This episode concludes the series dedicated to the "Cognosystemic Theory of Human Psychosocial Relational Construction" (TCCR) with an invitation to look toward the future of Social Work through a critical, rigorous, and deeply transformative lens.
What Fundamental Problem Gave Rise to the TCCR?
The absence of a unified, discipline-specific theory has long been a major void in Social Work. This lack has limited its recognition as a science, its capacity to generate autonomous knowledge, and its ability to structurally impact social problems. The TCCR emerges as a radical and systematic response to this historic need.
What Does the TCCR Propose?
The TCCR is not merely a theory for intervention—it is a proposal for the epistemological refoundation of Social Work. It redefines:
Its object of study: the relational psychosocial construction of human reality. Its method: narrative, cognitive, systemic, and situated. Its professional role: as a facilitator of symbolic, relational, and structural transformation.
What Does It Mean to Conceive Social Work as a Social Science of Human Relationships?
It means recognizing Social Work as an applied discipline specialized in understanding and intervening in the narrative and relational systems that shape human experience. This represents a shift from an assistential or technical outlook toward a scientific, ethical, and emancipatory practice.
What Are the Distinctive Contributions of the TCCR?
This episode revisits the core concepts developed by the theory:
- Cognosystem
- Cognosystemic narrative
- Cognosystemic meme
- Narrative frictions and hierarchies
- Symbolic displacements
It also highlights its transdisciplinary foundation, integrating phenomenology, hermeneutics, systems theory, narrative psychology, memetics, and the bioecological model into a coherent and original theoretical architecture.
Where Is the TCCR Headed?
The theory presents significant research challenges: it must be empirically validated as both an explanatory and operational framework. This involves developing tools to analyze, predict, and transform psychosocial dynamics through: Qualitative and quantitative methods. Narrative and computational methodologies. These approaches aim to examine symbolic trajectories, social crises, memetic shifts, and collective transformation processes.
A Final Invitation
This episode closes with an open call: Whether you are a professional, researcher, educator, or student, you can be an active part of this disciplinary transformation. The TCCR is not a theoretical endpoint—it is a starting point for a social science of human relationships with its own voice, ethical foundation, and scientific rigor.
Listen and discover how the TCCR can radically renew the way we understand and practice Social Work in the contemporary world.
This episode explores one of the most powerful analytical tools of the "Cognosystemic Theory of Human Psychosocial Relational Construction" (TCCR): the classification of narrative systems that constitute the Cognosystem. This proposal does not aim to produce a rigid taxonomy, but rather a flexible and operational guide to map the complex web of narratives that organize human meaning—from inner experience to macro-level cultural structures.
Why Classify Narrative Systems?
Because narrative does more than explain what we feel, think, or do—it structures psychosocial experience across multiple levels. Classifying it allows us to analyze how meaning is organized, how it is transmitted, and how it can be intentionally transformed. This tool is essential for Social Work, providing a comprehensive framework for deeply understanding individuals, groups, institutions, and cultures.
Three Primary Ecosystemic Levels
The TCCR organizes narrative systems across three major ecosystemic levels:
- Intrapersonal narratives (microsystem): shape identity, self-image, and the sense of self.
- Extrapersonal narratives (meso and exosystem): structure family, group, community, institutional, and media-based relationships.
- Sociocultural narratives (macrosystem): shape the broader symbolic frameworks of culture, power, morality, and tradition.
Types of Narrative Systems by Level
Intrapersonal Narratives:
-Identity-based: structure the self (“I”)
-Self-perceptive and self-evaluative: regulate self-esteem and self-concept
Ideological Narratives:
- Philosophical, political, and religious: construct ethical, power-based, and transcendent frameworks
Chronological Narratives:
- Sequential, prospective, and time-valuative: organize the temporal experience
Interpersonal Narratives:
- Family, group, and community: shape belonging and relational bonds
Organizational Narratives:
- Institutional, economic-commercial, and media-cultural: regulate experience in organized and mass contexts
Sociocultural Narratives:
- Traditionalist, moralist, normativist, legalist: uphold the collective symbolic order
A Narrative Ecology in Motion
The TCCR emphasizes that narrative systems interact in a dynamic network: they influence each other, fuse, contradict, and transform. This narrative plasticity is key to understanding social, subjective, and cultural change processes. Through this classification, we can observe how certain narratives rise, shift, or disappear in response to historical and political contexts.
Practical Applications for Social Work
This tool enables professionals to:
- Analyze narrative frameworks from micro to macro levels.
- Diagnose symbolic structures within individuals, communities, or institutions.
- Design multi-level interventions and strategies for narrative transformation.
- Ground public policies, psychosocial research, and programs in a relational and contextual approach.
The episode concludes with a central affirmation: To understand the classification of narrative systems is to understand how meaning is organized in human experience.
Within the TCCR, this classification serves as a theoretical and methodological compass, linking the personal with the collective, and the individual with the cultural—offering Social Work a robust, situated, and transformative analytical foundation.
Listen and reframe your way of reading the world—through the narratives that hold it together.
This episode dives into one of the most original and operational concepts of the "Cognosystemic Theory of Human Psychosocial Relational Construction" (TCCR): the cognosystemic meme. Unlike the classical memetic theory proposed by Dawkins—where memes are viral, mechanically replicated contents—the cognosystemic meme in the TCCR is intentional, dynamic, structured, and transformative.
What Is a Cognosystemic Meme?
A cognosystemic meme is a unit of narrative meaning strategically designed to influence the symbolic organization of the Cognosystem. It serves as a vehicle for meaning that traverses narrative levels, modifies symbolic structures, and enables both the reproduction and transformation of collective meaning. Unlike the classical meme, this version plays a modulatory, adaptive, and critical role in narrative processes.
