Podcast TCCR - Cognosystemic Theory of Human Psychosocial Relational Construction

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.

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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.

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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.

Click here to purchase the book on Amazon Books.

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.

Click here to purchase the book on Amazon Books.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Click here to purchase the book on Amazon Books.