Sense making occupies a peculiar and generative position within the depth-psychology corpus: it appears simultaneously as a biological imperative, a relational achievement, a cognitive operation, and a spiritual aspiration. The most theoretically rigorous treatment emerges from the enactivist tradition, where Evan Thompson, drawing on Varela, establishes sense making as the constitutive activity of living systems — not merely a cognitive gloss upon pre-given data, but the very manner in which autopoietic organisms enact a world of significance from their autonomous organisation. Here sense making is inseparable from identity: to be alive is to make sense. A sharply contrasting register appears in the bereavement literature gathered under Neimeyer’s editorship, where sense making denotes the hermeneutic labour of survivors attempting to integrate catastrophic loss into coherent self-narratives — a process that may succeed, fail, or remain deliberately suspended. Siegel’s neurobiological framing locates sense making at the intersection of hemispheric specialisation and interpersonal attunement, while Epstein’s Buddhist-psychoanalytic voice renders it an intersubjective, embodied event in which emotional experience becomes bearable through exchange. The tensions are productive: between sense making as organismic necessity and as cultural achievement, between its unconscious biological roots and its reflexive, narrative dimensions, and between the therapeutic injunction to find meaning and the clinical evidence that meaning sometimes refuses to be found.
cognition, in the present context, means the activity of sense-making. Cognition is behavior or conduct in relation to meaning and norms that the system itself enacts or brings forth on the basis of its autonomy.
Thompson identifies sense making as synonymous with cognition in its minimal biological form, grounding it in the autonomous normative activity of living systems rather than in representational processes.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
sense-making requires adaptivity, but minimal autopoiesis is not sufficient for adaptivity and hence is insufficient for sense-making. Adaptivity is a special way of being tolerant to challenges by actively monitoring perturbations and compensating for them in relation to the autopoietic identity taken as an internal norm.
Thompson, following Di Paolo, argues that sense making requires adaptivity beyond bare autopoiesis, because only a system capable of flexible self-regulation can enact genuine norms of meaning.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
Varela eventually came to believe that this notion of immanent purposiveness is not simply descriptive but explanatory, because it makes visible a dynamic pattern of activity proper to life that would otherwise be missed. He calls this pattern the twofold pattern of identity and sense-making.
Thompson shows that Varela’s concept of immanent purposiveness is explanatorily expressed as the conjoint pattern of identity and sense making, making this dyad the theoretical core of enactivist biology.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
on identity and sense-making, 146–148; immanent teleology, 453n8; on isomorphism, 86; on living as sense-making, 157–159
Thompson’s index entries confirm that Varela’s work systematically equates living with sense making, treating it as coextensive with biological existence itself.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
Coping with the inconsistency between the data of the event and one’s view of the world by changing one’s worldview may not be easy, and the data indicate that finding meaning for the first time at this later point in time is not significantly correlated with changes in emotional adjustment to the loss.
Neimeyer’s contributors demonstrate that sense making in bereavement — specifically the revision of assumptive worldviews — does not reliably predict improved adjustment, complicating therapeutic prescriptions to ‘find meaning.’
Paying attention to the types of meaning being made helps the clinician track the family’s progress in grieving and target certain meanings as the focus of treatment.
Nadeau argues that systematic attention to the varieties of sense making within grieving families provides the clinician with both a diagnostic map and a therapeutic lever.
, Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Losssupporting
individuals do not grieve in a vacuum. They make sense of their experience by interacting with others. Furthermore, meanings are critical in understanding family grieving.
Nadeau situates sense making as fundamentally intersubjective and systemic, arguing that meaning is co-constructed through relational interaction rather than achieved in private cognitive labour.
, Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Losssupporting
searching for meaning may be a general response to severe, unexpected negative life events. Different Notions of Meaning The need for meaning has been so frequently observed and so urgently pursued by individuals coping with such events that a number of theorists have suggested that finding meaning is critical for successful adjustment.
Davis surveys the theoretical consensus that the search for meaning constitutes a normative, cross-contextual response to traumatic loss, while noting that ‘meaning’ itself remains inconsistently defined across this literature.
, Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Losssupporting
Just as my son needed us to take in his dread of death and make it make sense, so were we spontaneously making sense out of each other’s most intimate emotions.
Epstein frames sense making as an intersubjective, embodied exchange in which emotional experience is rendered tolerable by being held and transformed within intimate relational contact.
, Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness, 1998supporting
The right hemisphere processes the overall gist of a scene and creates a context-rich representational ‘understanding.’ This might be how we cultivate systems-level thinking, sensing the interactive ways in which elements of a larger whole are connected to one another.
Siegel locates sense making at the neurological level, attributing holistic, context-rich comprehension to right-hemisphere processing and distinguishing it from the left hemisphere’s context-poor, linear explanatory mode.
, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020supporting
Understanding a thing is to arrive at a metaphor for that thing by substituting something more familiar to us. And the feeling of familiarity is the feeling of understanding.
Jaynes argues that sense making is fundamentally metaphorical: comprehension is achieved by assimilating the unfamiliar to familiar models, so that understanding is always a structured substitution rather than direct apprehension.
, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976supporting
Notice how this is essentially the same story, but the meaning of it is entirely different… there is a lot more meaning in it, now, too.
Goodwyn illustrates clinically how narrative reframing transforms the meaning of identical events, showing that sense making is a function of the story-template applied rather than of the raw facts themselves.
, Understanding Dreams and Other Spontaneous Images: The Invisible Storyteller, 2018supporting
Soul-making is also described as imaging, that is, seeing or hearing by means of an imagining that sees through an event to its image. Imaging means releasing events from their literal understanding into a mythical appreciation.
Hillman’s concept of soul-making offers an archetypal counterpoint to cognitive accounts of sense making, locating the deepening of meaning in imaginal and mythopoeic perception rather than in explanatory cognition.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983aside
Soul-making is also described as imaging, that is, seeing or hearing by means of an imagining that sees through an event to its image. Imaging means releasing events from their literal understanding into a mythical appreciation.
This parallel text from Hillman reinforces the archetypal psychology position that meaning is deepened through imaginal vision rather than through explanatory or narrative closure.
, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983aside
I sense, I act, I feel, I perceive, I reflect, I think and I reason; therefore I know I am.
Levine proposes a somatic hierarchy for sense making in which bottom-up sensorimotor processing precedes and grounds reflective cognition, inverting the Cartesian priority of rational thought.
, In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010aside