Based on the case study of Jeanne, the objective of this article is to study patterns of anorexic people’s specific subjectivity. We seek to identify, in a first-person perspective, the core vulnerability features of anorexic existence, beyond the dimension of food alone. The identification of a psychopathological structure results in a better understanding of Jeanne’s clinical situation and helps formulate psychotherapeutic and prophylactic recommendations. We suggest that so-called “denial” is a psychological mechanism that should be reconsidered. Denial is not a (...) mechanism pertaining to anorexic subjects alone, but is also a process encountered both in the patient’s family and in the therapeutic environment. Anorexic denial is based on anosognosia and the refusal to see one’s own thinness, while other people’s denial consists in a widespread inability to perceive the altruism and intersubjective problematic on which the existence of an anorexic subject fundamentally depends. (shrink)

Today the phenomenological concept of the lived body figures centrally in several philosophical and special scientific debates. In these wide and widening fields, the concept is used with multiple different meanings. In order to clarify and delineate the debates, this paper provides an explication of the phenomenological-transcendental methods. It argues that these methods help us remove the most fundamental ambiguities of the concept of embodiment by distinguishing between the main constituents of the lived body and by illuminating their mutual relations.

Several enactive-phenomenological perspectives have pointed to affectivity as a central aspect of mental disorders. Indeed, from an enactive perspective, sense-making is an inherently affective process. A question remains on the role of different forms of affective experiences (i.e., existential feelings, atmospheres, moods, and emotions) in sense-making and, consequently, in mental disorders. This work elaborates on the enactive perspective on mental disorders by attending to the primordial role of affectivity in the self-individuation process. Inspired by Husserl’s genetic methodology and Simondonian philosophy (...) of individuation, sense-making is described as the process of progressive concretization and structuration of the self-world structures that support the intentionality of conscious experiences. Accordingly, affectivity is described as the force that anticipates a partial self-world coherence in sense-making. Structurally different types of affective experiences are integrated into the genetic picture and, on this basis, a reinterpretation and classification of certain mental disorders, such as schizophrenia, depression, and the anxiety spectrum, is provided. In this way, this work contributes to a phenomenologically informed enactive account of mental disorders as disorders of affectivity. (shrink)