Psychological Architecture and the Practicing Therapist
A Structural Framework for Understanding Inter-Domain Dynamics in Clinical Presentation
This paper introduces Psychological Architecture as a structural framework for understanding how the primary domains of psychological functioning — Mind, Emotion, Identity, and Meaning — operate not in isolation, but as an interdependent system. Written for practicing therapists, it does not propose new techniques or interventions. It addresses a different question: how the conditions that organize a presenting problem may originate outside the domain in which that problem appears, and how those conditions propagate across the system in patterned ways. By specifying the structural relationships among the domains and the dynamics through which disruption is maintained, the paper offers a reference framework that extends what clinicians can see in their work, without displacing the methods through which they practice.
April 2026
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.31943.25766
Download PDF
Table of Contents
Abstract
Practicing therapists work with the full complexity of human psychological life, yet the dominant organizational frameworks available to them — categorical diagnosis, transdiagnostic process models, and neurobiologically oriented research criteria — each operate at a level of analysis that does not include the structural relationships among the primary domains of psychological functioning. This is not a criticism of those frameworks; it is a description of their characteristic scope. Each operates effectively at its own level of analysis. The structural level — the level at which the domains interact as an organized system — remains unaddressed. This paper introduces Psychological Architecture as a domain-level structural framework that addresses this specific gap. The framework proposes that human psychological functioning is organized across four interacting domains: Mind, Emotion, Identity, and Meaning. These domains are not parallel and independent; they are structurally interdependent, such that disruption in one domain creates organizing conditions that propagate into others in patterned ways. Seven structural models derived from the framework describe these propagation dynamics; four are developed in detail here as illustrations of inter-domain dynamics directly relevant to clinical observation. The paper argues that a structural map of this kind extends what practitioners can see in clinical presentation — enabling the identification of domain of origin, propagation pathways, and the governance status of the Meaning domain — without prescribing intervention or displacing existing clinical frameworks. The framework is positioned as a complement to current clinical and transdiagnostic approaches, offering a structural vocabulary and reference system that organizes what practitioners already observe and work with. A therapist working without such a map may address what is visible while the organizing conditions beneath it remain untouched.
I. Introduction
The Problem of the Presenting Problem
Therapy begins with what the client brings. The presenting problem — the named distress, the behavioral pattern seeking change, the emotional state pressing for relief — is the natural entry point of clinical work. It is what is visible, what is reportable, and what provides the initial shape of the therapeutic encounter. But the presenting problem and the organizing conditions that produce it are not always the same thing.
This gap between surface presentation and structural origin is not a clinical failure. It is a feature of how psychological distress is organized. The mechanisms that sustain a presenting problem may operate at a level of the psychological system that differs from the level at which the problem presents. A client who arrives reporting emotional numbness may be experiencing the downstream effects of a meaning structure that has collapsed. A client whose cognitive patterns resist revision despite competent cognitive work may be working from an identity organization that makes the revision threatening at a structural level. A client who achieves symptom reduction across one domain may find that the gains remain unstable because the inter-domain conditions that originally generated the symptoms are still in place.
The clinical literature has increasingly recognized this complexity. The transdiagnostic movement has established that the mechanisms maintaining psychological distress frequently operate across diagnostic boundaries — that emotion dysregulation, for example, is not specific to any single disorder but functions as a sustaining condition across a wide range of clinical presentations (Harvey, Watkins, Mansell, & Shafran, 2004; Aldao, Nolen-Hoeksema, & Schweizer, 2010). Network models of psychopathology have demonstrated that symptoms are not independent but are connected through dynamic interaction effects, such that some symptoms function as central activating nodes whose disruption propagates to others (Borsboom & Cramer, 2013). The field has moved, meaningfully and productively, away from the assumption that a discrete diagnostic category describes a discrete, contained, and structurally uniform condition.
Yet even within this more sophisticated clinical landscape, something remains missing. Transdiagnostic frameworks identify shared mechanisms; they do not specify how the fundamental domains of psychological functioning are organized as a structural system. Network models map symptom interactions; they do not map the domain-level architecture within which those interactions occur. Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) advances the biological basis of psychological function; it was designed as a research framework and, by its own architects' admission, has not yet proven useful to clinicians working in practice (Insel et al., 2010). Existential frameworks have illuminated the clinical relevance of meaning and purpose; they have not integrated the meaning domain into a structural account of how it relates to emotion, identity, and cognition as a system.
This paper introduces Psychological Architecture as a framework that addresses this gap. The move from the preceding survey to this proposal is a move in kind, not only in content. The frameworks surveyed operate at the symptom level, the mechanism level, the neurobiological level, or the domain-specific level of meaning or identity. What follows operates at a different level: the level of structural architecture — the organizational logic through which those domains interact as a system. It is a domain-level structural framework — not a clinical protocol, not a diagnostic system, and not a mechanism-level process model. It proposes that human psychological functioning is organized across four primary domains (Mind, Emotion, Identity, Meaning), that these domains are structurally interdependent, and that the clinical presentation of distress cannot be fully understood without a structural account of how disruption propagates across domain boundaries.
The paper is directed at practicing therapists as its primary audience, and its orientation is collaborative. Psychological Architecture is not proposed as a correction to clinical practice or as a challenge to existing frameworks. It is proposed as a structural map that extends what practitioners can see — a reference system for organizing the complexity that clinical work already encounters and that existing frameworks, individually and in combination, do not fully integrate at the structural level.
Argument Overview
The argument proceeds in five movements. The paper first surveys the current landscape of clinical frameworks — categorical diagnosis, transdiagnostic models, RDoC, existential approaches, and salutogenesis — identifying what each contributes and where the structural gap remains. It then introduces the Psychological Architecture framework: its four domains, their structural properties, and coherence as the governing principle of the system. It develops the inter-domain dynamics through four structural models derived from the framework, each grounded in empirical literature and each illustrating a distinct form of inter-domain propagation. It then addresses what a structural lens makes visible that domain-specific and mechanism-level frameworks do not. It closes by positioning the framework in relation to existing clinical practice — specifying what it offers, what it does not claim, and how it may function as a resource for practitioners whose work already engages the full complexity of the psychological system.
II. The Landscape of Existing Frameworks: Convergence and Structural Gap
The frameworks currently available to clinicians for organizing clinical observation and structuring clinical work represent decades of serious theoretical and empirical development. Each has made real contributions. Each also has a characteristic scope — a level of analysis at which it operates most effectively — and that scope defines not only what it illuminates but what it leaves in shadow.
Categorical Diagnosis and Its Known Limitations
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5; American Psychiatric Association, 2013) has served as the primary organizational framework for clinical practice in the United States for more than four decades. Its diagnostic categories — defined by symptom clusters, duration criteria, and functional impairment thresholds — have provided the shared language of clinical communication, the framework for treatment authorization, the structure of research design, and the organizing basis of clinical training.
