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

This thesis develops an enactivist account of emotion and affective memory and explores its implications for understanding psychopathology, with a particular focus on fear-related disorders. Departing from representational models, it adopts an enactive framework according to which cognition, emotion, and memory are enacted through ongoing, embodied, and environmentally situated interactions. Within this perspective, affectivity is a constitutive dimension of how we respond to our worlds and is not a secondary layer added to cognition.

Building on this conceptual framework, the thesis presents three applications in the philosophy of memory and psychopathology, each addressing a distinct interactional dimension. First, in the two initial chapters, it provides an original account of emotions and affective memory. In the third chapter, transgenerational trauma/PTSD is reconceptualized through what I call the extended body—that is, mimesis and background emotions enabling traumatic meaning to be transmitted across generations via embodied attunement in vicarious remembering and cultural inheritance, facilitated by the emotional function of mirror neurons, looking at literature about the Shoah.

Second, panic disorder—the interaction between a subject and her past—is analyzed as a form of embodied remembering grounded in Husserlian genetic phenomenology. Beyond offering an original account of unconscious processes in enactivism, it argues that sedimented affective patterns are reenacted without explicit episodic memory once the environment opens up as threatening, challenging the cognitivist claim that panic sometimes involves objectless fear, since these attacks are memories in themselves.

Third, anxiety in digitally mediated interactions is examined as a collective phenomenon shaped by a Heideggerian-oriented account of mood and media-structured anticipatory dynamics, with particular attention to catastrophic future imaginings during the COVID-19 pandemic. This chapter challenges the literature on collective mental time travel, which holds that fostering agency contributes to imagining better futures. I argue that this is not possible, as affectivity already narrows the horizon of imagination beforehand through various forms of extended emotion.