To what extent is our experience of spatiality affected by our experience of others? Such is the question I will be exploring in this paper. I will do so via the mood of agoraphobia. Agoraphobia is often thought of as a phobia involving spatiality, especially in relation the space of the home. In this paper, I will argue that the issue of spatiality cannot be understood without reference to intersubjectivity. I will pursue this claim with a first-person analysis of agoraphobia. To achieve this, I will turn to Sartre’s account of the look. Sartre’s account of intersubjectivity is helpful in allowing us to recognise both the intersubjective structure of spatiality and the embodiment. For Sartre, the look of the other carries with it a destabilising affect. In it, a conflict takes place between two of more selves, each of whom struggle to regain control over their environmental and bodily bearings, as he puts it: “The appearance of the Other in the world corresponds therefore to a fixed sliding of the whole universe, to a decentralization of the world which undermines the centrality which I am simultaneously effecting” (255). To understand this relation between decentralization and centralization, I turn to the phenomenology of agoraphobia, and especially to the experience of walking. My claim is that the agoraphobic experience getting from A to B is never simply a question of spatial relations, but is always informed by the expression of our total subjectivity and our relation with the other’s look. By way of conclusion, I will propose the following formulation: our experience of others is mediated by space and our experience of space is mediated by the look of the other, such that we cannot speak about intersubjectivity without also speaking about interspatiality.

How does our bodily mood affect our experience and interpretation of an environment? Taking “mood” in the Heideggerian sense of how we attune ourselves to the world, the question points toward the circularity structuring our environmental experience. Thus, if we can speak of an anxious or ecstatic place, then it is only because we can also speak of an anxious or ecstatic body. While Heidegger is helpful in demonstrating the ontological significance of mood, what he leaves unresolved is the role our bodies play shaping the mood of the world. As such, just how this interpretive interaction between mood and environment is possible remains a mystery. In this paper, I will examine the question of to what extent our bodily mood affects our experience and interpretation of an environment by looking at the phenomenology of agoraphobia. Agoraphobia is the phobic response to a space in which the possibility of escape is comprised by any number of environmental factors such as large crowds, expanses of space, or an abiding sense of unfamiliarity. Because it produces a restrictive worldview, agoraphobic subjects tend to experience their environment as been constructed from a series of invisible boundaries and voids, all of which demarcate the sense of being at home from non-home. In this paper, I will argue that agoraphobia offers us a clear illustration of how the materiality of an environment gains its genius loci through the affective role of bodily interpretation. In order to defend this claim, I will pursue two trajectories of thought. First, on an interpretative level, not only is the body the “bearer of sensations” (Husserl), but through the sensuality of its moods, it is also the manifestation of an environment’s material reality. Far from the means to orient ourselves in the world and that alone, the body’s moods serve to define the very materiality of that world. This is especially clear in the phobic body. That the agoraphobic subject can experience being outside of his or her home territory as threatening and nauseating illustrates that our interpretation of the world is also an interpretation of our own lived bodies. Second: on an experiential level, the agoraphobic’s bodily experience of the environment is characterised by a sense of impending doom, vertiginous anxiety, and an abiding feeling of ontological security. Because of the disturbing affectivity of agoraphobia, what it reveals is that a place’s genius loci is not only informed by a topophilia but also by a topophobia. By way of conclusion, I will make the argument that the “spirit of place” leads us, not only to an ineffable character within the environment to which we feel an attachment, but to an uncanny agency that is both possessed by the subject and possessive of the subject: mood.

How is our experience of the world affected by our experience of others? Such is the question I will be exploring in this paper. I will do so via the agoraphobic condition. In agoraphobia, we are rewarded with an enriched glimpse into the intersubjective formation of the world, and in particular to our embodied experience of that social space. I will be making two key claims. First, intersubjectivity is essentially an issue of intercorporeality, a point I shall explore with recourse to Merleau-Ponty’s account of the prepersonal body. The implication of this claim is that evading or withdrawing from the other remains structurally impossible so long as we remain bodily subjects. Second, the necessary relation with others defines our thematic and affective experience of the world. Far from a formal connection with others, the corporeal basis of intersubjectivity means that our lived experience of the world is mediated via our bodily relations with others. In this way, intercorporeality reveals the body as being dynamically receptive to social interactions with others. Each of these claims is demonstrated via a phenomenological analysis of the agoraphobe’s interaction with others. From this analysis, I conclude that our experience of the world is affected by our experience of others precisely because we are in a bodily relation with others. Such a relation is not causally linked, as though first there were a body, then a world, and then a subject that provided a thematic and affective context to that experience. Instead, body, other, and world are each intertwined in a single unity and cannot be considered apart.

Anxiety is sometimes thought of as either a state of mind, lacking a thick spatial depth, or otherwise conceived as something that individuals undergo alone. Such presuppositions are evident both conceptually and clinically. In this paper, I present a contrasting account of anxiety as being a situated affect. I develop this claim by pursuing a phenomenological analysis of agoraphobia. Far from a disembodied, displaced, and solitary state of mind, agoraphobic is revealed as being thickly mediated by bodily, spatial, and intersubjective dimensions.

Influenced by the works of Merleau-Ponty and of Heidegger, I argue that our spatial experience is rooted in the way we are engaged with and in our world. Space is not a predetermined and uniform geometrical grid, but the network of engagement and alienation that provides one's orientation in the inter-human world. Drawing on this phenomenological conception of space, I show that the neuroses of agoraphobia and, more unexpectedly, hypochondria must not be understood as mere "psychological" problems, but rather as problems of one's overall way of spatial being-in-the-world, that is, of "dwelling." With respect to both neuroses, I argue that subjects experience a sense of spatial contraction that mirrors a contraction in their abilities to engage with the people, the environment, and the situations that surround them.

This paper looks at the phenomenon of space primarily from an Existential-phenomenological perspective. Its focus is on our every-day experience of space, and this is referred to as the ontic dimension of experience. The relationship between the ontic dimension and the ontological dimension, which refers to the underlying nature of our being-in-the-world, is examined. Ontologically it is more accurate to consider our nature as being spatial rather than being in space or having space inside us. These ideas are then applied to the conditions of Claustrophobia and Agoraphobia. It is suggested that they are best understood not as pathological states but as the ontic equivalents of our ontologically unsupported status in the world and are particular ways of solving the existential dilemma of how to be in-the-world, or spatial. It is suggested however that personal developmental history can influence the likelihood that one person complain of the conditions and another not. An Existential-phenomenological understanding of space is compared with a Psychoanalytic understanding of space.