FUCHS / THE TACIT DIMENSION � 323

© 2002 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

Thomas Fuchs

The Tacit Dimension

THIRTY YEARS after its appearance, Blanken-burg’s “Psychopathology of commonsense” has not lost its relevance. In my

commentary I will try to illustrate the fruitful-ness of his approach by pointing to some connec-tions with the phenomenology of the body aswell as with recent memory and infant research.

As Blankenburg himself indicates, the notionof common sense developed by a shift of mean-ing from the classical sensus communis and thushas its original basis in the sensual-bodily experi-ence. By the koinè aísthesis, Aristoteles meant acentral sense organ integrating all single modali-ties of sensation (which he localized in the heart).In German physiology and psychiatry of the nine-teenth century, the sensus communis was stilltranslated as “Gemeingefühl” (“common feel-ing”) or “cenesthesia” (Fuchs 1995). This termdenoted the inner, proprioceptive bodily sensa-tions, but also an original unity of the senses,which has been rediscovered by recent infantresearch as intermodal sensory perception. Theaffection of the body was thus regarded as thecommon basis of all sensation.

Looking on this track for a bodily basis of thecommon sense, we find it in the habitual struc-ture of the lived-body as analysed by Merleau-Ponty (1945). The body is the primary “matter-of-course,” namely, the tacitly functioningmedium of our everyday being-in-the-world pri-or to any subject-object split. The body schema,in Merleau-Ponty’s view, is not only a system offamiliar units of movement or “kinetic melo-dies,” it also incorporates the surrounding things,

tools, and spaces that are familiar to us and thatwe “inhabit.” Thus, the musician “does not onlymanipulate the instrument like a separate object,but lives in it like a limb and inhabits the expres-sive musical space it opens” (Behnke 1997). Butfor Merleau-Ponty, the body schema is also thebasis of “intercorporeity,” i.e., a prepersonalsphere of reciprocal comportment and under-standing prior to any explicit consensus and sym-bolic communication. In this sphere of elementa-ry contact, the “atmospheric” senses play a majorrole: The sense of smell (as shown, e.g., by theexpression “to scent treason” or in German, “je-mand nicht riechen können” [not be able to“smell” or stand someone]) as well as the senseof taste whose ambiguous meaning, mentionedby Blankenburg, points to the bodily basis of thefeeling for what is suitable, decent, or aestheti-cally pleasing. Even the designation of homosapiens that we give to ourselves is derived fromthe latin sapere (to taste/to know), and thus showsthat the knowledge characteristic for man is notan explicit one, but an intuitive, implicit know-ing or “feel” for his surroundings, or as Kantsays, an “aesthetic rather than intellectual judg-ment” (cited by Blankenburg).

Polanyi (1967) has analysed this knowledgeat the roots of common sense as “tacit knowl-edge.” It is based on processes of Gestalt forma-tion that enable us to grasp unified wholesthrough their constituting elements without stillbeing aware of the latter. Thus, we understandthe facial expression of others immediately butcannot tell from which details. Or we know how

324 � PPP / VOL. 8, NO. 4 / DECEMBER 2001

to waltz without knowing the single movementsor being able to explain it. Tacit knowledge im-plies all the taken-for-granted that we have for-gotten once it has become our second nature andpart of our bodily habits. It is mainly based onthe neuronal coupling of single sensori-motorunits by repeated perception or action. This un-conscious knowing has only recently come to beexplored by psychology under the heading of“implicit” or “procedural memory” (Schacter1987, 1996). It contains familiar styles or “melo-dies” of moving, perceiving, and being-with-oth-ers in which our whole bodily and emotionalexperience is engaged. There is an atmospheric,“felt” quality about them that cannot be analy-sed into single elements. Implicit knowledge may,therefore, never be wholly expressed by words—it is only realized in the concrete situation. It mayonly be circumscribed by expressions such as“how it feels...,” “how it is...,” e.g., how it is towaltz, how water feels, how it smelled at homeon Christmas, etc.

