific individuals more often than not struggling gain distance from all those "secondary" qualities, as Locke would describe them, its nice sometimes to have a specific theoretical "go-ahead" to allow our feelings (befindliches) to show themselves, not as obstacles, but as the ground of all authentic understanding.
 

1. Gelven M. A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time (Revised Edition) . Dekalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press; 1989.

[If you are interested in Heidegger, there are several good Commentaries on Being and Time. Those comming from the field of psychology can (and probably should) read people like Medard Boss, Erwin Strauss, Ludwig Binswanger, Clark Moustakas and the others (try the following: Existential Foundations of Medicine & Psychology by Medard Boss, Being-in-the-world: Selected Papers of Ludwig Binswanger ,   Being-In, Being-For, Being-With by Clark Moustakas -- though Moustakas isn't strictly Heideggerian, as those familiar with Sartre can tell from his title). Heidegger presents a special problem for us in that he really wasn't interested in framing his work for psychologists. He was simply going in another direction. Outside of his  Zollikan Seminars , which have not yet been translated, you are forced to go either to secondar works, or go directly to Heidegger himself and struggle with attempting to see for yourself how Heidegger's thinking applies to psychology. I personally have not found anyone quite as fascinating, mysterious, frustrating, confusing and fulfilling as Heidegger himself, and have felt many times that secondary works often take wrong turns in the road that are as diffucult to back out of as it would have been to struggle through Heidegger's work directly in the first place. Several Commentaries take Being and Time chapter by chapter and are designed to be read side-by-side with this work. Michael Gelven's book is good. The Dreyfus book lised below is also good (for Division I of BT, and discussions about late Heidegger). There is a relatively new book entitled  Heidegger and Introduction  by Richard Polt that is interesting. In addition, there is a Heidegger list -- like a chat room -- on the Net. Type in Heidegger and you will find it. This list is open to anyone. But if you are not a professional philosopher you might want to approach with a degree of humility.]

[Dreyfus is a fascinating read. Some European philosopheres complain that he is overly Americanized, but I have found him to be endlessly interesting. He has done a lot of work in the field of Artificial Intelligence and recently published a book entitled What Computers Still Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason which was a sequal to his earlier work  What Computers Can't Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence that established him as the leader of the body of thought opposing the idea that that what computers do when they appears to "think" is quite different from what humans do when they are thinking. I found his critique of Artificial Intelligence to open several doors to Heidegger for me that were formerly closed, especially with respect to what he calls the background of information comprising our being-in-the-world.]

[William Barrett is a wonderful source for those interested in Existential and Phenomenological philosophy. He reads quite easily and smoothly.  ]

[The Special Edition I referenced here may be out of print. Amazon turned up nothing in my search. However, the work I have linked to may have Genlin's article in it. I can't confirm this because I don't have the volume I have linked to. But if you are interested in phenomenological psychology, I would highly recommend this Journal. Genlin's article is just one of many really fine pieces of work scattered throughout the 'Reviews' of years past. I would also recommend for the psychologist interested in Heidegger, Michael Zimmerman's book  Eclipse of the Self. The Development of heidegger's Concept of Authenticity].

6. Ogden TH. Subjects of Analysis . New Jersey: Jason Aronson Inc.; 1994.

[I am trying to latch on to permission to reprint some of Ogden's Subjects of Analysis here on my web page because I think this book is simply fantastic. Both Ogden, and Christopher Bollas, who wrote  The Shadow of the Object, Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known , are psychoanalysts at the fore front of intersubjectivity. Ogden, who has a practice in San Francisco, has written several books and is well respectected in the Psychoanalytic community. Subjects of Analysis is the book I thought was his best work (certainly influenced me to the most).

8. Gendlin, op cit.