Marinella Greco
Biographic Data
| ID | 139867 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Marinella Greco |
| GIVEN NAMES | Marinella |
| FAMILY NAME | Greco |
| SIGNATURE | GRECO M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Goldsmiths University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0165-0617 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 296 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Embodied wisdom: Towards acceptable and helpful explanations for functional somatic symptoms
Many people with persistent symptoms navigate illness without an adequate explanatory framework. The systematic disadvantages that arise from the lack of a collectively shared explanation can be considered a form of epistemic injustice, namely hermeneutic injustice. In response to this problem, we explored whether therapeutically relevant and broadly acceptable explanations for symptoms could be developed through iterative stages of dialogue betw…
One time my gut and psyche talked to each other: The flexible use of mind-body dualism to articulate socially situated selves
Instead of pursuing the dissolution of mind-body dualism, this article argues for examining when and to what purposes it is mobilised. The article explores notions of the 'gut', 'psyche' and 'self' as mobilised in descriptions of personal experiences, which were examined through collective memory-work with three groups of women. Rather than responding to direct questions about mind-body dualism, participants wrote memories from the prompt One tim…
Awakening the sense of the possible: The Symptoms Clinic as liminal affective technology
Persistent ('medically unexplained') physical symptoms (PPS) that are disproportionate to detectable disease are common in all clinical settings, with significant impacts in terms of quality of life and cost to health services and society. In the absence of an orthodox biomedical explanation, PPS are often attributed to psychological causes and associated with significant stigma. Emerging neuroscientific approaches to symptom explanation imply ca…
Explanation for symptoms and biographical repair in a clinic for persistent physical symptoms
Introduction: Biographical disruption describes the process by which illness impacts not just on a person's body and their participation in activities, but also on their sense of self. Biographical disruption is often followed by a process of biographical repair in which identity is reconstructed and a new normality is restored. People with persistent physical symptoms (sometimes referred to as medically unexplained symptoms) experience biographi…
Vitalism Now - A Problematic
This paper considers whether and how 'vitalism' might be considered relevant as a concept today; whether its relevance should be expressed in terms of disciplinary demarcations between the life sciences and the natural sciences; and whether there is a fundamental incompatibility between a 'vitalism of process' and a 'vitalism as pathos'. I argue that the relevance of vitalism as an epistemological and ontological problem concerning the categorica…
Biopolitics, psychosomatics, participating bodies
> “ Smokers and obese people ‘soft targets’ for NHS savings, say surgeons .”1 The rationing of medical services to patients with so-called lifestyle diseases remains a controversial proposition worthy of newspaper headlines—like the one above from The Guardian , reporting on findings from a study commissioned in 2015 by the Royal College of Surgeons.2 Such headlines tend to prompt lavish commentary from readers, and opinions tend to be highly pol…
Chronic fatigue syndrome and an illness-focused approach to care: Controversy, morality and paradox
Contemporary medicine distinguishes between illness and disease. Illness refers to a person's subjective experience of symptoms; disease refers to objective bodily pathology. For many illnesses, medicine has made great progress in finding and treating associated disease. However, not all illnesses are successfully relieved by treating the disease. In some such cases, the patient's suffering can only be reduced by treatment that is focused on the …
On illness and value: Biopolitics, psychosomatics, participating bodies
In its heyday, around the mid-twentieth century, psychosomatic medicine was promoted as heralding a new science of body/mind relations that held the promise of transforming medicine as a whole. Sixty years on, the field appears to have achieved no more than a respectable position as a research specialism within the medical status quo. This paper articulates the problematic of psychosomatics through a number of propositions that reconnect its prom…
Introduction to the Special Issue on Liminal Hotspots
This article introduces a special issue of Theory and Psychology on liminal hotspots. A liminal hotspot is an occasion during which people feel they are caught suspended in the circumstances of a transition that has become permanent. The liminal experiences of ambiguity and uncertainty that are typically at play in transitional circumstances acquire an enduring quality that can be described as a “hotspot”. Liminal hotspots are characterized by dy…
From paradox to pattern shift: Conceptualising liminal hotspots and their affective dynamics
This article introduces the concept of liminal hotspots as a specifically psychosocial and sociopsychological type of wicked problem, best addressed in a process-theoretical framework. A liminal hotspot is defined as an occasion characterised by the experience of being trapped in the interstitial dimension between different forms-of-process. The paper has two main aims. First, to articulate a nexus of concepts associated with liminal hotspots tha…