The limitations of this framework are now extensively documented, and the documentation has come from within the field rather than from outside it. High rates of diagnostic comorbidity across the DSM categories raise a fundamental question: if the categories represent discrete natural kinds, why do they co-occur at rates far exceeding chance? Presentations within a single diagnosis are often highly heterogeneous — two clients sharing a diagnosis may present with markedly different symptom profiles, respond to different interventions, and exhibit different trajectories over time. Categorical diagnoses show limited correspondence with underlying biological mechanisms and only modest predictive value for treatment response (Dalgleish, Black, Johnston, & Bevan, 2020; Kotov et al., 2017).
The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP; Kotov et al., 2017) has emerged as one of the most developed dimensional alternatives to the DSM framework. HiTOP organizes psychopathology hierarchically — from a general factor at the highest level of abstraction down through spectra, subfactors, and individual symptoms — on the basis of empirical patterns of co-occurrence rather than consensus-driven categorical definitions. This represents a genuine advance in structural thinking about psychopathology.
But HiTOP, like the DSM, operates at the level of symptoms and syndromes. It provides a more empirically defensible organizational structure for what is already visible in clinical presentation. It does not provide an account of the domain-level architecture — the structural organization of Mind, Emotion, Identity, and Meaning as a system — that generates and sustains what becomes visible as symptoms and syndromes.
Transdiagnostic Models: Shared Mechanisms Without Structural Architecture
The transdiagnostic movement has offered the most significant challenge to categorical diagnosis and the most productive alternative framework for both research and clinical application. Its central insight — that many psychological processes, risk factors, and treatment mechanisms operate across traditional diagnostic boundaries — has reorganized a significant portion of clinical psychology research and has generated effective clinical applications, most notably Barlow and colleagues' Unified Protocol for the Transdiagnostic Treatment of Emotional Disorders (Barlow et al., 2010).
Transdiagnostic research has established that emotion dysregulation is a cross-cutting mechanism relevant to a wide range of presentations (Aldao et al., 2010; Harvey et al., 2004). It has identified negative affectivity, cognitive avoidance, perfectionism, and rumination as processes that sustain distress across diagnostic boundaries. It has demonstrated that interventions targeting these shared mechanisms often produce broader clinical gains than disorder-specific protocols, and that heterogeneity within diagnoses is better explained by process-level variables than by categorical membership (Ellard, Fairholme, Boisseau, Farchione, & Barlow, 2010).
These are substantive contributions. The transdiagnostic framework has made the field structurally more sophisticated by establishing that the symptom level and the mechanism level are distinct, and that the mechanism level is often more clinically tractable.
The limitation of the transdiagnostic approach — from the perspective of Psychological Architecture — is that it remains mechanism-focused rather than architecturally organized. It has mapped the processes that operate across disorders; it has not specified how the fundamental domains of psychological functioning are organized in relation to each other. As Dalgleish and colleagues (2020) noted in a comprehensive review, a genuine understanding of how dysfunctional processes affect mental health will require attention to "the critical interactions between mental processes and mental content" — a structural question that the transdiagnostic framework has identified but not yet resolved.
The tridimensional model proposed by Eket and colleagues (2025) represents a recent effort within the transdiagnostic tradition to integrate cognitive, behavioral, and attentional domains into a coherent framework for intervention. Its contribution is integrative: it organizes existing CBT-tradition approaches and makes their interactions explicit. But it remains within the CBT tradition and does not address the Identity or Meaning domains that Psychological Architecture treats as co-equal structural elements.
RDoC and the Biological Frontier
The Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) initiative, launched by the National Institute of Mental Health in 2009, represents the most ambitious effort yet undertaken to reorganize psychiatric classification around biological and behavioral dimensions rather than symptom clusters (Insel et al., 2010). RDoC conceptualizes mental illness through a matrix of functional domains and levels of analysis — from genes, molecules, and cells through circuits, physiology, and behavior to self-report — with the primary organizing level being neural circuitry.
RDoC has advanced the field significantly at the research level. It has accelerated the identification of transdiagnostic neural mechanisms, supported the development of computational approaches to psychopathology (Huys, Maia, & Frank, 2016), and opened new lines of inquiry into the biological substrates of psychological function. For researchers, it represents a genuine alternative to the descriptive limitations of categorical diagnosis.
For practicing clinicians, RDoC's contribution remains prospective rather than current. The framework's architects were explicit on this point: in the near term, RDoC is most useful for researchers mapping brain-behavior relationships; the findings of developmental neuroscience "have not yet proven useful for clinicians, often because the results are relevant to broad domains of function such as temperament rather than specific diagnoses" (Insel et al., 2010, p. 749). Subsequent critiques have identified additional limitations: an overemphasis on biological units, neglect of the phenomenological level of analysis, and a structure that may not map well onto the complexity of clinical presentations (Lilienfeld, 2014).
From the perspective of Psychological Architecture, the more fundamental issue is that RDoC — even at full development — would not provide a structural map of how the phenomenological domains of psychological life (the experience of emotion, the organization of identity, the construction of meaning) relate to each other as a system. RDoC begins from neural circuits; Psychological Architecture begins from the structural organization of the person's psychological world. These are genuinely different levels of analysis, and a complete account of clinical presentation requires both.
Existential and Meaning-Based Frameworks
The existential tradition in psychology has given the field its most developed account of what Psychological Architecture calls the Meaning domain. Frankl (1959/2006), whose logotherapy emerged from his experience in Nazi concentration camps, proposed that the search for meaning is the primary motivational force in human psychology — not a secondary function of biological drive or social learning, but the organizing orientation of the person as such. Meaninglessness, in Frankl's account, constitutes a distinct clinical condition: an existential neurosis characterized not by conflict or repression but by the absence of any organizing direction — the inability "to believe in the truth, importance, usefulness or interest value of any of the things one is engaged in" (Yalom, 1980, p. 422, citing Maddi).
Yalom (1980) formalized the existential framework in its most comprehensive clinical form, organizing the field around four ultimate concerns — death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness — each of which generates existential anxiety when it cannot be adequately engaged. Yalom's contribution to clinical practice has been substantial: his framework provides a vocabulary for presenting problems that resist conventional diagnostic categorization, and his insistence on the therapeutic relationship as the primary medium of existential work has influenced a generation of practitioners across theoretical orientations.
May (1953), Rollo May's earlier treatment of the existential themes of anxiety, meaning, and selfhood, provided the philosophical groundwork for an American existential psychology and established the connection between the anxiety of meaninglessness and broader psychological functioning that Yalom would later develop clinically.
These frameworks have made the Meaning domain visible as a clinical domain of the first order. What they have not provided is an account of how meaning relates structurally to the other domains — to identity, to emotion, to the interpretive and attentional processes of the Mind. The existential tradition treats the Meaning domain as primary and addresses it directly; it does not specify the structural conditions through which meaning collapse generates downstream effects in the other domains, or the pathways through which disturbances in other domains may degrade the meaning structure.
