Misfelt Feelings

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (4)

1. #01

   Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.19

   Self > Preface

   Theoretical move: Johnston argues that psychoanalysis, enriched rather than foreclosed by neuroscience, can theorize (if not always cure) neuropathological conditions, and proposes a novel neuro-psychoanalytic account of affective subjectivity built on a Hegelian-inflected tripartite distinction between affects, emotions, and feelings—culminating in the concept of "misfelt feelings" as distorted conscious registrations of unconscious affects.

   Contemporary affective neuroscience… is requisite for doing justice to the lingering difficulty of the topic of unconscious affect via the idea of misfelt feelings, with the latter involving distorted conscious registrations of unconscious affects that aren't consciously felt for what they truly are, but are felt all the same.

2. #02

   Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.111

   8. > Toward a New Conception of Affects

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that affects are reflexive, second-order phenomena — "feelings of feelings" — structured by unconscious mediations that make them irreducibly compound rather than immediately self-evident, thereby extending a Freudian-Lacanian-Hegelian critique of immediacy into affective life and proposing that subjects can systematically misknow their own emotional states (misfelt feelings).

   A perhaps controversial aspect of my notion of misfelt feelings is its clearly implied claim that there is a truth to certain feelings at odds with what the first-person conscious awareness of the feeling subject takes these feelings really to be

3. #03

   Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.116

   9. > F r e u d a n d t h e U n r e s o lv e d P r o b l e m of Unconscious Guilt

   Theoretical move: Johnston argues that Freud's concept of "unconscious guilt" predates the second topography and cannot be resolved by simply mapping it onto the ego/superego framework; instead, the passage proposes that unconscious affects are "misfelt feelings"—consciously registered but phenomenologically displaced onto other affects (e.g., guilt felt as anxiety)—thereby reframing the apparent contradiction in Freud's metapsychology of affect.

   maybe one could claim that unconscious affects in the strict Freudian sense are feelings, involving interconnected somatic and psychical states palpably felt by consciousness, as well as reflexively felt by linguistically and conceptually mediated self-consciousness as other than what they are or refer to.

4. #04

   Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.237

   13. > The Paradoxes of the Principle of Constancy > Psychoanalysis: Are There Unconscious Feelings?

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that Freud and Lacan's shared thesis—that affects are always conscious and the unconscious is constituted by signifiers/representations, not affects—runs into paradox through the concept of "misfelt feelings" (guilt, anxiety), and that this psychoanalytic topology of drive, representation, and affect is now challenged by neurobiology's discovery of an emotionally competent, symbolically active brain.

   How can there be seen to be something like misfelt feelings? How can it be supposed that 'one can feel without feeling that one feels, namely, that there can be, so to speak, unfelt (or, more accurately, misfelt) feelings?'