Embodied Neuropsychodynamics of the Relational Self Across Space and Time: An Integrative Narrative Review

Summary

This narrative review integrates findings from neuroscience, psychology, and psychotherapy to propose a framework for understanding selfhood as embodied and relational. It positions peripersonal space (PPS) as a key interface that develops bodily self-consciousness, self-other relations, affect regulation, and temporal continuity. Subjective time arises from bodily rhythms and interpersonal synchronization, extending into autobiographical continuity and mentalizing. Psychodynamic concepts like holding and containment are reinterpreted through embodied neuroscience. Psychotherapeutic change involves reorganizing embodied, affective, and reflective dimensions via co-regulation and attunement. The framework links embodiment, temporality, and therapy, guiding future interdisciplinary research.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Extensive explorations in neuroscience, psychology, and psychotherapy increasingly recognized the embodied and relational foundations of selfhood, underscoring the need for an integrated framework spanning development, psychopathology, and therapeutic change. This narrative review synthesizes empirical and theoretical literature across neuroscience, embodiment research, predictive processing, developmental science, phenomenology, and psychodynamic theory, proposing a multidimensional neuropsychodynamic framework of embodied selfhood and its clinical implications. A central contribution is the positioning of Peripersonal Space (PPS) as an embodied action-oriented interface that functions as a primary developmental scaffold for bodily self-consciousness, self-other relations, affect regulation and temporal continuity. PPS is proposed as a dynamic matrix linking embodied predictive self-processes with relational experience, thereby shaping subjective temporality and autobiographical processes. Within this framework, subjective time emerges through bodily rhythms, interpersonal synchronization, and predictive engagement with environmental affordances. These embodied temporal processes gradually extend toward autobiographical continuity and mentalizing capacities, supported by coordinated interactions among large-scale brain networks. Psychodynamic concepts including holding, containment, dimensionality, and symbolic transformation are revisited in dialogue with contemporary embodied and relational neuroscience. Clinically, disturbances of selfhood across psychopathological conditions are discussed in relation to altered PPS organization, disturbances in self-evidencing, and embodied temporal continuity. Psychotherapeutic change is conceptualized as involving gradual reorganization across embodied, affective, and reflective dimensions through co-regulation, interpersonal attunement, and temporally extended relational engagement. Overall, this perspective advances a process-oriented and interdisciplinary framework linking embodiment, temporality, autobiographical integration, and psychotherapy, while highlighting directions for future interdisciplinary research at the interface of neuroscience, embodiment and psychodynamics.

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