Model of Authorship and Relational Illegitimacy: A Theoretical Model of Psychological Suffering Organized by the Experience of Illegitimacy

This article introduces the Model of Authorship and Relational Illegitimacy, a theoretical framework designed to describe a specific pattern of psychological suffering that is organized not primarily around intrapsychic conflicts or cognitive deficits, but around a structural experience of existential illegitimacy within relational contexts. The model proposes that, under certain developmental conditions, the individual internalizes a relational field in which legitimacy is distributed comparatively, based on performance, hierarchy, or external validation. Within this Comparative Relational Field, existence is experienced as conditionally authorized, generating a persistent need to justify one's own presence and worth. Psychological suffering thus manifests as a continuous effort of existential justification. To regulate the threat of symbolic exclusion, the subject develops what the model terms an Alibi Structure—a defensive organization oriented toward maintaining conditional legitimacy through performance, adaptation, or self-justification. This dynamic produces a regulatory circuit sustained by shame as a phenomenological marker of exposure to illegitimacy. Clinical observations suggest that therapeutic transformation does not occur through the restoration of comparative legitimacy, but through the progressive recognition of the authorship of one's own being. In this process, the subject begins to question the implicit premise that their existence depends on relational authorization. Clinical questions such as "Can I be me?" become possible at this stage, functioning as signs of structural transition. These do not merely represent a request for permission directed at the other, but an incipient realization that the right to act and exist may not depend on validation from the Comparative Field. From this displacement, action ceases to function as a justification for existence and gradually begins to take shape as an expression of being. The article outlines the model's conceptual architecture, its proposed regulatory circuit, and a preliminary set of clinical markers associated with the transition from Alibi-based functioning to an experience oriented by Authorship.