The essential structures of implicit knowingare certainly built up in early childhood. Blan-kenburg himself points to a developmental basisof the apparent “a priori” of the common sensein the intersubjective constitution of the life-world. (“Every child knows these things!” as hispatient complains.) Now this implicit knowing ismainly imparted to the child by way of imita-tion, i.e., by the mimetic capacities of the lived-body. Infant research has shown that even new-born babies are able to imitate expressions ofothers, to transpose the seen gestures and facialmovements into their own bodily proprioception(Meltzoff and Moore 1977, 1989). Visual, prop-rioceptive, and motoric modalities are integratedinto one intermodal space (sensus communis).One’s own body and the other’s body are experi-enced as similar. There is a sphere of bodily sensi-bility and mutual resonance that we all share fromthe beginning with others as embodied subjects.

In this way, as Stern (1985) and Beebe, Lach-mann, and Jaffe (1997) have described, schemasof interactions are formed and laid down in thechild’s implicit memory, integrating the sensoric,the motoric, and the emotional modes. The childinternalizes not isolated images of significant oth-

ers or “objects” but, rather, mutual experiencesand sequences of interaction. From this resultswhat Lyons-Ruth (1998) and Stern (1998) havetermed an “implicit relational knowledge.” It isa preverbal, not symbolically encoded, knowl-edge of how to get along with others—how tohave fun with them, how to express joy, elicitattention, avoid rejection, restore interrupted con-tact, etc. It is a procedural knowledge in thesense of being accessible only in contact withothers, and of being organized temporally: as afeeling for the rhythm of action and reaction, forthe crescendo and decrescendo of a sequence ofbehavior, for the “dancing steps” of the interac-tion. Implicit relational knowledge is a “musi-cal” memory—one must be able to hear the “un-dertones,” the “music” that plays inaudibly inthe interaction with the other. Also, when wespeak of the sense of “tact,” it points to therelevance of rhythm and synchronization for theintercorporeal sphere. Common sense is also afeeling for the proper timing.

Let us summarize: In implicit memory, singleelements of movement and perception are cou-pled together to unified wholes. This implicationhappens mainly by repetition and exercise: Thecouplings—or Husserl’s “passive syntheses”—arelearnt and forgotten at the same time, thus eas-ing our everyday performance. We do not haveto think of how we do something and are free todirect ourselves to the aims we choose. However,the reciprocal process is also possible, i.e., anexplication or uncoupling of the connected ele-ments, e.g., by conscious attention that disturbsthe taken-for-granted, implicit performance, orGestalt. We do not see the wood for the treesanymore. If we repeat a familiar word severaltimes aloud and think of the syllables, it willsound strange to us: The implicit coupling ofsyllables and meaning is dissolved. If the musicianconcentrates on his individual fingers, he willstumble in his run, as we also will when runningdown the stairs and thinking of the single steps.Explication thus disturbs the former familiarityand leads to an alienation or disintegration.

This pathological explication also applies toschizophrenia; it may be regarded, following Blan-kenburg, as a fundamental loss of implicit knowl-

FUCHS / THE TACIT DIMENSION � 325

edge and familiarity with the world and with others.Patients often experience a disintegration of hab-its or automatic performances, a “disautomation”:

“I found recently that I was thinking of myself doingthings before I would do them. If I am going to sitdown, for example, I have got to think of myself andalmost see myself sitting down before I do it. It’s thesame with other things like washing, eating, and evendressing — things that I have done at one time with-out even bothering or thinking about at all.…I amalways conscious of what I am doing.” (McGhie andChapman 1961)

The units of meaningfully connected actionsare deconstructed. Patients have to compensatefor this disautomation by an awareness of eachsingle movement that they have to prepare andrelease deliberately. This results in a loss of spon-taneity and in what Sass (1992) called “hyperre-flexivity”: Each action needs reflection and voli-tion in a way that one could call a “Cartesian”action of the soul on the body. It is no wonderthat the patients speak of a split between theirmind and their body, of feeling hollowed out orrobot-like. The sense of being alive depends onbeing an incarnated subject, i.e., on the integrationof sensori-motor elements into meaningful unitiesthat are at the person’s disposal. In perception,the disturbance manifests itself in an impairedcapacity to recognize and categorize familiar pat-terns, which, in turn, leads to an overload ofdetails; e.g., features of familiar faces may lookodd and distorted like masks. Finally, the sphereof intercorporeity, based on the implicit feelingfor atmospheric qualities, may be fundamentallydisturbed, as shown by a patient of mine:

