The processes linking meaning, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity constitute a central challenge for understanding life trajectories marked by dark times, particularly experiences of entrapment or violence during childhood. This presentation explores the conditions of possibility of speech, as well as the processes of elaboration unfolding within the temporal dynamics of subjectivation and relational life.

Cultural psychology, in the tradition of Vygotsky and subsequent developments, addresses the effects of constraining environments on human development. Following Bakhtin, a path-breaking figure in the vibrant dialogical current, dialogical psychology is grounded in a conception of mind as fundamentally relational. In this presentation, this framework is mobilized to examine dialogical processes and meaning-making, as well as their disruptions under conditions of violence and entrapment, through a fine-grained analysis of discourse, its polyphonies, self-positions, and dynamics of sense.

Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s distinction between power and violence, this communication conceptualizes entrapment not as a form of power but as a radical rupture of the dialogical bond, and adopts a psychodynamic perspective attentive to the singularity of the subject.

This analysis is supported by an in-depth case study embedded within broader research devoted to desire, based on a corpus of more than 250 authentic therapeutic interviews in clinical sexology.

Among other findings, the analyses demonstrate that subtle discursive variations accompany shifts in self-positions and intersubjective dynamics. These findings open toward a renewed understanding of elaborative processes in traumatic contexts, where dominant clinical frameworks tend to posit a relative fixation or rigidity of psychic organization.

Unified libertarian theory (ULT) contends that libertarianism and realism are expressions of a single ethic shaped by context. At its core, ULT affirms the nonaggression principle (NAP) as the foundational moral commitment of libertarian thought. However, it recognizes that international relations lack the legal infrastructure and mutual norms that make this principle operational at home. While a domestic environment allows for law and norms-based restraint, foreign affairs operate in an anarchic environment where deterrence, not morality, secures order. ULT asserts that liberty is preserved through two means: institutions where possible, strategy where necessary. Realism becomes not a rival to libertarianism but its external application in a world without courts, contracts, or reciprocity. Power must still be bound, but by prudence and self-interest rather than statute. The state’s function remains constant: to preserve liberty, not project virtue. Internally, this is achieved through decentralized law and voluntary interaction; externally, through strategic discipline and calibrated force. ULT acknowledges that a state may be forced to act to preserve the liberty of those it serves. Action must be guided by interest, necessity, and proportionality. Coercion is justified only insofar as it defends liberty without becoming its own threat. ULT therefore rejects both the moral imperialism of idealist interventionism and the paralyzed absolutism of doctrinaire pacifism. ULT offers a doctrine for a world where good intentions are not enough. It affirms that liberty is sustained by structure—legal where it can be, strategic where it must. Additionally, ULT can be used to gain greater insight into how states think as unitary actors, relying on public choice theory, realism, and classical liberal thinkers to lay the foundation. Using ULT as a lens can provide insight into causes and outcomes of armed interstate conflicts, alliances, and treaties, while providing greater clarity on interstate and international relations in general.

This theoretical synthesis explores the notion of home as a dynamic, semiotically mediated construct by connecting a dimensional model of home with a case study on international students’ lived negotiations of belonging. The model conceptualizes home as a hypergeneralized feeling field that becomes experientially meaningful through semiotic emergence across temporal, psychosocial, spatial, cultural, and power dimensions. The power dimension, in particular, highlights how social hierarchies, institutional structures, and political conditions shape who is permitted to feel at home and under what circumstances. The case study illustrates how these interwoven dimensions unfold in practice, showing that home is not a fixed location but a dialogical and developmental process continually reshaped through rupture, transition, and imaginative reconstruction. Drawing on dialogical and developmental perspectives, it demonstrates how internal and external voices, cultural symbols, and imagined futures interweave to restore coherence and continuity after migration-induced disruptions.

By linking the theoretical hierarchy of affective-semiotic levels with the empirical narrative of symbolic reattachment, this synthesis reveals how meaning-making, emotion, and imagination together constitute home as both a psychological resource and an evolving identity field. Home thus emerges as a site of agency and negotiation within asymmetrical power relations, where individuals construct belonging through semiotic traces—food, language, memory, and cultural icons—that bridge past and present. The integration of these perspectives underscores the developmental and dialogical complexity of “home” as a lived process and invites further theoretical discussion on how semiotic mediation, identity, and power co-produce a sense of being at home.