An enactive approach to anxiety and anxiety disorders

This article sketches in which way clinical practice and the science of anxiety and anxiety disorders could benefit from an enactive approach. It starts with the clinical phenomenology of anxiety and anxiety disorder. It describes why traditional theories of emotion have difficulty doing justice to aspects of anxiety that are important in psychiatric practice, most importantly the contextual embedding and the self-referential nature of manifestations of anxiety. The article shows how an enactive approach provides a possible route to do justice to these two dimensions of anxiety, both theoretically and practically. Finally, I situate the enactive approach conceptually, by interpreting it as a primarily philosophical paradigm with strong suggestions for both the theory and clinical practice of psychiatry.