Internal Structure of the Cognosystemic Meme
The episode describes its essential components:
- Semantic core: the central meaning, adaptable across contexts.
- Narrative body: the cognitive evaluation that justifies and sustains it.
- Representation format: expressed discursively, visually, gesturally, or ritually.
- Dissemination channels: family, community, institutional, or media-based.
- Propagation strategy: planned modes of legitimation, viralization, and repetition.
Types of Cognosystemic Memes
Three main types are identified:
- Consolidation memes: reinforce hegemonic narratives.
- Friction memes: introduce tension, challenge structures.
- Transition memes: enable gradual reorganizations of meaning.
Key Functions of the Cognosystemic Meme
- Disseminate and integrate narratives across the Cognosystem’s levels.
- Maintain symbolic coherence over time (chronosystem).
- Activate deep narrative transformations.
How Do Memes Propagate and Mutate?
Cognosystemic memes are transmitted across ecosystemic levels and can mutate semantically as they enter new interpretive frameworks. These mutations can take various forms:
- Fusion: combining with other memes.
- Competition: vying for control of meaning.
- Absorption: being incorporated by dominant narratives.
Their transformation depends on factors such as:
- Sociopolitical and cultural context.
- The use of symbols, metaphors, and emotional language that facilitate internalization.
Impact on the Narrative Hierarchy of the Cognosystem
This episode explores how memes can:
- Promote the rise of subaltern narratives.
- Consolidate hegemonic narratives through repetition and consensus.
- Erode dominant discourses through disruptive memes.
Shaping the Cognosystem
Finally, the episode analyzes how the cognosystemic meme functions as a strategic tool for reconfiguring the symbolic fabric that structures psychosocial reality. It is, therefore, a privileged device for analysis and intervention in Social Work aimed at generating cultural, subjective, and political transformation.
The episode concludes with a key affirmation: Understanding the cognosystemic meme is understanding how the shared meaning of a society is built, sustained, and transformed.
Listen and discover how narratives spread, change—and change the world.
This episode introduces a profound analytical framework within the Cognosystemic Theory of Human Psychosocial Relational Construction (TCCR) for understanding how meaning is organized in psychosocial reality. The layers of the Cognosystem function as interdependent ecosystemic levels, where narratives are produced, circulate, clash, and transform. This episode is essential for grasping the dynamic architecture of meaning and for designing strategic interventions in Social Work.
What Are Cognosystemic Layers?
Cognosystemic layers are symbolic and relational levels where the discourses and meanings that shape human experience are structured. They act as hermeneutic filters: legitimizing, restricting, or transforming the narratives that circulate in society. Far from being isolated compartments, these layers are constantly interacting, shaping what can be thought, said, and done in any given context.
Ecosystemic Levels of the Cognosystem
The TCCR identifies four primary layers that make up this architecture:
- Microsystem: intimate, familial, and school-related narratives—the subjective base.
- Mesosystem: intermediate social relationships (community, groups, institutions).
- Exosystem: institutional, legal, and media structures that exert indirect influence.
- Macrosystem: overarching civilizational, ideological, and cultural narratives that provide global meaning.
These layers interconnect continuously, generating complex webs of meaning.
Narrative Movements Between Layers
The episode explains how narratives may:
- Move upward: marginalized stories gain symbolic power.
- Move downward: dominant narratives lose legitimacy (e.g., radical individualism).
- Shift horizontally: narratives hybridize or combine within the same level (e.g., contemporary spiritualities).
These movements are not neutral—they reshape the symbolic structure of the Cognosystem.
Permeability and Interdependence
The Cognosystemic layers are highly permeable, enabling:
- The circulation of cognosystemic memes.
- The breakdown of rigid meaning structures.
- Narrative reconfiguration in response to symbolic crises or disruptive events.
This explains how a personal story can become culturally influential—or how institutional change can reshape everyday subjectivities.
Friction Between Layers: Symbolic Conflict and Opportunity for Change
Friction arises when incompatible narratives collide across different levels. These tensions generate:
- Crises in the symbolic order.
- Reconfigurations of narrative hierarchies.
- The emergence of hybrid or innovative discourses.
Examples include:
- Meritocracy vs. Equity
- Free market vs. Protective State
- Religious tradition vs. Reproductive rights
Implications for Social Work
Understanding these layers allows practitioners to:
- Identify symbolic conflicts at the appropriate ecosystemic level.
- Design more precise and ethically grounded interventions.
- Support narrative reorganization following crises, trauma, or social transformation.
- Critically intervene in narrative shifts that shape everyday life.
The episode concludes with a key premise: The layers of the Cognosystem are the dynamic map of human meaning.
To intervene in them is to intervene in how individuals and societies construct their realities.
The TCCR provides a powerful tool for thinking and acting in contexts of complexity, conflict, and change.
Listen and explore how narratives travel, collide, and reorganize the world we inhabit.
This episode delves into one of the most powerful contributions of the "Cognosystemic Theory of Human Psychosocial Relational Construction" (TCCR): narrative hierarchy. In this framework, narratives are not just floating stories—they are structured systems, organized in levels that determine their ability to influence, guide, and shape the psychosocial world. Understanding this symbolic stratification enables critical intervention in the struggles over meaning that define our personal, institutional, and cultural realities.
What Is a Narrative Hierarchy?
The TCCR defines narrative hierarchy as the structural and functional stratification of narrative systems, based on their power to organize meaning, influence behavior, and legitimize social structures. Narratives may reinforce, challenge, resist, or transform the existing order. Their position is not fixed—it shifts based on factors like emotional resonance, memetic circulation, adoption by key actors, and cultural reach.
