A big thank you to Tom Roberts and Joel Krueger for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper, as well as to the anonymous reviewers for their lovely feedback.

Introduction

1While depression is often associated with feeling deadened or flat, depression is a bodily intense experience. As the DSM-V highlights, depression is characterized, inter alia, by feelings of lethargy, tiredness, heaviness, sadness, guilt and/or hopelessness. It also notes that depression can “cause significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning” (APA, 2013, p. 163). Although the DSM makes explicit reference to experiential disruptions in depression, its descriptions of them are only “cursory” (Ratcliffe, 2014, p. 5). In particular, while the DSM briefly refers to an impairment in social functioning in depression, it does not expand upon how interpersonal relations are altered in depression, nor which ones are affected. This is surprising given that most first-person descriptions of depression put much emphasis on feelings of isolation and disconnection from others. For example, David Karp (2017) in his book Speaking of Sadness, which records both his own and others’ lived experience of depression, notes that “the most insistent theme” (p. 73) that arises is the affect depression has on relations with other people; going so far as to describe depression as “an illness of isolation, a disease of disconnectedness” (ibid.).

2Many working in phenomenological psychopathology, however, have put the interpersonal impact of depression front and centre (e.g. Fuchs, 2005, 2013; Ratcliffe, 2014; Ratcliffe & Stephan, 2014; Wehrle, 2019). Ratcliffe, in his book Feelings of Depression (2014), devotes a whole chapter to detailing how a central feature of depressive experience is a change in the structure of interpersonal experience. He describes how feelings of isolation, estrangement, distance from the world and from other people frequently crop up in descriptions of depression: “The person is cut off from the world and, most importantly, from habitual forms of interaction with other people” (Ratcliffe, 2014, p. 31). He claims that there is an erosion of “certain kinds of interpersonal relation” in depression (ibid., p. 202). Ratcliffe is not alone in this diagnosis. Fuchs, for instance, argues that an individual’s intercorporeality and interaffectivity with others is impacted by depression. Fuchs (2013) describes how the individual with depression loses their ability to be affected by others, that the depressive body “acts as a barrier” (p. 223) to being moved by the world and other people.

3This emphasis on social impairment in depression prompts us to ask how this loss of connectedness with others is experienced in depression. In this paper, I introduce the notion of ‘bodily saturation’ as a way to unpack why and how depression disrupts the embodied subject’s affective relation with others. There has been increasing recognition in phenomenology that we are affective beings (e.g. Colombetti, 2014; Fuchs & Koch, 2014; Maiese, 2018a); that we do not just look upon the world coldly but are moved by the world, experience the world through our feeling bodies. However, while the role of our bodies as an affective medium is emphasized, what goes unremarked is that while we are feeling beings, we do not have an infinite capacity for feeling. The term ‘bodily saturation’ is intended to capture situations where we are, so to speak, affectively ‘full’. When this occurs, one is rendered less sensitive, or even insensitive, to other affective, bodily experiences. I argue that depression is a bodily intense experience that leaves the body saturated, thus disrupting affective ways of feeling connected to and together with others.

1. A disease of disconnectedness

4It is generally acknowledged that depression is an affective disorder. Descriptions of depression commonly refer to persistent feelings of depressed mood, anxiety, despondency, worthlessness, guilt, isolation and hopelessness. The DSM states that at least one of the symptoms of depression is either:

1. depressed mood most of the day, nearly every day, as indicated by either subjective report (e.g., feels sad, empty, hopeless) or observation made by others; or
2. markedly diminished interest or pleasure in all, or almost all, activities most of the day, nearly every day.

5Alongside this, the DSM specifies that an individual must experience at least 4 of the following additional symptoms:

1. significant weight loss when not dieting or weight gain or decrease or increase in appetite nearly every day;
2. insomnia or hypersomnia nearly every day;
3. restlessness or lethargy;
4. fatigue or loss of energy nearly every day;
5. feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt;
6. diminished ability to think or concentrate, or indecisiveness; or
7. recurrent thoughts of death or suicide.

                    (APA, 2013, p. 163)

6While depression is often associated with feeling deadened or flat, depression is a bodily intense experience. As the DSM-V highlights, depression is characterized by feelings of lethargy, tiredness, heaviness, sadness, guilt, and/or hopelessness. Even feelings of emptiness are not neutral states but involve an acute “felt awareness of absence” (Roberts, 2019, p. 188). As I argue below, we might be better doing away with characterizing depression as involving an affective flattening and instead talk about depression involving specific forms of affective intensity or heightening which excludes other feelings or ways of affectively engaging with the world. Moreover, the DMS-V notes that depression can “cause significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning” (APA, 2013, p. 163). How, though, does depression impact one’s social experience? What kinds of social encounters are impaired?