The Salutogenic Framework: Coherence Named but Not Mapped
Antonovsky's salutogenic framework (1979, 1987) approached the question of psychological coherence from a distinctive angle: rather than asking what causes illness, it asked what maintains health under conditions of adversity and stress. The central construct of this framework — Sense of Coherence (SOC) — is defined as a global orientation toward life in which the world is experienced as comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful. These three components are consistently found to be strongly interconnected and to function as a unified orientation rather than separable dimensions (Moksnes, 2021; Hochwälder, 2019).
Research has established SOC as one of the most robust predictors of psychological wellbeing and physical health across populations, diagnoses, and life stages (Eriksson & Lindström, 2007). High SOC is associated with greater resilience under stress, better coping outcomes, lower rates of depression and anxiety, and in clinical populations, better quality of life and functioning (Griffiths, Ryan, & Foster, 2011). The framework has been successfully applied in nursing, public health, and clinical psychology contexts.
Antonovsky's contribution to the question addressed by this paper is significant: he identified coherence as a health-determining property of the person's relationship to their psychological world — a property that is integrative and cross-domain rather than specific to any one mechanism or symptom cluster. His framework comes closest, among existing approaches, to the structural concern of Psychological Architecture.
The gap, from the perspective of this framework, is that SOC describes a global orientation — what the person's relationship to their world feels like — rather than specifying the structural conditions that generate or undermine that coherence. It does not map the domain-level architecture; it does not specify the inter-domain dynamics through which coherence is maintained or lost; and it does not provide an account of what happens when specific domains are disrupted and how those disruptions propagate. The salutogenic framework names the target; Psychological Architecture attempts to specify its structural organization.
The Structural Gap
Across the frameworks surveyed — categorical diagnosis, transdiagnostic models, RDoC, existential psychology, and salutogenesis — a structural gap is now visible. Not as a criticism of any of them, but as a consequence of their characteristic levels of analysis. The symptom level. The mechanism level. The neurobiological level. The phenomenological level of meaning and existential concern. Each of these is real, necessary, and productive. None is the structural level — the level at which the primary domains of psychological functioning (Mind, Emotion, Identity, Meaning) interact as an organized system, propagate disruption across domain boundaries, and maintain or lose their functional integration.
That level does not yet have a map. Psychological Architecture is proposed as one.
III. Psychological Architecture: The Framework
Psychological Architecture is a theoretical and organizational framework for understanding human psychological functioning at the structural level. It proposes that human psychological functioning is organized across four primary domains — Mind, Emotion, Identity, and Meaning — and that these domains interact according to a structural logic that can be specified, observed, and used as a reference system for understanding clinical presentation.
The framework is not a clinical model. It does not propose assessment tools, intervention protocols, or treatment sequences. It does not make claims about etiology, prognosis, or treatment response. It operates entirely at the level of structural description — specifying how the psychological system is organized, not prescribing what to do about any particular condition of that organization.
This distinction is deliberate. The claim being made is not that the framework tells clinicians what to do, but that it extends what clinicians can see. A structural map of the psychological system functions as a reference system for clinical observation — a way of organizing what is already present in the work at a level that symptom-level and mechanism-level frameworks do not address.
The Four Domains
Mind
The Mind domain encompasses the cognitive architecture through which the person constructs their experience of reality. This includes perception and attentional orientation; the interpretive schemas that organize incoming information; the belief structures that give experience its meaning at the immediate, everyday level; and the patterns of cognitive processing — including rumination, reappraisal, avoidance, and elaboration — through which experience is evaluated and responded to.
Research in cognitive psychology has established that the Mind domain is not a neutral processor of information but an active, schema-driven interpreter. Beck's (1979) cognitive model of depression demonstrated that systematic biases in the interpretation of experience — negative schemas applied to the self, the world, and the future — are not mere symptoms of depression but organizing conditions that sustain it. Kahneman's (2011) two-system account of cognition established that fast, automatic processing and slow, deliberate processing produce different classes of interpretive error, each with distinct implications for behavior and emotional response.
In Psychological Architecture, the Mind domain's significance extends beyond its intradomain function. Because it is the domain through which the person interprets and evaluates their experience, its condition affects what enters the Identity domain as self-relevant information, what the Emotion domain has to process, and how the Meaning domain's constructs are applied to specific events. The Mind domain is not primary — none of the domains is primary in a fixed sense — but it is the domain of first contact with experience, and its organizational patterns have structural consequences across the system.
Emotion
The Emotion domain encompasses affective experience, emotional processing, and the regulatory processes through which emotional states are generated, maintained, and modulated. It includes both the phenomenology of feeling — the subjective experience of emotional states — and the functional processes through which those states are regulated, expressed, and integrated into ongoing behavior.
Gross's process model of emotion regulation (1998, 2015) has provided the most influential account of the Emotion domain at the mechanism level. The model identifies distinct points in the emotional generation process at which regulatory strategies can operate — from situation selection and modification, through attentional deployment and cognitive change, to response modulation — and has generated extensive research on the differential effectiveness and costs of different regulatory strategies. Gross and Levenson's (1993) early work establishing the physiological costs of expressive suppression, and Sheppes and colleagues' subsequent research on emotion regulation choice (2011, 2014), have collectively demonstrated that emotion regulation is an active, resource-demanding process whose outcomes depend on the interaction of cognitive capacity, motivational orientation, and situational intensity.
What this research has also established — though often without framing it in structural terms — is the inherently inter-domain character of emotional functioning. Emotion regulation is a Mind-domain activity with Emotion-domain consequences. The regulatory strategies a person uses are selected on the basis of Identity-domain factors (what strategies are consistent with how they understand themselves) and Meaning-domain factors (whether the emotional response is understood as meaningful or as threatening to the person's meaning structure). The Emotion domain, in other words, does not function in structural isolation; its condition at any moment is partly a function of the structural conditions in the other three domains.
Identity
The Identity domain encompasses the organized sense of self — the ongoing construction of who the person is, how they understand their continuity across time, what values and commitments define them, and what relationship they have to their own experience as a self-organizing agent. It is the domain of selfhood understood not as a fixed property but as an active, ongoing structural achievement.
Erikson's (1968) account of identity development established identity formation as a fundamental developmental task — one that does not conclude in adolescence but continues across the lifespan as the person encounters new circumstances that require identity revision. Marcia's (1966) operationalization of identity statuses — diffusion, foreclosure, moratorium, and achievement — provided a framework for describing the degree to which identity work has been engaged and consolidated. More recent research has established that identity coherence — the degree to which the self-concept is organized, stable, and internally consistent — is not merely a developmental variable but a structural organizing condition of psychological functioning across the lifespan.
