The Fundamental Structure of Psychic Suffering: A Neuropsychoanalytic Approach

Contemporary nosography tends to fragment psychic suffering into discrete, separate categories, each with its own diagnostic criteria. This work argues instead that its most varied forms share a single underlying structure: the brain's regulation of the precision with which it weighs signals from its own body. When this regulation fails, it does so in one of two opposite directions: rigidity, which fixes on a stable but non-adaptive value, and instability, which never settles on any value at all. The type of early attachment is the parameter that decides which of the two directions the system veers towards. Built on the free energy principle and on recent transdiagnostic data, this thesis traces clinical categories that the DSM keeps apart back to a single computational mechanism and recovers within that same mechanism Freudian and Lacanian concepts (repression, foreclosure, compromise formation) that psychoanalysis had already identified by another route. Within this framework, depression, generalised anxiety, phobias, post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anorexia, conversion hysteria, somatic symptom disorder, panic disorder, addictions and autism fall under rigidity, while schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and ADHD fall under instability. A final chapter turns to a form of suffering that falls outside this map: pure anguish, a structural, non-pathological condition that no recalibration can correct.