Enactive and simondonian reflections on mental disorders

Abstract

As an alternative to linear and unidimensional perspectives focused mainly on either organic or psychological processes, the enactive approach to life and mind—a branch of 4-E (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended) cognitive theories—offers an integrative framework to study mental disorders that encompasses and articulates organic, sensorimotor, and intersubjective dimensions of embodiment. These three domains are deeply entangled in a non-trivial manner. A question remains on how this systemic and multi-dimensional approach may be applied to our understanding of mental disorders and symptomatic behavior. Drawing on Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation (focusing particularly on the concepts of tension, metastability, and preindividual), we provide some enactive conceptual tools to better understand the dynamic, interactive, and multi-dimensional nature of human bodies in mental disorders and psychopathological symptoms. One of such tools cursiva is sense-making, a key notion that captures the relational process of generating meaning by interacting with the sociomaterial environment. The article analyzes five aspects related to sense-making: temporality, adaptivity, the multiplicity of normativities it involves, the fundamental role of tension, and its participatory character. On this basis, we draw certain implications for our understanding of mental disorders and diverse symptoms, and suggest their interpretation in terms of difficulties to transform tensions and perform individuation processes, which result in a reduction of the field of potentialities for self-individuation and sense-making.

Landau model for illustrating the learning and unlearning process of nociplastic pain

“…Extensions of the model can be used to address learning/unlearning of other mental syndromes such as anxiety, depression, functional or somatoform symptoms, and addictions, which seem to have a common underlying mechanism ( 79 , 88 ). It is interesting to notice that biopsychosocial loops are in both, hypervigilance bias and curiosity bias, landscapes, as might happen with screen addictions where curiosity bias is looking for the sensation of surprise.…”

“…This is in line to the proposal of extending criticality and symmetry breaking, where the living state of matter is interpreted as an ongoing extended or critical transition, always transient to a renewed organism ( 69 ). We conceive the learning process in the line to the proposal given in the Enactive plus Simondonian approach ( 88 ), which emphasizes that “growth and transformation processes can arguably be seen as fundamental for self-individuation for humans, not only subsistence.” This devenir seems to be in line with the process of individuation proposed by Simondon as the generation of metastable states by transforming tensions in the environment or in the society ( 91 ).…”

Desde el pluralismo integrativo hacia un modelo enactivo en psiquiatría

“…Desde esta perspectiva enactiva, la naturaleza de los trastornos psiquiátricos no es exclusiva del cerebro, sino que la unidad de análisis adecuada es más bien el individuo que interactúa con su mundo, más la historia de estas interacciones (De Haan, 2020a). Dicha perspectiva pretende Revista Culturas Científicas Departamento de Filosofía | Universidad de Santiago de Chile así evitar todo tipo de integración neuroreduccionista en psiquiatría, a la vez que generar un pluralismo integración de las diversas dimensiones psiquiátricas sin caer en dualismos o relativismos (De Jaegher y Di Paolo, 2007;De Haan, 2020b;Nielsen y Ward, 2018, 2020aMaiese, 2021Maiese, , 2022García y Arandia, 2022).…”

“…Dicho de diversas formas, en palabras de De Haan (2020a, p.66): "un monismo pluriforme"; en palabras de Di Paolo et al, (2010, p.36): "una especie de naturalismo no-reduccionista y no-funcionalista". Recientemente, en consideración a sus premisas tanto anti-dualistas como anti-reduccionistas, se ha descrito a la ontología enactiva como una ontología relacional (De Haan, 2020a;García y Arandia, 2022). Así es descrito por De Haan: La característica fundamental de la ontología enactiva es que las relaciones, y no solo la materia, importan [matter].…”

“…Para la psiquiatría enactiva, la unidad de análisis es la persona en interacción (sense-making) con su mundo, considerando la historia de interacciones previas e individuación participativa como intersubjetividad encarnada (sense-making participativo) (De Jaegher, 2013;De Haan, 2020b;García y Arandia, 2022). Para De Haan (2020a), la alteración de la toma de sentido en los trastornos mentales se caracteriza por la presencia de sesgos estructurales en determinadas direcciones, como patrones sostenidos de alteraciones en el proceso sense-making.…”