The best books for understanding the uncanny feeling of felt presence

My book starts with a series of conversations with people who have psychosis and hear voices. Some people described to me a particularly unusual experience: the feeling of a voice being there, even when it wasn’t speaking.

As an undergraduate student one of the books that first got me thinking about these topics was Richard Bentall’s Madness Explained. It really opened my eyes to the possibilities of the mind and how we can think about experiences like hallucinations without necessarily pathologizing them.

This book was my gateway to then learning about things like the International Hearing Voices moment, which argues against an overly medicalized understanding of unusual experiences like voice-hearing. My book is quite wide-ranging, but I’ve tried to retain some of the ethos of Madness Explained in how I’ve approached the world of uncanny presences. 

Some of the most famous felt presences are those that occur in survival situations under the name of the “Third Man”.

The name comes from a line in The Wasteland, by T.S. Eliot, in which he recalled the story of Antarctic explorers being accompanied by a phantom figure. Tat story was Ernest Shackleton’s: at the end of the ill-fated Endurance expedition, Shackleton experienced something like a felt presence when crossing the interior of South Georgia Island to save the rest of his crew.

He recounts the story of the whole expedition in South, and it’s an amazing read. When I was writing my book, I was really struck by how good a psychologist Shackleton was: he was constantly trying to understand and motivate his crew, while being acutely aware of the impact of the situation and the environment around them.

At several points he directly comments on the hallucinatory nature of Antarctica – almost as if he already knew what was coming at the end of the mission. 

Over the past few years I have had the great pleasure of learning from a number of academics and researchers who work in literary studies rather than psychology.

The capacity for fiction to express and represent the more uncanny and ineffable aspects of human experience is unbounded, and I have my colleagues to thank for introducing me to the stories of Toni Morrison, Hilary Mantel, and Virginia Woolf.

I could have chosen any number of texts, but one I particularly like is Grief is the Thing with Feathers. Poetic in form but still a novel, it brilliantly depicts the presence of grief – personified as a jet-black crow – that visits a widower and his two young sons.  

Staying with fiction, this is a book (or rather, a trilogy of books), that has so much to say about presences and voices.

It made a huge influence on me as a young reader with the first volume, Northern Lights, being released when I was 10. Throughout the series the prominence of daemons, spectres, angels, and ghosts prompts readers to be constantly thinking about questions concerning self and others, and the divisions of mind, body, and soul.

In his collection of essays, Daemon Voices, Pullman has also written about how fictional characters begin speaking for themselves as part of the creative process – a form of imaginative companionship that I discuss towards the end of my book.   

An obvious influence on the style and format of my book is Oliver Sacks, whose example looms large over anyone seeking to explain the mind and brain primarily via story and narrative.

But a writer who provided as big an influence for me in writing this book is the psychiatrist Irvin Yalom, and his 1989 book, Love’s Executioner. The book contains several tales from Yalom’s practice in psychotherapy, and the title story concerns a story of obsessional and unrequited love that must be dispelled – Yalom must be the executioner of the misplaced affection.

The human ability to create whole relationships in our minds – as if another mind is constantly with us – is sensitively expressed and navigated by Yalom, and crucial to how we can understand the personal meaning and significance of many experiences of felt presence.