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Somatic personhood and the dilemma of authenticity in ADHD subjectivity

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Abstract

In this paper, I discuss the dilemma of authenticity in ADHD subjectivity in the context of somatic, especially cerebral and neurochemical, personhood, which was stimulated by the rise of neuro-scientific knowledge, practices and technologies and their impact on culture and society. Through these processes, selfhood is continually identified with brainhood, in which mental processes are reduced to brain functions and neurochemistry. This has vast consequences on our understanding of human agency, morality and responsibility and opens existentialist questions about authenticity. In this sense, authenticity marks the effort to navigate the shifting relations of nature-culture and mind-brain and the uncertainty in conceptualisations of health, social functionality and normality. These dilemmas are practically significant in the case of subjectivities defined by psychiatric diagnosis in which the definition of authentic self impacts self-understanding and self-management of life strategies, such as treatment decisions.

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Notes

  1. “Neuroexistentialism is what you get when Geisteswissenschaften reaches the stage where it finally and self-consciously exorcises the geist and recommends that no one should take seriously the Cartesian myth of the ghost in the machine”(Caruso and Flanagan 2017, s. 2).

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  1. Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University, Joštova 10, 602 00, Brno, Czech Republic

    Alexandra Vrhel

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Vrhel, A. Somatic personhood and the dilemma of authenticity in ADHD subjectivity. Subjectivity 30, 251–266 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-023-00165-8

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