THE LIVED AND THE OBJECTIVE
BODY, SPACE AND INTERDISCIPLINARY ENCOUNTERS IN EMBODIED AND ENACTIVE COGNITION

John J. Sykes

At first glance, it may seem that the radical attention paid to the content of lived experience, as promoted by phenomenologists, has no readily justifiable place alongside scientific modes of inquiry. However, despite this apparent tension, so-called embodied and enactive approaches to cognition have freely recruited findings from phenomenology, psychiatry and the neurosciences into singular, interdisciplinary accounts for the purpose of addressing a myriad of complex research questions. In this article, I aim to focus on how, through the use of particular case examples, such disciplines might indeed mutually inform one another by jointly incorporating both the “lived” and “objective” dimensions of their subject matter. To accomplish this, I briefly review how the notion of the lived body has migrated from phenomenology to inform accounts of embodiment in both the neurosciences and clinical psychology. Thereafter, I analyse how emerging literature on spatial cognition and the distinction between lived and objective space and its clinical manifestations can serve as a parallel to, and complement, the distinction between the lived and objective body that remains central to embodied-enactive approaches. Finally, I argue that phenomenological approaches to both psychopathology and experimental neuroscience are well-suited to describing the kinds of experiences inherent to certain clinical conditions and patterns of neurophysiological activity, especially where alternative conceptual frameworks may prove less conceptually compatible in an embodied and/or enactive context