8First-person descriptions of depression almost uniformly highlight feelings of isolation and disconnection from others as central to the disorder (e.g. Karp, 2017; Plath, 1963; Styron, 2010; Wurtzel, 1994). Sylvia Plath (1963) describes how, when watching others interact, the depressed individual experiences a veil between themselves and the others, a distinctive experience of being cut off. While depressed individuals can shut themselves away (and many often do), this isolation or disconnection is not primarily about a physical distance between the depressed individual and others. Indeed, the sense of disconnectedness seems to be most painful when the depressed individual is around others, is not physically alone, but feels isolated nonetheless: “During all this I felt deeply alone. Everyone else seemed to be moving through their days peacefully, laughing and having fun…Their very presence seemed to magnify my sense of isolation” (Karp, 2017, p. 59, my emphasis). Depression, then, is characterized by feelings of isolation, disconnection, and loneliness even when the depressed individual is not by themself.

9Interestingly, what this description from Karp highlights is that not all interpersonal experience is diminished in depression. One is not thrown into an entirely solipsistic world, where there are no others at all. Others still feature in experience and depressed individuals do not seem to lose their ability to understand others entirely. Indeed, in order to capture the experience of depressed individuals as missing out, as being cut off from others, some interpersonal experience must still be intact; for the depressed individual to experience being cut off from another and their happiness, they must be able to perceive the other and their happiness to some extent in the first place. Some forms of interpersonal experience and social understanding, then, are preserved; namely, a visual and perhaps auditory form of direct social perception or empathy (Krueger & Overgaard, 2012), whereby they are still able to see or hear the expressive behaviour of others. What depressed individuals seem to experience is, specifically, a diminished sense of connectedness to others. I suggest that we conceive of this sense of connectedness to others in affective terms. This will allow us to not only say that there is social impairment in depression but provide a more fine-tuned analysis of what forms of social relation are impacted in depression; thus, adding to the aforementioned works that highlight social disruption as a key characteristic of depression in more general terms. In order to unpack this, we must turn to how we not only encounter the other in visual or auditory terms but how we feel the other, through our feeling bodies.

2. Feeling the other

10The phenomenology of sociality highlights numerous forms of interpersonal experience that are affective in nature. The phenomenological notion of empathy, which claims that we can directly perceive at least some aspects of the other’s experience through their expressive bodies, predominately discusses how we visually perceive the other’s experience (e.g. Krueger & Overgaard, 2012; Overgaard, 2019; Zahavi, 2014). However, there is growing recognition that empathy is not restricted to visual perception but that we can also empathetically perceive the other through other sensory modalities (Osler, 2021a). Relevant for our purposes is the idea that we not only empathetically see someone’s experience, say in their clenched fists and scowl, but can empathetically feel the other (e.g. Colombetti, 2014; Fuchs, 2016; Svenaeus, 2016, 2018). Drawing on thinkers such as Edith Stein (1989) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2012), the role of the feeling body in our empathetic grasp of others is highlighted (sometimes described as sensual empathy (e.g. Svenaeus, 2018). Thus, I might not only see the other’s anger but feel their anger “pouring” out of them (Stein, 1989, p. 54). This is not to suggest that when I feel your anger pouring out of you this is because you have made me feel angry, indeed I might be afraid of or amused by your anger. Rather, that your anger is given to me affectively, I feel your anger without mistaking it for my own emotional reaction.

11Fuchs, in particular, has developed Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intercorporeality to discuss how our empathetic perception is rooted in our bodily awareness of and interconnection with others. He emphasizes that we do not coldly look upon others but experience a “mutual bodily resonance in social encounters” (Fuchs, 2013, p. 222; also see: Fuchs, 2016; Fuchs & De Jaegher, 2009). Through our bodies we express and connect with others through patterns of imitation, co-ordination, bodily expression, and bodily feeling. As such, we do not merely gaze upon others but find ourselves bodily present with and bodily affected by others and vice versa. This “intercorporeal affection” is highlighted as our fundamental way of being with others and feeling ourselves connected to others, as an important “pre-reflective attunement to others” (Fuchs, 2013, p. 225). Where Fuchs (2013, 2016) and Merleau-Ponty (2012) refer to this as intercorporeality, the phenomenologist Watsuji pre-emptively describes this felt interconnectedness and interrelatedness with others as “betweenness” (Watsuji, 1996; see: Krueger, 2020; Osler & Krueger, 2021a).

