The past twenty years have seen an increase in the importance of the body in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind. This ‘embodied’ trend challenges the orthodox view in cognitive science in several ways: it downplays the traditional ‘mind-as-computer’ approach and emphasizes the role of interactions between the brain, body, and environment. In this article, I review recent work in the area of embodied cognitive science and explore the approaches each takes to the ideas of consciousness, computation and representation. Finally, I look at the current relationship between orthodox cognitive science and the study of mental disorder, and consider the implications that the embodied trend could have for issues in psychopathology.

Key words: cognition, computation, consciousness, dynamical systems, embodiment, enactivism, extended mind, phenomenology, representation.

I argue that theory theory approaches to autism offer a wholly inadequate explanation of autistic symptoms because they offer a wholly inadequate account of the non-autistic understanding of others. As an alternative I outline interaction theory, which incorporates evidence from both developmental and phenomenological studies to show that humans are endowed with important capacities for intersubjective understanding from birth or early infancy. As part of a neurophenomenological analysis of autism, interaction theory offers an account of interpersonal problems that is fully consistent with the variety of social and nonsocial symptoms found in autism.

Within the philosophy of psychiatry and the study of psychopathology more broadly, there is rapidly growing interest in embodied, embedded, and enactive approaches to mental disorder. Two recent approaches have attempted to provide overarching frameworks, considering the conceptual nature of mental disorder itself from an embodied, embedded, and enactive view. These are de Haan’s ‘Enactive Psychiatry,’ and Nielsen’s ‘Embodied, Embedded, and Enactive Psychopathology,’ These two frameworks were developed essentially in parallel. This article compares the two frameworks, exploring their similarities as well as three key differences. Some relative strengths and weaknesses are explored. It is argued the two frameworks are largely compatible, do different work to one another, and are best understood as complimentary. Related to the differences explored, three recommendations are made for the continued development of an embodied, embedded, and enactive conceptualization of mental disorder.