Excerpt: Recent work has begun to apply embodied and enactivist approaches to understanding mental disorders (Colombetti 2013; Fuchs 2009; Fuchs and Schlimme 2009; Zatti and Zarbo 2015). We believe that cultural psychiatry stands to gain a great deal from these new paradigms. This chapter will outline an approach to the cultural neurophenomenology of mental disorders that focuses on the interplay of culturally shaped developmental processes and modes of neural information processing that are reflected in embodied experience, narrative practices that are structured by ideologies of personhood, culturally shared ontologies or expectations, and situated modes of enactment that reflect social positioning and selffashioning. Research on metaphor theory suggests ways to connect the approaches to embodiment and enactment in cognitive science with the rich literature on the cultural shaping of illness experience in current medical and psychological anthropology. The resulting view of cultural enactment has broad implications for psychiatric theory, research, and practice, which we will illustrate with examples from the study of the phenomenology of delusions.

Anthropologists and psychologists have long debated the relative importance of nature and nurture in human affairs. By and large anthropologists have opted for what might be called the ‘naïve culturological position’ that when our species developed culture, it left its biological roots behind. Psychologists, on the other hand, until relatively recently, have largely ignored the impact of culture upon the processes and functioning of the human mind. In their attempt to approximate the rigors of scientific methods practiced in the so-called ‘hard’ sciences, it is often a naïve scientism that drives theorizing and research in the discipline. The single most decisive impediment to the emergence of a mature anthropology and psychology is the mind–body schism. We will argue that bridging the mind–body schism requires a language by means of which we can refer to individual experience, culture and extramental reality simultaneously. Our approach is that of a cultural neurophenomenology that allows us to speak about the social and biological factors that produce, potentiate and limit human experience. We show that one key concept in unifying the languages of these different domains is ‘information’. We trace the history of the concept of information, and demonstrate that from the perspective of Fisher information one may more easily conceive of the interactions among experience, culture and reality in commensurable terms. Fisher information also allows us to model the relationship between knowledge and reality, and to suggest some of the mechanisms by which the individual psyche and a society’s culture remain ‘trued-up’ relative to the reality of the world and the individual’s own being.

Key words: brain, cultural neurophenomenology, culture, experience–reality problem, husserl, information, psychological anthropology