Touch: Recovering our most Vital Sense

by Richard Kearney

Published by Columbia University Press, April 2021. ISBN: 9780231199537 reviewed by Áine Hutchinson

“We listen with our skin and our skin remembers” (29)

Covid-19 has seen us yearn for reconnection with ourselves and our environment, and grasping at ways to connect through the earlier restrictions of 2021. Richard Kearney conveys the “crisis of touch” (2) in a world immersed in virtual experience, concluding that the greatest lesson from Covid-19 is the question of connection. The director of the Guestbook Project for Creative Space Pedagogy, Kearney holds the Charles Seeling Chair of Philosophy at Boston College, and has written extensively on the philosophy of imagination and embodiment. The author acknowledges his Irish background, his own personal experience with depression, and the discovery of embodied healing. The introductory questions of this essay capture the crisis (2):

“are we losing touch with our senses as our senses become even more mediated? Are we entering into an era of excarnation, where we obsess about the body in ever more disembodied ways?”

The author opens with praise for the human desire for physical closeness, and a plea for healing from our virtual age, where digital connectivity does not necessarily mean closeness.

“Incarnation invests flesh; excarnation divests it.” (2)

There was a synchronicity when I heard Richard Kearney interviewed on radio one morning while I returned from a nourishing, restorative bogland walk. His words on “touch hunger” reflected my own need for that earthy walk. I found in my reading that the book became like a hand, with five fingers of chapters, its palm ingrained with years of story, myth and researched truth, coming together with a firm, warm holding touch. The flesh and bones of this book draw deeply from so many fields, including philosophy, psychology, literature, psychotherapy, and poetry. The substantial Notes section is like the other hand, making a handshake and hand hold experience in processing the book and being touched by it.

Chapter One, Coming to Our Senses: Tact, Savvy, Flair, Insight, Sound explores how all our senses convey touch, with the author’s central argument being that the potential for touch is everywhere. This is illustrated in the interrelationship between our senses and the synesthetic essence of this sensitive sensibility. The “carnal wisdom of tactility” (10) to which the author refers, includes the etymology root of tact: a person’s skill in being with others. The author presents the synesthetic quality of tact, and how it manifests as savvy in taste, as flair in smell, as insight in sight, and as resonance in sound. The “double sensibility” (16) of touch, as a reciprocal experience, affirms how integral it is in development. Trauma, healing and the “tactful acoustics” (28) of therapy acknowledge the witnessing role of the tactful therapist. “A double act of touching and being touched by the ear of the heart” (30).

The second chapter, Philosophies of Touch: From Aristotle to Phenomenology traces how touch became the most relegated of senses, with sight and the optocentric perception gaining precedence in Western Philosophy. The author reiterates that “one cannot live without sensing, exist as soul without flesh, and that every sense requires the ability to be touched” (43). The ethical considerations of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ touch are acknowledged, and the risks of being in touch with joy and with suffering. The essential dimension of psychic-corporal “semiotics” for healing underpins the author’s challenge of the optocentric view. The word empathy refers to womb or belly in Semitic languages - recham/rechem: “the innermost core of life and nourishment” (53). The chapter appendix concludes with the paradox of the uncanny, described as embodied knowing, a knowing of what is repressed in the unconscious. The medium of dousing where the diviner and the uncanny may merge, perhaps as in therapy, is the author’s illustration of “a special art of touching and being touched” (57)

The Wounded Healer to which we as psychotherapists often refer, is introduced in Chapter Three. Here, in Tales of the Wounded Healer and the Greek myths, we learn of Chiron, part man and part animal, embodying that archetype. The Olympian Gods influenced the Hippocratic approach of pain control, while earth wisdom informed the Asceplian approach, which the author argues offers an embodied understanding of accompanying suffering.

“Such a mutual abiding with pain becomes a form of shared witness - a bilateral healing beyond unilateral curing” (69)

My hand metaphor for this book sees the holding hands come together, where the capacity for change is enshrined. Chapter Four, Healing Touch: Therapies of Trauma and Recovery addresses psychoanalysis, body therapy, reintegrating trauma, epigenetics and attachment theory. The author’s assertive response being that “We must re-cognise the somatic symptoms of trauma, as well as cognise the causes” (88).

This is further affirmed in his description of the body as a healing bridge, and the importance of attending to projective identification for a therapist. Kearney brings these strands together in acknowledging the trauma of war, conflict, genocide, terrorism, natural disasters and climate crisis.  He introduces the concept “Towards a Commons of the Body” (108) where the personal body and the communal body are home to the psyche and where trauma is our greatest threat. The author illustrates through truth and reconciliation projects that a communal memory of trauma may see a communal healing. The author celebrates the “reciprocity principle” of a new age of therapeutic connectedness between all sentient beings, including animals, described as “Symbiocence” (111). There is a strong call for public health strategists to heed the collective and individual need for healing through “contact”.

“Moving thus from traumatised nobody to reintegrated somebody is an empathetic opening to everybody who has suffered pain. Human sense is ultimately embodied sense. A commons of the body” (109)

Experiencing the contradiction and tension as a psychotherapist now fully immersed in online therapeutic work, I welcomed how the author concluded this fascinating journey from Aristotle to Apple influences. Kearney wishes for the symbiotic collaboration between digital and tactile symbiotic therapies, for the healing of the person, and the planet - where we “remain sensitive to both our cyber and carnal existence” (132). Reclaiming Touch in the Age of Excarnation presents various aspects of our policy makers, for a reinvention of how we inhabit this world. The term which the author proposes is “ana -technology” (130).

“It is clear that to live fully in tomorrow’s world we will need both virtual imagination and incarnate action” (132).

Áine Hutchinson MIAHIP, MIACP, CQSW is a Humanistic and Integrative Psychotherapist working privately in Cloughjordan Ecovillage, Tipperary. Her MSc in Existential Psychotherapy, and thesis on Birth Trauma, embodied her particular intrigue with transgenerational trauma, loss and biosynthesis. Connect with Áine on (087) 2921790, aine@hutchinson.work, or https://aine.hutchinson.work

IAHIP 2021 - INSIDE OUT 95 - Autumn 2021