Nature-Aligned Psychology and the Problem of Epistemic Fragmentation: A Structural-Dynamic Model of Psychological Organization

Contemporary psychology employs multiple theoretical and methodological frameworks to describe cognitive, emotional, behavioral, regulatory, and meaning-related processes. While such specialization enables detailed investigation of particular phenomena, it also raises a problem of epistemic fragmentation: how can different levels and forms of psychological inquiry be related within a model of the human being as an integrated psychological system without reducing one level of description to another?

This paper presents Nature-Aligned Psychology, a structural-dynamic approach in which the primary object of analysis is not an isolated class of psychological processes but the organization of their interrelations and the conditions of their coherent functional continuity. The approach begins from the ontological premise that the human being is a living system embedded in natural reality. Psychological organization is therefore examined not as an autonomous collection of processes, but in relation to the conditions under which an integrated living system maintains its organization over time.

The model distinguishes between structure, dynamics, the processual unfolding of dynamics, observability, and formal measurability. This distinction allows different manifestations of psychological functioning to be treated as related but non-identical levels of description. The proposed framework thus seeks integration without eliminating methodological or conceptual differences among them.

The model introduces a formal core comprising a space of structurally distinguishable configurations, interrelated components of psychological organization, an operator of organizational reproduction, a resource-sufficiency constraint, and criteria of structural coherence. Organizational reproduction is defined here as the preservation of functional organization across transitions between system states. Within this framework, nature-alignment is neither a normative demand, a metaphorical "return to nature," nor a subjective sense of connectedness with the natural environment. It is formulated as an operational state of structural coherence, requiring coordination among the system's principal components together with sufficient resources for their functional realization.

The formalization also specifies conditions under which the model could be empirically challenged or falsified, including failure of organizational reproduction, failure to establish the proposed structural distinctions or predicted relations among components, and failure to replicate the predicted empirical structure. The model is not presented as a fully psychometrically validated theory. Its empirical foundations have developed primarily through long-term qualitative and naturalistic observations; the present formalization is therefore proposed as a basis for subsequent standardized tests of reliability, validity, measurement invariance, and replication in independent samples.

In the context of "From Ontic Unity to Epistemic Defragmentation," Nature-Aligned Psychology approaches defragmentation not as the construction of a single universal language for psychology, but as the search for a structural level of description capable of preserving distinctions among different forms of psychological inquiry while specifying relations among them. The ontic unity of the human being as an integrated living system embedded in natural reality is thereby connected to the epistemological task of constructing a multilevel, internally coherent, and empirically testable model of psychological organization.