Depression and Psychosis- Perspectives on the Body, Enactivism, and Psychotherapy

Abstract

This article will discuss how the ‘enactive’ approach to cognition and psychological processes can help further clarifying and developing a more heuristic framework for the understanding of severe mental disorders, in this case, depression and schizophrenia. Furthermore, enactivismwill serve as a framework that comprehends depressions and schizophrenia as disorders that encompass three dimensions of human life: subjectivity (experiential domain), the body and the organismic domain, as well as the world (sociality, etc.). All three are intrinsically interwoven and consider processes, which are mental and/or cognitive to be in constant interconnection, since it is by means of this complex and auto-regulatory system that the direct meaningful connection with the world is made.  I argue, however, that while all three components must be considered in severe disorders such as depression or schizophrenia, it remains paramount to maintain that there seem to be several differences in the way the schizophrenic or depressive person ‘enactively’ engages with the world and others, or not. For instance, while subjects with schizophrenia usually have a fragmented feeling of ‘self’, person with depression often have significant difficulties relating to others, and the world. This also depends on the severity in which the other processes have been affected, or not.