12Work done on shared emotions also emphasizes the role affectivity has in experiencing oneself as together with others. Shared emotions refer to instances where we experience an emotion not just as an I but as a We. This is not intended to simply refer to two or more individuals who happen to be having the same kind of emotion simultaneously but to individuals experiencing an emotion that they experience together. Scheler (2017, p. 9) famously describes two parents sharing their grief over the loss of their child. Influenced by the work of Walther (1923), many now argue that when sharing an emotion with another, part of the ‘glue’ that joins people in a shared emotion is a felt sense of togetherness (e.g. Osler, 2020; León and Zahavi, 2016; Szanto, 2017). Walther argues that togetherness as a We is experienced as something bodily and affective. As such, an experience of shared grief is not only bodily felt in terms of feeling grief but involves an affective sense of experiencing that grief together with another. If one were not able to affectively experience this sense of togetherness, one would not be able to share emotions with others.

15What is also interesting about these bodily experiences of the other, is that these encounters often move us or prompt us to undergo a change in emotion or mood. For instance, when I feel your anger through my body, this might lead me to feeling afraid myself; sharing an emotion with another can intensify or prolong an emotional experience; being infected by your happiness can lift my mood; feeling excited about your happiness can shift my current emotion; experiencing an atmosphere of grief might prompt me to mute my own happiness. As such, not only are these examples of affective interpersonal experience, but they are often ways in which my emotion or mood is altered or even regulated by others (Krueger, 2015).

16It is these affective forms of interpersonal experience that I suggest are inhibited in depression. What I argue is that in depression our bodily feelings of, say, tiredness, lethargy, hopelessness, and so on, are bodily intense experiences and preclude or inhibit one’s ability to be affectively sensitive to others, resulting in a sense of disconnectedness from others. I suggest we understand this as a temporally-extended and chronic experience of ‘bodily saturation’. Cashing depression out in these terms, I think, helps does justice to the felt dimension of depression which typically goes overlooked in favour of discussions of depression as involving an affective flattening or diminishment.

3. Bodily saturation

18However, what has not gone explored is that while we are feeling beings, we do not have an infinite capacity for feeling – we cannot feel all things at all times. I want to introduce a notion that I call ‘bodily saturation’. This term is intended to capture situations where we are, so to speak, affectively ‘full’. When this occurs, one is rendered less sensitive, or even insensitive, to other affective, bodily experiences. When one has a sudden experience of pain, for example, it can be experienced so intensely that we seem to only experience that pain. If the pain continues, it does so at the expense of feeling much else. When, for example, I have an ongoing headache, I feel a kind of distance from the world around me, it no longer solicits my attention in the way it normally does, it does not draw me in. My affective engagement with the world seems to have been muted by this other bodily intense feeling. This can be thought of as akin to a loud noise drowning out all other noises or a flash of bright light taking over one’s visual field.

20My suggestion is that this bodily saturation can happen at the level of affectivity more broadly, that we can be overwhelmed or filled up by a particularly intense feeling (or feelings) which renders us insensitive to other feelings at that moment, including the kind of bodily feeling that I have argued is part of our felt experience of others. As such, bodily saturation does not only occur in cases of bodily sensation (such as pain). We can also be saturated by emotional experiences. Think of cases where one feels very anxious about something, like an upcoming presentation. Concern about whether your material makes sense, worries about whether someone might spot a problem in your account, or ask you a question about a philosopher you know next to nothing about, fear that you might forget what you were going to say – this anxiety can be so all-consuming that you no longer feel hungry (despite not having eaten yet), no longer feel affectively drawn in by the beautiful scenery on the walk to the conference, are left untouched by someone excitedly telling you about their upcoming birthday dinner that you are invited to.

22Now this is not to say that our bodies are all the same ‘size’. Schmitz (2019, p. 100) highlights that how and to what extent we become affectively involved with the world, how affectively sensitive we are, changes from person to person, as well as being impacted by one’s own personal history. In a similar vein, then, it should be recognized that we do not all get bodily saturated by the same ‘amount’ of feeling, our thresholds might be different. Different individuals might have a greater capacity to feel a multitude of things at the same time or to feel an intense emotion without experiencing a desensitization to other affective experiences. Indeed, an individual may have different bodily capacities at different times in their life, in different situations, and so on. Nor is this to imply that bodily saturation only occurs in cases of negative sensations or emotions. We can, for instance, have our ‘bodily bandwidth’ used up with positive feelings and sensations; think of an experience of intense joy that leaves us desensitized to other feelings (e.g. episodes of mania: Bowden, 2013; Fuchs, 2015) or intense pleasurable experiences like when one orgasms. Moreover, while I have used pain in self-harm as an example of how individuals use bodily saturation as a way of blocking out negative feelings such as stress or anxiety, it is conceivable that bodily saturation can be sought out in and of itself. For example, individuals who enjoy pain as part of their sexual practice might enjoy the sensation of being bodily saturated, being entirely in a particular moment and a particular feeling, that need not be related to a desire to force out other (negative) feelings. Acknowledging all this, the point stands that no individual is capable of an infinite array of feelings at any one time.