Pragmatics of explanation: Creative accountability in the care of 'medically unexplained symptoms
This article describes an emergent reconfiguration of the problem of somatization in contemporary research and practice around 'medically unexplained symptoms' among UK-based primary care researchers with a special interest in these conditions. Based on an analysis of clinical research literature and on participant observation in the early stages of a clinical research project, the article explores recent accounts of the role of medicine and doct…
What is the DSM? Diagnostic manual, cultural icon, political battleground: An overview with suggestions for a critical research agenda
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the APA (known as the DSM) is a system for the classification of mental disorders that provides diagnostic criteria used by psychiatrists and experts in related fields. Although classification systems and standards are ubiquitous in social life, they are rarely conspicuous and almost never become an object of public debate. Yet the DSM has attained the status of a ‘cultural icon’ and ha…
A perceptual approach to the fusion of visible and NIR images in the examination of ancient documents
The Politics of Attachment: Lines of Flight with Bowlby, Deleuze and Guattari
Research on attachment is widely regarded in sociology and feminist scholarship as politically conservative - oriented by a concern to police families, pathologize mothers and emphasize psychological at the expense of socio-economic factors. These critiques have presented attachment theory as constructing biological imperatives to naturalize contingent, social demands. We propose that a more effective critique of the politically conservative uses…
Wait Up: Attachment and Sovereign Power
Sociologists and feminist scholars have, over many decades, characterised attachment as a social construction that functions to support political and gender conservatism. We accept that attachment theory has seen use to these ends and consider recent deployments of attachment theory as justification for a minimal State within conservative political discourse in the UK since 2009. However, we contest that attachment is reducible to its discursive …
Happiness and the Art of Life: Diagnosing the psychopolitics of wellbeing
Building upon the idea of a psychology without foundations and on vitalist approaches to health, the paper presents the concepts of ‘joy’ and of ‘gay science’ as theoretical points of contrast to Seligman’s ‘happiness’ and ‘positive psychology’. Defined by Spinoza and Nietzsche as the feeling of becoming more active in the world, joy emphasises the embodied connection between self and world. By contrast, we propose, a defining characteristic of t…
The classification and nomenclature of 'medically unexplained symptoms: Conflict, performativity and critique
On the Art of Life: A Vitalist Reading of Medical Humanities
Medicine and the Body
On the Vitality of Vitalism
The term 'vitalism' is most readily associated with a series of debates among 18th- and 19th-century biologists, and broadly with the claim that the explanation of living phenomena is not compatible with, or is not exhausted by, the principles of basic sciences like physics and chemistry. Scientists and philosophers have continued to address vitalism - mostly in order to reject it - well into the second half of the 20th century, in connection wit…
The ambivalence of error: "Scientific Ideology" in the History of the Life Sciences and Psychosomatic Medicine
The Politics of Indeterminacy and the Right to Health
Discussions of the framework and terminology associated with the right to health tend to treat the indeterminacy of 'health' as conceptual noise that the construction of effective policy must not focus on, but find ways of bracketing out. On this basis, the right to health is broadly regarded as a social and economic, rather than a civil and political right. A focus on indeterminacy allows for the perception and the formulation of health-related …
Three-dimensional modelling of statues: The Minerva of Arezzo
Inconspicuous Anomalies: Alexithymia and Ethical Relations to the Self
This article uses the analysis and discussion of the 'alexithymia construct' to approach the question of how we might think about the relationship between ethics and illness. After a brief introduction to the construct, its paradigmatic potential within the broader context of psychosomatic medicine is discussed. The article then elaborates on the sociocultural specificity of alexithymia, both as a construct and as a mode of being, to argue that c…
Between social and organic norms: Reading Canguilhem and 'somatization
Contemporary accounts of somatization tend to imply that the 'biological' and the 'social' are competing and mutually contradictory epistemological perspectives. This situation ismirrored by the alternative between biomedical objectivism and sociological relativism in accounting for the reality (or, indeed, the non-reality) of this phenomenon as a pathological condition. This paper reads the debate on somatization through Canguilhem's writings. C…
Psychosomatic subjects and the 'duty to be well'. personal agency within
This paper compares the epistemologies of psychosomatics and biomedicine and examines their interrelation. In so far as the psychosomatic subject constitutes both the locus and the ultimate responsible agency of preventive intervention, the event of disease has become a moment of verification of the moral aptitude of individuals to form part of the society within which they live. While the ‘right to health’ is preserved through the biomedical san…
