Michelle Maiese
Biographic Data
| ID | 460979 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michelle Maiese |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michelle |
| FAMILY NAME | Maiese |
| SIGNATURE | MAIESE M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Emmanuel College - Massachusetts |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4039-4561 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 16 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Problems for enactive psychiatry? Mindshaping, social normativity, and neurodiversity
Enactive psychiatry challenges a traditional medical model and its guiding assumption that it is the source of mental disorder in the individual and their malfunctioning brain. Instead, it emphasizes that mental disorder is fully embodied and involves a disruption in the relationship between an agent and their world. Proponents have argued this enactive approach to psychiatry offers a way to view mental disorders in more holistic terms, recognize…
Naming the familiar: The power of emancipatory terms
Life Shaping, Habits of Mind, and Social Institutions
According to the enactivist view of the mind, there is close connection between being alive and being cognitive: to be alive is to be capable of cognitive engagements. The living organism does not passively receive and process stimuli from an external world, but rather helps to determine what counts as useful information on the basis of its structure, needs, and the way that it is structurally coupled with its surroundings. Sense-making is the pr…
Self-equilibration, borderline personality disorder, and dance-movement therapy
Patients as Experts, Participatory Sense-Making, and Relational Autonomy
Although mental health professionals traditionally have been viewed as sole experts and decision-makers, there is increasing awareness that the experiential knowledge of former patients can make an important contribution to mental health practices. I argue that current patients likewise possess a kind of expertise, and that including them as active participants in diagnosis and treatment can strengthen their autonomy and allow them to build up im…
Anorexia Nervosa, Bodily Alienation, and Authenticity
Situated Affectivity, Enactivism, and the Weapons Effect
Existing research on the “weapons effect” indicates that simply seeing a weapon can prime aggressive thoughts and appraisals and increase aggressive behavior. But how and why does this happen? I begin by discussing prevailing explanations of the weapons effect and propose that these accounts tend to be over-intellectualistic insofar as they downplay or overlook the important role played by affectivity. In my view, insights from the fields of situ…
Self-illness ambiguity, affectivity, and affordances
Self-illness ambiguity involves difficulty distinguishing between patterns of thought, feeling, and action that are the ‘products’ of one's illness and those that are genuinely one's own. Bortolan maintains that the values, cares, and preferences that define someone’s personal identity are rooted in intentional emotions and non-intentional affects (i.e., existential feelings and moods). The uncertainty that comprises self-illness ambiguity result…
Autonomy, enactivism, and psychopathy
Most philosophical discussions of psychopathy have centered around its significance in relation to empathy, moral cognition, or moral responsibility. However, related questions about the extent to which psychopaths are capable of exercising autonomous agency have remained underexplored. Two central conditions for autonomous agency that are highlighted by many existing accounts include (1) reasons-responsivity, and (2) authenticity. However, avail…
Autonomy, Enactivism, and Mental Disorder: A Philosophical Account
This book brings together insights from the enactivist approach in philosophy of mind and existing work on autonomous agency from both philosophy of action and feminist philosophy. It then utilizes this proposed account of autonomous agency to make sense of the impairments in agency that commonly occur in cases of dissociative identity disorder, mood disorders, and psychopathy. While much of the existing philosophical work on autonomy focuses on …
Neoliberalism and mental health education
In 2017, the Departments of Health and Education in the United Kingdom initiated a national mental health agenda that includes new curriculum interventions and mandatory training courses for teachers. While the stated goal is to support children and young people with mental health difficulties, there are deeper economic and political forces driving these policy decisions. Both the underlying socio-structural causes of mental health problems and t…
White Supremacy as an affective milieu
An enactivist reconceptualization of the medical model
According to the medical model that prevails in the Western world, mental disorder is a form of illness, parallel to bodily illness, which can be diagnosed by a doctor on the basis of symptoms and administered treatments designed to “cure” it. However, it seems clear that how we understand “disorder” is influenced by cultural norms and values. Theorists associated with the so-called anti-psychiatry movement have gone so far as to claim that ‘ment…
Online education as a “Mental Institution”
Work on situated cognition and affectivity holds that cognitive and affective processes always occur within, depend upon, and, perhaps, are even partially constituted by the surrounding social and environmental contexts. What some philosophers call a ‘mental institution’ consists of various toolsand technologies that help people to solve a particular problem and scaffold their cognitive and affective processes in various ways. Examples include le…
The Mind-Body Politic
Transformative Learning, Enactivism, and Affectivity
Embodied Selves and Divided Minds
Embodied Selves and Divided Minds examines how research in embodied cognition and enactivism can contribute to our understanding of the nature of self-consciousness, the metaphysics of personal identity, and the disruptions to self-awareness that occur in case of psychopathology. It begins with the assumption that if we take embodiment seriously, then the resulting conception of the self (as physically grounded in the living body) can help us to …
Addressing the Clinical Burden of Child Physical Abuse and Neglect in a Large Metropolitan Region: Improving the Evidence-Base
Children at risk of abuse are more likely to be hospitalized and utilize health services according to international research. In a large metropolitan health region in New South Wales, Australia, there was little known of the clinical burden of child physical abuse and/or neglect (PAN), or of systems for clinical assessment of children presenting with abuse/neglect. We aimed to identify the number of children presenting with suspected PAN to emerg…
White Supremacy as an affective milieu
Neoliberalism and mental health education