4. The depressed body

23How, though, does the notion of bodily saturation inform our understanding of the experience of social disconnectedness in depression? What I suggest is that rather than conceiving of depression as a case where individuals experience a flattening or deadening of affect, that we focus on and recognise the bodily feelings that characterize depression, such as feelings of tiredness, heaviness, fatigue, and hopelessness and even felt experiences of emptiness, listlessness, and absence. By recognising how intense such feelings can be, we can see how this picture fits with the notion of bodily saturation, whereby the depressed body is flooded with bodily feelings such as tiredness and fatigue that, in turn, diminish one’s ability to enter into or be moved by other affective experiences that are bodily felt. If we accept that many of our interpersonal encounters are bodily felt, then the saturation that a depressed individual experiences inhibits their ability to also experience affective forms of social relation.

24Just as when I am in so much pain I am not sensitive to someone bumping into my elbow on the street, so when my body is saturated with, say, the lethargy of depression, I am no longer affectively sensitive to or moved by the happiness of another. I might still see that they are happy but no longer feel their happiness radiating from them, do not feel sympathy for the other, do not find their happiness contagious, cannot enter into a shared happiness together with them. For all these forms of social encounter involve being bodily sensitive and receptive to the other, to being moved by the other or feeling a sense of connectedness and togetherness with them. The depressed body, already saturated with other bodily feelings, is unable to enter into these affective styles of sociality; it does not have the affective bandwidth available that is needed for these interpersonal encounters. Thus, the depressed body is still a feeling body but it is so full with on-going bodily intense feelings that it is affectively cut adrift from others -leaving the depressed individual a cold social observer, rather than a bodily engaged, connected social participant.

25In contrast to short-lived experiences of bodily saturation, such as the case of stubbing one’s toe or having a headache, the depressed body is chronically saturated by certain negative feelings. The depressed body undergoes a temporally-extended form of saturation, that impacts one’s ability to access other forms of affective experience not just for moments but for prolonged periods of time. We might, then, think of depression as involving a chronic, on-going bodily saturation that can significantly impair an individual’s affective social relations.

26What might be particularly pernicious about depression is that the sorts of social relations that are curtailed are the very kinds of social experience that lead to us being moved, to experiences that can bring about a change or shift in our emotions and moods. As such, when one is rendered bodily insensitive to experiences of sharing emotions, being upregulated by others’ affective states, and so on, we can be left in a situation where we become stuck with these negative and isolating bodily experiences. By acknowledging this, we can go some way to accounting for how depression can progress, leading to a downward spiral of feeling that one cannot escape one’s depression.

27Importantly, by employing the notion of bodily saturation, we are able to specifically account for why certain forms of social relations are impaired in depression (e.g. those which are affective), while preserving other forms of social understanding that remain in place (e.g. the ability to grasp that others are happy and are easily engaging with one another and the world). This, then, allows us to provide a more fine-grained account of social impairment in depression. It also, importantly, enables a distinction to be drawn between the kinds of social impairment that characterize a disorder such as major depression disorder and other disorders such as catatonia. In catatonia, individuals appear to experience a complete breakdown in one’s bodily receptivity to others and the world (Takaoka & Takata, 2007), rather than the partial impairment I suggest depression typically involves.

28Note that while my account of depression as involving bodily saturation has certain commonalities with Fuchs’ discussion of the breakdown of social relations in depression (Fuchs, 2005, 2016) it has a key difference. Like Fuchs, I claim that one’s ability to experience others in a bodily and affective manner is diminished in depression. Moreover, I root this claim in the idea that depression involves a change in the way that one experiences one’s body, particularly in terms of experiencing one’s body as ‘closed’ to affective styles of interpersonal relation. However, unlike Fuchs, I do not want to characterise the depressed body as a corporealized body. According to Fuchs, in depression, the individual primarily experiences their body as object-like. He suggests that in depression “the materiality, density, and weight [of the body], otherwise suspended and unnoticed in everyday performance, now come to the fore and are felt painfully” (2005, p. 99). The body is experienced as a burdensome object, inhibiting one’s ability to smoothly engage with the world as a lived body and, importantly for our purposes, inhibiting one’s bodily sensitivity to others.

