We explore different modes of experience in performance, including various experiences of flow, heedful performance, and habit. In contrast to conceptions that take habit to be automatic or a more-or-less rote repetition of behavior, Dewey and Merleau-Ponty consider habit to be a general bodily responsiveness to the world. Dewey's conception of intelligent habit involves a thoughtful attitude of care and attunement to the parameters of the task. Merleau-Ponty likewise describes habit as being both motor and perceptual. Habit is an open and adaptive way in which the body learns to cope with familiar situations in ways that involve some degree of heedful performance. The deployment of a motor habit, for example, adapts to the specific contour of the situation – different situations make different demands on how the habitual task, here and now, ought to be achieved. This conception of habit meshes well with ecological affordance-based accounts of action and perception.

As Froese and Krueger indicate, much attention has been paid to negative symptomology of schizophrenia known as “dissociality.” Persons with schizophrenia commonly report a detachment from themselves, a kind of disembodiment and depersonalization of the body; and “others become problems to be solved by intellectual effort and no longer present opportunities for spontaneous interpersonal alignment” (Froese & Krueger, 2021, p. 318).

Studies of depression indicate the existence of temporal abnormalities, particularly as related to the perspectival and agentive aspects of lived experience in persons who undergo depression. With reference to these anomalies, there is a long-standing view in phenomenological psychopathology, reinforced by empirical studies, that depression involves a disruption of “intrinsic temporality.” This view is widely incorporated into contemporary enactivist approaches to cognition, which link such a disruption to disorders involving affect, affordances, and narrative aspects of experience. We argue that classical phenomenological accounts of temporal abnormalities in depression do not warrant the supposition of a disruption to “intrinsic temporality,” and that this term itself is ambiguous. Instead, we understand depressive experience primarily in terms of affectivity, which does indeed feedback into the experience of lived time. Our view demonstrates a deeper consensus between phenomenological psychopathology and “4E” approaches, including work on both Gibsonian affordances and narrative, than is typically recognized.

Advancing a radically enactive account of cognition, this chapter argues for the possibility that cultural factors permeate rather than penetrate cognition such that cognition extensively and transactionally incorporates cultural factors in lieu of there being any question of cultural factors having to break into the restricted confines of cognition. We review the limitations of two classical cognitivist, modularist accounts of cognition in addition to a revisionary new order variant of cognitivism – a predictive processing account of cognition (PPC). We argue that the cognitivist interpretation of PPC is conservatively and problematically attached to the idea of inner models and stored knowledge. Instead, we offer a radically enactive alternative account of how cultural factors matter to cognition – one that abandons all vestiges of the idea that cultural factors might contentfully communicate with basic forms of cognition. In place of that idea, we promote the possibility that culture permeates cognition.

This chapter reviews some central issues concerning body self-awareness, the sense of ownership, and how these phenomena are modulated in psychopathology. I argue that various aspects of body self-awareness can be organized in a relatively coherent manner by thinking of them in terms of dynamical gestalts. Taking this approach moves us away from thinking of these issues as involving multiple or different levels, or conceiving of them under hierarchical descriptions that refer to ‘top-down’ versus ‘bottom-up’ processes. Thinking of body self-awareness on the model of a dynamical gestalt allows us to see how different forms of pre-reflective and reflective self-awareness are related in a more holistic fashion.

This commentary on Parnas and Zandersen reinforces their view about scientific reductionism and their insistence on the importance of a phenomenology of the subjective life for diagnosis and explanation. This “phenomenal ontology” includes experiential structures that involve embodiment, temporality, intentionality, selfhood, and intersubjectivity. A phenomenological account of such factors can counter the lack of specificity about self-related phenomena in the DSM. The vignettes they provide point to a rich complexity in the subject’s situation involving a variety of different dimensions or variables related to the self, and disruptions or anomalies across a pattern of aspects, and not just with respect to the minimal level of experience. The full picture of the self, implicit in the clinical vignettes, involves the recognition of a dynamically structured self-pattern of the many variables that make up one’s life. Such a focus on a self-pattern, however, undermines thinking in terms of explanatory levels.