Dimensions of embodiment: a performative and enactive approach to the issue of corporeity in schizophrenia and eating disorders

The aim of this work is to enrich the enactive approach to cognition with the observations coming from the phenomenological interpretation of some symptoms of schizophrenia and eating disorders. Albeit different for many aspects, these two pathological conditions share a core feature, that is, they are both characterized by the patient’s sense of “disembodiment”, a feeling of detachment and distance from the dimension of the lived corporeity that arise at the level of the body schema (especially in schizophrenia) and at the level of the body image (in both schizophrenia and eating disorders). As I will discuss throughout the chapters, the body schema and the body image correspond respectively to the performative and the perceptual aspects of one’s own bodily experience and undergo through several kinds of distortion that undermine the patient’s enactive and pre-reflective attunement to the environment. In my view, focusing on bodily processes such as the body schema and the body image and analyzing the implications behind their pathological disruption may be a good way for enactivism to overcome some criticism.