gray metal bridge over river during daytime

Title: Temporality and Emotional Inertia in Fear Disorders: Affectivity, Embodiment, Unforgetfulness

The project aims to redefine the concept of affective memory within the paradigms of enactivism to explain fear-related disorders such as PTSD, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and Panic Disorder through this lens. This leads to certain conceptual innovations, such as a causalist account of enactivist remembering, an enactivist account of the unconscious, the notion of embodied vicarious memory and a criticism of collective mental time travel holding positive appraisals due to the implications of subject-media interaction in anxious states.

Specific Aims

  1. Affective Memory Concept: Develop a new concept of affective memory aligned with enactivism and embodied cognition.

  2. Emotional Reactions: Explain how PTSD, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and Panic Disorder involve mental time travel due to emotional and bodily re-enactment.

  3. Collective Trauma: Investigate how collective transgenerational trauma functions as embodied vicarious memory, triggering PTSD in communities through emotional contagion and extended bodily emotions/atmospheres.

  4. Panic Disorder and Déjà Vu: Explore Panic Disorder as a form of déjà vu.

Methodology

  • Examination of medical literature and patient reports

  • Philosophical engineering to redefine affective memory

  • Conceptual analysis