Brain Sciences
June 11, 2026
Sharon Vaisvaser
Selfhood arises from embodied and relational processes, with Peripersonal Space (PPS) serving as a key interface for bodily self-consciousness, self-other relations, affect regulation, and temporal continuity. This narrative review synthesizes neuroscience, embodiment research, predictive processing, developmental science, phenomenology, and psychodynamic theory into a multidimensional neuropsychodynamic framework. Subjective time emerges from bodily rhythms, interpersonal synchronization, and predictive engagement with the environment, extending toward autobiographical continuity and mentalizing. Psychodynamic concepts like holding and containment are reinterpreted through contemporary neuroscience. Psychotherapeutic change involves reorganizing embodied, affective, and reflective dimensions via co-regulation and relational engagement.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2026
Sharon Vaisvaser
Aesthetic experiences are rooted in the body and can evoke deep emotions, supporting development, mental health, and well-being. This conceptual review integrates neuroaesthetics and psychodynamic approaches to show how aesthetic experiences arise from a dynamic interplay between anticipation and surprise, generating prediction errors that drive exploration, curiosity, and meaning-making. These processes engage neural systems for sensorimotor processing, emotion-valuation, and meaning-knowledge integration. In psychotherapy, aesthetic moments emerge through embodied interactions and creative arts, enabling pre-symbolic impressions to be transformed into symbolic, thinkable experience. Therapist and patient co-create a shared field that expands peripersonal space, deepens connection, and helps integrate unrepresented aspects of self, supporting emotional regulation, mentalization, neural plasticity, and corrective learning.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2024
Sharon Vaisvaser
The self is a multi-layered construct with bodily, mental, subjective, objective, spatial, and temporal dimensions, supported by integrated hierarchical brain processes. This conceptual analysis interweaves neural mechanisms and network configurations underlying self-experience, its deviations in psychopathology, and implications for Creative Arts Therapies (CATs). The predictive processing account of brain function is discussed regarding selfhood and consciousness. CATs generate aesthetic experiences and creative processes that touch upon and connect layers of self-experience, nurturing the sense of self. The epistemic affordance of CATs enables creating updated self-models of the body in the world. The relational therapeutic encounter involves intersubjective brain synchronization through verbal, non-verbal, and aesthetic means.