On the Vitality of Vitalism
The term 'vitalism' is most readily associated with a series of debates among 18th- and 19th-century biologists, and broadly with the claim that the explanation of living phenomena is not compatible with, or is not exhausted by, the principles of basic sciences like physics and chemistry. Scientists and philosophers have continued to address vitalism - mostly in order to reject it - well into the second half of the 20th century, in connection wit…
The Politics of Indeterminacy and the Right to Health
Discussions of the framework and terminology associated with the right to health tend to treat the indeterminacy of 'health' as conceptual noise that the construction of effective policy must not focus on, but find ways of bracketing out. On this basis, the right to health is broadly regarded as a social and economic, rather than a civil and political right. A focus on indeterminacy allows for the perception and the formulation of health-related …
The classification and nomenclature of 'medically unexplained symptoms: Conflict, performativity and critique
Vitalism Now - A Problematic
This paper considers whether and how 'vitalism' might be considered relevant as a concept today; whether its relevance should be expressed in terms of disciplinary demarcations between the life sciences and the natural sciences; and whether there is a fundamental incompatibility between a 'vitalism of process' and a 'vitalism as pathos'. I argue that the relevance of vitalism as an epistemological and ontological problem concerning the categorica…
Pragmatics of explanation: Creative accountability in the care of 'medically unexplained symptoms
This article describes an emergent reconfiguration of the problem of somatization in contemporary research and practice around 'medically unexplained symptoms' among UK-based primary care researchers with a special interest in these conditions. Based on an analysis of clinical research literature and on participant observation in the early stages of a clinical research project, the article explores recent accounts of the role of medicine and doct…
The Politics of Attachment: Lines of Flight with Bowlby, Deleuze and Guattari
Research on attachment is widely regarded in sociology and feminist scholarship as politically conservative - oriented by a concern to police families, pathologize mothers and emphasize psychological at the expense of socio-economic factors. These critiques have presented attachment theory as constructing biological imperatives to naturalize contingent, social demands. We propose that a more effective critique of the politically conservative uses…
Wait Up: Attachment and Sovereign Power
Sociologists and feminist scholars have, over many decades, characterised attachment as a social construction that functions to support political and gender conservatism. We accept that attachment theory has seen use to these ends and consider recent deployments of attachment theory as justification for a minimal State within conservative political discourse in the UK since 2009. However, we contest that attachment is reducible to its discursive …
Between social and organic norms: Reading Canguilhem and 'somatization
Contemporary accounts of somatization tend to imply that the 'biological' and the 'social' are competing and mutually contradictory epistemological perspectives. This situation ismirrored by the alternative between biomedical objectivism and sociological relativism in accounting for the reality (or, indeed, the non-reality) of this phenomenon as a pathological condition. This paper reads the debate on somatization through Canguilhem's writings. C…
On illness and value: Biopolitics, psychosomatics, participating bodies
In its heyday, around the mid-twentieth century, psychosomatic medicine was promoted as heralding a new science of body/mind relations that held the promise of transforming medicine as a whole. Sixty years on, the field appears to have achieved no more than a respectable position as a research specialism within the medical status quo. This paper articulates the problematic of psychosomatics through a number of propositions that reconnect its prom…
The ambivalence of error: "Scientific Ideology" in the History of the Life Sciences and Psychosomatic Medicine
Three-dimensional modelling of statues: The Minerva of Arezzo
Chronic fatigue syndrome and an illness-focused approach to care: Controversy, morality and paradox
Contemporary medicine distinguishes between illness and disease. Illness refers to a person's subjective experience of symptoms; disease refers to objective bodily pathology. For many illnesses, medicine has made great progress in finding and treating associated disease. However, not all illnesses are successfully relieved by treating the disease. In some such cases, the patient's suffering can only be reduced by treatment that is focused on the …
A perceptual approach to the fusion of visible and NIR images in the examination of ancient documents
On the Art of Life: A Vitalist Reading of Medical Humanities
Inconspicuous Anomalies: Alexithymia and Ethical Relations to the Self
This article uses the analysis and discussion of the 'alexithymia construct' to approach the question of how we might think about the relationship between ethics and illness. After a brief introduction to the construct, its paradigmatic potential within the broader context of psychosomatic medicine is discussed. The article then elaborates on the sociocultural specificity of alexithymia, both as a construct and as a mode of being, to argue that c…