In 2017, the Departments of Health and Education in the United Kingdom initiated a national mental health agenda that includes new curriculum interventions and mandatory training courses for teachers. While the stated goal is to support children and young people with mental health difficulties, there are deeper economic and political forces driving these policy decisions. Both the underlying socio-structural causes of mental health problems and t…
Transformative Learning, Enactivism, and Affectivity
Addressing the Clinical Burden of Child Physical Abuse and Neglect in a Large Metropolitan Region: Improving the Evidence-Base
Children at risk of abuse are more likely to be hospitalized and utilize health services according to international research. In a large metropolitan health region in New South Wales, Australia, there was little known of the clinical burden of child physical abuse and/or neglect (PAN), or of systems for clinical assessment of children presenting with abuse/neglect. We aimed to identify the number of children presenting with suspected PAN to emerg…
Embodied Selves and Divided Minds
Embodied Selves and Divided Minds examines how research in embodied cognition and enactivism can contribute to our understanding of the nature of self-consciousness, the metaphysics of personal identity, and the disruptions to self-awareness that occur in case of psychopathology. It begins with the assumption that if we take embodiment seriously, then the resulting conception of the self (as physically grounded in the living body) can help us to …
Transformative Learning, Enactivism, and Affectivity
The Mind-Body Politic
An enactivist reconceptualization of the medical model
According to the medical model that prevails in the Western world, mental disorder is a form of illness, parallel to bodily illness, which can be diagnosed by a doctor on the basis of symptoms and administered treatments designed to “cure” it. However, it seems clear that how we understand “disorder” is influenced by cultural norms and values. Theorists associated with the so-called anti-psychiatry movement have gone so far as to claim that ‘ment…
Online education as a “Mental Institution”
Work on situated cognition and affectivity holds that cognitive and affective processes always occur within, depend upon, and, perhaps, are even partially constituted by the surrounding social and environmental contexts. What some philosophers call a ‘mental institution’ consists of various toolsand technologies that help people to solve a particular problem and scaffold their cognitive and affective processes in various ways. Examples include le…
Situated Affectivity, Enactivism, and the Weapons Effect
Existing research on the “weapons effect” indicates that simply seeing a weapon can prime aggressive thoughts and appraisals and increase aggressive behavior. But how and why does this happen? I begin by discussing prevailing explanations of the weapons effect and propose that these accounts tend to be over-intellectualistic insofar as they downplay or overlook the important role played by affectivity. In my view, insights from the fields of situ…
Self-illness ambiguity, affectivity, and affordances
Self-illness ambiguity involves difficulty distinguishing between patterns of thought, feeling, and action that are the ‘products’ of one's illness and those that are genuinely one's own. Bortolan maintains that the values, cares, and preferences that define someone’s personal identity are rooted in intentional emotions and non-intentional affects (i.e., existential feelings and moods). The uncertainty that comprises self-illness ambiguity result…
Autonomy, enactivism, and psychopathy
Most philosophical discussions of psychopathy have centered around its significance in relation to empathy, moral cognition, or moral responsibility. However, related questions about the extent to which psychopaths are capable of exercising autonomous agency have remained underexplored. Two central conditions for autonomous agency that are highlighted by many existing accounts include (1) reasons-responsivity, and (2) authenticity. However, avail…
Autonomy, Enactivism, and Mental Disorder: A Philosophical Account
This book brings together insights from the enactivist approach in philosophy of mind and existing work on autonomous agency from both philosophy of action and feminist philosophy. It then utilizes this proposed account of autonomous agency to make sense of the impairments in agency that commonly occur in cases of dissociative identity disorder, mood disorders, and psychopathy. While much of the existing philosophical work on autonomy focuses on …
Neoliberalism and mental health education
In 2017, the Departments of Health and Education in the United Kingdom initiated a national mental health agenda that includes new curriculum interventions and mandatory training courses for teachers. While the stated goal is to support children and young people with mental health difficulties, there are deeper economic and political forces driving these policy decisions. Both the underlying socio-structural causes of mental health problems and t…
White Supremacy as an affective milieu
Patients as Experts, Participatory Sense-Making, and Relational Autonomy
Although mental health professionals traditionally have been viewed as sole experts and decision-makers, there is increasing awareness that the experiential knowledge of former patients can make an important contribution to mental health practices. I argue that current patients likewise possess a kind of expertise, and that including them as active participants in diagnosis and treatment can strengthen their autonomy and allow them to build up im…
Anorexia Nervosa, Bodily Alienation, and Authenticity
Life Shaping, Habits of Mind, and Social Institutions
According to the enactivist view of the mind, there is close connection between being alive and being cognitive: to be alive is to be capable of cognitive engagements. The living organism does not passively receive and process stimuli from an external world, but rather helps to determine what counts as useful information on the basis of its structure, needs, and the way that it is structurally coupled with its surroundings. Sense-making is the pr…
Self-equilibration, borderline personality disorder, and dance-movement therapy
Problems for enactive psychiatry? Mindshaping, social normativity, and neurodiversity
Enactive psychiatry challenges a traditional medical model and its guiding assumption that it is the source of mental disorder in the individual and their malfunctioning brain. Instead, it emphasizes that mental disorder is fully embodied and involves a disruption in the relationship between an agent and their world. Proponents have argued this enactive approach to psychiatry offers a way to view mental disorders in more holistic terms, recognize…
Naming the familiar: The power of emancipatory terms
Psychology (16 works) · Epistemology (14 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Embodied and Extended Cognition (8 works) · Mental Health and Psychiatry (8 works) · Social Psychology (8 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Cognition (5 works) · Embodied cognition (5 works)