The clinical literature on identity disturbance has been particularly productive for understanding the Identity domain's structural role. Neacsiu and colleagues (2015) demonstrated in a cross-diagnostic sample that emotion dysregulation was a significant predictor of identity disturbance — and critically, that this relationship held after controlling for BPD diagnosis, depression, and anxiety — establishing the identity-emotion connection as a transdiagnostic structural relationship. Research on identity diffusion has further established that the collapse of identity structure is associated not only with emotion dysregulation but with cognitive distortion, hopelessness, and, in severe cases, with suicidal ideation — demonstrating multi-domain propagation effects from a single Identity-domain disruption (Moretti, Barberis, Verrastro, & Gratteri, 2025).
In Psychological Architecture, the Identity domain functions as the structural reference system for self-relevant information. The Mind domain's interpretive activity is organized, in part, by what the Identity domain defines as consistent with the self. The Emotion domain's regulatory activity is shaped, in part, by what the Identity domain permits as emotionally acceptable. The Meaning domain's constructs are anchored, in part, by the self-commitments the Identity domain maintains. When identity is coherent and stable, it provides organizing structure for the other domains. When it is destabilized, that organizing function fails — and the consequences distribute across the system.
Meaning
The Meaning domain encompasses the system by which the person constructs, organizes, and maintains their sense of purpose, significance, and coherence with respect to their existence. It operates across multiple levels of abstraction simultaneously: from foundational existential commitments — the deepest convictions about what makes life worth living — through intermediate-level values and commitments, to moment-by-moment evaluations of whether specific experiences are consistent with or threatening to the meaning structure.
In Psychological Architecture, the Meaning domain occupies a special structural position: it is the governing domain. Its governing function is not a claim about philosophical primacy, nor is it a fixed hierarchy in which Meaning always takes precedence over the other domains. It is a claim about structural consequence under conditions of disruption. When the Meaning domain is intact and functioning, it provides the organizational logic that integrates the other three domains — that gives the Mind's interpretive activity a directional orientation, that contextualizes the Emotion domain's affective experience, and that supplies the Identity domain with the values and commitments around which selfhood is organized. Governing, here, is a functional and situational description: the domain whose collapse generates the most comprehensive downstream effects across the system, and whose restoration most reliably reorganizes the others. When the Meaning domain is disrupted, its governing function fails, and the consequences distribute across the full system in ways that no single-domain account can capture.
The empirical foundation for treating meaning as a governing domain is substantial. Frankl (1959/2006) proposed the will to meaning as the primary motivational force in human psychology — not a secondary function of biological drive or social learning, but the organizing orientation of the person as such. The empirical literature on meaning in life has confirmed robust associations between meaning and psychological wellbeing, physical health, resilience under adversity, and protection against depression and anxiety (Steger, Frazier, Oishi, & Kaler, 2006; Ryff & Singer, 1998). Park's (2010) integrative review of the meaning-making literature established that meaning-making processes — the cognitive and emotional activity through which meaning disruptions are resolved — are central to adjustment to stressful life events, operating both at the moment of disruption and in the longer process of structural revision.
What the existing literature has not specified is the structural relationship between the Meaning domain and the other domains — the pathways through which meaning disruption generates conditions in Mind, Emotion, and Identity that are not simply parallel responses to the same stressor but structural consequences of the governing domain's degradation. This is the contribution the structural models are designed to make.
Coherence as the Governing Principle
Coherence is the governing principle of Psychological Architecture. It describes the degree to which the four domains are functionally integrated — aligned in their operation, mutually supportive rather than in structural conflict, and organized around a common orienting structure that the Meaning domain supplies when it is intact.
Coherence is not a state to be achieved once and maintained permanently. It is an ongoing condition subject to continuous perturbation, requiring active maintenance, and vulnerable to disruption from within any domain or from the external circumstances that impinge upon any domain. The system can absorb significant perturbation without losing coherence, provided the perturbation does not reach the structural level — provided, that is, that the domains' interdependencies remain organized and the governing function of the Meaning domain remains intact.
This concept connects directly to Antonovsky's (1979) sense of coherence while differing from it in a critical respect. SOC describes how the world is experienced — as comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful — and its relationship to health has been confirmed extensively in the empirical literature (Eriksson & Lindström, 2007). Coherence in Psychological Architecture describes the structural property of the domain system that generates that experience — the inter-domain organizational condition whose presence or absence determines whether the person's psychological world feels, to them, like something they can understand, navigate, and find meaningful.
A person with high system coherence may experience significant domain-level distress — grief, confusion, fear — without structural collapse, because the domains remain functionally aligned and the governing logic of the Meaning domain remains intact. A person with low system coherence may present with diffuse, shifting, or apparently disconnected symptoms across multiple domains, because the organizing conditions have degraded at the system level. Understanding which of these two conditions is present changes what the clinical work is engaging.
IV. Inter-Domain Dynamics: The Structural Logic of Interaction
The structural models of Psychological Architecture describe the patterned dynamics through which inter-domain disruption occurs, propagates, and sustains itself. They are not accounts of individual pathology; they are specifications of structural conditions — organizing patterns that may be present across diagnostic categories, across different presenting problems, and across different levels of severity.
Seven structural models have been developed within the framework. Four are presented here in detail, selected because they together illustrate the full range of inter-domain dynamics — Mind-Emotion interdependency, Identity-Emotion interdependency, Meaning as governing domain, and the constructive logic through which meaning is built and revised. Each model is grounded in the empirical literature and is presented as a structural description rather than a clinical diagnosis.
The Emotional Avoidance Loop: Mind-Emotion Interdependency
The Emotional Avoidance Loop describes a structural dynamic in which the Mind domain's regulatory activity — specifically, the suppression or avoidance of emotional content — generates feedback conditions in the Emotion domain that sustain and often amplify the emotional states the regulatory activity was organized to reduce.
The structural logic of the Loop begins with an emotional state that the Mind domain registers as threatening, unacceptable, or unmanageable. The Mind domain initiates a regulatory response: suppression, cognitive avoidance, distraction, or thought suppression. This response temporarily reduces the visibility of the emotional state — it becomes less consciously accessible, less behaviorally expressed, or less cognitively elaborated. The apparent reduction confirms the regulatory strategy's effectiveness and reinforces its use.
But the emotional state has not been processed; it has been managed at the surface level. Its organizing conditions — the events, beliefs, or identity-level threats that generated it — remain intact. The Emotion domain continues to process the unresolved material, often with increased intensity (the rebound effect documented in thought suppression research; Wegner, 1994). The Mind domain's regulatory effort must increase to maintain the suppression. Over time, the regulatory burden accumulates, the emotional intensity increases, and the cycle becomes self-sustaining — a structural condition that does not resolve through the regulatory strategy that maintains it.
