Feeling Haunted by Loss: Some Reflections on the Experience of Possibility

By Matthew Ratcliffe

Talk of feeling haunted in an emotional way is widespread. It is doubtful that the relevant experiences are reducible to any combination of established emotion categories, such as regret, remorse, or guilt.

Date: 19 May 2025
Time: 16:00 -17:00
Organised by: Natashe Lemos Dekker

Nevertheless, what it is to feel haunted has been neglected by philosophers of emotion and by emotion theorists more generally.

In this online talk, professor Matthew Ratcliffe will focus specifically on what it is to feel haunted by loss. Here, he suggests, talk of haunting spans a variety of different experiences.

However, the majority of these share a common phenomenological structure. Being haunted by loss involves experiencing counterfactual possibilities in ways that are inextricable from how we experience the significance of our actual situation. Their effect is to diminish us and undermine our pursuit of future possibilities.

About Matthew Ratcliffe

Matthew Ratcliffe is Professor of Philosophy at the University of York, UK. His work addresses issues in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychiatry, and emotion theory.

He is author of the books Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of Reality (Oxford University Press, 2008), Experiences of Depression: A Study in Phenomenology (Oxford University Press, 2015), Real Hallucinations: Psychiatric Illness, Intentionality, and the Interpersonal World (MIT Press, 2017), and Grief Worlds: A Study of Emotional Experience (MIT Press, 2022).

More about Matthew Ratcliffe

This lecture is part of the Grief Lab Online Seminar Series. The Grief Lab online seminar series invites international speakers from different disciplines to present their research on grief and loss. By highlighting the work of interdisciplinary scholars, the seminar series aims to develop a dialogue between diverse approaches and perspectives, and in so doing to further unpack the concept and experience of grief. The online seminars take place every three months and attendance is open to all.

Based at the University of Amsterdam, the Grief Lab is a platform for knowledge exchange about grief and loss in a broad sense that aims at bringing together scholars, professionals, and students in various disciplines.

The Grief Lab is hosted by the NWO-Veni project Grief Politics, an anthropological study led by Dr. Natashe Lemos Dekker that focuses on the political and collective aspects of grief by studying the experiences of people who lost relatives during the Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil.

Feeling Haunted by Loss: Some Reflections on the Experience of Possibility

About Matthew Ratcliffe

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