This chapter offers an interpretative phenomenology of functional neurological disorder (FND) by attempting to get a sense of ‘what it means’ and ‘what it feels like’ to live with the disorder. Drawing on the author’s own experience as well as first-person accounts from recent qualitative and phenomenologically informed research, the chapter explores the long and difficult journey to get a diagnosis for a neurological disorder that is incompatible with neurological disease and sheds light on how the symptoms of FND can fundamentally alter the meaning-structures that constitute subjectivity. The chapter focuses specifically on the emotion of shame, exploring how shame is both embodied and intersubjective and the extent to which it can disrupt and modify our experience of space and time. The chapter concludes by introducing the concept of ‘vulnerabilisation’ and how the complex, highly specialised, and bureaucratised structure of the healthcare system can cause iatrogenic harm by delegitimising patient experiences and creating unnecessary obstacles for accurate diagnosis and appropriate treatment. The aim is to illuminate the emotional and experiential complexity of the condition, the damaging toll symptoms can take on one’s self-understanding and way of being-in-the-world, and the additional harms the healthcare system can inflict on patients.

This chapter explores the intersection of Aristotle’s virtue ethics and Husserl’s phenomenology within the context of dementia research, emphasising the concept of habits. By introducing curability as the counter-pole to vulnerability, the chapter highlights a shift towards integrating medical and philosophical perspectives. It argues that embodied practices, regarded as meaningful, are key in both preventing and treating dementia. Through Aristotle’s ethics, the chapter examines malign habitualisation in touch with the preventive turn. Here, the vice of intemperance is related to excessive alcohol consumption, alcohol dependence, and Korsakoff’s dementia. Through Husserl’s phenomenology, the chapter examines the power of benign habitualisation, connecting embodiment, narrativity, and affectivity. Drawing on a video of Marta Cinta, a former ballerina with Alzheimer’s, the chapter rethinks influential concepts, such as narrative identity and second nature, through the lens of embodiment. The chapter ultimately demonstrates that embodied habits, when perceived as meaningful, can aid in balancing health, well-being, and eudaimonia. Focusing on the affective sphere, the study contemplates whether we can still feel home in embodied habits despite dementia.

This chapter reconceives core symptoms of schizophrenia by shifting the explanatory centre of gravity from putative structural breakdowns of time-consciousness to its affective distortion as rooted in the living, situated body. Drawing on Heidegger’s existential temporality and Merleau-Ponty’s embodied, social and psychopathological temporality, the authors propose ‘schizophrenic vulnerability’ as a world-involving mode of dysregulation in which affective ‘irruptions’ alter saliency and meaning in past–present–future relations without abolishing structure itself. This argument unfolds across six progressive steps: a critical review of clinical phenomenology’s shift from structural to affective accounts of time, exegetical analyses of relevant notions in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, schizophrenia’s prodromal phase, embodied affective temporality in schizophrenia, intersubjective affective temporality in schizophrenia, and a case study of ‘mission delusions’ in which an affectively charged future mandate reorganises existential time. The chapter concludes by emphasising a perspective that situates schizophrenia at the mind–body–world interface, deepening dialogue between phenomenology and psychiatry.

This chapter introduces the philosophical rationale for investigating emotions in their dimensions of embodiment and existential vulnerability, drawing on phenomenology, psychopathology, and psychotherapy as complementary perspectives. Grounded in phenomenology and enactivism, it argues that emotions are essentially embodied, intersubjective phenomena through which we experience the world as meaningful in the first place. According to this approach, emotions cannot be adequately captured by cognitivist or appraisal-theoretic frameworks alone but must be explored in their embodied dimensions and intertwinement with existential vulnerability. This constitutive vulnerability is described as an ontological condition rooted in the lived body, its essential exposure to others and contingency. The Introduction surveys contemporary philosophy of emotion, mapping competing accounts across cognitive, perceptual, feeling-based, and motivational theories, before arguing that all tend to consider the richness of the lived body insufficiently. The volume’s three parts address the experiential richness of the lived body by moving from phenomenological analyses of emotional life and vulnerability, through psychopathological perspectives, to the transformative role of embodied emotions in psychotherapy. The Introduction thereby establishes embodiment as the conceptual bridge integrating emotion theory, psychopathology, and psychotherapy into a unified inquiry of emotions as a central aspect of human vulnerability.

