Incorporating others: what an extended self tells us about intersubjectivity

Abstract

Incorporation is the body's capacity to take something to alter or extend itself. In the literature on the subject, there is a lively debate on what constitutes incorporation. According to the Hypothesis of Extended Mind, whatever extends our cognitive processes is incorporated. At the same time, that object becomes a part of our self-manifestation. However, De Preester, in what I call a narrow version of incorporation, proposes that an object is incorporated to the self only if it is included in the sense of ownership of the body. Here, I explore a broader version of incorporation, related to Merleau-Ponty's ideas of habit and incorporation. From this perspective, incorporation is the way a self expands and alters itself in its dealings with the world. A self, as a lived body, emerges in the self's constitutive openness to worlds; therefore, objects (and even others) are incorporated in a temporal and situated way if they participate in constitutive experiences. Finally, this perspective explores the idea of a flexible and transparent self rather than a fixed self based on representations of the body.

Affective affordances and psychopathology

“…One way to mark degrees of incorporation is the extent to which object(s) become experientially transparent when absorbed into the subject's lived body, i.e., the more transparent the object becomes in experience, the more incorporated it also becomes (compare the feeling of first putting on a new pair of shoes versus the feeling after you've worn them for a week). For more on these phenomenological dimensions and degrees of incorporation, see Colombetti 2016, De Preester 2011, and Garavito 2018 Again, aspects of their affective difficulties also stem from disturbances of social scaffolding, too, but that is not our focus here. See Krueger 2018, Kyselo 2015, and Ratcliffe 2017.…”

Paradoxes of (un)veiling and the extended self: the experiences of Arab-Muslim women in Kuwait

“…Theoretically, this study develops knowledge in relation to the extended self-theory by focusing on the incorporation of others into one’s identity, which, to date, remains underexplored in the extant literature (Gjersoe et al , 2014; Garavito, 2019). Specifically, the findings demonstrate that the constitution of others into one’s identity is not necessarily between two individuals only (e.g.…”

“…This affirms Belk’s (2014) finding that the boundary between self and others tends to dissolve when people form part of our extended selves. In other words, when we incorporate others into our sense of self and perceive them as a part of our own constitutive experiences, we tend to treat these individuals as devoid of their own subjective experiences (Garavito, 2019). This linear and individualized perspective understates the bilateral and collective relationship that exists between the self and others.…”

La psicología fenomenológica en Colombia: siglo XXI

“…Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. 14 En este último tema se destacan trabajos en Colombia que vinculan la fenomenología y la psicología del desarrollo de Piaget (Chaves y Yáñez, 2018;Garavito y Yáñez, 2011), entre otros estudios desde la cognición situada y corporizada, la subjetividad y la intersubjetividad entendida como co-constitución (Garavito, 2018(Garavito, , 2019.…”