Hormē: A First-Principles Theory of Human Behavior and Its Clinical Implications

Clinical psychology diagnoses from symptom clusters and selects treatment from tradition. This produces a well-documented puzzle: cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and psychodynamic therapy (PDT) yield statistically equivalent outcomes across disorders, yet no framework explains why from generative mechanism, or predicts when each will fail. This paper derives a behavioral architecture from a single empirical fact: all humans share one hormonal substrate differentiated by two continuous parameters, the androgen-estrogen ratio and the oscillation period. The survive-reproduce tradeoff, mediated by this ratio, generates two drive basins (survival and eros), a permanent toolkit shaped by development, an energy system with magnitude, quality, and regularity, and minimum-cost behavioral routing. This architecture — Hormē — subsumes the empirically validated findings of Freud (defense mechanisms, unconscious processing, transference) and Jung (personality dimensions, the Shadow, archetypal universality, individuation) without their theoretical superstructures. It explains therapeutic equivalence as a structural consequence: CBT and PDT modify the same architectural layer through different entry points. It proposes a diagnostic framework grounded in generative mechanism, five distinct configurations that produce identical symptom presentations but require different interventions, and a treatment selection protocol that matches modality to architectural variable. The paper does not propose a clinical protocol. It provides the first-principles reasoning from which protocols can be derived and tested.