gray metal bridge over river during daytime

Title: Temporality and Emotional Inertia in Fear Disorders: Affectivity, Embodiment, Unforgetfulness

This PhD project explores how fear alters our perception of time and affectivity, emphasizing the role of memory and imagination in re-eliciting and anticipating fearful events. While political science and sociology provide insights into these mechanisms, memory studies offer crucial evidence. The project aims to redefine the concept of affective memory within the paradigms of enactivism and embodied cognition and to explain fear-related disorders such as PTSD, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and Panic Disorder through this lens, namely, as forms of embodied mental time travel.

Specific Aims

  1. Affective Memory Concept: Develop a new concept of affective memory aligned with enactivism and embodied cognition.

  2. Emotional Reactions: Explain how PTSD, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and Panic Disorder involve mental time travel due to emotional and bodily re-enactment.

  3. Collective Trauma: Investigate how collective transgenerational trauma functions as embodied vicarious memory, triggering PTSD in communities through emotional contagion and extended bodily emotions/atmospheres.

  4. Panic Disorder and Déjà Vu: Explore Panic Disorder as a form of déjà vu.

Methodology

  • Examination of medical literature and patient reports

  • Philosophical engineering to redefine affective memory

  • Conceptual analysis