“For some time I had a feeling as if my clothes did notseem appropriate any more. My gait had changed; Iwalked stiffly and did not know how to hold myhands. My face seemed changed, too, and I began towonder whether I might be regarded as a prostitute.Men looked at me so strangely....I took passport pic-tures of myself in order to see if I only imagined that.Then I began to feel sort of a charging or tension inmy body when others came near to me. Finally Ithought I should be made a prostitute by brain manip-ulation….” (Fuchs 2001, 165)

The patient is no longer able to use her bodilyfeelings as tacit means of perceiving the world.By the explication of single details of movement

and perception, the intercorporeal sphere hasbecome unfamiliar and artificial. The patient’sbody has come to seem distant and strange toher, reminding her of a prostitute. As Blanken-burg’s patient, she loses the sense of “taste“ or“tact,” the feeling for what is appropriate anddecent in everyday situations; but this time thealienation of intercorporeity leads directly to adelusional interpretation.

By referring to phenomenology and develop-mental psychology, I have tried to point out animplicit, bodily basis of common sense, namely,in the intercorporeal sphere. By embodying moreand more elements of perception and interac-tion, the child learns to use his body as a mediumto understand the others and to make himselfunderstood. Practical understanding in the life-world is orginally based on an implicit, intuitiveknowledge mediated by the lived-body. It is there-fore no coincidence that the term “commonsense” has its origins in the Aristotelian sensuscommunis, meaning the embodied unity of thesenses. The question of how the implicit knowl-edge, the “wisdom of the body,” comes to suffera pathological explication and disintegration inschizophrenia still remains open for further study.In any case, Blankenburg has pointed out thetacit dimension that may lead us to a betterunderstanding of psychotic experience.

ReferencesBeebe, B., F. Lachmann, and J. Jaffe. 1997. Mother-

infant interaction structures and presymbolic self-and object-representations. Journal of RelationalPerspectives 7:133–82.

Behnke, E. A. 1997. Body. In Encyclopedia of phe-nomenology, 66–71. Dordrecht, Boston, and Lon-don: Kluver Academic Publishers.

Fuchs, T. 1995. Coenaesthesie. Zur Geschichte desGemeingefühls. Zeitschrift fuer klinische Psychologie,Psychopathologie und Psychotherapie 43:103–12.

———. 2001. Psychopathologie von Leib und Raum.Phaenomenologische und empirische Untersuchun-gen zu depressiven und paranoiden Erkrankungen.Darmstadt: Steinkopff.

Lyons-Ruth, K. 1998. Implicit relational knowing: Itsrole in development and psychoanalytic treatment.Infant Mental Health Journal 19:282–89.

McGhie, A., and J. Chapman. 1961. Disorders ofattention and perception in early schizophrenia.British Journal of Medical Psychology 34:103–16.

326 � PPP / VOL. 8, NO. 4 / DECEMBER 2001

Meltzoff A., and M. K. Moore. 1977. Imitation offacial and manual gestures by human neonates.Science 198:75–78.

———. 1989. Imitation in newborn infants: Explor-ing the range of gestures imitated and the underly-ing mechanisms. Developmental Psychology25:954–62.

Merleau-Ponty, M. 1945. Phénomenologie de la per-ception. Paris: Gallimard. (Phenomenology of per-ception) trans. Colin Smith. New York: Humani-ties Press, 1996.

Polanyi, M. 1967. The tacit dimension. Garden City,N.Y.: Anchor Books.

Sass, L. 1992. Madness and modernism: Insanity inthe light of modern art, literature and thought.New York: Basic Books.

Schacter, D. L. 1987. Implicit memory: History andcurrent status. Journal of Experimental Psycholo-gy 13:501–18.

———. 1996. Searching for memory. The brain, themind, and the past. New York: Basic Books.

Stern, D. 1985. The interpersonal world of the infant.New York: Basic Books.

———. 1998. The process of therapeutic change in-volving implicit knowlegde: Some implications ofdevelopmental observations for adult psychothera-py. Infant Mental Health Journal 19:300–308.