Awakening the sense of the possible: The Symptoms Clinic as liminal affective technology
Persistent ('medically unexplained') physical symptoms (PPS) that are disproportionate to detectable disease are common in all clinical settings, with significant impacts in terms of quality of life and cost to health services and society. In the absence of an orthodox biomedical explanation, PPS are often attributed to psychological causes and associated with significant stigma. Emerging neuroscientific approaches to symptom explanation imply ca…
Psychosomatic subjects and the 'duty to be well'. personal agency within
This paper compares the epistemologies of psychosomatics and biomedicine and examines their interrelation. In so far as the psychosomatic subject constitutes both the locus and the ultimate responsible agency of preventive intervention, the event of disease has become a moment of verification of the moral aptitude of individuals to form part of the society within which they live. While the ‘right to health’ is preserved through the biomedical san…
Between social and organic norms: Reading Canguilhem and 'somatization
Contemporary accounts of somatization tend to imply that the 'biological' and the 'social' are competing and mutually contradictory epistemological perspectives. This situation ismirrored by the alternative between biomedical objectivism and sociological relativism in accounting for the reality (or, indeed, the non-reality) of this phenomenon as a pathological condition. This paper reads the debate on somatization through Canguilhem's writings. C…
Inconspicuous Anomalies: Alexithymia and Ethical Relations to the Self
This article uses the analysis and discussion of the 'alexithymia construct' to approach the question of how we might think about the relationship between ethics and illness. After a brief introduction to the construct, its paradigmatic potential within the broader context of psychosomatic medicine is discussed. The article then elaborates on the sociocultural specificity of alexithymia, both as a construct and as a mode of being, to argue that c…
Three-dimensional modelling of statues: The Minerva of Arezzo
The ambivalence of error: "Scientific Ideology" in the History of the Life Sciences and Psychosomatic Medicine
The Politics of Indeterminacy and the Right to Health
Discussions of the framework and terminology associated with the right to health tend to treat the indeterminacy of 'health' as conceptual noise that the construction of effective policy must not focus on, but find ways of bracketing out. On this basis, the right to health is broadly regarded as a social and economic, rather than a civil and political right. A focus on indeterminacy allows for the perception and the formulation of health-related …
Medicine and the Body
On the Vitality of Vitalism
The term 'vitalism' is most readily associated with a series of debates among 18th- and 19th-century biologists, and broadly with the claim that the explanation of living phenomena is not compatible with, or is not exhausted by, the principles of basic sciences like physics and chemistry. Scientists and philosophers have continued to address vitalism - mostly in order to reject it - well into the second half of the 20th century, in connection wit…
On the Art of Life: A Vitalist Reading of Medical Humanities
The classification and nomenclature of 'medically unexplained symptoms: Conflict, performativity and critique
Happiness and the Art of Life: Diagnosing the psychopolitics of wellbeing
Building upon the idea of a psychology without foundations and on vitalist approaches to health, the paper presents the concepts of ‘joy’ and of ‘gay science’ as theoretical points of contrast to Seligman’s ‘happiness’ and ‘positive psychology’. Defined by Spinoza and Nietzsche as the feeling of becoming more active in the world, joy emphasises the embodied connection between self and world. By contrast, we propose, a defining characteristic of t…
Wait Up: Attachment and Sovereign Power
Sociologists and feminist scholars have, over many decades, characterised attachment as a social construction that functions to support political and gender conservatism. We accept that attachment theory has seen use to these ends and consider recent deployments of attachment theory as justification for a minimal State within conservative political discourse in the UK since 2009. However, we contest that attachment is reducible to its discursive …
What is the DSM? Diagnostic manual, cultural icon, political battleground: An overview with suggestions for a critical research agenda
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the APA (known as the DSM) is a system for the classification of mental disorders that provides diagnostic criteria used by psychiatrists and experts in related fields. Although classification systems and standards are ubiquitous in social life, they are rarely conspicuous and almost never become an object of public debate. Yet the DSM has attained the status of a ‘cultural icon’ and ha…
A perceptual approach to the fusion of visible and NIR images in the examination of ancient documents
The Politics of Attachment: Lines of Flight with Bowlby, Deleuze and Guattari
Research on attachment is widely regarded in sociology and feminist scholarship as politically conservative - oriented by a concern to police families, pathologize mothers and emphasize psychological at the expense of socio-economic factors. These critiques have presented attachment theory as constructing biological imperatives to naturalize contingent, social demands. We propose that a more effective critique of the politically conservative uses…
