Toward an Integrative Neuroexistential Psychology: The RIM–NEAS Framework for Meaning and Change
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: How can neuroexistential psychology investigate meaning-oriented responsiveness without reducing existential meaning to psychological regulation? Taking Viktor Frankl's retrospective testimony as a historically situated hermeneutic case rather than neural evidence, this article develops an abductive plausibility argument for integrating the Resonance-Inference Model (RIM) and the Neuro-Existential Architecture System (NEAS). RIM coordinates six explanatory perspectives through cross-perspectival explanatory constraint, seeking greater explanatory discrimination without postulating a unified mechanism. NEAS distinguishes three potentially overlapping modes of existential self-relation: Transparency, Witnessing Space, and Logos-Vector. A further distinction between a biographically formed Logos-Horizon and a situated Logos-Vector clarifies how commitments may persist while their enactment changes. Beyond methodological coordination, we propose a bounded heuristic hypothesis: meaning-related orientations may participate in the recursive stabilization or reorganization of embodied self-patterns through anticipatory, affective, motivational, narrative, and interpersonal processes. This does not identify existential meaning with a computational master prior or attribute autonomous causal power to NEAS modes. Functional relevance, lived significance, existential meaning, and normative validity remain analytically distinct. The framework's proposed explanatory advantage and process hypotheses are critically examined against objections of redundancy, empirical underdetermination, category conflation, and normative overreach. RIM–NEAS thus offers a heuristic metamodel for investigating psychological change without claiming an empirically established integrative mechanism.
Author: Leidig, Gerd
Institution: FernUniversität in Hagen
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225799368
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