29My concern with this approach is that while the depressed body is often overwhelmed by experiences of, say, fatigue and tiredness, this fatigue and tiredness need not only be experienced as foregrounded in our experience, nor solely in terms of experiencing the body as object-like (though this is not to say that it cannot be experienced in this way). As Sartre (2005) highlights in his description of tiredness, our tiredness can be revealed to us in the way that the tired body discloses the world to us: for instance, in the way that I experience the words on the page I am reading as blurred, finding it difficult to concentrate on specific tasks. The body is not the object of the tiredness here, rather it is a lived tiredness that shows up in the way that the world is disclosed to the subject.

30When we talk of the body as the medium through which we have a world, that discloses the world to us, we should be careful not to imply that this is a neutral or unfeeling medium. While we often see descriptions of the body as transparent (Fuchs, 2005, p. 25) or absent (Leder, 1990, p. 10) when we are engaging with the world smoothly, this can mask the way in which our feeling bodies shape the way in which we experience the world. As Ratcliffe (2008) highlights, our bodies do not disclose the world in a uniform manner; our emotions, moods and feelings can colour the way we experience the world. When I am joyful, the world is experienced as full of exciting possibilities; when I am tired, the world can be experienced as dull and lifeless. Feelings of tiredness, then, do not have to foreground the body as object but still impact the way in which the world and others are disclosed to us.

31This is to say that in depression feelings of tiredness, fatigue, and hopelessness can be intensely felt in the way that the world is disclosed as not interesting, beyond one’s reach, as difficult or burdensome. These, though, are still felt experiences of the world, not just felt experiences of one’s body as an object. Feelings that characterize depression, then, do not need to render the depressed individual corporealized per se. Rather, the depressed body feels these negative bodily feelings in such an intense manner that it no longer has the capacity to be affectively sensitive to or moved in other ways. The saturated body is not simply closed, is not a complete barrier to the world, and does not necessarily have to have the body itself as its intentional object. Instead, it is closed to specific forms of affective experience, leaving the individual with a limited range of affective options, a limited way in which the world and other people are experienced.

32Importantly, this helps us capture cases of individuals who have lived with depression for a long time, where feelings of depressed mood become habitualized. When this way of being in the world just becomes ‘the way things are’, we do not see the depressed individual as totally trapped inside a corporealized body. Many people are still able to go about their lives, do their jobs, even hold down stable relationships. One might suppose that if the depressed individual predominantly experienced their body as corporealized, this would be a difficult feat to pull off. I suggest that if we adopt a bodily saturation model, we are able to capture how the depressed individual still experiences the world and even others in it in some ways; yet are left peculiarly disconnected from those around them. In short, then, I pose the notion of bodily saturation as an alternative way of conceiving of the depressed body that accounts for experience of being disconnected or unable to be moved by others, that I think provides a richer picture of the depressed individual and their world.

Conclusion

33In this paper, I have developed the notion of ‘bodily saturation’ as a way of unpacking how depressed individuals experience a sense of disconnectedness from others. While we are feeling bodies, we do not have infinite capacity for feeling and can become saturated with our affective experiences. When this occurs, we are rendered insensitive to other affective or feeling experiences. Depression, I have argued, is an intensely felt affective disorder. I suggest that the intense feelings characteristic of depression leave individuals insensitive to ‘feeling the other’, thus impairing certain social encounters and interactions, as well as their social understanding. This, though, does not mean that the depressed individual primarily experiences their body as the object of their experience. Rather, the saturated body in depression is rendered insensitive to certain forms of affective experience, including a raft of affective social experiences such as sensual empathy, shared emotions and other shared experiences, intercorporeality, interaffectivity, interpersonal atmospheres, emotional contagion, and sympathy. All these affective forms of interpersonal experience are ones which connect our embodied selves with others in terms of how we feel the other as present, feel the other’s feelings, feel sympathy for others, or feel together with others. When these interpersonal experiences are impaired, an individual is left with a peculiar sense of isolation.

34Using the notion of bodily saturation, we can move towards a more fine-grained picture of depression and social impairment. Whereby we can elucidate how the depressed body is affectively cut off from others and which forms of interpersonal experiences might be compromised by this. Moreover, while I have developed the notion of bodily saturation in the context of self-harm and depression, I think it could be fruitfully applied to other disorders (such as anorexia nervosa and autistic spectrum disorder), as well as to positive experiences of bodily saturation such as orgasm and BDSM practices. With increased recognition that we are affective, feeling bodies, greater attention can now be turned to the limit cases of our affective experiences.