Proposed Mechanisms of Existential Resilience: A Heuristic Framework Integrating Free Energy Principle, Affective Criticality, and Spatiotemporal Neuroscience

Background: Contemporary psychiatry has achieved unprecedented neurobiological precision in understanding symptom-level mechanisms, yet clinical outcomes remain stagnant—depression prevalence unchanged, suicide rates rising, and patients frequently reporting existential emptiness despite achieving symptom remission. This paradox suggests a fundamental theoretical gap: psychiatry lacks a scientific language for meaning.Objective: This paper develops the Neuro-Existential Architecture System (NEAS), integrating five previously disparate theoretical domains—Friston's Free Energy Principle, Melloni's laminar cortical architecture, Tucker's affective criticality, Northoff's spatiotemporal neuroscience, and Frankl's existential psychology—into a unified framework explaining how meaning stabilizes resilience at the neurobiological level.Theoretical Framework: The NEAS proposes that meaning is the highest-order generative model in the brain's hierarchical predictive system. It is not epiphenomenal but thermodynamically necessary: meaning minimizes free energy by providing a stable prior that constrains lower hierarchical levels through downward causation. Three core mechanisms are proposed: (1) Model Shattering and Reconstruction—how trauma destabilizes priors and meaning-centered recovery provides scaffolding for reintegration; (2) Affective Criticality—how meaning maintains the balance between confidence and error-checking that characterizes optimal neural function; (3) Spatiotemporal Coherence—how meaning extends temporal integration windows, preventing dissociation and fragmentation.Clinical and Empirical Implications: The framework generates a three-level intervention model (physiological, narrative, existential) and four falsifiable predictions regarding autocorrelation window extension, infra-slow oscillation strengthening, laminar disruption in trauma, and three-level intervention efficacy.Conclusions: By grounding existential meaning in neurobiological architecture, the NEAS bridges a century-long gap between neuroscience and existential psychology, explaining why meaning is fundamental to resilience and suggesting that psychiatry must become a science of meaning to advance beyond symptom management toward genuine healing.