This chapter introduces the philosophical rationale for investigating emotions in their dimensions of embodiment and existential vulnerability, drawing on phenomenology, psychopathology, and psychotherapy as complementary perspectives. Grounded in phenomenology and enactivism, it argues that emotions are essentially embodied, intersubjective phenomena through which we experience the world as meaningful in the first place. According to this approach, emotions cannot be adequately captured by cognitivist or appraisal-theoretic frameworks alone but must be explored in their embodied dimensions and intertwinement with existential vulnerability. This constitutive vulnerability is described as an ontological condition rooted in the lived body, its essential exposure to others and contingency. The Introduction surveys contemporary philosophy of emotion, mapping competing accounts across cognitive, perceptual, feeling-based, and motivational theories, before arguing that all tend to consider the richness of the lived body insufficiently. The volume’s three parts address the experiential richness of the lived body by moving from phenomenological analyses of emotional life and vulnerability, through psychopathological perspectives, to the transformative role of embodied emotions in psychotherapy. The Introduction thereby establishes embodiment as the conceptual bridge integrating emotion theory, psychopathology, and psychotherapy into a unified inquiry of emotions as a central aspect of human vulnerability.

This chapter focuses on the painful quality of emotional experience and aims for a phenomenological conceptualisation of affective suffering. This endeavour addresses issues such as the relation between vulnerability and emotions, the role of our embodied experience in painful emotions, the formation and deformation of our sense-making in affective suffering, the weight of passivity and activity in such experiences, as well as the role of a primary sociality. The phenomenological exploration uses Wehrle’s differentiation between experience-oriented and discourse-oriented approaches to encompass contributions from phenomenological psychopathology (Fuchs, Waldenfels, Ratcliffe) and contributions from politico-ethical accounts of vulnerability (Butler, Mackenzie, Rogers, Dodds, Boublil, Huth, and Thonhauser), combining structures of existential experience with the constitution of subjects through normative discourses. The concepts are illustrated by psychotherapeutic grief counselling. The objective is to offer a philosophical framework for practical psychotherapeutic work with clients and psychotherapy research.