This model is grounded in an extensive empirical literature. Gross and Levenson (1993) established that expressive suppression — a Mind-domain regulatory strategy — increases physiological arousal even while reducing behavioral expression, demonstrating a direct Mind-to-Emotion feedback effect at the biological level. Subsequent research has confirmed that suppression-based regulation strategies are associated with worse outcomes across multiple clinical presentations, with higher reported negative affect, greater cognitive interference, and less successful emotional processing over time (Aldao et al., 2010; Gross & Jazaieri, 2014).
The clinical relevance of the Emotional Avoidance Loop as a structural model is that it identifies the mechanism of a common impasse in clinical work: the client whose emotional experience intensifies despite — or because of — their significant regulatory effort. From a symptom-level perspective, this may present as treatment resistance, emotional lability, or apparently paradoxical responses to intervention. From a structural perspective, it is the predictable outcome of a Mind-domain regulatory strategy that is creating maintaining conditions in the Emotion domain. Seeing it structurally changes what the clinician is able to understand about what is happening — even before any question of intervention is raised.
The Identity Collapse Cycle: Identity-Emotion Interdependency
The Identity Collapse Cycle describes a structural dynamic in which disruption to identity coherence — the stability and integration of self-concept — generates dysregulation in the Emotion domain, which in turn further destabilizes identity, producing a self-sustaining collapse cycle that may persist and intensify independently of the precipitating event.
The cycle begins with an event or condition that disrupts identity coherence. This disruption may be acute — a significant loss, a betrayal, a failure that contradicts a central self-concept — or chronic, the product of cumulative conditions that erode identity stability over time. The disruption activates uncertainty about the self: who the person is, whether their self-concept is accurate, whether their values and commitments remain operative. This uncertainty generates an affective response — anxiety, shame, or existential distress — that the Emotion domain must process.
The Emotion domain's capacity to process this material is compromised by the very instability that generated it. Identity provides the organizational reference system for emotional regulation: it specifies what emotional responses are consistent with self-concept, what regulatory strategies are identity-consistent, and what the emotional experience means in relation to the person's understanding of themselves. When identity is unstable, these organizational functions are unavailable, and emotional dysregulation results — not as a secondary symptom but as a structural consequence of the Identity domain's diminished organizational capacity.
The dysregulation then feeds back into the Identity domain. Emotional states that cannot be regulated or integrated become part of the self-relevant information that the Identity domain must organize — and when that information is chaotic or contradicts existing self-structures, the identity disruption deepens. The cycle is now self-sustaining: identity instability produces emotion dysregulation; emotion dysregulation produces further identity instability.
The empirical support for this model is robust and, critically, transdiagnostic. Neacsiu and colleagues (2015) demonstrated in a cross-diagnostic sample that emotion dysregulation was a significant predictor of identity disturbance, controlling for BPD, depression, and anxiety — establishing the relationship as structural rather than disorder-specific. Huang and colleagues (2025) used network analysis and Bayesian modeling to demonstrate that reduced self-identity coherence and maladaptive emotion regulation strategies are directionally connected, with the pathway running through disrupted tolerance of uncertainty — a structural propagation mechanism consistent with the Identity Collapse Cycle model.
Research on identity diffusion has further established the multi-domain reach of this cycle. Moretti and colleagues (2025) found that identity diffusion — the absence of a cohesive personal identity — mediates the relationship between childhood emotional abuse and adult psychache and hopelessness, even after accounting for emotional dysregulation. This finding is structurally significant: it establishes that the identity-emotion cycle, once in motion, generates conditions in the Mind domain (cognitive distortion, hopelessness) and in the Meaning domain (loss of purpose, despair) that are not simply parallel responses to the same stressor but structural downstream consequences of the cycle's propagation.
For the practicing clinician, the structural significance of the Identity Collapse Cycle is this: emotion-focused work conducted in the absence of a structural understanding of the identity disruption that initiated and sustains the cycle may produce partial gains that do not hold. The Emotion domain's dysregulation is real and warranted as a clinical focus — but the organizing conditions maintaining that dysregulation may be structural rather than purely emotional.
Existential Drift: The Governing Domain and Its Degradation
Existential Drift describes a structural dynamic in which the Meaning domain — the governing domain of the system — loses its organizing function not through acute collapse but through gradual erosion, without a discrete precipitating event, and often without the person being able to name what is happening or why.
The clinical profile of Existential Drift is distinct from the profile of acute meaning crisis. The client in acute meaning crisis — confronted with the sudden death of a loved one, a diagnosis that reorganizes their relationship to time, a loss that dismantles a central life structure — is typically aware of their distress and its source. The existential dimension of the disruption is often close to the surface.
The client experiencing Existential Drift presents differently. They may report functioning adequately — maintaining employment, relationships, and the behavioral structure of their life — while describing a quality of experience that is difficult to name: a flatness, a disengagement, a sense that the activities and commitments that once organized their investment in life no longer carry their former significance. They may not know when this began or what caused it. They may minimize it: "I'm fine, I just feel a bit distant from things." They may present with symptoms that meet criteria for dysthymia or persistent depressive disorder while the structural condition organizing those symptoms is a gradual degradation of the Meaning domain's governing function.
Frankl (1959/2006) described this condition in the language of logotherapy as existential vacuum — a widespread condition of his time characterized by meaninglessness, boredom, and a lack of content. Yalom (1980) formalized it as one of the four existential ultimates, noting that meaninglessness is distinguished from other forms of distress by its particular quality: not anxiety about a specific threat, but an encounter with the groundlessness of experience itself. The existential tradition has been clear that this condition is clinically real and clinically distinct — not a secondary consequence of other disorders but a primary organizing condition of its own.
The structural contribution of the Existential Drift model to this existing account is the specification of how meaning's degradation propagates. When the Meaning domain loses its governing function gradually, the other domains do not immediately destabilize. The Mind domain continues its interpretive activity, but without the orienting function that meaning provides, that activity becomes increasingly self-referential — rumination without resolution, interpretation without the larger frame that would give interpretive activity its direction. The Emotion domain continues to process affect, but the affective states generated no longer connect to the meaning-organized motivational structure that would give them signal value. The Identity domain continues to maintain self-continuity, but the values and commitments around which identity is organized become progressively less activated — present in self-concept but not functionally engaged.
The result is a clinical presentation in which the client is observably present but experientially absent — a condition that Yalom (1980) described as the most profound clinical challenge of meaninglessness: not that the person cannot function, but that functioning no longer feels like living.
The Meaning Hierarchy System: Structural Construction and Revision
The three structural models presented so far — the Emotional Avoidance Loop, the Identity Collapse Cycle, and Existential Drift — each describe a condition of disruption and propagation. They map how the system breaks down, how damage travels, and how self-sustaining collapse cycles form. This is necessary work for a structural framework. But it is not sufficient.
