The Missing Self – An Enactive Proposal

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 my talk, I discuss two recent views of psychiatry (by Shaun Gallagher and Sanneke de Haan) that use embodied and enactive cognition as their conceptual basis. I will argue that they have a problem in common with traditional views in psychiatry, namely that they rely on an undertheorized relationship between the individual and their social environment.

I call this the “body-social problem”. As a solution to the body-social problem in psychiatry, I introduce 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.

Miriam Kyselo is a full Professor of Philosophy at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She has a PhD degree in Cognitive Science from the University of Osnabrueck. Miriam’s expertise is in the philosophy of cognitive science, philosophy of psychology, and interdisciplinary research in embodied cognitive science.