Types of Narratives According to Their Position in the Hierarchy
The episode outlines seven types of narratives, ranked from least to most influential:
1. Subjugated narratives: silenced, marginalized, or excluded voices.
2. Resigned narratives: passively accept symbolic domination.
3. Adaptive narratives: adjust to the existing order without questioning it.
4. Resilient narratives: resist through memory, identity, and culture.
5. Challenging narratives: openly confront hegemonic narratives.
6. Emerging dominant narratives: rising toward symbolic centrality.
7. Hegemonic narratives: structure the Cognosystem with broad consensus and institutional power.
Dimensions of Narrative Power
The episode explores four key dimensions for assessing the strength of a narrative:
- Structuring: shapes identities, roles, and practices.
- Legitimizing: naturalizes power relations.
- Transformative: opens symbolic possibilities for change.
- Resistant: opposes hegemonic impositions from a subaltern position.
Three Phases of Narrative Evolution
Narratives may also be understood through three developmental phases:
- Beta phase: consolidation.
- Alpha phase: legitimacy crisis.
- Delta phase: displacement or mutation.
Hierarchical Shifts: How Narratives Move
Narratives can shift their hierarchical position through:
- Upward movement: when previously marginalized narratives gain influence (e.g., feminism, LGBTQ+ rights).
- Downward movement: when dominant narratives lose legitimacy (e.g., radical meritocracy).
- Horizontal movement: when competing narratives interact on the same level (e.g., green development vs. degrowth).
These movements are triggered by contextual crises, symbolic leadership, emotional resonance, or feedback across Cognosystemic levels.
Narrative Frictions and Meaning Struggles
The episode explores how conflicts between narratives become key sources of transformation.
Example: the tension between industrial growth and ecological transition.
These frictions can generate:
- Discursive crises.
- Symbolic reformulations.
- Innovative narrative syntheses that redefine collective meaning.
Applications for Social Work
From the TCCR perspective, analyzing narrative hierarchies allows practitioners to:
- Identify naturalized oppressive discourses.
- Make visible excluded, potentially emancipatory narratives.
- Design interventions that promote just symbolic shifts.
- Actively engage in meaning-making struggles guided by a relational and transformative ethics.
The episode closes with a key affirmation: Narrative hierarchy reveals the symbolic struggles of the social world.
Intervening in them—as the TCCR proposes—is not only possible, but necessary for a critical, ethical, and socially committed practice.
Listen and transform how you read power, culture, and change through the lens of narratives.
This episode introduces a groundbreaking and original theoretical proposal within the "Cognosystemic Theory of Human Psychosocial Relational Construction" (TCCR): narrative systems are not fixed or abstract entities—they are living structures that go through a life cycle, much like biological organisms. This perspective offers a powerful way to understand how the narratives that shape psychosocial reality emerge, consolidate, dominate, and eventually transform or fade away.
What Is the Narrative Life Cycle?
Drawing inspiration from the biological sciences, the TCCR applies the concept of a life cycle to narrative analysis. Narratives are thus understood as dynamic systems that are born, grow, stabilize, and may eventually enter into crisis or change. This temporal and evolutionary lens allows for the study not only of a narrative’s content but also of its trajectory, resilience, and potential for transformation.
The Four Phases of the Narrative Life Cycle
This episode outlines the stages that every narrative system within the Cognosystem passes through:
1. Emergence:
- The narrative arises from a concrete experience.
- It is fragile, not widely shared, and lacks structuring power.
2. Development:
- The narrative is reinforced, repeated, and transmitted.
- It begins to shape identity, relationships, and social practices.
3. Maturity:
- The narrative becomes central and dominant within the Cognosystem.
- It organizes peripheral narratives and reproduces memetically.
- It is highly resistant to change.
4. Decline or Transformation:
- The narrative enters crisis due to internal contradictions or tension with alternative stories.
- It may fade, mutate, or be re-signified.
5. Renewal:
- The narrative evolves or disappears, giving rise to another.
What Drives a Narrative from One Phase to Another?
This episode explains how both internal and external factors influence the transition between phases:
- Intersystemic narrative frictions within the Cognosystem.
- The emergence of new cognosystemic memes.
- Significant social, cultural, or historical changes.
- Professional interventions, especially in contexts of crisis or vulnerability.
Practical Applications in Social Work
Understanding the narrative life cycle enables practitioners to:
- Identify the current phase of a personal, family, institutional, or community narrative.
- Assess its stability, fragility, or transformative potential.
- Intervene strategically to deconstruct oppressive narratives, strengthen protective ones, or support narrative transitions in processes of personal or social change.
An Ethical and Political Tool
Narrative intervention means engaging with the systems of meaning that sustain everyday life. The episode highlights that every narrative can be either emancipatory or oppressive, and that its life cycle offers a guide for supporting cultural, personal, or collective change in a critical and committed way.
The episode concludes with a key affirmation: Narrative systems are alive.
Reading their life cycles allows Social Work to understand and transform reality through a deeply human, ethical, and situated lens.
Listen and discover how narratives are born, grow, change—and change us.
This episode dives into the structural core of the "Cognosystemic Theory of Human Psychosocial Relational Construction" (TCCR), offering a precise analysis of how a narrative is internally composed. Far from being a vague or anecdotal story, the narrative—within the TCCR framework—is understood as a complex cognosystemic structure that organizes human experience. This episode is essential for equipping Social Work with rigorous tools for narrative analysis.
Narrative as a Cognosystemic Structure
The TCCR conceives narrative as a functional unit within the Cognosystem: an articulated structure that allows for the understanding, classification, recollection, and intervention in psychosocial experience. It is not a mere sequence of sentences, but a system composed of specific elements that interact dynamically.
