Touching and being touched: where knowing and feeling meet.

Self-touch, particularly the form observed in infant engagement with transitional objects, provides a pre-reflective sense of mine-ness that grounds experience during states of self-loss. These transitional states include absorption in art, empathic immersion, drug-induced ego dissolution, and depersonalization. Drawing on examples from Rodin, Dante, and the Beatles, along with neurophysiological research, predictive processing models, and phenomenological perspectives on touch, the author argues that self-touch serves as a template for experiencing oneself as both subject and object, thereby maintaining a sense of reality and grounding in experiences where the self is diminished or dissolved.

Study at a glance

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.