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

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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

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The real wall is not geographical

The migrant does not cross borders: they reveal them. They do not destabilize countries, but fictions. They do not threaten our security, but the illusion that we were ever homogeneous. Their face does not demand compassion—it demands responsibility.

Borders exist precisely where we most insist on denying them: not between nations, but in our perception of the other. The migrant does not destabilize economies, but certainties; they do not threaten resources, but the illusory homogeneity with which we upholster our inner selves. Their true crime is not crossing geographic lines, but transgressing the boundaries of our self-understanding.

The “irrevocable freedom” that Levinas (2002) attributes to the foreigner functions like an inverted mirror: while we reinforce physical walls, it is our mental constructs that collapse. Paradoxically, the more we try to protect our collective identity from the “invader,” the more we reveal its fictional and fragile nature. The migrant exposes the contingency of the values we believed to be universal and eternal.

Today, we desperately try to reduce the migrant to a statistic, a media tragedy, or an abstract threat. Anything but recognize them as the bearer of a face that, in Levinasian terms, imposes an ethical responsibility prior to any political construct. Physical fences are mere symbols of deeper boundaries we refuse to examine.

References

Levinas, E. (2002). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (A. Leyte, Trans.). Sígueme. (Original work published in 1961).

Psychotherapy

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