The Eight Components of a Cognosystemic Narrative
This episode details the foundational elements that constitute any narrative within the Cognosystem:
1. The experience: the lived event that gives rise to the narrative.
2. Perceptions and emotions: tied to that experience.
3. The context: the situated conditions in which it occurs.
4. Propositional content: the semantic core of the narrative.
5. Cognitive evaluation: the argumentative body that supports it.
6. Epistemic stance: the subject’s position toward the narrative (certainty, doubt, belief, etc.).
7. Narrative purpose: the intention or meaning guiding the story.
8. Narrative function: the role it plays within the Cognosystem and in psychosocial life.
A System Within the System
These elements do not operate in isolation but as parts of a self-contained system. Internal feedback loops emerge: for instance, an epistemic stance of certainty may reinforce cognitive evaluation, or an emotional mandate may consolidate an ethical judgment. Each narrative is, in itself, a dynamic, self-regulating system.
Central and Peripheral Narratives
Within a Cognosystem, not all narratives carry the same weight. Central narratives structure long-standing identities, relationships, and practices. They are more resistant to change and often span multiple ecosystemic levels. Peripheral narratives, by contrast, are more flexible, contextual, and adaptable.
A Tool for Social Work Intervention
Understanding this narrative structure enables practitioners to:
- Analyze conflicts of meaning within individuals, families, or communities.
- Detect critical components for intervention, such as oppressive mandates or obstructive purposes.
- Design narrative re-signification strategies that promote agency, healing, or relational transformation.
Link to Cognosystemic Memes
Each narrative component may contain cognosystemic memes—minimal units of meaning that circulate, replicate, or transform across levels of the Cognosystem. This allows narratives to have an impact not only at the individual level but also socially and culturally.
The episode concludes with a central affirmation for the TCCR: A narrative is not merely “what someone tells.” It is a complex structure that organizes the lived world.
Understanding it with rigor is essential for a professional practice that is critical, ethically grounded, and scientifically sound.
Listen and transform how you read and intervene in the narratives that shape psychosocial reality.
This episode marks a turning point in the development of the "Cognosystemic Theory of Human Psychosocial Relational Construction" (TCCR) by introducing its central and most innovative concept: the "Cognosystem". This unit of analysis profoundly redefines how psychosocial phenomena can be observed, interpreted, and addressed in Social Work—moving beyond models based on fixed structures or linear explanations.
What Is the Cognosystem?
The Cognosystem is defined as an intersubjective, open, dynamic, and situated narrative system, composed of a network of meanings that shape the psychosocial reality of individuals, groups, and communities. It is the minimal unit of analysis and intervention in the TCCR, and its structure captures the full complexity of human life in constant interaction with its environment.
Key Features of the Cognosystem
This episode explains that the Cognosystem is:
- Narrative: structured through shared stories and meanings.
- Cognitive: it organizes perception, emotion, behavior, and decision-making.
- Systemic: composed of interrelated elements that form a coherent whole.
- Relational: it emerges and evolves through interaction with other narrative systems.
- Ecosystemic: distributed across multiple levels—micro, meso, macro, and chrono.
- Autopoietic: capable of self-reproduction and transformation through its own internal dynamics.
Internal Components of the Cognosystem
The episode details its internal architecture, including:
- Organizing narratives, both central and peripheral.
- Cognosystemic memes that enable the flow of meaning across levels.
- Narrative hierarchies that structure symbolic power and discursive relevance.
- Feedback circuits that maintain system stability or promote change.
Functions of the Cognosystem
The Cognosystem performs essential functions:
- It organizes the psychosocial meaning of experience.
- It defines identities and relationships within the relational fabric.
- It filters, translates, and adapts contextual influences.
- It regulates social practices based on dominant or alternative narratives.
A Powerful Tool for Social Work
This episode demonstrates how the Cognosystem enables Social Work professionals to:
- Diagnose dysfunctional, contradictory, or oppressive narrative configurations.
- Understand the role of meaning in shaping social practices.
- Design narrative interventions that foster personal, familial, or community transformation.
Beyond Traditional Units
Unlike traditional categories such as “individual,” “family,” or “group,” the Cognosystem is not a static or structural entity. It is a dynamic web of meanings in continuous production and reorganization. This allows Social Work to intervene at the level of meaning, not just in visible structures.
Connection with Other TCCR Concepts
The Cognosystem is interwoven with key theoretical concepts, such as:
- Narrative system
- Intersystemic friction
- Hierarchical displacement
- Memetic transformation
The episode concludes with a decisive idea: The Cognosystem represents the most significant innovation of the TCCR—a tool that allows us to understand human reality as a living network of meanings and provides Social Work with a situated, ethical, and profoundly transformative lens.
Listen and discover how a theory centered on meaning can radically change the way you understand and practice Social Work.
This episode reveals the meticulous, critical, and deeply reflective process that gave rise to the "Cognosystemic Theory of Human Psychosocial Relational Construction" (TCCR). Unlike other theoretical proposals, this theory did not emerge from an isolated intuition or an arbitrary compilation of concepts, but from a rigorous, transdisciplinary methodology grounded in the real practice of Social Work.
Why Build an Original Theory?
The TCCR was born out of the lack of a unified and original theoretical framework that would allow Social Work to approach the complexity of the psychosocial from a relational, narrative, and contextualized perspective. The author argues for the necessity of an autonomous theoretical platform—one that does not rely on imported or fragmented frameworks but emerges from within the discipline itself and its contemporary challenges.
Abductive Logic as Methodological Foundation
This episode explains that the TCCR was not built through inductive logic (based solely on experience) or deductive logic (from pre-established theories), but through abductive reasoning. This means the process began with real problems observed in practice, and sought the most plausible explanations through a flexible, open, and coherent theoretical articulation. This logic enabled the integration of diverse conceptual frameworks without falling into eclecticism.