A framework that describes only breakdown cannot account for how the system builds and maintains what it then loses. Understanding inter-domain dynamics requires an account of the constructive logic of the Meaning domain — how meaning is organized in the first place, how that organization generates coherence, and what it means to revise it rather than simply restore it. The Meaning Hierarchy System is that account. It is a generative model, and its purpose in this paper is distinct from the preceding three: not to describe a failure mode but to specify the structural architecture within which failure and recovery both occur.
The Meaning Hierarchy System describes the structural organization of the Meaning domain itself — how meaning is constructed, maintained, and revised across a hierarchical system that operates simultaneously at multiple levels of abstraction. It is a generative model: where the other structural models describe conditions of disruption and propagation, the Meaning Hierarchy System describes the architecture through which meaning is built and through which structural revision becomes possible.
The hierarchy is organized from the most foundational level — existential commitments about what makes life significant, what the self is oriented toward, what constitutes a life worth living — through intermediate levels of value and purpose-organized commitment, to the most immediate level of moment-by-moment evaluation: does this specific experience, relationship, or activity connect to what matters? The levels are not independent. Higher-level structures organize the interpretation of lower-level experience. Lower-level events, when they violate or challenge higher-level structures, trigger meaning-making processes that may revise the hierarchy.
Park's (2010) integrative review of the meaning literature established this hierarchical model empirically, describing how global beliefs and goals function as the organizing reference system against which specific events are evaluated, and how discrepancies between the meaning of a specific event and global meaning structures initiate meaning-making activity. Baumeister (1991) earlier identified the multiple levels at which meaning operates — from the most abstract questions of cosmic significance to the most concrete questions of daily activity — and established that human beings require not a single level of meaning but a coherent organization across levels.
The structural contribution of this model is the distinction it enables between levels of meaning disruption. A client who has lost a significant relationship has experienced a meaning disruption — the specific activities, roles, and commitments organized around that relationship no longer operate. This is real distress. But the structural question is at what level of the hierarchy this disruption is occurring. If the relationship was meaningful within a larger structure of meaning that remains intact — if the person's foundational commitments, identity-organizing values, and global sense of purpose are not implicated — the disruption is painful but structurally contained. Meaning can be reconstructed at the level at which it was disrupted.
If the relationship was carrying a larger structural function — if its loss disrupts a self-concept organized around that relationship, or removes the primary vehicle through which foundational meaning was enacted — the disruption propagates to a higher level of the hierarchy. Reconstruction at the lower level is insufficient; the structural revision required is at the level of foundational meaning, which is a different and considerably more demanding condition than the loss itself.
For the clinician, the Meaning Hierarchy System provides a structural framework for assessing not simply whether meaning is disrupted but where in the hierarchy the disruption is organized. This assessment has consequences for understanding what the person is actually navigating — and for recognizing when what presents as a specific loss is in fact a structural condition requiring engagement at the foundational level.
V. What a Structural Lens Makes Visible
The structural models described in the preceding section are theoretical. They describe organizational dynamics at the domain-interaction level — dynamics that are not directly observable in clinical presentation but that, when understood, change what the clinician is able to see.
This section addresses what a structural lens — the capacity to view clinical presentation through the framework of domain-level organization and inter-domain dynamics — makes visible that is not available to a purely symptom-level or single-domain framework.
The Domain of Presentation and the Domain of Origin
When a client presents with distress, the presenting problem provides an initial domain location: this is an emotional problem, a behavioral problem, a cognitive problem, a relational problem. This initial location is clinically necessary — it organizes the first level of assessment and shapes the early direction of the work.
The structural question is whether the domain of presentation is also the domain of origin.
A presenting problem may be organized primarily within a single domain — the distress that presents emotionally is generated and maintained by conditions within the Emotion domain; the cognitive distortions that present in the Mind domain are generated and maintained by conditions within the Mind domain; and work within those domains addresses the organizing conditions and produces stable outcomes. This is the structure that much clinical work assumes, and it is the structure that describes a significant portion of the cases that respond well to focused, domain-specific intervention.
But there is another possibility, and the inter-domain research suggests it is not uncommon: the domain of presentation and the domain of origin differ. The distress that presents emotionally is generated by conditions in the Identity or Meaning domain that the Emotion domain is processing but cannot resolve. The cognitive patterns that present in the Mind domain are organized by an identity structure that makes revision of those patterns structurally threatening. The flatness that presents as depression is organized by a degradation of the Meaning domain's governing function that depression criteria do not capture.
When the domain of origin and the domain of presentation differ, domain-specific work may produce partial outcomes that do not hold over time — not because the work was inadequately executed, but because it was addressing the presentation without access to the structural conditions that generated and maintained it. This is the impasse that a structural lens is designed to make visible.
Three Structural Observational Moves
A structural lens in clinical observation enables three specific moves that are not available without a map of the domain-level architecture.
The first is domain identification: the capacity to distinguish between the domain in which a presenting problem is visible and the domain in which its organizing conditions are located. This is not a diagnostic move — it does not classify or categorize the presentation. It is an observational move: tracking the material that arises in clinical work and recognizing where in the structural system it is organized. A client who reports significant emotional dysregulation may be presenting an Emotion-domain condition or may be presenting an Identity-Collapse Cycle condition whose primary structural site is the Identity domain. The observation that identifies this difference changes what the clinician understands about what the work is engaging.
The second move is propagation tracking: recognizing the structural pathways through which disruption in one domain is creating organizing conditions in others. When a client's Mind-domain patterns appear to be a response to — rather than a cause of — a deeper structural disruption, this changes the structural reading of what is present. When an emotional regulation difficulty is recognized as a structural consequence of an identity disruption rather than a primary Emotion-domain condition, the clinical understanding of the material changes — even if the specific techniques employed in the work do not.
The third move is governance assessment: evaluating the condition of the Meaning domain as the governing domain and recognizing when its degradation is organizing the presentation at a structural level that domain-specific work alone will not reach. This is the move that the Existential Drift model is designed to support. A client whose presentation involves diffuse, multi-domain dysfunction — emotional flatness, identity disengagement, cognitive aimlessness — may be experiencing the structural consequences of a Meaning domain that is no longer performing its governing function. Recognizing this condition as structural rather than symptomatic changes what is understood to be at stake in the work.
Coherence as a Clinical Indicator
The governing principle of coherence provides a specific additional resource for clinical observation. Where domain-level symptoms describe what is dysregulated, coherence describes the structural status of the system as a whole — the degree to which the domains are functionally integrated and the governing logic of the Meaning domain is operative.
This distinction matters clinically. Two clients may present with comparable symptom severity across the Emotion and Mind domains while differing fundamentally in their system-level coherence. The client with high system coherence — whose domains, while stressed, remain functionally aligned and whose Meaning domain continues to provide its governing orientation — is navigating a different structural condition than the client whose system coherence has degraded, whose domains are no longer functionally aligned, and whose Meaning domain's governing function is absent or severely compromised.
