"Psychology Has Been Studying Effects Without a Mechanism."

This paper reconstructs psychology from the ground up by identifying the generative mechanism the field has lacked since its inception. Psychology has spent more than a century cataloguing symptoms, traits, biases, developmental stages, relational patterns, and cognitive tendencies without a unifying explanation for why these patterns arise. The discipline fragmented because it inherited an ontology of internal contents rather than a model of the structure that produces behavior.The mechanism is orientation—the real‑time alignment between an agent and the structure of reality. Orientation determines what is noticed, what is ignored, what is interpreted as threat or opportunity, what actions appear available, and what outcomes seem possible. Once orientation is recognized as foundational, every major subfield reorganizes: clinical symptoms become misaligned postures; counseling concerns become transitional misfits; cognition becomes compression; social behavior becomes collective alignment; development becomes manifold expansion; personality becomes long‑run priors; health behavior becomes orientation to the body and future; neuropsychology becomes hardware constraints; education becomes guided reorientation; abnormality becomes collapse or rigidity; and organizations and communities become engineered orientation environments.The result is a unified ontology that dissolves disciplinary fragmentation and grounds psychology in a single generative mechanism. Orientation does not replace psychology—it completes it.