About the book
The Emotional
Manual
An emotion is not a bug.
It is an update from the living.
The Emotional Manual begins with a simple shift: what if emotions are not problems to solve, but signals from a living system doing exactly what it is meant to do?
Drawing on the free energy principle (Karl Friston), autopoiesis (Maturana and Varela), enaction (Varela, Thompson, Rosch), and the phenomenology of the lived body (Merleau-Ponty), Pierre Dufraisse builds a framework that is simultaneously theoretical and grounded.
The book proposes four movements: listen, anticipate, update, act. Not as a protocol — as a way of inhabiting experience.
Not a therapy. Not a self-help method. Not a biohacking guide. A serious essay — demanding, fluid, embodied — for readers who want to think clearly about what it means to feel.
Originally published in French as Le Manuel Émotionnel. Read the French edition