Prof. Dr Miriam Kyselo presented her enactive theory of the self and argued that recent enactive views on psychiatry must answer the problem of the missing self!
Miriam Kyselo from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology gave the lecture on December 17th via Zoom. She started with the premise that what we think of the nature of mind and self is fundamental to what we think of mental health or what a mental disorder is. In her presentation, she discussed two recent views of psychiatry, by Shaun Gallagher and Sanneke de Haan, that use embodied and enactive cognition as their conceptual basis. Kyselo argues that they have a problem in common with traditional views in psychiatry, namely that they rely on an under-theorised relationship between the individual and their social environment. She called this the “body-social problem”. To solve the body-social problem in psychiatry, she introduced the enactive theory of the self. The enactive self adopts a strongly relational view of the human self. It suggests that the constitutive mechanisms of the self transcend the brain to partially include co-embodied interactions with others, also in the case of alterations and disorders of the self. After this inspiring presentation on her new work and an upcoming book, an interesting debate on the nature and future of enactivism ensued.
This lecture was the twelfth in the 2024 series of seminars on “Philosophy and Psychiatry” organized by the Center for Philosophy at the Institute of Social Sciences. The seminar aims to allow young colleagues and doctoral students to present and enhance their work through the discussions following each lecture.