This chapter provides a critical reflection on past and current research on ethnic and racial discrimination and youth development with recommendations for future research directions. First and foremost, I emphasize the need for positionality, reflexivity, and representational ethics to avoid advancing false or problematic narratives and to advance research that is more transparent and accountable. It also is necessary to distinguish and better contextualize ethnic discrimination (rooted in ethnocentrism) and racial discrimination (rooted in modern imperialism and White supremacy) rather than conflate these two constructs and measure them in ahistorical ways. These considerations require researchers to select or develop critically appropriate measurement tools, moving beyond commonly used measures that may not be relevant or appropriate to all racialized groups. Ethnic and racial discrimination during youth development requires special considerations, as discrimination coincides with identity formation and pubertal development. Yet there remains limited research on the ways in which these developmental tasks and experiences interplay. Given the complexities of how ethnic and racial discrimination manifest during youth development, researchers may want to consider novel methods like storytelling to embody discriminatory experiences and strengthen ecological validity.

Chapter 2 discusses the soteriological nuances of Blake’s preformationist imagery. From the seed in the husk to the larva in the chrysalis, preformationist science offered Blake potent images with which to present the idea that the soul might persist beyond the death of the body. This chapter examines these symbols as they appear across Blake’s corpus, from early illuminated books such as The Book of Thel (1789) and Vision of the Daughters of Albion (1793) to later works such as The Four Zoas and Jerusalem. The chapter also shows how the ecological aspect of this paradigm further provided Blake with the vocabulary to articulate how life after death is ultimately a communal affair. The final section of the chapter, reading Blake through Alfred Gell, explores how attending to the preformationist language of exuviae and shells can shed new light on how to approach the exuvial materiality of the Blakean book.

The brief conclusion summarises the book’s argument about Blake in relation to the critical terms of humanism and posthumanism. It argues that Blake’s nuanced representation of the body, which, in his universe, is simultaneously preformed and self-organised, aligns him with a distinctly Romantic humanism while also allowing him to anticipate the insights of posthumanism. Finally, it suggests that Blake’s works offer the concept of elasticity as an alternative to plasticity – a concept which acknowledges the complexities of embodiment while insisting on the importance of resilience and identity.

John Locke’s influential account of personal identity emphasizes the importance of consciousness.  This had led many commentators to argue that Lockean selves just are consciousnesses.  Charles Taylor has mounted persuasive critiques of this “punctual” Lockean self; such a conception of the self is too thin and stands divorced from our values and moral agency.  This chapter shifts the focus from Locke’s views on personal identity to his views on personhood in an effort to show that Locke is sensitive to the kinds of worries raised by Taylor.  Lockean persons are more than consciousness.  In particular, the chapter focuses on Locke’s exploration and analysis of the complex faculty psychology undergirding consciousness and on the ways in which persons can be embodied.  This allows for a richer conception of the self.  It then argues that this richer conception better aligns with Locke’s own views about the value and importance of the self and with what he says regarding our moral agency and our duty of self-improvement.  Finally, the chapter shows that understanding Locke’s examination of human cognition as contributing to an analysis of the self allows us to resituate him with respect to some of his predecessors in seventeenth-century England.

This chapter introduces the reader to the understanding of the human person articulated by Gregory Palamas (1296–1357) during the late Byzantine Hesychast controversy. The notion of the self elaborated and defended by Palamas is notable for its stress not only on the practice of inner prayer and stillness (“hesychia”) as crucial for the true cultivation of the self, but likewise for its robust defence of the embodiment of the self. Before discussing Palamas’ approach in detail, some background on the question of the relationship of body and soul in Greek patristic thought is offered, with special reference to Maximus the Confessor. This sets the scene for Palamas’ argumentation regarding the body as constitutive of the self together with the soul. Several ways in which Palamas both adopts and challenges classical views of the human self are presented. For instance, while the human soul might be detachable from the body, the human self, or person, is not. In some sense, moreover, every activity of the human self can be understood as a “common activity” of soul and body. The interweaving of body and soul in Palamas’ thought ultimately challenges a straightforward hylomorphic conception of the human being, notwithstanding certain commonalities.

Mary Astell (1666–1731) relies on a Cartesian account of the self to argue that both men and women are essentially thinking things and, hence, that both should perfect their minds or intellects. In offering such an account of the self, Astell might seem to ignore the inescapable fact that we have bodies. This chapter argues that Astell accommodates the self’s embodiment along two main dimensions. First, she tempers her sharp distinction between mind and body by insisting on their union. The mind and body are united in such a way that they exert reciprocal causal influence and form a whole together. Second, she argues that the mind–body union is good, that the union has its own distinctive form of good or perfection, and that the mind should pursue this good alongside its own.

The introduction outlines the main thesis that metaphor is not only for understanding abstract concepts but also for understanding human bodily experience. If the body itself is understood as metaphor, this gives a completely different view of how metaphor functions in thinking, language, and action.