The broken mirror.

We devalue in others what we cannot bear to recognize in ourselves. Cruelty is always autobiographical.

The broken mirror.

We devalue in others what we fear most to recognize in ourselves. Like vampires fleeing from mirrors, we attack in the other precisely what confronts us with our own fragility. This defensive operation reveals an uncomfortable truth: we only wound where we have been wounded before, we only deny what we secretly long to possess. Aggression toward others is always autobiographical.

The mechanism of devaluation builds castles on swampland. Each act of contempt toward others temporarily strengthens our ego, but paradoxically makes us more dependent on that same destructive operation. It's like burning furniture to keep warm: it works momentarily, but each combustion leaves us poorer, colder, more desperate to find something else to burn.

Current clinical practice reveals that behind every systematic devaluer lives a child not recognized in their uniqueness. Analytic work consists of creating a space where that vulnerability can emerge without the compulsive need to attack the otherness of others. Only by recognizing our own wound can we stop inflicting it.

Psychotherapy

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When satisfaction becomes obligation.

Consumer culture's achievement: not eliminating dissatisfaction, but making ordinary unhappiness feel like unbearable catastrophe, pathologizing the human condition itself as deficiency.

When satisfaction becomes obligation.

The analytic experience reveals a perverse shift: satisfaction has mutated from possibility into mandate. Contemporary subjects arrive in consultation not because they suffer too much, but because they cannot tolerate suffering at all. Every minor discomfort registers as crisis, every moment without pleasure as pathology. The culture promises total satisfaction while paradoxically rendering ordinary unhappiness unbearable: we have more access to pleasure than ever, yet less capacity to endure its inevitable absence.

This creates what clinicians encounter daily—subjects who experience the gap between advertisement and reality as personal failure. The problem isn't that satisfaction eludes them, but that anything less than constant euphoria feels catastrophic. Consumer culture doesn't fail to deliver happiness; it succeeds in making normal melancholy intolerable, transforming existential lack into emergency requiring immediate pharmaceutical or commercial intervention.

The cruelest aspect: this system feeds on its own failure. Each promise of total satisfaction raises expectations while lowering tolerance, creating subjects who need ever-increasing doses of novelty to maintain baseline contentment. The addict merely embodies this logic without pretense, choosing chemistry over the exhausting theater of perpetual consumer optimism.

Psychotherapy

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The chemistry of solitude.

The addict's tragedy: choosing chemistry's reliable repetition over humanity's unreliable surprise, they discover their perfect partner is also their executioner.

The chemistry of solitude.

The analytic experience reveals a disturbing substitution: the addict doesn't merely prefer the drug over people, they fundamentally reorganize the economy of trust itself. Where the neurotic suffers the unreliability of human desire, the addict finds salvation in chemical consistency. The drug never disappoints because it never speaks: it delivers its effect with mechanical precision, asking nothing in return except the body's continued availability.

This transformation operates through a brutal logic: human relationships demand interpretation, negotiation, the anxiety of not knowing what the Other wants. The object-drug eliminates this unbearable uncertainty. It becomes the only Other who keeps promises, who arrives on schedule, who never asks uncomfortable questions. The addict hasn't abandoned society; they've simply found a more reliable partner in chemistry than in conversation.

Yet this apparent solution conceals a deeper impasse: the drug's reliability is also its tyranny. Unlike human others who can surprise, disappoint, or transform us, the chemical bond remains static, repetitive, mortifying. The addict trades the risk of human unpredictability for the certainty of pharmaceutical servitude, discovering too late that the most trustworthy Other is also the most deadly.

Psychotherapy

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