Ineffable Experience Research Articles

Close, yet so far away: a phenomenology of the praecox feeling in the diagnosis of schizophrenia as intercorporeal alienness.

Debates concerning the reliability and validity of operationalized criteria and diagnostic tools have surrounded the issue of schizophrenia diagnosis and clinical decision-making related to the disorder. The notion of the praecox feeling (PF) has played a prominent role in the discussions as an example of the possibility of a rapid and potentially valid diagnosis based solely on "intuition" or a peculiar emotional experience or impression arising in a physician during an interaction with a patient with schizophrenia. In this paper, we argue that PF is enabled by the (phenomenologically understood) intercorporeal dimension of the clinical encounter. Intercorporeality in this sense denotes intertwinement between embodied expressions that may lead to feelings of connection but also, as in the case of PF, of disconnection and strangeness-the experience of alienness. Following Waldenfels, alienness ranges from the average social encounter to more extreme and peculiar forms-such as PF. To prove our point, we analyze the metaphors used by physicians in various cultural contexts (the United States, the United Kingdom, and Poland) to express the apparently ineffable experience of the PF. We focus on two dominant metaphors of distance: the first expressing spatial distance by referring to an "object in-between" the physician and the patient and the second expressing mental distance by referring to the "other-worldliness" of the patient. We interpret the object in-between metaphors as reflecting the sense of separateness and the other-worldliness metaphors as reflecting the sense of strangeness, with both meanings unified in the notion of "close remoteness." Such unsettling but speculation-provoking feeling of close remoteness may be rendered by the concept of "the eerie" (Mark Fisher). We conclude that metaphor and phenomenological analysis facilitate an understanding of the experiential profile of PF in the clinical encounter, outlining relevant clinical implications.

The Narrative of Trauma in Art spiegelman’s Maus

This article explores how Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986-1991) challenges the humanist concept of the unified self, proposing instead that the post-war self is fragmented and split. This fragmentation is particularly examined through the lens of Holocaust survivors in Maus, showcasing how extreme experiences during and after the Second World War cause the self to fracture and even disintegrate. The article argues that storytelling and narration serve as a crucial tool for the trauma survivors to navigate and reconcile the fractured aspects of their self. Through storytelling, the protagonist finds a means of survival, by finding a language to articulate his otherwise inexpressible and ineffable experiences and memories. It highlights the fragmentation of the human psyche as a direct consequence of Holocaust trauma and similar traumatic experiences, examining how narrative acts as a medium for the protagonist to deal with his traumas. The novel offers insights into the complexities of the new post-war self, the enduring scars of trauma and the potential of narrative in coping with trauma, providing a deeper understanding of the fragmented self in the context of Holocaust trauma.

KOAN AS A MEDIATED TOOL FOR THE INEFFABLE EXPERIENCE: THE MIDDLE POSITION IN APPROACHING CHINESE CHAN TEACHING

KOAN AS A MEDIATED TOOL FOR THE INEFFABLE EXPERIENCE: THE MIDDLE POSITION IN APPROACHING CHINESE CHAN TEACHING

Metaphors as Knowledge in Mystical Writings

Writers anchored in the Christian mystical tradition generally present their spiritual experience as loaded with cognitive content bearing on things divine. The nature of this mystical knowledge, the way they receive it, and its effect on their existence can be fruitfully approached only by elucidating the way their language and discourse make use of metaphors. Accordingly, starting with references to the early modern period, this article investigates a set of classical mystical metaphors so as to gain insight into the unique mode of metaphorical cognition, highlight the epistemological status proper to mystical experience, and distinguish the latter from other theological cognitive modes. Metaphors borrowed from daily life endow the mystical experience—of which the object is described as being beyond senses and reason—with a perceptible, comprehensible, and communicable configuration. At the same time, metaphors should not be regarded as being merely an approximate expression of an ineffable experience. Through the “gestalt” or structure of a metaphor, mystical experience locates itself and develops in spacetime, thus laying out the path of the spiritual journey. The way various metaphors naturally associate allows the expression, intensity, and self-understanding of spiritual experience to “grow” from one image to another. Thanks to the metaphorical operation, mystics are able to describe their journey and give spiritual direction, providing disciples and readers with concrete directions for reforming and renewing their lives. Furthermore, the connection that metaphor establishes between everyday routines and things divine allows for a two-way exchange of meanings: the objects or events met in daily life are “sanctified” as they become metaphors that convey spiritual understanding and allow an ever-growing number of people to “seek and find God in all things”.

