• Valuing patient perspectives in the context of eating disorders
    Eating and Weight Disorders - Studies on Anorexia, Bulimia and Obesity 29 (1). 2024.
    This paper advocates for the inclusion of patient perspectives in the diagnosis and treatment of eating disorders (EDs) for ethical, epistemological, and pragmatic reasons. We build upon the ideas of a recent editorial published in this journal. Using EDs as their example, the authors argue against dominant DSM-oriented approaches in favor of an increased focus on understanding patients’ subjective experiences. We argue that their analysis stops too soon for the development of practical—and acti…Read more
  •  31
    Personal Intentionalism and the Understanding of Emotion Experience
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 30 (7): 61-87. 2023.
    How should we seek to account for the qualitative aspect of emotion? Strong intentionalism presents one promising avenue for such an account. According to strong intentionalism, the phenomenology of a mental state is entirely determined by that state's intentional content. Given that many views of the emotions have it that the intentionality and phenomenology of the emotions are very closely related, this makes strong intentionalism an especially promising route. However, strong intentionalism h…Read more
  •  5
    What role should the expertise of the autistic communities play in shaping the category of autism compared to the role played by science? This question led to a debate about the quantitative importance of science compared to first-person perspectives for the understanding of autism. I see this debate as lying on a false dichotomy between science and activism, according to which only scientific inquiry would reveal the empirical nature of autism, while the discourse of autistic communities would …Read more
  •  7
    Teasing Apart the Roles of Interoception, Emotion, and Self-Control in Anorexia Nervosa
    with Jacqueline Sullivan, Amy MacKinnon, and Lindsay P. Bodell
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1-25. forthcoming.
    Anorexia Nervosa (AN) is widely considered to be a bodily disorder accompanied by unrealistic perceptions about one’s own body. Some researchers thus have wondered whether deficits in interoception, a conscious or non-conscious sense of one’s own body, could be a primary cause of AN. In this paper, we make the case that rather than interoception being a primary cause, deficits in interoception may occur as by-products of emotions that arise upstream in the pathogenesis of AN and interact with fe…Read more
  •  55
    This paper suggests that autistic people relate to themselves via a third-person perspective, an objective and explicit mode of access, while neurotypical people tend to access the different dimensions of their self through a first-person perspective. This approach sheds light on autistic traits involving interactions with others, usage of narratives, sensitivity and interoception, and emotional consciousness. Autistic people seem to access these dimensions through comparatively indirect and eff…Read more
  •  54
    Unconscious Emotions
    Erkenntnis 1-20. forthcoming.
    According to some authors, emotions can be unconscious when they are unfelt or unnoticed. According to others, emotions are always conscious because they always have a phenomenology. The aim of this paper is to resolve the ongoing debate about the possibility for emotions to be unfelt. To do so, I focus on the notion of “unconscious emotions”. While this notion appears paradoxical, by way of a distinction between two meanings of emotional consciousness I show that it is not so. These meanings ar…Read more
  •  37
    The new self-advocacy activism in psychiatry: Toward a scientific turn
    with Anne-Marie Gagné-Julien
    Philosophical Psychology. forthcoming.
    The anti-psychiatry movement of the 20th century has notably denounced the role of values and social norms in the shaping of psychiatric categories. Recent activist movements also recognize that psychiatry is value-laden, however, they do not fight for a value-free psychiatry. On the contrary, some activist movements of the 21st century advocate for self-advocacy in sciences of mental health in order to reach a more accurate understanding of psychiatric categories/mental distress. By aiming at s…Read more
  •  6
    Sarah Arnaud C’est par une affirmation provocatrice que Hacking propose un ratio pour représenter le rapport entre science et militantisme dans le façonnement des notions sur l’autisme. Selon lui, la définition et la compréhension actuelles de l’autisme proviennent à 99 % de personnes « personnellement connectées à une personne autiste » plutôt que de la science. Kendler rejette un tel point de vue en suggérant au contraire que notre compréhension de l’autisme est le résultat d’un travail scient…Read more
  •  61
    Emotional Consciousness in Autism
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 27 (9-10): 34-59. 2020.
    An abundant literature on autism shows differences in emotional consciousness between neurotypical and autistic people. This paper proposes an interpretation of these results through a conceptual clarification of emotional consciousness. It suggests that autistic people generally access their emotions through a thirdperson's perspective whereas neurotypical people's emotions reach consciousness via first-person access. This interpretation is based on a model of 'emotional consciousness' that app…Read more
  •  44
    Sensibilité et conscience émotionnelle dans l’autisme
    Revue Médecine et Philosophie 1 (1). 2019.
    Cet article propose une caractérisation de la sensibilité et de la conscience émotionnelle des personnes autistes grâce à des précisions terminologiques des concepts d’émotions et de conscience. Il met en évidence le caractère contradictoire qui semble caractériser la sensibilité des personnes autistes : alors que leurs états internes du corps parviennent à la conscience beaucoup plus fréquemment que pour les personnes neurotypiques, leurs émotions sont appréhendées de manière descriptive et non…Read more