Psychopathology, phenomenology and affordances

Abstract

Can affordances help in understanding psychiatric illness and psychopathological experience? In recent work on the philosophy of psychiatry and phenomenology, the answer appears to be a clear 'yes', but some recent worries have emerged that the affordance-concept might be “insuffciently discerning” and thus ill-suited to make sense of psychiatric illness and experience. In this paper I briefy review recent attempts to use the affordance-concept to make sense of psychopathology, as well as the worries voiced by the critics. I argue that much of this criticism is, in fact, best understood as a call for more research and offer some exploratory considerations on how this research might proceed. Specifcally, I argue that an improved understanding of the self-referentiality that is inherent to experiencing affordances can be useful for psychiatry.