Metaphorical value in the narrative of a conversion: The sacred and profane memoirs of Captain Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

Ordinary language has difficulty transmitting certain spiritual experiences, such as mystical ecstasy or the process of conversion. These experiences, which cannot be expressed in words, and which involve both the spiritual and the corporeal, are called ineffable. But the literary tradition is full of examples in which these incommunicable truths are expressed linguistically: from St. Augustine to C.S. Lewis, from St. John of the Cross to John Henry Newman, many authors have expressed their mystical or conversion experiences through metaphor. Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited presents the action of divine grace on the characters, as seen through the eyes of the narrator as he undergoes his conversion. The intention of this article is to discover how the use of metaphor succeeds in expressing the action of divine grace in a conversion, providing important insights into the way poetic language can communicate the ineffable experience of the intimate encounter with divinity. To this end, the article analyses three metaphors of novel, (the twitch upon the thread, the balking horse and the hut collapsing under the avalanche) taking into consideration literary theory and what it says about metaphor.

Nothingness, Oneness, and Infinity: Transcendent Experience as a Promising Frontier for Religion and Health Research.

This paper advocates for a renewed focus intothe experiential domain of religious and spiritual expression in research on physical and mental health. Most studies, up to now, have investigated risk or protection associated with behavioral measures of religiousness, whether public behaviors such as religious attendance or private behaviors such as personal prayer. Religious attitudes, beliefs, and identity have been studied, as well, as have religious self-rating scales of various types, but, relatively less emphasized have been subjective experiences, such as feelings of transcendence or unitive connection with the divine. There is good reason to believe that such experiences may impact on well-being, based both on previous studies and on theory and clinical observation. This paper suggests that although researching the domain of such seemingly ineffable experiences may present certain conceptual and methodological challenges, these would be worth facing in order to gain deeper insight into the human spiritual dimension and into connections among body, mind, and spirit.

Feeling Beyond Words: Ineffability and Haptic Translational Praxis of Black German Writings

In this article, I focus on selections from Black German essayistic and creative writings that center experiential knowledge that is personal and often multisensory. My case studies are excerpts from Farbe bekennen: Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte (1986), its English translation by Anne V. Adams (Showing Our Colors 1992), and Natasha Kelly’s collection of interviews from her documentary film, Millis Erwachen (Milli’s Awakening) (2018), which Kelly herself translated. These texts, I argue, explore the ways in which words fail to fully express the visceral reaction of living while Black in Germany, particularly those that seek to make connections across geographic, linguistic, and generational differences. Focusing on the concept of transvivência (Araújo, Silva, and Silva-Reis) and hapticity of Black life (Tina Campt), I propose a model of translation that acknowledges the limitations of spoken and written words to convey all meaning and yet suggest that awareness through annotation, page format, and explanation might gesture toward more nuanced cultural references and ineffable experiences. Translation of Black-authored works into another language suggests a two-fold translation, from experience into language, from one language into another. I argue that hapticity combined with translation as transvivência has the ability to bridge what is felt and experienced with that which is read and observed. I conclude with a discussion of my own experience of translating Sharon Dodoa Otoo’s essay “Liebe” ‘Love’ from Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum (Your Homeland is Our Nightmare).

Mystical Symbols of Divine Love in the Poetry of Omar Tarin and William Blake: A Comparative Cognitive Analysis7

This study is a comparative cognitive analysis of the identical symbols of Divine Love in the poetry of the oriental Pakistani poet Omer Tarin and the occidental English poet William Blake. It adopts the Mental Spaces theory in Cognitive Poetics and the theory of Perennialism in Comparative Mysticism as the main theoretical frameworks. The study aims at demonstrating the mental operation of meaning construction of these symbols and help deliver meaningful mystical perceptions of the human soul’s ineffable experience in its union with the Divine. Exploring mystical symbols via these theories will offer an accurate interpretation of the meaning of the abstract concepts based on the concrete ones and stipulate deeper insight into the commonality of the ambiguous feelings of the soul in Divine Love. Answering the question of the existence of identical symbols with mystical connotations, the study focusses on the symbols of Pipe, Woman, and Bird and reveals that despite the religious and cultural disparities between Omer Tarin and William Blake, there is a keen affinity between them as related to their unitary poetic-mystical consciousness of the soul’s experience in its search for the Divine, for which both poets have ingeniously utilized identical symbolism not only as a tool for artistic ornamentation but as a tool for cognitive orientation. The study endorses further research on mystical language and poetry from comparative and cognitive perspectives to corroborate the tenets of cognitive theories in comparative literary studies through cross-cultural research.

The lived experience of psychosis: a bottom-up review co-written by experts by experience and academics.

