We drug the body to silence what we don't know how to hear. Chemistry: provisional punctuation for biological texts no one taught us to read.
Chemistry of silence
Bodies speaking languages their owners cannot recognize. Where words fail, physical pain constructs cathedrals of precise and ordered symptoms that no dictionary translates. We search in pharmaceuticals and substances for interpreters of this incomprehensible monologue emerging from territories that predate language.
Psychic suffering without symbolic representation materializes in aching flesh, inflamed tissues, protesting organs. Paradoxically, the more sophisticated our medical diagnoses become, the less we understand these bodily hieroglyphics. Like archaeologists facing inscriptions from extinct civilizations, we accumulate data while deeper meaning remains sealed behind impenetrable walls.
Contemporary clinical practice receives these bodies suffering in pre-verbal dialects. The real challenge is not silencing symptoms but developing new grammars where pain finds translation without resorting to chemicals that mute the question. Between medicine that medicates and psychoanalysis that listens, these patients seek someone who can read the scores written in their cells.
We consume our ideals until they are extinct. Addicted to the sacred in portable format, we have lost the distance that makes worship possible.
Liquid ideals
Objects have become solutions. Where once there existed unattainable ideals that guided us from the heights, we now consume pills, powders, and pixels that promise to deliver in digestible format what we once pursued as horizon: instant transcendence, packaged connection, identity with barcode. Addiction is not excess but chemical transformation of the ideal: from external compass to internal fuel.
Paradoxically, the more we attempt to materialize our ideals into tangible objects, the more their structuring function vanishes. Like someone trying to capture wind in jars: the very act of possession destroys what we intend to preserve. The void that addictive objects promise to fill expands precisely with each new acquisition that should reduce it.
Contemporary clinical practice receives exhausted consumers of liquid ideals that evaporate after each dose. The true analytic work consists of restoring the distance between subject and ideal, reintroducing impossibility as a constitutive dimension of desire. Addiction converts horizons into destinations; analysis returns horizons to their guiding but unreachable function.
The word 'I' is a late elaboration; long before learning it, the child has already mapped their existence in a universe of sensations that define their boundaries. This sensory map is the true proto-language of being.
First Inscriptions
Before we acquire language to name ourselves, before reason elaborates complex narratives about our identity, the body has already begun to trace the primordial contours of being. This sensory cartography precedes any abstraction, any verbal construction of the self. We are first a tactile experience, a sensation of boundaries, a set of perceptions that delineate where I end and the other begins.
The infant who cannot yet say "I" already experiences their separate existence through sensations: the hunger that tenses their entrails, the well-being that follows satisfaction, the pain that circumscribes a specific zone of their corporality. These sensory experiences constitute the raw material of consciousness. The skin, the material frontier between being and world, becomes the first canvas where identity is drawn through the registration of countless contacts, caresses, pressures, and temperatures.
This primeval bodily inscription persists as a permanent substrate even when we develop more sophisticated representations of ourselves. Deep analysis reveals how, beneath layers of intellectual elaboration, this foundational somatic memory always underlies. Patients with identity disorders frequently manifest alterations in their body schema, evidencing that when the original bodily representation is distorted, the entire subsequent architecture of the self falters.