Integrative review bridges neuroscience, predictive frameworks, and psychodynamics on the embodied relational self.

Contemporary neuroscience views the self as an emergent, embodied process, integrating sensorimotor activity, interoceptive signals, and affective states. Reflective capacities like mentalization arise from these embodied and relational processes. Psychoanalysis has long recognized the body's role in self-experience and affect regulation. Despite these insights, a critical gap exists in integrative models that effectively bridge neuroscience, predictive frameworks, and psychodynamic theory to fully understand self-organization and disruption.

This paper presents an integrative narrative review, synthesizing existing literature from contemporary neuroscience, predictive processing frameworks, and psychodynamic theory. The authors conducted a comprehensive qualitative analysis, identifying key conceptual overlaps and divergences in how each discipline understands the relational self and its embodied neuropsychodynamics. The review aims to bridge these distinct traditions, highlighting the body's central role in self-experience, affect regulation, and temporal continuity within interpersonal contexts.

The review found that contemporary neuroscience increasingly conceptualizes the self as an emergent, embodied process arising from continuous coordination of neural, bodily, and environmental dynamics. It integrates sensorimotor activity, interoceptive signals, and affective states into a coherent experiential field. Reflective capacities like mentalization are understood to emerge from these embodied and relational processes. > The body constitutes the primary medium through which the self is enacted, stabilized, and transformed across time. The authors highlight how multidimensional models of selfhood distinguish between minimally embodied selfhood and narrative identity, linking these to social self-processing and agentic self-regulation. They propose that psychopathology reflects specific disruptions across these self-dimensions rather than a unitary self-system, aligning with both embodied neuroscience and psychodynamic perspectives.