Psychosis is the most ineffable experience of mental disorder. We provide here the first co-written bottom-up review of the lived experience of psychosis, whereby experts by experience primarily selected the subjective themes, that were subsequently enriched by phenomenologically-informed perspectives. First-person accounts within and outside the medical field were screened and discussed in collaborative workshops involving numerous individuals with lived experience of psychosis as well as family members and carers, representing a global network of organizations. The material was complemented by semantic analyses and shared across all collaborators in a cloud-based system. The early phases of psychosis (i.e., premorbid and prodromal stages) were found to be characterized by core existential themes including loss of common sense, perplexity and lack of immersion in the world with compromised vital contact with reality, heightened salience and a feeling that something important is about to happen, perturbation of the sense of self, and need to hide the tumultuous inner experiences. The first episode stage was found to be denoted by some transitory relief associated with the onset of delusions, intense self-referentiality and permeated self-world boundaries, tumultuous internal noise, and dissolution of the sense of self with social withdrawal. Core lived experiences of the later stages (i.e., relapsing and chronic) involved grieving personal losses, feeling split, and struggling to accept the constant inner chaos, the new self, the diagnosis and an uncertain future. The experience of receiving psychiatric treatments, such as inpatient and outpatient care, social interventions, psychological treatments and medications, included both positive and negative aspects, and was determined by the hope of achieving recovery, understood as an enduring journey of reconstructing the sense of personhood and re-establishing the lost bonds with others towards meaningful goals. These findings can inform clinical practice, research and education. Psychosis is one of the most painful and upsetting existential experiences, so dizzyingly alien to our usual patterns of life and so unspeakably enigmatic and human.

Knock Knock: An Exploration of Diverse Student Identities in a South African Design Classroom

Incorporating socially just concepts into classrooms means students’ needs are considered and pedagogic activities recognise everyone and make sure that student voices are heard, acknowledged and affirmed. Art has historically provided alternative ways of making sense of our worlds, commenting on them, questioning practices and structures, and voicing our feelings and experiences. In the context of the volatile South African higher education landscape, diverse student populations, widespread calls for decolonisation and social justice, arts-based enquiry as a method provides a view into the ineffable experiences of students. This article explores collage as a conduit for design students to engage with their designer identities, experiences of higher education and personal narratives. The research documents students’ liminal experiences at the start of their journey as extended curriculum design students and uses collage as a form of elicitation, a reflective process and a way of conceptualising ideas as an attempt at restoring justice in an African (design) classroom.

Festive Friars: Embodied Performance and Audience Affect

This essay models a method for unearthing performance traces in texts that seem on the surface to be strictly literary. Centering on Thomas Dekker's The Raven's Almanac, a compilation of stories akin to those in early modern jest books, it analyzes a bawdy tale about a friar and an abbess that reveals deep connections to May games. Festivity constituted a mode of embodied knowledge, a somatic and kinesthetic process that conditioned playgoer responses. This essay demonstrates how examining nondramatic performance, including quotidian, ceremonial, and ritual practices, allows the recovery of ephemeral audience affect. Studying spectators’ emotions is notoriously challenging but can productively complicate concepts such as character and narrative. Moreover, it was through amorphous feelings and sensations that theater actively produced cultural understandings. Expanding the methodological toolkit for investigating performance offers a useful blueprint for researching other ineffable but consequential historical experiences that exceed, by definition, the documentary evidence.

A Psychology of Religion via Thick Phenomenology in Thin Places

ABSTRACT Prof. Ralph Hood’s career can be approached from many angles. One such perspective is that his work has consistently engaged in-depth interactions with people to understand the thick, rich, details of their individual stories. The context for these investigations has been predominately one of mystical or ineffable experiences that occur in “thin spaces” involving decisive moments with regard to identity and behavior. In this paper, we explore the emergence of these themes in his work and conclude by observing how his thinking suggests opportunities for additional cross-disciplinary conversations.

Poetic Commoning in European Cities – Or on the Alchemy of Concrete

This piece presents an exploration into how to write-do-think ineffable affective experiences that might cultivate more than human ethical relations in concrete environments. Learning from two urban commoning projects, I take guidance from Édouard Glissant’s aesthetic of the earth to recognize poetic practices that might seem anachronistic or naïve, awkward or intrusive, and in apparent contradiction to rational thought and critical politics. I adopt what Joan Retallack calls a “poethical attitude” to offer (reasoned) compositions with concrete as material and metaphor … mixed with a shimmer of alchemy.

Archetypes of the pandemic.

