Aluizio Barros da Silva Junior

Manifesto of Abiding presents an ontological reflection on the relationship between Being, Experience, Consciousness, and Meaning. Drawing a distinction between what grounds existence and what merely describes it, the text argues that human consciousness tends to invert the original order of experience, seeking in attributes, achievements, identities, beliefs, or justifications what only Being itself can provide. This inversion gives rise to substitute forms of legitimation, referred to as Alibis, through which the subject attempts to ground existence in elements that can be acquired, demonstrated, defended, or lost. In contrast, the manifesto proposes a restoration of the original order in which Being precedes Meaning, Legitimacy precedes justification, and Belonging precedes production. The text maintains that human experience becomes inhabitable not through the attainment of a sufficient justification for existence, but through the abandonment of the need to justify what never required a foundation. As an ontological unfolding of the theses developed in Beyond the Alibi: Relational Ontology of the Soul and the Restoration of Life, this manifesto explores the existential implications of the distinction between foundation and attribute, proposing an understanding of Abiding as a return to the origin of experience.

Além do Álibi: Ontologia Relacional da Alma e a Restauração da Vida investiga um problema central da experiência humana: como o sujeito se reorganiza quando a continuidade da experiência psíquica é interrompida e o pertencimento passa a ser vivido como condicional. O livro parte da hipótese de que parte significativa do sofrimento psicológico não decorre apenas de eventos traumáticos isolados ou conflitos intrapsíquicos, mas da reorganização funcional produzida quando experiências fundamentais de vínculo, reconhecimento, diferenciação e sustentação não encontram continuidade suficiente. Nessas condições, a ação deixa progressivamente de expressar participação espontânea na vida e passa a funcionar como condição de legitimidade subjetiva.

Beyond the Alibi: Relational Ontology of the Soul and the Restoration of Life investigates a central problem of human experience: how the subject reorganizes when the continuity of psychic experience is disrupted and belonging comes to be experienced as conditional. The book advances the hypothesis that a significant portion of psychological suffering does not arise solely from isolated traumatic events or intrapsychic conflicts, but from the functional reorganization that occurs when fundamental experiences of attachment, recognition, differentiation, and relational support fail to achieve sufficient continuity. Under such conditions, action progressively ceases to express spontaneous participation in life and instead comes to function as a condition for subjective legitimacy.

Esta obra propõe um modelo teórico-clínico para compreender o sofrimento psíquico não como conflito interno, mas como interrupção relacional da experiência. Através de uma ontologia relacional, o livro articula psicanálise, filosofia e neurociência cognitiva em quatro níveis complementares: dinâmico (Fluxos de Eros), processual (SPEE — Sequência de Processamento do Evento Emocional), estrutural (Criança Interior como fragmentação) e relacional (Ilegitimidade Relacional). O conceito central é a transição do Álibi — estrutura de sobrevivência na qual o sujeito precisa justificar constantemente sua existência através de desempenho, utilidade ou sofrimento — para a Autoria — capacidade de habitar a própria vida sem necessidade de justificativa externa. Esta transição é possibilitada pela regulação de Eros através de Anteros (alteridade/reciprocidade), reposicionando Thanatos não como pulsão autônoma, mas como consequência da interrupção do fluxo vital. A obra oferece ferramentas conceituais operacionalizáveis, incluindo: a Anatomia da Alma (7 aspectos de Eros), o modelo SPEE de formação de padrões, o conceito de Legislador da Alma (função executiva sobre significados) e estudos de caso clínicos. Destina-se a psicanalistas, psicoterapeutas, pesquisadores em filosofia da mente e leitores interessados em modelos integrativos de compreensão da experiência humana. Nota da Revisão (abril/2026) Esta versão (2.0) apresenta refinamentos no Capítulo 8, com maior explicitação da distinção funcional entre Conhecer e Saber e da operação do Legislador da Alma. As alterações visam aprimorar a precisão conceitual e a aplicabilidade clínica, sem modificar a estrutura geral do modelo.

