The Embodied Mind as Pharmacological Target: Towards a Phenomenology of Psychopharmacological Interventions.
Stefan Jerotić, Janko Nešić, Vuk Vuković, Luís Madeira
Psychopathology 2025 DOI: 10.1159/000548625 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Philosophy of mind |
| Keywords | Circular causality Embodiment Enactivism Existential feelings Psychopharmacology |
| Citations | 3 |
| Key points | Argues that psychopharmacological treatments must be understood through an embodied and enactive approach that integrates phenomenology, neuroscience, and physiology, moving beyond biochemical reductionism to account for patients' lived experiences and embodied sense of self. |
Abstract
Psychopharmacology is currently plagued by reductionism since it is understood as the treatment of biological and behavioural symptoms of mental disorders without taking into account the subjective life of the self in relation to others. Psychopharmacological interventions, such as antidepressants and antipsychotics, must be situated and discussed within the embodied context of the organism-environment. In this paper, we present a framework for understanding the effects of psychopharmacological treatments that move beyond the traditional reductive, biochemical perspective by putting forward an embodied and enactive approach to psychopharmacology that integrates phenomenology, neuroscience, and physiology. This approach explores how medications impact not only symptoms but also patients' lived experiences, existential feelings, and embodied sense of self. Psychotropic drugs interact with the entire lived body, influencing emotional processing, perception, and the embodied self, determining emotional blunting, changing affect, temperamental dispositions, and altering motor function and sensory experience. This fundamentally shapes patients' embodied engagement with their environment, which reciprocally influences the entire embodied system, thereby promoting a more nuanced understanding of treatment effects that account for physiological and experiential dynamics. We emphasize the importance of the clinician as a mediator of embodied change, moving beyond the mere management of symptoms to supporting patients in navigating the complex shifts in self-perception and relationality induced by pharmacotherapy. We advocate for the development of phenomenological profiles of psychopharmacological drugs, as well as tailored, patient-centred psychopharmacological interventions that take into account not only clinical efficacy but also the subjective and embodied changes these treatments induce, and how they interact with the patients' unique phenomenological profiles.
Comparable studies
Other theoretical and historical papers on philosophy of mind, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Psychosis as a state of aberrant salience: a framework linking biology, phenomenology, and pharmacology in schizophrenia. | 2003 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| From dopamine to salience to psychosis--linking biology, pharmacology and phenomenology of psychosis. | 2005 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| How do the brain's time and space mediate consciousness and its different dimensions? Temporo-spatial theory of consciousness (TTC). | 2017 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| The phenomenology of deep brain stimulation-induced changes in OCD: an enactive affordance-based model. | 2013 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Looking for the Self: Phenomenology, Neurophysiology and Philosophical Significance of Drug-induced Ego Dissolution | 2017 | Theoretical or philosophical paper |
Citations in the library
Cited by 2
Cites 11
- Understanding subjective experience in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy: The need for phenomenology Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry November 17, 2022
- An Embodied Cognition Perspective on the Role of Interoception in the Development of the Minimal Self. Frontiers in Psychology 2021
- Putting down the revolt: Enactivism as a philosophy of nature. Frontiers in Psychology October 21, 2022
- Body social models of disability: Examining enactive and ecological approaches. Frontiers in Psychology 2023
- Schizophrenia and the bodily self. Schizophrenia Research July 1, 2024
and 6 more in the library