Poetry Collections

Afar (the Hardscrabble Press 2020)

Debut poetry collection by poet, philosopher, and singer A. L. Westin, with illustrations by Kate Young.

The poems in Afar are filled with beautiful qualities of light and storm and sea. They speak to moments – both domestic and grand – with a care-filled attention that lets Westin’s Nordic sensibility shine through. Her imagery puts one in mind of the poetry of Tomas Tranströmer; there is something Hopkinsesque about her delight in the texture of her language and the mouthfeel of her words; and then, too, one is apt to meet Emily Dickinson in her genius for off/slant/mid-line rhymes. In short, her work does what all really good writing does: it folds the voices of the tradition inside its own voice, and then goes on to say something truly new with the result.

Kate Young’s images, with their dreamy invocations of weather – both noetic and meteorological – shimmer alongside the poems, lending the collection as a whole a rhythm that is as grounded as it is surprising.

Academic Books

Embodied Trauma and Healing: Critical Conversations on the Concept of Health

(Routledge 2022)

What if philosophy could solve the psychological puzzle of trauma? Embodied Trauma and Healing argues just that, suggesting that one might be needed in order to understand the other. The book demonstrates how the body-mind problem that haunted Descartes was addressed by phenomenologists, whilst also proposing that the human experience is lived subjectively as embodied consciousness.

Throughout this book, the author suggests that the phenomenological tools that are used to explore the body can also be an effective way to discuss the physical and mental aspects of embodied trauma. Drawing on the work of Paul Ricœur, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Lévinas, the book outlines a phenomenological approach to the embodied and relational subject. It offers a reading of embodied trauma that can connect it to wider conversations in psychological underpinnings of trauma through Peter Levine’s somatic research and Bessel van der Kolk’s embodied remembering. Connecting to the analytic tradition, the book suggests that phenomenology can unify both language-based and body-based therapeutic practice. It also presents a compelling discussion that ties the embodied experience of relation in trauma to the wider causal factors of social suffering and relational rupture, intergenerational trauma and the trauma of land, as informed by phenomenology.

Embodied Trauma and Healing is essential reading for researchers within the fields of philosophy, psychology and medical humanities for it actively engages with contemporary configurations of trauma theory and recent research developments in healing and mental disorder diagnosis.

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

(Bloomsbury Press 2019)

Existential phenomenology can be a particularly helpful philosophical method for understanding human experience. Starting from the perspective of the subject, it can clarify and problematize subtle everyday relations, enabling greater insight into difficult situations. Used by contemporary philosophers as a way of understanding the embodied experience of illness, this method has been helpful for understanding physical illness in the medical humanities, offering a fruitful way of reading the subjectivity of mental states.

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction examines how the experience of addiction engages both mental and physical phenomena within the existence of a particular human life, using the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas and Søren Kierkegaard. The book maps out an existential phenomenology of subject-in-relation. Both Lévinas and Kierkegaard use decidedly psychological and theological language to situate their philosophy, discussing the subject through concepts of love, otherness, responsibility and hope, while played out in a situation of anxiety, suffering, desire and revelation.

Combining existential phenomenological discourse with contemporary addiction discourse, Westin argues that the concept of subject as 'addict', as found in the Twelve Steps Program and disease models of addiction, ought to be replaced with the free and relational identity of subject as 'addicted'.