I came from the machine to the couch — and never let go of either.
PhD in Psychoanalysis, Health and Society from UVA — and before that, a Master's in Mechanical Engineering from COPPE/UFRJ. Researcher at the frontier between psychoanalysis and artificial intelligence, with 25 years of experience in software engineering and technology — including 3 years living in Sunnyvale as a software engineer at QualiTau Inc., in Silicon Valley. This page gathers the fronts where this unlikely encounter takes place — from the clinic to the machine, from research to song — and points to where each of them lives.
I don't work in a single place. The same gesture — listening — unfolds into three fronts that speak to one another. Each door below leads out of here to where things actually happen.
I have seen adults online since 2016, supervise clinicians in training and lead study groups along the Freud-Lacan-Ferenczi line. I have coordinated CEPCOP/USU since 2019 — with more than 6,000 sessions a year at the sharing clinic — and we offer free listening to marginalized populations through the Xica Manicongo dispositif (CPAPEC).
A mechanical engineer from UFRJ, an AI researcher with 3 years in Silicon Valley and a PhD in Psychoanalysis from UVA — that is where I ask what happens when the machine meets the unconscious. This axis drives the TMU-LAB research program, the book O Impossível da Máquina (forthcoming, 2026), the articles in Tempo Psicanalítico and Estudos da Língua(gem), and the managing editorship of Revista Tempo Psicanalítico.
I co-founded EPEP — Brazil's first psychoanalytic school with more than 51% Black, brown and Indigenous members — and coordinate CPAPEC with Jairo Carioca and Ronald Lopes. An anticolonial wager: to train, publish and organize a listening that recognizes itself as origin, not as a copy of the center.
16 essays on the structural impossible that inhabits the learning machine — a metapsychological reading of AI through Freud, Lacan and Ferenczi. Forthcoming, 2026.
View at TMU-LAB tmulab.orgThere is a part of me that fits neither the consulting room nor the paper: I write lyrics.
PeriphArt is where listening becomes song — the same periphery I claim in theory, now in verse and melody. It is the freest place among the axes: here the unconscious is not interpreted, it is sung.
Listen on YouTube @periphartI started in 1987: a bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering at UFRJ, a master's at COPPE, and from the very first year I was already programming — Pascal, Basic, C. I lived for 3 years in Sunnyvale and worked as a software engineer at QualiTau Inc., a semiconductor test company in the heart of Silicon Valley. Then, almost thirty years inside technology in Brazil: Oracle, Brainox, the CTO chair — systems too large to fit in a single head, and the persistent feeling that a question was missing there. The question was about the subject.
The question about the subject became research before the doctorate: in 2019 I published Psicanálise em Tempos de Tecnocultura, the first book of that crossing. In 2024, the PhD in Psychoanalysis, Health and Society at UVA — with the thesis "Uma ética do Real: identificações hiperdinâmicas em um não-lugar" (An ethics of the Real: hyperdynamic identifications in a non-place), supervised by Prof. Dr. Auterives Maciel Junior — formalized what was already in motion. From that crossing came the concepts that organize my work: the Impossible of the Machine, Pulsional AI, the Analyst of the Machine. This triad anchors the book O Impossível da Máquina (forthcoming, 2026) and the research program I lead at TMU-LAB, where I ask what happens when the machine meets the unconscious.
I think in public. The articles appear in Tempo Psicanalítico — the journal where I serve as managing editor — and in Estudos da Língua(gem); the daily thinking, in the Confiar Melhor newsletter. And what research asks, the movement practices: I co-founded EPEP — Brazil's first free psychoanalytic school with more than 51% Black, brown and Indigenous members — and coordinate CPAPEC and CEPCOP/USU, which provides more than 6,000 free sessions a year.
And there is still what escapes all of this: I write song lyrics at PeriphArt. It is perhaps where the axes finally meet — technique, listening and the periphery becoming song.