Three Phases of the Construction Process
The development of the TCCR unfolded in three major phases:
- Exploratory Phase: critical review of literature and professional practice; identification of theoretical gaps and the disciplinary object.
- Articulatory Phase: integration of multiple currents—phenomenology, hermeneutics, systems theory, narrative theory, memetics, and the ecological approach—through a relational logic.
- Constructive Phase: formulation of original concepts such as Cognosystem, cognosystemic meme, and narrative system within a coherent, functional, and operational structure.
Internal Validation Criteria
The TCCR was designed with strict epistemological and methodological standards in mind:
- Logical consistency among its concepts.
- Epistemological coherence with its relational-narrative foundation.
- Operational viability for professional intervention.
- Ethical-political meaning, aimed at promoting a critical and transformative practice.
A Transdisciplinary Theory Rooted in Social Work
This episode also shows how the TCCR articulates knowledge from multiple disciplines—philosophy, psychology, linguistics, sociology, biology, and cultural theory—while maintaining its core in Social Work. This theoretical openness grants it strong explanatory power in the face of complex phenomena, without falling into reductionism or arbitrary amalgamation.
Professional Reflexivity as a Source of Knowledge
One of the methodological pillars of the TCCR is the validation of professional practice as a source of theory. Field observations, experiences with individuals and communities, and situated reflection were all integral to the construction process. In this framework, practice is not merely the application of theory—it is a legitimate source of theoretical knowledge.
The episode concludes with a powerful statement: The TCCR is not an improvised theoretical exercise, but the result of a systematic, ethical, and transdisciplinary process aimed at providing a solid, coherent, and useful tool for contemporary Social Work.
Listen and discover how a theory can be built on practice, critical thought, and an ethical commitment to social transformation.
This episode explores how the "Cognosystemic Theory of Human Psychosocial Relational Construction" (TCCR) integrates and reinterprets Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model to build a multilevel narrative architecture: the Cognosystem. Here, you’ll discover how environmental levels not only influence human development but also serve as narrative stages where psychosocial reality is produced, contested, and transformed.
Foundations of the Bioecological Model
The episode presents Bronfenbrenner’s ecological approach to human development, where the subject is shaped through interaction with various environmental systems:
- Microsystem: immediate relationships, such as family, school, and friends.
- Mesosystem: interconnections between microsystems (e.g., school-family dynamics).
- Exosystem: structures that influence the individual indirectly (media, policies).
- Macrosystem: cultural beliefs, ideologies, dominant worldviews.
- Chronosystem: the temporal dimension (life cycles, historical events).
This model allows for a nuanced view of human development, recognizing that no individual is formed in a vacuum.
Cognosystemic Interpretation of the Model
The TCCR revisits this framework not to analyze behavior, but to organize the narrative levels in which meaning is produced. Each ecological system is seen as a space where stories, norms, symbols, and discourses circulate—shaping and being shaped by the other levels. The theory thus fuses developmental ecology with a narrative and intersubjective logic.
The Cognosystem as a Multilevel Structure
The TCCR proposes that narrative systems are structured in hierarchical layers—micro, meso, macro, and chrono—that interact through narrative flows or cognosystemic memes. These layers are not static; they are dynamic and recursive: events at one level can affect others, generating coherence, friction, or transformation.
Human Development as a Narrative Phenomenon
In this perspective, development is not merely psychological or biological—it is also narrative and relational. Identity, relationships, and life meaning emerge through interaction with narratives situated at different ecosystemic levels. The TCCR sees development as an evolving process in which individuals are shaped—and shape themselves—within complex narrative webs.
Friction and Shifts Across Levels
The episode introduces the concept of intersystemic narrative friction: tensions between dominant narratives circulating across different levels—such as family values clashing with social or school discourses. It also analyzes how marginalized narratives can rise and become dominant, or be silenced by narrative power structures.
Implications for Social Work
This episode offers essential tools for more contextualized psychosocial intervention:
- It allows practitioners to detect misalignments between narrative levels that cause distress or blockage.
- It provides a basis for designing systemic, strategic, and ethical interventions.
- It supports understanding the psychosocial as a multilevel phenomenon—where each layer must be considered in intervention processes.
The episode concludes with a core affirmation of the TCCR: The bioecological model, reinterpreted through a narrative lens, enables us to situate the Cognosystem within a comprehensible and operational structure, paving the way for deeper, more critical, and more coherent interventions aligned with the complexity of human development.
Listen and expand your understanding of how narratives shape, condition, and transform human experience at every level of the environment.
This episode explores one of the most original and innovative contributions of the "Cognosystemic Theory of Human Psychosocial Relational Construction" (TCCR): the critical incorporation of memetic theory as a framework for understanding the circulation of meaning within psychosocial systems. Here, the cognosystemic meme is introduced as a minimal unit of narrative meaning that structures, transforms, or reinforces both collective and individual narratives.
Origins of Memetic Theory
The episode begins by introducing the concept of the meme as originally proposed by Richard Dawkins in 1976: a unit of cultural transmission analogous to the gene. It explores subsequent developments by Susan Blackmore, who described memetic dynamics in terms of replication, variation, and selection, and Kate Distin, who expanded the concept toward a semiotic understanding. Recent contributions on digital and communicational memetics are also discussed, which are essential in today’s context.
A Critical Reinterpretation from the TCCR
The TCCR does not adopt this theory in a literal or biologicist way. Instead, it reinterprets it through a narrative, intersubjective, and systemic lens. From this perspective, memes are not mere automatic content replications, but meaning-laden narrative fragments that circulate across individuals, groups, institutions, and cultures.
The Meme as a Narrative Unit of Meaning
The TCCR defines the cognosystemic meme as the minimal unit of narrative meaning capable of influencing perception, emotion, behavior, and relationships. These memes can carry norms, mandates, beliefs, or emotions, and function as symbolic structures deeply embedded in everyday life.