Introduction to the Special Issue on Liminal Hotspots
This article introduces a special issue of Theory and Psychology on liminal hotspots. A liminal hotspot is an occasion during which people feel they are caught suspended in the circumstances of a transition that has become permanent. The liminal experiences of ambiguity and uncertainty that are typically at play in transitional circumstances acquire an enduring quality that can be described as a “hotspot”. Liminal hotspots are characterized by dy…
From paradox to pattern shift: Conceptualising liminal hotspots and their affective dynamics
This article introduces the concept of liminal hotspots as a specifically psychosocial and sociopsychological type of wicked problem, best addressed in a process-theoretical framework. A liminal hotspot is defined as an occasion characterised by the experience of being trapped in the interstitial dimension between different forms-of-process. The paper has two main aims. First, to articulate a nexus of concepts associated with liminal hotspots tha…
Pragmatics of explanation: Creative accountability in the care of 'medically unexplained symptoms
This article describes an emergent reconfiguration of the problem of somatization in contemporary research and practice around 'medically unexplained symptoms' among UK-based primary care researchers with a special interest in these conditions. Based on an analysis of clinical research literature and on participant observation in the early stages of a clinical research project, the article explores recent accounts of the role of medicine and doct…
Biopolitics, psychosomatics, participating bodies
> “ Smokers and obese people ‘soft targets’ for NHS savings, say surgeons .”1 The rationing of medical services to patients with so-called lifestyle diseases remains a controversial proposition worthy of newspaper headlines—like the one above from The Guardian , reporting on findings from a study commissioned in 2015 by the Royal College of Surgeons.2 Such headlines tend to prompt lavish commentary from readers, and opinions tend to be highly pol…
Chronic fatigue syndrome and an illness-focused approach to care: Controversy, morality and paradox
Contemporary medicine distinguishes between illness and disease. Illness refers to a person's subjective experience of symptoms; disease refers to objective bodily pathology. For many illnesses, medicine has made great progress in finding and treating associated disease. However, not all illnesses are successfully relieved by treating the disease. In some such cases, the patient's suffering can only be reduced by treatment that is focused on the …
On illness and value: Biopolitics, psychosomatics, participating bodies
In its heyday, around the mid-twentieth century, psychosomatic medicine was promoted as heralding a new science of body/mind relations that held the promise of transforming medicine as a whole. Sixty years on, the field appears to have achieved no more than a respectable position as a research specialism within the medical status quo. This paper articulates the problematic of psychosomatics through a number of propositions that reconnect its prom…
Vitalism Now - A Problematic
This paper considers whether and how 'vitalism' might be considered relevant as a concept today; whether its relevance should be expressed in terms of disciplinary demarcations between the life sciences and the natural sciences; and whether there is a fundamental incompatibility between a 'vitalism of process' and a 'vitalism as pathos'. I argue that the relevance of vitalism as an epistemological and ontological problem concerning the categorica…
Explanation for symptoms and biographical repair in a clinic for persistent physical symptoms
Introduction: Biographical disruption describes the process by which illness impacts not just on a person's body and their participation in activities, but also on their sense of self. Biographical disruption is often followed by a process of biographical repair in which identity is reconstructed and a new normality is restored. People with persistent physical symptoms (sometimes referred to as medically unexplained symptoms) experience biographi…
Embodied wisdom: Towards acceptable and helpful explanations for functional somatic symptoms
Many people with persistent symptoms navigate illness without an adequate explanatory framework. The systematic disadvantages that arise from the lack of a collectively shared explanation can be considered a form of epistemic injustice, namely hermeneutic injustice. In response to this problem, we explored whether therapeutically relevant and broadly acceptable explanations for symptoms could be developed through iterative stages of dialogue betw…
One time my gut and psyche talked to each other: The flexible use of mind-body dualism to articulate socially situated selves
Instead of pursuing the dissolution of mind-body dualism, this article argues for examining when and to what purposes it is mobilised. The article explores notions of the 'gut', 'psyche' and 'self' as mobilised in descriptions of personal experiences, which were examined through collective memory-work with three groups of women. Rather than responding to direct questions about mind-body dualism, participants wrote memories from the prompt One tim…
Sociology (20 works) · Psychology (15 works) · Epistemology (14 works) · Mental Health and Psychiatry (14 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · Social Psychology (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Empathy and Medical Education (7 works)