Chemistry without metaphor

Drugs don't cure pain, they only silence the narrator. When we eliminate symptoms without listening to them, we amputate entire chapters of our history.

Chemistry Without Metaphor

The addict seeks direct happiness while discarding the very possibility of symbolizing their suffering. Like someone installing a bridge where a river should exist, they substitute the elaborative journey with a chemical shortcut that promises destination without travel. The discomfort is thus deactivated but not transformed, silenced but never truly heard.

The libidinal economy of the drug user operates through this fundamental paradox: the more successfully they eliminate the symptom, the more radically they fail in their subjective function. While the traditional neurotic weaves compromises between desire and prohibition—constructing symptoms like building habitable houses on impossible terrain—the addict purchases prefabricated solutions that dismantle the very architecture of the desiring subject.

Contemporary clinical practice faces this dilemma: how to reintroduce symbolic production where chemistry has installed shortcuts? The analyst must become an advocate for the symptom, defending the fundamental right to construct metaphors where the market only offers molecules. A subject without symptoms is a subject without text.

Psychotherapy

Book Now

Erections without desire

The true dysfunction is not in the penis that falls but in a culture that demands permanent erection as proof of subjective existence.

Erections Without Desire

Young men take blue pills to sustain encounters where their bodies no longer listen to what they desire. They seek tireless organs while their minds drift away from the erotic scene. Paradoxically, the more they guarantee physical potency, the more they demonstrate their subjective impotence to inhabit the encounter with the unpredictability of the other.

Viagra functions as an orthopedics of desire in times where sexuality has mutated from experience to performance. This transformation reveals the perverse inversion of the Freudian mandate: we no longer repress the sexual to sustain culture but instead medicalize sex to comply with the contemporary imperative of mandatory enjoyment. The pharmacological success is a symptom of symbolic failure.

Contemporary clinical practice receives subjects who confuse eroticism with hydraulics. Their chemically modified bodies execute perfect acts that do not concern them subjectively. The analyst faces the task of helping them reconnect with the dimension of desire they have outsourced to the pharmaceutical industry, restoring the dignity of a desire that includes the possibility of intervals, failures, and singularities.

Psychotherapy

Book Now

Words in freedom

Where public speech withers, the unconscious falls silent. Psychoanalysis is not just a victim of totalitarianism; it is its structural antagonist.

The word is the primordial instrument of psychoanalysis, but not just any word. It is that which emerges without restrictions, the one that surprises even the person who pronounces it. The unconscious requires safe territories to manifest itself, just as a bird needs open space to spread its wings. Without guarantees of freedom, the repressed remains in the shadows.

The analytic device operates under a fundamental contradiction: it demands limitless speech within a rigorously limited framework. This paradox is sustainable only when the social pact guarantees that no word will be punished for its disturbing content. The setting protects, but only democracy legitimizes that singular pact we call transference.

Contemporary clinical practice confirms that under authoritarian regimes, psychoanalysis becomes deformed or disappears. When words must pass through the filter of fear, the analyst involuntarily becomes an accomplice to power. The unconscious, as an intimate territory, requires for its exploration the same oxygen as public life: the freedom to speak.

Psychotherapy

Book Now