Violence and Intimacy: A Conceptual Model of Subjectivity, Boundaries, and Co-Regulation

Extended English Version of the Theoretical Preprint This record contains the extended English version of a theoretical preprint proposing a humanistic conceptual model of violence and dyadic intimacy as different organizations of subjectivity, boundaries, and co-regulation. Violence is described as regulatory collapse—an attempt to restore manageability, integrity, or agency by reducing the Other to a function, obstacle, threat, resource, or element of an internal scenario. Intimacy is understood as incorporating a significant Other into one’s own field of integrity, care, and regulation while preserving the Other’s separateness, boundaries, and autonomous trajectory. The model’s central distinction concerns subject-oriented and object-oriented sensitivity: not only how accurately the Other’s state is perceived, but whether the perceived signal acquires regulatory force and can modify the form, timing, intensity, or terms of subsequent action. Version v0.95 additionally distinguishes subject-preserving incorporation of the Other from objectifying incorporation. The preprint retains the model’s full theoretical architecture, including regulatory cost, survival and development modalities, belonging and agency, distributed regulation, distributed safety, and relational restoration. It also presents preliminary hypotheses, a working operationalization, and criteria for micro-process analysis of contact episodes. Regulatory explanation does not replace responsibility, analysis of power and coercion, assessment of harm, or safety-oriented intervention. This text is not identical to the shortened English journal manuscript prepared for submission. A corresponding extended Russian version is available as a separate, related preprint: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21406336