Entangled Autopoiesis: Reframing Psychotherapy and Neuroscience Through Cognitive Science and Systems Engineering

The increasing intersection of psychotherapy, cognitive science, neuroscience, and systems engineering beckons us to rethink what it means to talk the language of the human mind in the clinical setting. This position paper proposes the idea of entangled autopoiesis, a metatheoretical paradigm that addresses the mind and therapy not as linear processes but as self-organizing, adaptive processes enfolded across neural, cognitive, relational, and cultural domains. Psychotherapy, from this viewpoint, is less a corrective technique and more a zone of systemic integration, wherein resilience and meaning are co-created in the interaction of embodied brains, lived stories, and relational fields. Neuroscience informs us about plasticity and regulation; cognitive science emphasizes the embodied and extended nature of cognition; and systems engineering sheds light on feedback, emergence, and adaptive dynamics. Artificial intelligence appears as a double presence: as a metaphor for complexity and as a practical tool able to chart patterns below human sensibility. By adopting a complexity-aware epistemology, we advocate a relocation in clinical thinking—one recognizing the psyche as an autopoietic network, entangled with culture and technology and able to renew itself in therapeutic encounters. The implications for clinical methodology, therapist training, and future interdisciplinary research are discussed.