Esta obra propõe um modelo teórico-clínico para compreender o sofrimento psíquico não como conflito interno, mas como interrupção relacional da experiência. Através de uma ontologia relacional, o livro articula psicanálise, filosofia e neurociência cognitiva em quatro níveis complementares: dinâmico (Fluxos de Eros), processual (SPEE — Sequência de Processamento do Evento Emocional), estrutural (Criança Interior como fragmentação) e relacional (Ilegitimidade Relacional). O conceito central é a transição do Álibi — estrutura de sobrevivência na qual o sujeito precisa justificar constantemente sua existência através de desempenho, utilidade ou sofrimento — para a Autoria — capacidade de habitar a própria vida sem necessidade de justificativa externa. Esta transição é possibilitada pela regulação de Eros através de Anteros (alteridade/reciprocidade), reposicionando Thanatos não como pulsão autônoma, mas como consequência da interrupção do fluxo vital. A obra oferece ferramentas conceituais operacionalizáveis, incluindo: a Anatomia da Alma (7 aspectos de Eros), o modelo SPEE de formação de padrões, o conceito de Legislador da Alma (função executiva sobre significados) e estudos de caso clínicos. Destina-se a psicanalistas, psicoterapeutas, pesquisadores em filosofia da mente e leitores interessados em modelos integrativos de compreensão da experiência humana.

The need for belonging is not merely another motivation or a simple desire; it is a survival strategy and the condition of possibility for the constitution of who we are. When belonging is experienced as conditional, the psychic structure ceases to organize itself around the expression of its specificities and begins to organize itself around its justification: the alibi. The alibi protects formal belonging — not being expelled, rejected, or excluded — but sacrifices real belonging: the possibility of being seen and received in one's singularity. The subject remains “within” the relationship, yet feels radically exiled. Relational Illegitimacy describes the state in which the subject, exiled from their own presence by shame, takes refuge in an idealized reality. This refuge is sustained only when meaning (subjective interpretation) replaces reality (the raw event) in lived experience, preventing direct access to life and the exercise of Authorship. This model proposes an ontology of experience aimed at displacing suffering from cognitive content to the structure of meaning, restoring to the subject the right to exist without prior justification.

This article introduces the Model of Authorship and Relational Illegitimacy, a theoretical framework designed to describe a specific pattern of psychological suffering that is organized not primarily around intrapsychic conflicts or cognitive deficits, but around a structural experience of existential illegitimacy within relational contexts. The model proposes that, under certain developmental conditions, the individual internalizes a relational field in which legitimacy is distributed comparatively, based on performance, hierarchy, or external validation. Within this Comparative Relational Field, existence is experienced as conditionally authorized, generating a persistent need to justify one's own presence and worth. Psychological suffering thus manifests as a continuous effort of existential justification. To regulate the threat of symbolic exclusion, the subject develops what the model terms an Alibi Structure—a defensive organization oriented toward maintaining conditional legitimacy through performance, adaptation, or self-justification. This dynamic produces a regulatory circuit sustained by shame as a phenomenological marker of exposure to illegitimacy. Clinical observations suggest that therapeutic transformation does not occur through the restoration of comparative legitimacy, but through the progressive recognition of the authorship of one's own being. In this process, the subject begins to question the implicit premise that their existence depends on relational authorization. Clinical questions such as "Can I be me?" become possible at this stage, functioning as signs of structural transition. These do not merely represent a request for permission directed at the other, but an incipient realization that the right to act and exist may not depend on validation from the Comparative Field. From this displacement, action ceases to function as a justification for existence and gradually begins to take shape as an expression of being. The article outlines the model's conceptual architecture, its proposed regulatory circuit, and a preliminary set of clinical markers associated with the transition from Alibi-based functioning to an experience oriented by Authorship.

