Towards an Enactive Approach to Health: An Integrative Perspective which Considers Interdependence, Agency, Autonomy and Participatory Sensemaking in Therapeutic Phenomena

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Background

The enactive perspective proposes that cognition is Enacted, Embodied, Embedded, Extended, and Affective. From this point of view, an organism creates its world by dynamically selecting certain environmental characteristics that make sense to it. This approach has contributed notably to the cognitive science field over recent decades. The enactive approach to health, however, is an emerging topic of interest – it highlights the significance of agency, autonomy, participatory sensemaking, affectivity, and empathy in therapeutic processes. This cutting-edge approach has contributed fruitful insights into the complex and multidimensional human phenomenon of health, which is traversed by sociocultural, historical, and ecological matters. It seems timely to make use of the strengths of the enactive perspective to address the issue of health and promote research into both the theoretical and pragmatic aspects of this approach.

Health is frequently tackled from a dualistic perspective that separates mind and body. The medical system tends to assume that experts must solve health issues while patients passively receive prescriptions. Patient agency is thus constrained, and first-person experience is dismissed. Following the enactive approach to the social domain, sensemaking emerges from intersubjective dynamic participation, a phenomenon that merits further research. In line with this, empathy and affect are inextricably involved in physician-patient relationships. Affect and emotion constitute the basis of how we cope with the world and, from the moment we are born, self-affection is cut across by alterity. In addition, medical systems tend to focus on discrete elements, ignoring the bidirectional interplay between local and global dynamics. The promising enactive perspective considers health as an emergent process, not reducible to local rules. Comprehension of how global and local levels interact could shed new light on the health problem. The enactive viewpoint might help us go beyond reductionist health approaches, raising awareness of the complex interrelations between interdependence, agency, autonomy, and participatory sense-making in the therapeutic process.

This Research Topic seeks to gather research that addresses the health problem from an enactive perspective, which comprehends the following topics:
Health as an emergent multidimensional process
Dynamic interaction between global and local levels in the health issue
Integrative medicine
The interplay between emotions, affectivity, and health
Agency and autonomy of the patient in the therapeutic process
Empathic phenomena involved in the therapeutic field
Participatory sense-making in physician-patient interactions

We invite authors to submit: Research articles, Systematic reviews, Methods, Perspectives, Case reports, Conceptual analyses, and Empirical studies.

Keywords: Embodiment, Enaction, Global and Local Dynamics, Empathy, Affectivity

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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