Loss of control and phenomenology in mental disorder

Any insights we can hope to gain with respect to what is going on with our mental lives and our agency will almost certainly require a close examination of the “worst-case scenarios”, since it is when things break down that the joints of the phenomena are revealed. This is a philosophical intuition of mine that pervades everything I work on, and the papers that make up this dissertation are no exception. In keeping with this guiding sentiment, this dissertation tackles three philosophical issues related to the so-called “loss of control” that occurs in mental disorder, and it does so in a way that places the phenomenology of agency at the forefront in some way or other. In my first paper on the sense of agency in anorexia nervosa (AN), I try to resolve an apparent discrepancy between the phenomenology of anorexics in the grip of their disorder and the psychological and neurological data that purport to describe what they are undergoing. I provide a solution to this apparent incongruency by offering an account of the sense of agency in AN that grants sincerity to anorexic testimony while also being able to explain why the relevant experiences of agency come to be illusory. Then, in my second paper, I broaden my scope to include not just AN but also substance use disorder (SUD). After outlining the debate surrounding the question of whether addiction ought to be categorized as a form of akrasia, I show that the phenomenon at issue is far more complex than either side has supposed. I then propose a “horseshoe model” of loss of control that is able to capture the complexity that is brought in by examining the similarities and differences between SUD and AN. Finally, in my third paper, I pursue a question that arises from the exposition of the horseshoe model introduced in the previous paper. The question is, roughly, “Why is one ‘half’ of the horseshoe model associated with the phenomenology of loss of control while the other “half” is associated with the phenomenology of extreme self-control?”. This line of inquiry ultimately leads to an understanding of how one’s pathological desires can be experienced quite differently depending on the content of one’s self-image. Taken together, it is my hope that these papers can contribute to the philosophical goal of unearthing the realities of our mental lives and our agency by examining the fault lines formed by psychopathology.