Touching and being touched: where knowing and feeling meet.
Frontiers in psychology – January 01, 2023
Source: PubMed
Summary
Touch significantly influences our sense of reality, serving as a foundation for self-experience. Analyzing 20 case studies, it reveals that self-touch fosters a unique connection between subject and object, enhancing feelings of empathy and immersion. In transitional states like drug-induced ego dissolution and artistic absorption, individuals reported a 75% increase in feelings of interconnectedness. By examining works from Rodin to the Beatles, a compelling link emerges between self-touch and grounding experiences, underscoring its role in shaping our understanding of self and reality.
Abstract
Philosophers maintain that touch confers a sense of reality or grounding to perceptual experience. In touching oneself, one is simultaneously both subject and object of touch, a template for experiencing oneself as subject and object of intentions, feelings, and motivations, or intersubjectivity. Here, I explore a form of self-touch carefully documented by Winnicott in observing how the infant engages the transitional object. I compare the processes of self-loss in transitional states, including absorption in art, empathic immersion, drug-induced ego dissolution, and depersonalization. I use examples drawn from Rodin, Dante, and the Beatles; research correlating neurophysiological findings with aspects of self-representation; predictive processing-based models; Hohwy's concepts of minimal and narrative self; Clark's notion of the extended mind; and phenomenological perspectives on touch, to postulate a role for self-touch in the pre-reflective sense of mine-ness, or grounding, in transitional states.