The Embodied Mind as Pharmacological Target: Towards a Phenomenology of Psychopharmacological Interventions

Psychopharmacology is currently plagued by reductionism since it is understood as the treatment of biological and behavioral symptoms of mental disorders without taking into account the subjective life of the self in relation to others. Psychopharmacological interventions, such as antidepressants and antipsychotics, must be situated and discussed within the embodied context of the organism-environment. To overcome this inadequacy, we present a framework for understanding the effects of psychopharmacological treatments that move beyond the traditional reductive, biochemical perspective by putting forward an embodied and enactive approach to psychopharmacology that integrates phenomenology, neuroscience, and physiology. This approach explores how medications impact not only symptoms but also patients' lived experiences, existential feelings, and embodied sense of self. Psychotropic drugs interact with the entire lived body, influencing emotional processing, perception, and the embodied self, determining emotional blunting, changing affect, temperamental dispositions, and altering motor function and sensory experience. This fundamentally shapes patients' embodied engagement with their environment, which reciprocally influences the entire embodied system, thereby promoting a more nuanced understanding of treatment effects that account for physiological and experiential dynamics. We also emphasize the importance of the clinician as a mediator of embodied change, moving beyond the mere management of symptoms to supporting patients in navigating the complex shifts in self-perception and relationality induced by pharmacotherapy. We advocate for the development of phenomenological profiles of psychopharmacological drugs, as well as tailored, patient-centered psychopharmacological interventions that take into account not only clinical efficacy but also the subjective and embodied changes these treatments induce, and how they interact with the patients’ unique phenomenological profiles.