I am pleased to share the release of my latest conceptual paper:
Psycho-Thermodynamics: A Functional Model of Load, Rhythm, and Coherence in Human Systems
This paper develops a psycho-thermodynamic framework for understanding regulation, dysregulation, and repair in human systems. It explores how ideas such as load, friction, reserves, rhythm, feedback, entropy, negentropy, and phase state can be used as a functional descriptive grammar for psychological life.
The central proposition is simple, but important: many difficulties commonly interpreted only through symptom, trait, or moral language can also be understood as state conditions within open, nested systems. Rather than asking only what a person believes, feels, or remembers, this framework also asks what the system is doing under present conditions. Where is load accumulating? What rhythms have degraded? What reserves are depleted? What phase is the system in, and what form of intervention is actually proportionate?
One of the key aims of the paper is to offer a disciplined bridge between psychological experience and systems language without collapsing one into the other. It does not argue that psychology can be reduced to physics, nor that thermodynamic concepts map neatly onto human life in a literal or mathematical way. Instead, it proposes that thermodynamic principles can function as a useful and carefully bounded language for describing how human systems organise, destabilise, recover, and reorganise across individual, relational, organisational, and wider social contexts.
The paper also introduces a phase-based state model — solid, liquid, gas, and plasma — as a way of recognising different system organisations and thinking more clearly about intervention fit. A useful response in one phase may be ineffective or even destabilising in another. In simple terms: right tool, wrong phase, more entropy.
This work follows on from my earlier paper, Field-Based Psychology: Registers of Inquiry in Consciousness Studies, and forms part of a broader body of research exploring field-based psychology, coherence, consciousness studies, and the conditions under which human systems move towards or away from integration.
For readers interested in psychological regulation, systems thinking, consciousness studies, philosophical psychology, organisational wellbeing, or field-based approaches to coherence and repair, I hope this paper offers a clear and useful contribution.
You can read the concept note here:
[Zenodo link]
