The Embodied Mind as Pharmacological Target: Towards a Phenomenology of Psychopharmacological Interventions.

Summary

Psychopharmacology is often reductionist, focusing on biological symptoms while ignoring patients' subjective experiences. This paper proposes an embodied and enactive framework integrating phenomenology, neuroscience, and physiology. It argues that psychotropic drugs affect the entire lived body—altering emotional processing, perception, motor function, and the embodied sense of self—and that these changes shape patients' engagement with their environment. The clinician's role shifts from symptom management to mediating embodied change. The authors advocate for phenomenological drug profiles and patient-centered interventions that account for subjective and embodied effects.

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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.

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