The term Phantomology is based on the Greek phántasma, apparition; the phantoms that are in the focus are not ghosts or spectres (cf. Derrida, 1994), but placeholders for something that is absent: as in the case of phantom pain, which refers to the perception of painful sensations in a part of the body that is no longer there, for example because it has been surgically or traumatically removed.
The key point here is: The limb, organ or eye is missing, but the pain felt there is real.
Pain is always real. There is this sequence of the sonnet "In Time of War" bei W. H. Auden, starting with 'Yes, we are going to suffer, now' (1945, p. 326), including the line "pain is real".
It is a basic but essential statement in the context of this research.
Not only phantom pain, but the broader concept of phantom experience is the subject of Phantomology.
These are experiences that were not really experienced, such as traumatic events in early childhood – events that were not (or not fully) integrated into the ego system and therefore did not become part of our – accessible – memory. Something has happened, the body knows about it, shows the traces, but it has happened in the time of zero. Zero time is a term used to describe a point in time when something starts, happens, or changes. At the same time, when we say that something happened in zero time, this can mean that it took no time at all, metaphorically speaking. In physics it is possible to set t=0 as the point at which a measurement or an event begins.
The focus of the Phantomolgy project lies on what is called zero processes; this concept is presented in chapter ZERO.
The aim of the Phantomology project is to develop artistic strategies, involving poetry, sound art and drawing, for dealing with these phantoms, guided by the question of how to grasp and investigate them as something absent.
The challenge is that it is ultimately about nothingness, timelessness, emptiness; it is about the void and the striving to fill voids as a basic human desire, this desire to give content to the gaps we are constantly confronted with in the timelines of our lives.
I always thought the name "phantom pain" strange and misleading,
because pain is real, as Auden emphasizes, "Yes, we are
going to suffer, now [...], pain is real" (1945, p. 326).
It is fundamental, and it was also important for me when I did
my pain study (Macek, 2018), to promote the overcoming of this
strange but still common dichotomy between physical and
psychological pain.
David Morris, in his book The Culture of Pain, calls this the
myth of the two pains, which he intends to demystify.
He states that "pain only emerges at the intersection of bodies,
minds and cultures. Pain is never the sole creation of our
anatomy and physiology" (Morris, 1991, p. 3).
According to the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotzky,
there is a law of the emotional reality of imagination.
This means "that every construct of the imagination
has an effect on our feelings, and if this construct
does not in itself correspond to reality,
nonetheless the feelings it evokes are real feelings,
feelings a person truly experiences."
(Vygotzky, 1930/2004, pp. 19-20)