Forcing an Effortless Stance: The Lived Body in Social Anxiety Disorder

The fear of scrutiny central in social anxiety disorder (SAD) points to a problem of the interpersonally perceivable body. Whereas the predominant cognitive-behavioral (CBT) account of the disorder understands this as a problem of excessive self-focused attention, the phenomenological literature reveals it as a sign of a fundamental transformation of body experience. The lived body absent from experience becomes the object body at the forefront of it. The present paper contributes to this literature by refining and grounding these notions in first-person descriptions of concrete experiences of social anxiety.

Repeated interviews were conducted with eight informants struggling with social anxiety and collected personal diaries. The interviews were informed by phenomenological concepts and a specific line of inquiry on body experiences. The analysis tested iteratively a set of phenomenologically grounded hypotheses of altered body experience against the first-person descriptions.

A concept of bodily instrumentalization is developed which accounts for the tendency of self-directed attention and behavior central to the disorder. That is, the socially anxious patient experiences their body as entrapped by the Other and thus unable to act freely among them. This felt bodily self-enslavement for the Other shows itself in efforts to conceal the body from the others and to puppeteer it for them.

The notion of bodily enslavement captures a central aspect of the suffering experienced by patients with SAD that exceeds the capability of the CBT language. Additionally, the social nature of the bodily instrumentalization that is constitutive of this suffering means that psychotherapy should not treat SAD as a cognitive disorder, but rather as an interpersonal disorder. Specifically, psychotherapy should offer patients shared interpersonal experiences in which they forget their bodily presence.