Self-Coherence as a Higher-Order Organizational Process: Toward an Integrative Theory of Selfhood

Individuals maintain a coherent sense of self across bodily, relational, and developmental change through a higher-order organizational process called self-coherence, which integrates embodied experience, identity processes, personal meaning organization, and self-regulatory mechanisms. Unlike self-regulation, which supports adaptive responding to demands, self-coherence concerns the preservation of continuity and intelligibility across experience. The framework draws on embodied cognition, predictive processing, phenomenology, identity research, and constructivist approaches to personality, positioning self-coherence as a principle that bridges these accounts and explains how continuity is established, maintained, and restored across change.

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Abstract

How do individuals remain themselves while continuously changing? Contemporary psychological theories have primarily addressed this question through the concept of self-regulation, emphasizing the processes through which organisms adapt to internal and environmental demands. However, adaptation alone does not explain how individuals maintain a coherent sense of self across bodily, relational, and developmental change. The present paper proposes a theoretical framework of self-coherence that integrates insights from embodied cognition, predictive processing, phenomenology, identity research, and constructivist approaches to personality. Within this framework, self-coherence is conceptualized not as an additional self-construct, but as a higher-order organizational process through which embodied experience, identity processes, personal meaning organization, and self-regulatory mechanisms are dynamically integrated across time. Embodied processes provide a foundational sense of continuity, identity supports the integration of past, present, and future experiences, and personal meaning organizations are reinterpreted as strategies through which continuity is maintained despite change. Building on this perspective, the paper distinguishes self-coherence from self-regulation. Whereas self-regulation supports adaptive responding, self-coherence concerns the preservation of continuity and intelligibility across experience. Regulatory processes are therefore understood as mechanisms serving a more fundamental organizational task: maintaining a coherent sense of self over time. By positioning self-coherence as a higher-order organizational principle, the proposed framework offers a conceptual bridge between embodied, developmental, phenomenological, constructivist, and predictive accounts of selfhood, providing a unified framework for understanding how continuity is established, maintained, and restored across change.