Properties of the Cognosystemic Meme
This episode outlines key characteristics of cognosystemic memes:
- They are narratively codifiable.
- They can replicate with high fidelity or mutate depending on the context.
- They are more or less resistant to change, depending on their integration within broader narrative systems.
- They subtly but persistently shape identity, relationships, and cultural processes.
Memetic Circulation and the Cognosystem
Memes circulate across narrative levels—micro, meso, macro, and the chronosystem—structuring the Cognosystem. This circulation functions as a form of narrative feedback, reinforcing dominant structures or enabling cultural change. Understanding this flow is key to intervening in dynamics of power, exclusion, or social transformation.
Examples of Common Psychosocial Memes
This episode offers concrete examples of culturally embedded memes:
- “Men don’t cry.”
- “Poverty is the fault of the lazy.”
- “Family is everything.”
These memes operate as condensed meaning nuclei that shape attitudes, justify inequalities, or sustain social bonds. Identifying them helps to denaturalize deeply rooted beliefs.
Implications for Social Work
The memetic lens of the TCCR provides powerful analytical tools to:
- Detect oppressive cultural mandates embedded in individual and collective narratives.
- Facilitate processes of narrative deconstruction and the creation of new, transformative stories.
- Recognize that deep cultural change also requires collective memetic transformation.
This episode closes with a key idea: the cognosystemic meme reveals how the meanings that sustain human psychosocial reality are produced, circulated, and transformed. It is both a theoretical and practical tool for thinking about intervention—from the most micro level to the most structural.
Listen and discover how what we share, repeat, or question in our everyday narratives has the power to change the world.
This episode delves into a key dimension of the "Cognosystemic Theory of Human Psychosocial Relational Construction" (TCCR): the connection between mind and narrative. Here, you’ll understand why narratives are not merely cultural expressions, but fundamental cognitive structures for organizing experience, constructing identity, interpreting the world, and making sense of what we live.
Narratives as a Form of Thought
The TCCR posits that the human mind thinks narratively. Our experiences are not encoded as lists or logical matrices, but as stories with a beginning, development, and meaning. People don’t just tell stories—they think, remember, feel, and make decisions through them. Narrative is the invisible architecture of human thought.
Contributions from Narrative Psychology
Inspired by authors such as Jerome Bruner, the TCCR builds on the idea that there are two modes of thought: the logical-paradigmatic and the narrative. The latter is essential for understanding the human experience. According to this perspective, we don’t just live stories—we organize our beliefs, emotions, and behaviors through narrative structures that help us navigate the complexity of the world.
Narrative Schemas as Interpretive Frameworks
Narratives function as culturally shared cognitive schemas. They define what we interpret as relevant, how we feel about it, and what meaning we assign to it. These are not merely individual stories, but collective plots that shape the structure of psychosocial life. These schemas determine how we perceive, react to, and act upon our lived experiences.
Narrative, Identity, and the Sense of Self
This episode presents a central idea: identity is a narrative. The “self” is not a fixed entity, but a story constructed in dialogue with others. The TCCR sees the subject as a narrative node—a convergence point of personal, social, and cultural stories that shape their being. How a person narrates their life defines their experience and their potential for transformation.
Narrative, Memory, and Emotion
Narratives organize memories and emotions into meaningful symbolic sequences. Through them, it becomes possible to reframe pain, integrate traumatic experiences, or reconstruct life’s meaning. The TCCR holds that narrative intervention is both cognitive and emotional—opening paths to understanding, agency, and healing in psychosocial practice.
Difference from Other Forms of Cognitive Encoding
Unlike logical or analytical schemas, narrative allows us to integrate complexity: ambiguity, contradiction, context, and intentionality. This makes it especially powerful for understanding the psychosocial, where multiple layers of meaning interact simultaneously. Narrative captures the richness and depth of human experience in all its complexity.
Why Does This Matter for Social Work?
This episode invites us to see people not as carriers of symptoms or problems, but as narrative subjects in ongoing construction. From this perspective, Social Work can:
- Identify oppressive or fragmented stories.
- Support processes of narrative reconstruction.
- Promote alternative stories that open new ways of being and relating in the world.
The episode concludes with an essential affirmation for the TCCR: narratives are the architecture of human thought. Understanding them as complex cognitive structures allows Social Work to access deeper processes of meaning, identity, and relational transformation.
Listen and discover how a cognitive-narrative lens can radically transform the way you understand and intervene in the psychosocial field.
This episode delves into one of the backbone components of the "Cognosystemic Theory of Human Psychosocial Relational Construction" (TCCR): the contributions of General Systems Theory. Through the concepts of open systems, feedback, and autopoiesis, the episode unfolds a dynamic, organizational, and adaptive understanding of psychosocial reality—crucial for intervening in Social Work from a more complex, relational, and transformative perspective.
A Systemic Legacy in Social Work
Since its beginnings, Social Work has drawn from systems theory to analyze the interactions between individuals and their environments. The TCCR acknowledges this legacy but expands it radically: the focus is no longer merely on observing structures and functions, but on interpreting social systems as narrative, cognitive, and symbolic networks that evolve, resist, and transform through continuous dialogue with their context.
Open Systems: Permeability and Transformation
An open system is one that maintains constant exchange with its environment. In the TCCR, narrative systems are open systems: they interact with other stories, contexts, and symbolic structures. These exchanges occur through cognosystemic memes—the minimal narrative information units that allow adaptation, conflict, or evolution. This openness is essential to understanding phenomena such as cultural change, identity transformation, or professional intervention processes.
Feedback: Stability and Change
This episode explains how systems self-regulate through two types of feedback:
- Negative feedback: reinforces system stability and continuity by preserving its boundaries and central narratives.
