TFB & Psychology

When the world enters from within: how internal organization shapes experience

How Is Experience Organized Internally?

Psychology is born when human beings realize that they do not react to the world directly. They react to the way the world is organized internally.

The same event, experienced by different people, produces completely different experiences. Here, the focus shifts away from the environment and turns toward internal experience.

The Unconscious Organization

Following Freud's insight, TFB recognizes that not everything that governs us is conscious. The world enters from within and continues to act even when it is not perceived. The fundamental belief operates at multiple levels—from biological functioning to conscious thought—organizing experience before it reaches awareness. This pre-conscious organization is not random; it follows the coherence established by the internal axis.

Collective and Individual Patterns

Integrating Jung's perspective, TFB understands that the world does not enter only through personal experience. It also enters through collective patterns of meaning. However, these collective patterns are always filtered and organized through the individual's fundamental belief. Two people exposed to the same collective archetype will organize it differently according to their internal axis, producing distinct experiences and responses.

Learned Patterns and Experiential Core

TFB bridges behavioral and humanistic perspectives by recognizing both learned patterns (Skinner) and an experiential core (Rogers). Much of what we call "choice" is indeed a response to learned patterns—but these patterns are organized and sustained by the fundamental belief. Despite internal and external influences, there exists an experiential core: a tendency toward coherence and development that seeks to maintain the integrity of the internal axis even as it adapts to new experiences.

Sub-beliefs and Individual Differences

According to TFB, each human being becomes entirely different from another due to sub-beliefs organized around the fundamental axis. These sub-beliefs are not isolated thoughts or emotions—they are organized patterns of meaning that emerge from the interaction between the fundamental belief and lived experience. This explains why identical twins raised in the same environment can develop profoundly different personalities: the same experiences are organized differently through distinct internal axes.

Psychological Integration

The Theory of Fundamental Belief is not a psychological method or therapeutic technique—it is an integrative theory that explains how internal organization shapes all human experience. It dialogues with psychoanalysis, analytical psychology, behaviorism, and humanistic psychology, recognizing the validity of each perspective while providing a unifying framework: the fundamental belief as the organizing principle that sustains coherence across all levels of psychological functioning.