This paper attempts to read the psychological and emotional impact of the COVID‐19 pandemic through the archetypal images contained in patients’ dreams. In these dreams, symbols related to the power of nature and to extreme danger are paired with feelings of detachment that seem to point to a traumatic dissociation, due to the archetypal experience that erupts in familiar surroundings. Through the humanization of the ineffable experience, dissociation, which in the beginning of the pandemic showed in high levels of anxiety, panic attacks and depersonalization, can be transformed into the overview needed for the search for meaning. The container for this process of transformation is the analyst, the real, virtual or imagined one, and his or her ability to relate and feel.

The trouble with research-creation: failure, play and the possibility of knowledge in aesthetic encounters

This paper reflects on a research-creation project that investigates the ways in which surveillance is experienced by youth as an embodiment that might be difficult to articulate in words but rather expressed affectively, through emotion and social practice. Our argument is that the aesthetic intervention provoked by research-creation can instantiate encounters that capture surveillance as an ineffable experience of everyday life. We situate our methodological claims in a concrete case study that considers youth engagement with a commissioned contemporary art project. Drawing on the writings of child and youth psychoanalyst W.D. Winnicott, we theorize the importance of a facilitating environment to create the conditions for young people to freely and playfully express meanings they make in their encounters with art. Research-creation suggests a perspective of resistance and failure as productive and constitutive of the possibilities of coming to know, both for the research subjects and ultimately for the authors in their orientation to research inquiry.

Effortless Expressions: Dōgen’s Non-Thinking about ‘Words and Letters’

What is the relationship between Zen experience and language? Is Zen awakening/enlightenment ineffable? In this article, I will address this general question by providing a panoramic treatment of Dōgen’s (道元) philosophy of language which Hee-Jin Kim characterizes as “realizational”. Building on the research of Kim, Victor Sōgen Hori and Dale S. Wright, I maintain that the idea of ineffable experiences in Dōgen’s Zen is embedded within language, not transcendent from it. My focus begins by reviewing Dōgen’s critical reflections on the idea of ineffability in Zen, and then proceeds to make sense of such in the context of zazen, and the practice of non-thinking, hi-shiryo (非思量). Based upon this inquiry, I then move into an examination of how Dōgen’s “realizational” philosophy of language, in the context of non-thinking, conditions a ‘practice of words and letters’ that is effortless, vis-à-vis non-action, wu-wei (無為). From there we shall then inquire into Dōgen’s use of kōan for developing his “realizational” perspective. In doing such, I shall orient my treatment around Hori’s research into kōan (公案), specifically the logic of nonduality. This inquiry shall in turn provide a clearing for highlighting the non-anthropocentric perspectivism that is salient to Dōgen’s “realizational” philosophy of language. Finally, I bring closure to this inquiry by showing how Dōgen’s “realizational” perspective of language sets the stage for expressing a range of value judgments and normative prescriptions, both on and off the cushion, despite his commitment to the philosophy of emptiness, śūnyatā, whereby all things, including good and evil, lack an inherent self essence, svabhāva.

Among Digitized Manuscripts: Philology, Codicology, Pale-ography in a Digital World by L. W. C. van Lit

