Depression, Self-Regulation, and Intersubjectivity

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Abstract

This paper addresses the phenomenological relationships between affect-regulation and interpersonal experience in psychiatric illness. It is focuses on a type of experience often associated with depression diagnoses. I argue that a capacity for affect-regulation is inextricable from how one relates to specific individuals and to other people in general. To do so, I show how a feeling of being estranged from other people can amount, at the same time, to a sense of the world as bereft of certain kinds of significant possibility and, by implication, to what we might call an experience of diminished ‘self’. This, I suggest, can be interpreted in terms of ‘existential feeling’. I also reflect on how one might seek to regulate and change one’s felt relationship with the world and other people, despite feeling cut off from people in general and having a pervasive sense that emotional change is impossible.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)21-41
Number of pages20
JournalDiscipline Filosofiche
Volume28
Issue number2
Publication statusPublished - 1 Sept 2018

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