- Positive feedback: introduces tension and fosters change, enabling the emergence of new narratives and structural transformation.
Within the TCCR, this logic helps explain how certain discourses persist for decades, while others collapse or are replaced in times of crisis or social conflict.
Autopoiesis: Systems That Narrate Themselves
Drawing on the work of Maturana and Varela, the episode introduces the concept of autopoiesis as the capacity of a system to produce and reproduce itself. In the TCCR framework, narrative systems are also autopoietic: they sustain, modify, and regenerate themselves through their internal narratives. This explains how cultures, identities, or institutions can persist over time without losing their transformative capacity.
The Cognosystemic Narrative System
This episode introduces a key concept: the Cognosystem. The TCCR posits that psychosocial reality is composed of interconnected narrative systems, organized hierarchically and governed by their own mechanisms of regulation and adaptation. Each of these subsystems receives and emits narrative memes, experiences feedback loops, and undergoes processes of preservation or rupture. This perspective systematizes the complexity of the psychosocial without reducing it to isolated variables or linear explanations.
What Does This Mean for Social Work?
Thinking in systemic terms enables Social Work to:
- Identify closed or rigid narrative systems that perpetuate distress or exclusion.
- Design interventions that introduce new narratives capable of generating relational and symbolic transformation.
- Understand that social change is neither instantaneous nor linear, but the result of multiple interactions and feedback processes.
This episode concludes with a key affirmation: systems theory provides the TCCR with the language and structure to conceptualize narratives as living, organized, and ever-evolving processes.
Listen and discover how this perspective can profoundly transform the way you understand and intervene in psychosocial reality through Social Work.
This episode explores one of the foundational pillars of the "Cognosystemic Theory of Human Psychosocial Relational Construction" (TCCR): the idea that psychosocial reality is neither an objective truth nor an isolated individual experience, but an intersubjective and narrative construction shaped within the relational fabric between subjects.
Reality as an Intersubjective Construction
The TCCR holds that the psychosocial cannot be reduced to the mental or the material. Reality is configured through the interaction between the human mind (cognition and emotion) and the social environment (language, culture, relationships). This episode explains how people do not simply perceive reality—they co-construct it through shared narratives.
Relationality as a Central Axis
Relationality is not just an additional theoretical category; it is the organizing principle of the TCCR. Instead of viewing the subject as an autonomous entity, it is understood as emergent from relationships. Identities, emotions, norms, and social structures are born and transformed through interaction. This perspective challenges individualistic approaches and offers a complex and dynamic reading of the human condition.
Intersubjectivity as the Source of Meaning
Drawing on Schütz and social constructionism, the episode delves into how meaning does not arise within the individual but between individuals. Intersubjectivity is the space where individual experience becomes understandable, validated, or questioned. Narrative plays a central role here: through it, lived experiences are transformed into shared realities that organize the lived world.
A Psychosocio-Material Perspective
The TCCR proposes an articulation of three dimensions: mind, society, and matter. Without denying the material conditions that shape human life, the theory focuses on the psychosocial level—the intersection between the internal and the collective where meaning is produced. This episode explains how these dimensions intertwine in daily life and why it is essential to understand them as a whole.
The Psychosocial as Narrative
Psychosocial reality is not something that simply is—it is narrated, interpreted, and contested. This episode introduces the concept of narrative systems: meaning structures that guide actions, shape emotions, and organize the perception of reality. From this perspective, intervening in the psychosocial means intervening in the narratives that sustain social problems.
What Does This Mean for Social Work?
The TCCR invites us to rethink Social Work from a deeply relational and narrative logic. Interventions should no longer focus solely on the individual or on decontextualized factors, but rather on the systems of meaning that emerge in interaction. Understanding the relationships and the narratives that traverse them is key to developing more ethical, situated, and transformative practices.
This episode concludes by reinforcing a central idea of the TCCR: there is no subject without relationship, and no reality without shared meaning.
Listen to it and discover how a relational and intersubjective lens can profoundly transform the way you understand and intervene in the psychosocial realm through Social Work.
In this episode, we delve into one of the most decisive pillars of the "Cognosystemic Theory of Human Psychosocial Relational Construction" (TCCR): power. But not through a traditional lens—instead, we explore its most profound, everyday, and symbolic expressions. Here, you'll discover how power is not only imposed, but narrated, negotiated, and naturalized.
The TCCR draws on two major critical thinkers to shape its conception of narrative power:
Michel Foucault: His approach revolutionizes how we understand power. It is not a visible hierarchical structure, but a diffuse, capillary, and omnipresent network that unfolds through discourses, norms, institutions—and our very ways of being. In this episode, we explore key concepts such as:
- Power-knowledge: every form of knowledge implies a form of domination.
- Biopolitics: the regulation of life through norms and discourses.
- Governmentality: the shaping of conduct in everyday life.
- Subjectivation: discourses not only inform—they shape identities.
The TCCR incorporates these concepts to assert that dominant narratives do not merely describe the world—they define what is possible to think, feel, and experience in the psychosocial realm.
Antonio Gramsci: From a different angle, Gramsci shows that power is not sustained solely by repression but by consent. His concept of cultural hegemony reveals how certain narratives become “common sense,” concealing their constructed nature. His notion of organic intellectuals further helps us understand the role of those who—within schools, media, networks, or communities—reproduce, challenge, or reframe these narratives.
The TCCR weaves these contributions together to build a critical perspective on how hegemonic narratives are consolidated, how they circulate, how they are contested, and how they can be transformed through conscious intervention.