The salutogenic literature has established that this distinction is clinically consequential. Antonovsky's (1979, 1987) research demonstrated that SOC — the global orientation that parallels system coherence in the present framework — predicts outcomes across diagnostic categories and clinical contexts, including quality of life in schizophrenia (Bengtsson-Tops & Hansson, 2001), adjustment in cancer patients, and recovery trajectories in mood disorders. The implication is that the structural condition of the system — its coherence — is a clinically relevant variable independent of symptom-level assessment.
Psychological Architecture provides an account of what generates and sustains coherence at the domain-interaction level: the functional alignment of the four domains, organized by the governing function of the Meaning domain. This account does not replace symptom-level assessment; it adds a structural dimension to it.
VI. Positioning the Framework in the Clinical Ecology
The preceding sections have introduced the framework, developed its structural logic, and specified what a structural lens makes visible in clinical work. This section addresses how the framework is positioned in relation to existing clinical practice — what it offers, what it does not claim, and how it may function as a resource for practitioners.
What the Framework Is Not
Psychological Architecture does not prescribe clinical technique. It does not tell the practicing therapist how to conduct assessment, organize formulation, sequence intervention, or make the countless relational and technical decisions that constitute skilled clinical practice. These matters belong to the clinical frameworks — CBT, psychodynamic approaches, ACT, DBT, existential therapy, somatic approaches, and the many integrative orientations that practitioners draw on — and the structural framework makes no claims about them.
It is not a replacement for any of these frameworks. Each operates at its own level of analysis with its own evidential base and clinical utility. CBT's account of cognitive processes, DBT's account of emotion dysregulation and identity, ACT's account of experiential avoidance and psychological flexibility, existential therapy's engagement with meaning and mortality — each of these addresses real clinical phenomena at the level at which they can be effectively engaged. Psychological Architecture operates at a different level. It does not compete with these approaches; it provides a structural map of the terrain within which all of them work.
It is also not a diagnostic system. The structural models are not diagnostic categories — they are descriptions of organizational dynamics that may be present across a wide range of presenting problems and diagnostic categories. The Identity Collapse Cycle is not a disorder; it is a structural condition. Existential Drift is not a diagnosis; it is a description of a specific form of Meaning domain degradation. These distinctions are not merely definitional. They protect against the misapplication of a theoretical framework as a clinical tool it was not designed to be.
What the Framework Offers
What Psychological Architecture offers to the practicing clinician is, at its most fundamental, an expansion of structural vision.
The first offering is a vocabulary. The framework provides a precise, domain-level language for describing the organization of psychological functioning — a vocabulary that complements and extends the existing vocabulary of symptoms, mechanisms, and processes. When a clinician has a name for the structural condition organizing a presentation, they have a frame for the work that symptom-level description does not provide. The name is not itself the work; it is the structural orientation within which the work is conducted.
The second offering is a map. The specification of inter-domain dynamics — the structural relationships among Mind, Emotion, Identity, and Meaning, and the propagation pathways through which disruption travels across those relationships — provides a reference system for clinical observation that extends beyond what any single domain's descriptive vocabulary can support. The map does not tell the clinician where to go; it tells them where they are.
The third offering is a governing reference: the coherence principle as a structural indicator of the system's organizational status. The capacity to assess whether a presentation reflects domain-level stress within a coherent system or reflects structural degradation of the system itself is a clinical resource that complements symptom-level and mechanism-level assessment.
These offerings are theoretical resources. They become clinical resources in the hands of practitioners who integrate them with their existing clinical training, judgment, and relational capacity — not as a separate methodology, but as a structural dimension added to the clinical observation they already conduct.
A Note on Independent Scholarship
A note on the position from which this framework has been developed and is being offered is warranted, particularly in the context of a paper directed at a professional clinical audience.
Psychological Architecture is a product of independent theoretical scholarship. It has been developed over an extended period of sustained theoretical work that draws on the empirical literature of academic psychology, the clinical literature of applied psychology and psychotherapy, and the intellectual traditions of existential and humanistic psychology. It is not the product of a university research program, a funded clinical trial, or a journal peer review process in the conventional sense. It is submitted here as a preprint precisely in order to enter that evaluative process — to be engaged with, assessed, and responded to by the professional and scholarly communities it addresses.
The absence of institutional affiliation is not, in the history of psychological thought, a disqualification for theoretical contribution. Frankl developed logotherapy as an independent theorist working from concentrated experience. Antonovsky developed salutogenesis as a medical sociologist operating outside the mainstream of clinical psychology. These precedents do not validate Psychological Architecture; they establish that independent theoretical work has a legitimate role in the development of clinical knowledge and that its validity is appropriately assessed on the merits of its argument and its capacity to organize clinical observation in ways that existing frameworks do not.
The claims made in this paper are theoretical and structural. They are falsifiable in the sense that a structural framework must be internally coherent, must account for the phenomena it addresses in a way that can be assessed against the empirical literature, and must be able to organize clinical observation in a way that adds something to what existing frameworks provide. These are the standards by which the framework should be evaluated, and this paper has been organized to make that evaluation possible.
VII. Conclusion
The case presented in this paper is structural. It does not argue that therapy is failing, that existing frameworks are insufficient in their own terms, or that clinical practice requires correction. It argues that something is not currently visible — and that what becomes visible when it is made visible changes how the clinical work can be understood.
The transdiagnostic movement has established that the organizing conditions of clinical presentations cross diagnostic boundaries. Network models have established that symptoms interact through dynamic, interconnected systems. Existential research has established that the meaning domain exercises governing functions that are not reducible to other psychological processes. Empirical identity research has established that the identity-emotion relationship is structural, transdiagnostic, and clinically consequential. Salutogenic research has established that the coherence of the person's orientation to their psychological world is among the most robust predictors of psychological wellbeing available.
Psychological Architecture does not contradict any of this work. It organizes it at a different level — the level of structural architecture rather than mechanism, symptom, neural circuit, or global orientation. In doing so, it provides a map that the practitioner can use to navigate terrain that the existing frameworks describe in pieces but do not fully integrate.
The four structural models developed here — the Emotional Avoidance Loop, the Identity Collapse Cycle, Existential Drift, and the Meaning Hierarchy System — are not exhaustive accounts of inter-domain dynamics. They are illustrations of the structural logic that the full framework specifies: that the domains interact according to patterned propagation dynamics, that disruption does not remain contained within the domain in which it originates, and that the governing function of the Meaning domain has consequences for the structural status of the whole system that no single-domain account can capture.
A therapist working without a structural map of the psychological domains and their interdependencies may address what is visible while the organizing conditions beneath it remain untouched. This paper has attempted to make those organizing conditions both visible and structurally legible — to offer, to the practitioner already engaged in serious clinical work, a map of the terrain they are already navigating.
References
Aldao, A., Nolen-Hoeksema, S., & Schweizer, S. (2010). Emotion-regulation strategies across psychopathology: A meta-analytic review. Clinical Psychology Review, 30, 217–237.
