Gestalt contributions to relational and interactional neuroscience. Reply to authors: Understanding and explaining differences across minds in social interaction: insights from social neuroscience and clinical psychiatry by Kamp, Bolis, Schilbach.

Résumé

This commentary responds to Kamp et al. (Eur Arch Psychiatry Clin Neurosci 275:2199-2201, 2025) editorial on understanding differences across minds in social interaction. It fully supports their relational perspective, which reframes social cognition and psychopathology as dynamic and interactional rather than individual phenomena. The reply highlights how autism research has been central in this paradigmatic shift: the double empathy problem and the dialectical misattunement hypothesis illustrate that social difficulties arise from reciprocal mismatches rather than unidirectional deficits. Drawing on Gestalt theory, the paper situates these ideas within a historical framework that conceives perception, cognition, and behavior as field-dependent and relational. From a Gestalt perspective, autism can be understood as a qualitative diversity in forming and maintaining social Gestalten-an alternative, not deficient, mode of constructing meaning. The commentary discusses a possible synthesis between social neuroscience and Gestalt theory in relation to an "interpersonalized psychiatry," emphasizing neural and experiential synchrony as potential mechanisms of therapeutic change. Ultimately, it calls for an integrative science of interaction that views the essence of the mind not within individuals, but between them.