This essay proposes a relational ontology of life as an immanent and generative principle whose manifestation occurs through relational processes, where being is understood as a relationship in act. Drawing inspiration from Bergson, Spinoza, Merleau-Ponty, Hans Jonas, Indigenous cosmologies, and contemporary theories of relational quantum physics and autopoiesis biology, I argue that being manifests in four interdependent movements: Life (creative potency), Consciousness (reflexive distinction), Meaning (narrative organization), and Vital Expression (the embodied return of life). These movements form a respiratory spiral of being, where the real continuously inhales, distinguishes, interprets, and returns to itself. The ontology defended here overcomes the dualism between idealism and materialism by understanding that matter is the mode by which life reflects and renews itself, and that time — including the “before” — only exists as an articulation of the lived present, not as an absolute, linear substance. From this vital-relational ontology, a respiratory epistemology — where knowing is participating — and an ecological ethic of presence, oriented toward the co-preservation of being in the Anthropocene, are delineated.

The concept of the inner child is widely recognized, particularly in contemporary therapies, where it is often viewed as a frozen image of ourselves, trapped in time and in need of care and attention. This article proposes a new perspective: the Emotional Absence and Suppression Model, which investigates how unacknowledged affective deficiencies generate idealized parts of the self, created to fill these voids. These parts, termed idealized psychic entities, function as compensatory mechanisms to cope with feelings that lacked space to develop. As long as these entities remain active, emotional needs remain unresolved. Beyond absence, there is also its opposite: suppression or the excessive fulfillment of a need which similarly hinders emotional growth, keeping fragments of the self fixed in immature stages. This model is grounded in the concepts of the Anatomy of the Soul, which explores affective flows and interruptions that shape the psyche, integrating theory and clinical practice.

This article explores adolescence as a critical phase for the formation of emotional and behavioral patterns, integrating neurobiological foundations with the Sequence of Emotional Event Processing (SPEE) model and the theory of the Anatomy of the Soul. Adolescence, marked by neurobiological changes that amplify emotional intensity, favors the consolidation of deep emotional meanings. SPEE describes how significant events generate subjective interpretations that, when not elaborated, interrupt emotional flows and form automatic patterns. The Anatomy of the Soul proposes that Eros, the primordial life drive, manifests in seven essential aspects, and its obstruction gives rise to Thanatos, manifested as suffering or dysfunctional patterns. A clinical case study (pseudonym “Davi”) illustrates these dynamics, while the metaphor of the “18,000 km check-up” suggests a reflective pause to prevent automatic repetitions.

In the theory of life and death drives, formulated by Sigmund Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), two opposing forces are described as guiding human behavior: the life drive, which seeks preservation and connection, and the death drive, which tends toward destruction and a return to the inorganic. Over time, this dichotomy has often been interpreted as the presence of two opposing forces, suggesting the psyche’s search for balance between them. However, we may reexamine the classical examples used to explain the action of these drives. The act of eating, though considered a life drive, destroys the food during mastication. Freud also associated the death drive with the search for peace, or the absence of stimuli, referring to soldiers who returned from World War II. Looking again at the eating example: wouldn’t the destruction of food essentially serve as a means to fulfill the life drive? And in the case of the soldiers — isn’t the desire for peace or for the absence of harmful stimuli actually a desire for the realization of the life drive? This article thus aims to review the conception of the life and death drives by proposing an alternative interpretation in which the death drive is not an original and equivalent force to the life drive, but rather a phenomenon that results from the obstruction of its original flow.

This paper aims to map the anatomy of the soul, offering a tangible view of its aspects to enable more effective treatments for social pains. Based on the hypothesis that Eros is the original drive and Thanatos a subordinate consequence, the study moves away from traditional psychoanalysis, focusing not on the balance between the drives but on identifying obstacles that prevent the full realization of Eros. From this understanding, the paper seeks to comprehend how the blockage of these flows can negatively impact emotional and mental health.