American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). American Psychiatric Publishing.
Antonovsky, A. (1979). Health, stress, and coping. Jossey-Bass.
Antonovsky, A. (1987). Unraveling the mystery of health: How people manage stress and stay well. Jossey-Bass.
Barlow, D. H., Farchione, T. J., Fairholme, C. P., Ellard, K. K., Boisseau, C. L., Allen, L. B., & Ehrenreich-May, J. (2010). Unified protocol for transdiagnostic treatment of emotional disorders: Therapist guide. Oxford University Press.
Baumeister, R. F. (1991). Meanings of life. Guilford Press.
Beck, A. T. (1979). Cognitive therapy of depression. Guilford Press.
Bengtsson-Tops, A., & Hansson, L. (2001). The validity of Antonovsky's Sense of Coherence measure in a sample of schizophrenic patients living in the community. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 33(4), 432–438.
Bogaerts, S., Jeandarme, I., & Van Den Berg, C. (2026). From diagnosis to dynamics: Complex systems, transdiagnostics, and networks in forensic psychiatry. Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1775635
Borsboom, D., & Cramer, A. O. J. (2013). Network analysis: An integrative approach to the structure of psychopathology. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 9, 91–121.
Dalgleish, T., Black, M., Johnston, D., & Bevan, A. (2020). Transdiagnostic approaches to mental health problems: Current status and future directions. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 88(3), 179–195.
Ellard, K. K., Fairholme, C. P., Boisseau, C. L., Farchione, T. J., & Barlow, D. H. (2010). Unified protocol for the transdiagnostic treatment of emotional disorders: Protocol development and initial outcome data. Cognitive and Behavioral Practice, 17(1), 88–101.
Erikson, E. H. (1968). Identity: Youth and crisis. Norton.
Eriksson, M., & Lindström, B. (2007). Antonovsky's sense of coherence scale and the relation with quality of life: A systematic review. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 61, 938–944.
Frankl, V. E. (1959/2006). Man's search for meaning. Beacon Press.
Griffiths, C. A., Ryan, P., & Foster, J. H. (2011). Thematic analysis of Antonovsky's sense of coherence theory. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 52, 168–173.
Gross, J. J. (1998). The emerging field of emotion regulation: An integrative review. Review of General Psychology, 2, 271–299.
Gross, J. J. (2015). Emotion regulation: Current status and future prospects. Psychological Inquiry, 26(1), 1–26.
Gross, J. J., & Jazaieri, H. (2014). Emotion, emotion regulation, and psychopathology: An affective science perspective. Clinical Psychological Science, 2(4), 387–401.
Gross, J. J., & Levenson, R. W. (1993). Emotional suppression: Physiology, self-report, and expressive behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64(6), 970–986.
Harvey, A. G., Watkins, E., Mansell, W., & Shafran, R. (2004). Cognitive behavioural processes across psychological disorders: A transdiagnostic approach to assessment and treatment. Oxford University Press.
Hochwälder, J. (2019). Sense of coherence: Notes on some challenges for future research. SAGE Open, 9(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244019846687
Huang, Y., Zhang, W., & Li, M. (2025). Exploring the interplay between self-identity, affective style, emotion regulation, and anxiety: Based on Bayesian network model. Brain and Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1002/brb3.70290
Insel, T., Cuthbert, B., Garvey, M., Heinssen, R., Pine, D. S., Quinn, K., Sanislow, C., & Wang, P. (2010). Research domain criteria (RDoC): Toward a new classification framework for research on mental disorders. American Journal of Psychiatry, 167(7), 748–751.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Kernberg, O. F. (1984). Severe personality disorders: Psychotherapeutic strategies. Yale University Press.
Kotov, R., Krueger, R. F., Watson, D., Achenbach, T. M., Althoff, R. R., Bagby, R. M., Brown, T. A., Carpenter, W. T., Caspi, A., Clark, L. A., & others. (2017). The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP): A dimensional alternative to traditional nosologies. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 126(4), 454–477.
Lilienfeld, S. O. (2014). The Research Domain Criteria (RDoC): An analysis of methodological and conceptual challenges. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 62, 129–139.
Marcia, J. E. (1966). Development and validation of ego-identity status. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 3(5), 551–558.
May, R. (1953). Man's search for himself. Norton.
Moksnes, U. K. (2021). Sense of coherence. In G. Haugan & M. Eriksson (Eds.), Health promotion in health care: Vital theories and research (pp. 29–37). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63135-2_4
Moretti, E., Barberis, N., Verrastro, V., & Gratteri, S. (2025). The despair of identity diffusion: Associations with psychache and hopelessness and the indirect effect of childhood emotional abuse. Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy.
Neacsiu, A. D., Herr, N. R., Fang, C. M., Rodriguez, M. A., & Rosenthal, M. Z. (2015). Identity disturbance and problems with emotion regulation are related constructs across diagnoses. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 71(4), 346–361.
Park, C. L. (2010). Making sense of the meaning literature: An integrative review of meaning making and its effects on adjustment to stressful life events. Psychological Bulletin, 136(2), 257–301.
Ryff, C. D., & Singer, B. (1998). The contours of positive human health. Psychological Inquiry, 9(1), 1–28.
Seligman, M. E. P. (2011). Flourish: A visionary new understanding of happiness and well-being. Free Press.
Sheppes, G., Scheibe, S., Suri, G., & Gross, J. J. (2011). Emotion-regulation choice. Psychological Science, 22(11), 1391–1396.
Sheppes, G., Scheibe, S., Suri, G., Radu, P., Blechert, J., & Gross, J. J. (2014). Emotion regulation choice: A conceptual framework and supporting evidence. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(1), 163–181.
Starr, R. J. (2024). The Meaning Dissolution Model: A structural account of meaning failure in Psychological Architecture. Depthmark Press. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.34484.10886
Steger, M. F., Frazier, P., Oishi, S., & Kaler, M. (2006). The Meaning in Life Questionnaire: Assessing the presence of and search for meaning in life. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 53(1), 80–93.
Wegner, D. M. (1994). Ironic processes of mental control. Psychological Review, 101(1), 34–52.
Yalom, I. D. (1980). Existential psychotherapy. Basic Books.
Citation
This work may be cited using the following formats:
APA Starr, R. J. (2026). Psychological architecture and the practicing therapist: A structural framework for understanding inter-domain dynamics in clinical presentation. Depthmark Press. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.31943.25766
Chicago Starr, RJ. 2026. "Psychological Architecture and the Practicing Therapist: A Structural Framework for Understanding Inter-Domain Dynamics in Clinical Presentation." Depthmark Press. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.31943.25766
MLA Starr, RJ. "Psychological Architecture and the Practicing Therapist: A Structural Framework for Understanding Inter-Domain Dynamics in Clinical Presentation." Depthmark Press, 2026. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.31943.25766