TPAB · Toward a Phenomenology of the Anxious Body
FP7 — People (Marie Curie Actions)
- Duration
- 2014-10-01 → 2017-09-30
- EU contribution
- €263,058
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MC-IOF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Toward a Phenomenology of the Anxious Body
Toward a Phenomenology of the Anxious Body (TPAB) is a study of anxiety, which employs an interdisciplinary methodology involving philosophy, cognitive science, and psychoanalysis. While the concept of anxiety has assumed a central role in the history of philosophy since the time of Kierkegaard up to Heidegger, a sustained and rigorous study of anxiety and the bodily self remains incomplete. The TPAB project attends to this oversight. To achieve this, the project uses an original and novel methodology that combines a first-person perspective with theories of psychoanalysis as well as recent empirical work. To understand the meaning of anxiety as it plays a role in our theoretical and experiential account of being a bodily subject, more than one disciplinary perspective is required. Anxiety’s complexity exceeds the confines of any given method, and therefore implicates an interdisciplinary methodology involving philosophy, cognitive science, and psychoanalysis by necessity. While maintaining phenomenology as a foundation, the justification for incorporating other approaches is to establish a mutually edifying and complementary dialogue, which can allow us to gain a broader perspective of anxiety than would be available from one perspective alone. Employing this framework, the project sets out to achieve the following aims: 1. RO1. To investigate the relation between anxiety and bodily subjectivity by focusing on key issues such as bodily ownership, bodily identification, and the materiality of the self. To ascertain to what extent anxiety challenges existing ideas of subjectivity. 2. RO2. To investigate the role other people play in contributing to the anxious person’s sense of self. Moreover, to suggest that intersubjectivity is fundamentally an issue of intercorporeality (i.e., that the relation between self and other is founded in the body). 3. RO3. To explore how the anxious person’s bodily experience is manifest in their relation with spatiality. In particular, to argue that spatiality, far from a homogenous backdrop to experience, is co-constituted between body and world via the idea of mood. 4. RO4. To explore the issue of anxiety within notions of wellbeing and normativity. To achieve this by placing phenomenology and psychoanalysis in dialogue with one another. In doing so, to make an original contribution to the treatment and understanding of anxiety from both a theoretical and applied context.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The project, Toward a Phenomenology of the Anxious Body (TPAB), is a study of anxiety, which employs an interdisciplinary methodology involving philosophy, cognitive science, and psychoanalysis. Anxiety is the most common form of mental illness in the US and UK, affecting 18% of the population in the US and 13% in the UK. Despite this, a rigorous analysis of anxiety at both an experiential and conceptual level remains overlooked. The project attends to this oversight. To achieve this, the project uses an original and novel methodology that combines a first-person perspective with state-of-the-art research in cognitive science. The project involves spending two years during the outgoing phase at the University of Memphis, School of Philosophy where the applicant will gain technical and complementary skills by working with the leading figure in embodied cognition, Shaun Gallagher. Dr. Trigg will then return to University College Dublin, School of Philosophy for the final year, where he will transfer knowledge acquired in the outgoing phase under the mentorship of Dermot Moran, the leading specialist in phenomenology. The research findings are then implemented during the return phase at policy level through collaborative research with medical practitioners. The training objective for the project is to gain the necessary skills required to becoming an independent researcher at a leading research institution in the EU. This objective is possible thanks to several factors, such as the expertise of the host departments, the excellent infrastructure in place, and the existing synergy between the outgoing and return scientists-in-charge. The impact of the TPAB project on EU Excellence will be to position the issue of anxiety on the research horizon; to diversify the research horizon through the novel methodology; and to make an enduring contribution to the EU strategy for the future of mental health by tackling societal challenges such as stigma and exclusion.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN, NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, DUBLIN · DublinCoordinatorIreland
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union