Affect-Logic, Embodiment, Synergetics, and the Free Energy Principle: New Approaches to the Understanding and Treatment of Schizophrenia

This theoretical paper explores the affect-logic approach to schizophrenia in light of the general complexity theories of cognition: embodied cognition, Haken’s synergetics, and Friston’s free energy principle. According to affect-logic, the mental apparatus is an embodied system open to its environment, driven by bioenergetic inputs of emotions. Emotions are rooted in goal-directed embodied states selected by evolutionary pressure for coping with specific situations such as fight, flight, attachment, and others. According to synergetics, nonlinear bifurcations and the emergence of new global patterns occur in open systems when control parameters reach a critical level. Applied to the emergence of psychotic states, synergetics and the proposed energetic understanding of emotions lead to the hypothesis that critical levels of emotional tension may be responsible for the transition from normal to psychotic modes of functioning in vulnerable individuals. In addition, the free energy principle through learning suggests that psychotic symptoms correspond to alternative modes of minimizing free energy, which then entails distorted perceptions of the body, self, and reality. This synthetic formulation has implications for novel therapeutic and preventive strategies in the treatment of psychoses, among these are milieu-therapeutic approaches of the Soteria type that focus on a sustained reduction of emotional tension and phenomenologically oriented methods for improving the perception of body, self, and reality

Sentimientos, afectos y lógica afectiva. Su lugar en nuestra comprensión del otro y del mundo.

El peso de los sentimientos, las emociones o los afectos en nuestra comprensión del prójimo y del mundo es un tema eludido conscientemente, durante mucho tiempo, por la ciencia y los científicos. Y esto se explica por las numerosas contradicciones e inexactitudes que, desde siempre, han enturbiado el problema de tales sentimientos. Sin embargo, es cierto que todos nosotros somos, de alguna manera, «expertos en sentimientos» e, incluso, también es verdad que vivimos toda nuestra vida, como bien decía Hermann Hesse, esencialmente «a través de los sentimientos». Aunque, por otro lado, no sabemos, o al menos la ciencia no lo sabe con certeza, qué es un sentimiento, cuál es su significado y cómo actúa