Abstract
This new book by John Cromby lays the foundations for a psychology of feeling. Although feeling is central to human experience—we are usually feeling something at each moment of our lives, even if it is simply “numb” or “confused”—this fundamental aspect of our being has received little attention from psychology, perhaps because the discipline has become increasingly focused on studying human cognition. Given this, nothing could seem more distant from the attempt to model human thought processes along the lines of computer programs than researching the nature and role of feelings, because they are assumed to be so ineffable, nebulous, and vague. Feeling is also seen as non-cognitive, to do with the body rather than the mind. The first thing Cromby does in this book is to establish feeling as the primordial matter of human psychology—feelings are the stuff of what we experience, reflect upon, and attempt to reason about. As such, feelings are the basis of an embodied psychology that challenges the dualism of body and mind, feeling and reason, and resists the metaphor of humans as machines. In this project Cromby utilises the work of Susanne Langer, which argues that feeling is the fundamental material of human experience and as such is the substance of all other psychological functions, including reasoning. But Cromby also builds on his own previous work on feeling, in which it is understood as constitutive of emotion, mood, and affect: feeling forms what we think and speak about as emotion but also involves the whole gamut of extra-emotional feelings (like pain, hunger, or sexual desire) that can be related to, but are not in themselves, emotions.
After establishing the basic theoretical elements of an embodied psychology of feeling in the first part of the book, Cromby moves on to look at how psychology can begin to research feelings, the methods that are appropriate, and also the various areas of research a psychology of feeling can throw new light upon. Although qualitative methods are judged best suited for this purpose, even they are limited, resting as they often do on language, particularly on interviews or forms of discourse analysis. Because feeling is not fundamentally linguistic, and thus often escapes forms of linguistic capture, other methods are needed that can illuminate corporeal practices lodged in enduring patterns, habits, and organisations of feeling that also reflect regimes of social influence. In this sense although feelings are not linguistically based they are nonetheless social, being situated, relational, and active. Cromby illustrates his position with reference to beliefs, specifically beliefs about health and wellbeing, and how these are bolstered by feelings. This is central in the recognition and treatment of conditions like chronic fatigue syndrome, where symptoms are associated with certain feelings, such as chronic tiredness, exhaustion, and enduring pain. Because no underlying causal pathology has yet been identified the condition is known only through feeling. The symptoms are “real” in that they characterise the central embodied, feeling core of the sufferer’s experience, and social practices are adopted to help cope with the condition. In this way all embodied experiences that are full of feeling and belief can be understood as sensibilities: feelings organised by webs of social relations and practices in contingent articulation with various discursive positions. This idea is articulated further with respect to sensibilities characterised as “paranoid,” such as chronic beliefs about persecution or constant surveillance. For Cromby these also have a reality in that they make sense within the social and material conditions in which the lower social classes—those most often diagnosed as paranoid—live, marked by uncertain life chances, insecurity, and powerlessness. However, these sensibilities become feeling-traps in that they extend beyond the situations in which they are inculcated, becoming intensified over time and generalised across varied situations as habits that can be regarded by others as “delusional.”
With concepts like embodied feeling, belief, and sensibility Cromby has staked out the terrain for future research and development in the psychology of feeling and has also shown how these concepts can be applied to research certain physical and mental health conditions, seeing these as not due solely to underlying “organic” pathologies, but as formed in people’s embodied social experiences that have organic and neural effects. However, because this is a new field there are aspects of the book that raise questions needing further theoretical and empirical development. Although I agree with Cromby that feelings cannot be reduced to language and are a-representational, they are nonetheless symbolic. How, then, are they related to language and discourse? If we were to follow Merleau-Ponty’s example in Phenomenology of Perception (1945/2012) and understand speech as a use and modulation of the body, could we then not understand speech and feeling as interrelated from the earliest childhood experiences onward? Cromby does draw on Ruthrof’s (1997) work to show that the body is centrally involved in symbolising, yet this line of thought needs developing. How are embodied signs related to other symbolic forms, for example in the way that G. H. Mead (1934) showed gesture to be fundamental to language, and how is this also tied into feelings, sensibilities, and their development? Then there is the equally difficult issue of method: while Cromby has eloquently shown the limits of our existing research methods when it comes to investigating feeling, what would more adequate methods look like? It must be said, though, that although some important questions are left hanging in the air at the end of this book, this is not a failing of the work itself: it is because these are such profound questions they cannot be answered adequately by any academic at this moment in time. In fact, the profound questions raised by this book are the hallmark of its success: it leads us not only into the realm of a psychology of feeling but also to ask questions about the basis of psychology itself.