Convergences and Implications
Foucault and Gramsci’s perspectives converge within the TCCR to explain that power is exercised through the configuration of narrative systems. Dominant narratives are not merely discourses—they are power devices that shape the symbolic, the emotional, and the behavioral. The TCCR analyzes how this narrative power circulates through cognosystemic memes, which either reinforce or challenge narrative hierarchies in society.
What does this mean for Social Work?
Listening to this episode is essential for anyone aiming to intervene in psychosocial reality from a transformative practice. It highlights that:
- Every intervention is also a struggle over meaning.
- Identifying oppressive or silenced narratives is an ethical and political act.
- Creating space for alternative stories promotes dignity, social justice, and human agency.
This episode invites you to understand that Social Work engages not only with people but also with stories—and that transforming those stories is a powerful path toward transforming realities.
Tune in and discover how the epistemologies of power can become key tools for a critical, relational, and emancipatory psychosocial intervention.
This episode delves into the philosophical foundations that support the "Cognosystemic Theory of Human Psychosocial Relational Construction" (TCCR). It is not merely a conceptual overview, but a critical reflection essential to understanding the relational, narrative, and critical perspective this theory brings to Social Work.
The TCCR is built upon three major philosophical currents which, far from being separate approaches, are strategically and complementarily integrated:
Phenomenology: We begin with the thought of Edmund Husserl and his idea that reality is not an objective entity, but a phenomenon revealed to consciousness. Then, through Alfred Schütz, we explore social phenomenology, emphasizing how human experience is shaped by shared meanings. In the TCCR, this foundation allows us to situate subjective experience as the starting point for understanding social reality, reclaiming the voice, lived experience, and meaning each subject assigns to their world.
Hermeneutics: Drawing on Hans-Georg Gadamer, this episode explains how all understanding involves interpretation. The “hermeneutic circle” and the notion of a “historically affected consciousness” are not merely philosophical ideas; they are crucial to recognizing that Social Work can never be neutral or aseptic, as all interpretations of reality are shaped by history, language, and context. The TCCR incorporates hermeneutics as a tool to interpret the complex narrative systems that structure psychosocial life.
Social Constructionism: From Berger, Luckmann, and Gergen, we explore the idea that social reality is not “out there” waiting to be discovered, but is instead collectively constructed through narratives, symbols, and relationships. The TCCR adopts this view to argue that human psychosocial reality is the product of intersubjective processes: it is narrated, negotiated, imposed, and transformed within relationships and everyday practices.
Throughout the episode, we explain how these three perspectives do not merely coexist, but are organically integrated:
- Phenomenology provides the grounding in subjective experience.
- Hermeneutics offers the method for understanding that experience as meaning-making.
- Social constructionism frames that meaning-making within a symbolic and relational structure.
From this foundation, the TCCR offers a cognosystemic view of reality: a dynamic web of shared meanings, narrated and constantly evolving. This conception not only enriches theoretical analysis but has profound implications for professional Social Work practice. It enables us to move beyond technocratic or reductionist approaches, toward interventions that are more critical, contextualized, ethical, and emancipatory.
If you’re wondering what sets the TCCR apart from other approaches, this episode provides a key answer: its philosophical robustness. Because it is not a mere compilation of theories—it is a coherent synthesis that understands and intervenes in reality through experience, interpretation, and relational construction.
Listen to this episode to discover how philosophy can be a powerful tool for transforming social practice.
In this episode, we address a question that lies at the heart of our discipline: What is Social Work, in essence? Beyond the functions it performs or the tools it uses, what is its ontological identity? What distinguishes it, legitimizes it, and grounds it as both a profession and an applied social science?
The "Cognosystemic Theory of Human Psychosocial Relational Construction" (TCCR) offers a clear answer: Social Work is, above all, a relational, symbolic, narrative, and situated practice that intervenes in the processes through which individuals and collectives construct meaning in complex, conflictive, and unequal contexts.
This episode invites us to move beyond the instrumentalist view that has historically reduced Social Work to a “technical doing” subordinated to policies, institutions, or legal frameworks. We challenge the notion that the profession merely “executes” external decisions and instead reclaim its epistemic and transformative potential.
We analyze how Social Work operates within the realm of human connection and the psychosocial, engaging with human suffering, life narratives, fractured relationships, and the symbolic structures that shape existence. For this reason, its field is not merely technical or operational: it is deeply human, ethical, and symbolic.
The episode also reflects on how this ontological understanding allows us to distinguish Social Work from other related disciplines—without resorting to rigid boundaries. Its specificity does not lie in the physical object it addresses, but in the way it observes, interprets, and intervenes in the social world, always prioritizing connection, relationality, dignity, and meaning.
In this inaugural episode, we delve into one of the most urgent and profound questions within the discipline: Is it enough to apply theories from other sciences, or does Social Work need a theory of its own—one that emerges from its practice and unique specificity? This reflection gives rise to the "Cognosystemic Theory of Human Psychosocial Relational Construction" (TCCR) and marks the starting point for reimagining Social Work as an autonomous social science, with its own voice and perspective.
We explore how, throughout its history, Social Work has relied on theoretical frameworks imported primarily from psychology, sociology, or law—making it difficult to build a solid and coherent disciplinary identity. This dependence has created tensions between professional practice and conceptual frameworks, resulting in a split between everyday practice and the available analytical models.
In this episode, we argue why adapting external theories is no longer sufficient. Today, more than ever, Social Work faces the challenge of conceptualizing itself as an applied science with its own object of study: human relationships, the symbolic construction of reality, and the narratives that organize psychosocial experience.
We also examine the consequences of lacking a foundational theory: conceptual fragmentation, the technical instrumentalization of the profession, and a diminished critical capacity in the face of dominant discourses. In response, this episode presents the need for a situated, relational, narrative, and transformative theory—precisely what the TCCR proposes—capable of grounding social intervention in a complex, coherent, and deeply ethical vision.