Friday, June 13 at 13:00 in Centro Carlos Santamaria Room 4. The talk will be hybrid. If you want to participate, please contact m.aste.tb2@gmail.com

Limit situations, such as trauma, illness, or existential crises, fracture the anticipatory structures that sustain the basic trust required to navigate the world. These functional structures serve as a pre-reflective substrate of certainty, enabling the organism to interact fluidly and meaningfully with its environment. Limit situations expose the inherent fragility of the patterns of sense of world and self
(sense-making), triggering organic imbalances, disruptions in sensorimotor agency, and ruptures in socially negotiated norms. However, the experience of limit situations and the challenge they pose to fundamental trust do not necessarily entail collapse. Rather, they may give rise to resilient responses. These responses emerge through dynamic processes of reorganization that modulate habits, norms, and practical orientations across three interconnected levels. At the organic level, disruption may lead to adaptive reorganization, where states of “malfunction” (such as chronic pain) are metabolized into new viable equilibria, showing the organism’s capacity to cultivate renewed trust in its bodily processes. At the sensorimotor level, loss of fluidity can prompt bodily relearning through active engagement with the environment, restoring embodied agency. At the social level, the rupture of shared meanings can be addressed through the co-construction of flexible norms
that validate diverse adaptive responses, thereby rebuilding intersubjective trust. These reorganizations entail active participation, ongoing involvement, and situated assessment of existential vulnerability, aiming not merely to restore but to redefine trust. In this light, a theory of resilience grounded in the interplay between limit situations and the re-establishment of trust is framed as a relational, multi-level achievement. It redefines mental health not as a fixed state of normative functioning, but as an ongoing process of contextual coordination, participatory agency, and sustained capacity to reorganize meaning under precarious conditions.