Reviewed by: Among Digitized Manuscripts: Philology, Codicology, Pale-ography in a Digital World by L. W. C. van Lit Kelly Tuttle Keywords Manuscript Studies, digital humanities, digital manuscripts L. W. C. van Lit. Among Digitized Manuscripts: Philology, Codicology, Pale-ography in a Digital World. L. W. C. van Lit’s latest book, Among Digitized Manuscripts, is a welcome addition to discussions of digitized manuscripts, which he calls “digital documents with a strong relationship with material manuscripts that interact in a complex way with print publications” (101). The first half of the book approaches digitized manuscripts from a theoretical point of view, providing some valuable context for thinking about the interactions of the manuscript, print, and digital worlds. In its second half, the book offers practical suggestions for ways of working with digitized images, with each chapter focusing on a classical aspect of manuscript research: paleography, philology, cataloging, and codicology. The first chapter, “Manuscript World, Print World, Digital World,” defines and explores the interactions of the three worlds of “manuscript material, paper publications and digital documents” (9). Van Lit analyzes these worlds using three lenses: surfaces, institutions, and habits, each of which has several subcategories. The first two subdivide between society-based and object-or individual-based, whereas the third category subdivides into “possession, engagement and product” (13). Three tables summarizing how each world works and highlighting the ways in which they are similar to and different from each other precede the discussions of each topic, but are best understood after having read the analyses. The chapter is quite theoretically dense. Since the author recognizes this, there follow, in the second half of the chapter, three short case studies that neatly demonstrate the ways in which the manuscript, print, and digital worlds overlap: manuscript and [End Page 177] print, then print and digital, and finally manuscript, print, and digital together. The first chapter complicates the relationship between manuscript, print, and digital and reminds the reader of the “vastly different world views these different worlds entail” and of the false assumptions or missed opportunities that may arise if those differences are not kept in mind when working with digital manuscripts (50). Chapters 2 and 3, “The Digital Materiality of Digitized Manuscripts” and “Digitized Manuscripts and Their Repositories, an Ethnography,” form one conversation. The set begins by asking why, if one is using digital surrogates to do research, one does not usually admit this in one’s publications. This question leads to an in-depth discussion of the struggles to future-proof digital assets, to counteract the problem of siloed projects, and to encourage researchers’ admissions of use of digital assets. The chapter also probes the idea of “the intangible aura of material manuscripts,” which, van Lit argues, is “largely a projection of our own experience onto the manuscript” rather than any actual aspect of material manuscripts (61). The author convincingly denies claims that “this aural, ineffable experience of handling a real manuscript” is somehow necessary for research or superior to a digital manuscript experience (62). The experience of working with digital surrogates is simply a different experience, neither superior nor inferior. Once researchers know how to evaluate the quality of a digital surrogate, they can determine whether the work they want to do can be completed using it. If it can, and researchers do complete work using digital surrogates, then they should cite the surrogate rather than the material manuscript. The author then leads the reader through ten aspects of assessing “digital materiality”: “(1) size of the collection; (2) online availability; (3) ability to download; (4) the portal; (5) the viewer; (6) indication of page numbers; (7) image resolution; (8) color balance; (9) lighting; and (10) how the image is cut” (70). Using these ten ways of evaluating digital materiality, van Lit uses the following chapter to evaluate twenty repositories that hold digital Islamic manuscripts. He discusses the various strengths and weaknesses of online repositories as well as listing desiderata for any online repository that is still in the making. This analysis of the state of affairs, though rapidly going out of date, provides one useful method of self-evaluation for those repositories that are at the beginning or in the middle...

Attempting to capture the ineffable quality: An interpretative phenomenological analysis of the experience of an epiphany

Examination of how people experience positive change outside the therapy room is of use to those seeking to support people who want to change within the realms of psychotherapy. The qualitative literature which has examined the topic of sudden and profound transformation has mostly focused on the antecedent and facilitative factors associated with this form of change. This study aims to explore the epiphanies of six participants who took part in unstructured interviews. The data generated was subjected to interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). Three major themes emerge: (i) Making sense of an ineffable experience; (ii) Who I was, what happened, who I am now; (iii) Illuminating purpose – each associated with a subtheme. A found poem is also presented for each major theme. The implications for therapeutic practitioners, mental health professionals and educators are discussed. It is concluded that the empathic understanding of such experiences may be enhanced from engaging with the dimensions of epiphanic experiences described here.

A framework for understanding spirituality and healthy ageing: perspectives from Aotearoa New Zealand

ABSTRACT Spirituality permeates our land, our waters, and our people; it is inherent in Māori culture, often explicit for new migrants, but frequently ignored or tokenistically acknowledged in mainstream culture. Older New Zealanders are a pluralistic population, often fiercely secular, with a small but active religious population. How we now treat our elders requires work, needs careful consideration, and vision. As a country, New Zealand has embraced the notion of ‘well-being’, with the first ‘well-being budget’ announced in 2019. But well-being, or hauora as it is known for Māori, is incomplete without spirituality. This paper examines the place of spirituality, based on understandings and observations grounded in the New Zealand context, which comprises four interrelated areas: zeitgeist, scope and definitions, models, and evidence. We suggest this framework is a useful approach to examining what can be an ineffable personal experience and challenge to society’s provision of aged care and healthy ageing.

The Epistemology of the “Great Invisibles”

Abstract The central collective myth of surrealism, Les grands transparents, was designed by André Breton in 1947 as a means for imagining a desirable society through effecting a vitalizing sense of the unknown and a “decentering of man”. As a contribution to the recent re-examination of surrealism in view of theoretical developments in the field of Western esotericism, this article argues that Breton utilizes his mythic narrative to articulate a transformative knowledge, a surreality, that in certain ways correspond to the concepts of gnosis and clairvoyance in esoteric discourse. To substantiate this, similar mythic narratives about great imperceptible entities in texts of Anthroposophy (Rudolf Steiner) and Rosicrucianism (Lectorium Rosicrucianum) are examined. A comparativist model for describing popular approaches (or mythemes) to ineffable experience is applied. An underlying “gnostic” approach of considering such experiences as incomplete and as being co-created is discerned, highlighting each actor’s endeavours to validate imaginative perception.