fidget

Why can others' fidgeting be so annoying? Why can the sound of other people eating be so annoying? Why can human-created noise more generally be so annoying?

We've names these days for such conditions as when the agitative annoyance becomes so powerful as to drive ongoing avoidance: misokinesia and misophonia. If you look up psychological resources on these you'll find zilch. No cogent explanations for them. But perhaps this is what you'd expect if your psychological theory has restricted itself to templates for understanding which deploy only representational notions: beliefs, constructs, reasoning problems, etc. It's intuitively clear that explanation in such terms is going to be unforthcoming here. So psychologists give up. But must we?

It might help to start with the phenomenology. People with misokinesia do not, contra what's typically said, find it inexorably annoying to see people make repetitive movements. Watching someone walk down the road, repeatedly putting one leg in front of the other? Really not a problem. Someone peeling a whole bucket of potatoes, or ploughing a large field? Again, no problem at all. So what gives? And people with misophonia typically don't find the gustatory noises of strangers so disturbing, so disgusting, as those of certain family members. And the repetitive movements or noises of natural phenomena - of the river, of the trees blowing in the wind - is not a problem. The pseudo-technical Latin terms by themselves take us nowhere near an understanding of what they indicate. So, again, what gives?

We intuitively lump the two phenomena together, and it's tempting to think that we do so because they both involve agitative annoyance at the movements of others, whether we're seeing or hearing them. But that grouping doesn't at all capture it. 

What they really have in common - I propose - is a difficulty with differentiation. This is what I want in life: I want for me to be me, you to be you. I want to able to engage you, but for you to remain over there. Now I don't mean literally over there, of course. That too might be nice. What I mean is rather that I don't want to become identified with you. I don't want to feel your movements in my body through a pathic (ie automatic, passive, bodily) identification. I don't want to be given over to you in that way. But that's what happens with misophonia. It's so damn disgusting, hearing you eat, because it's as if you are now eating in my mouth. (Disgust is contaminative in origin and character: it makes us want to throw up the foreign matter we now experience as inside us.) It's utterly under my skin. It's so damn annoying, watching you fidget, because your tension discharge is now pathically evoking tension in me. I'm too close. I merge. I'm pulled into a reverberation which colonises me, and I don't want to be colonised thus.

A 27 year old schizophrenic patient - and schizophrenic patients can when psychotic particularly struggle with all of this, and with a particularly profound and desperate form of it - sought consultation because of (Jacobsen 1954):

her fear that her husband 'might have to commit suicide' should she desert him, as she was planning to do. ... In the course of my talk with her, the girl, a pathetic, beautiful Ophelia clad only in a torn nightgown - pulled me down to the couch where she had seated herself. 'Let us be close', she said, 'I have made a great philosophical discovery. Do you know the difference between closeness, likeness, sameness, and oneness? Close is close, as with you; when you are like somebody, you are only like the other; sameness - you are the same as the other, but he is still he and you are you; but oneness is not two - it is one, that's horrible - horrible', she repeated, jumping up in sudden panic: 'don't get too close, get away from the couch, I don't want to become one with you,' and she pushed me away very aggressively.

 ... Pausing for a moment now to acknowledge that these genuinely are philosophically astute remarks by this poor woman ... Now, these difficulties with collapsing identificatory merging, with maintaining a safe, self-preserving, distance, are surely not difficulties with the subject's representation of the other or of the self. No, they're disturbances in the self's enaction of itself in relation to other. The experience of collapse-into-other in psychosis is real; the need for a preserving isolation, withdrawal, is palpable.

Now in the ordinary cases of misophonia and misokinesia we aren't talking this degree of psychotic derangement. But we are, surely, talking of difficulties with relating whilst remaining self-same. And this obtains at the level of corporeal selfhood itself, not at the later level of representation. And it occurs with those creatures with whom we are pre-programmed to identify: other human beings, especially those in our families. We become who we are through conjoint identification with and disidentification (differentiation) from these particular others. (Mitsein is intercorporeality.)

Notable, by the way, is that the form of attention which the person uses to steel themselves against the aversiveness of the pathic identification is one which can't help but increase the salience of the signal. One might hope that it would keep the other out: by watching you, or by turning away from you and avoiding watching you, I keep you at a distance. But the problem - I propose - is that this happens too late. It happens when the underlying dedifferentiation has already been evoked. 

What is needed? Well, clearly, avoidance is not going to solve the problem. If anything it reinforces it. What's needed is self-other differentiation-in-the-midst-of-relatedness. I engage with you, and when I notice you fidget or chew, and I feel agitated and corporeally invaded by these, I remind my body that these are your experiences. I am over here. There is nothing in my mouth. Feel it: nothing. My own limbs are nice and still. I have no autochthonous agitation in them. None. You are over there, and you have got entirely your own mind and body. How wonderful that we are different people thus! Im fact, I can only be myself at all because I can be close to you. I can only be close to you because I am like you. We can both be the same too in that we both eat, both have limbs, both get agitated sometimes. Individuation is differentiation. I might run phantasies of self-dependence, of auto-individuation, to preserve me from intrusive others. But those are just phantasies. In truth I only have a mind in so far as I have the capacity to relate to a world, and I enjoy that capacity only in so far as I can experience other as other. 

Agitation makes differentiation - makes reality-testing more generally - difficult. And what we find in misophonia and misokinesia, along with a variety of other non-psychotic conditions - is a partial disturbance of reality-testing. For the anxious person, fear or wish bleed into fact; the distinction between what is imagined and what is encountered gets blurred. Hence phobias. Hence OCD. Reality contact itself, self-and-world differentiation-and-relatedness, now proceeds lease peaceably. But helping the patient see what the disturbance of embodied selfhood is, helping them guard against pathic collapsing identification, and helping them know relationship as ultimately not the undoing of, but the condition of possibility of, selfhood, is the way out. A graded exposure whilst in the new interpersonal mode constituted by the aforementioned self-understanding would be one good way to go.