The machine of jouissance

The capitalist discourse operates as a relentless programmer of our desire. It doesn't limit itself to selling us objects: it installs in us the feeling that we need them, that without them something is missing. Like a perverse algorithm, it anticipates our "desires" before they even arise, creating a perpetual thirst that no object can truly quench.

What contemporary clinical practice reveals is the trap of this device: each consumer object promises a satisfaction that, being unattainable, pushes us toward the next object in an infinite chain. It's not a cycle of desire but of jouissance: that paradoxical satisfaction which, in its compulsive repetition, produces more discomfort than pleasure. The latest iPhone isn't an object: it's a gear in this machinery of jouissance.

The paradox is that this system doesn't work despite its failure, but because of it. Each unfulfilled promise of satisfaction pushes us to seek the next object, the next gadget, the next experience that promises to be "the definitive one." Capitalism doesn't sell products: it trades in promises of completeness that, in failing, fuel their own continuity.

The virtue of ignorance

The true analytic act begins with a necessary forgetting: the analyst must set aside everything they think they know about human suffering, theories of the unconscious, therapeutic techniques. Not because this knowledge isn't valuable, but because theoretical knowledge can easily become a screen that prevents hearing the radical singularity of each analysand.

Contemporary clinical practice is saturated with experts who have answers for everything, who diagnose and prescribe before really listening. Psychoanalysis proposes something radically different: a space where the analyst's not-knowing allows the analysand's unconscious knowledge to emerge. The difference between analyzing and indoctrinating lies precisely in this capacity to suspend our certainties.

Every time an analyst believes they know too much about what's happening to their analysand, they're closer to indoctrination than analysis. True analytic listening requires this continuous emptying of one's own certainties, this willingness to be surprised by what the other brings, this capacity to keep alive the question of what's singular in each case.

The modest truth

Psychoanalysis radically distinguishes itself from the contemporary wellness industry by what it doesn't promise. It doesn't sell magical recipes for happiness or instant formulas for success. Its proposal is more modest and, paradoxically, more ambitious: the possibility of encountering our truth, however uncomfortable it may be. It doesn't offer a life instruction manual, but rather a space where questions can unfold.

This position directly contradicts today's self-help market, saturated with promises of immediate transformation and guaranteed happiness. While personal development "gurus" sell packaged certainties and prefabricated habits, psychoanalysis proposes something more unsettling: the exploration of those dark corners of the soul that we prefer to keep in the shadows.

While self-help sells packaged happiness, psychoanalysis proposes a modest truth: real wellbeing means embracing the parts of us that no success manual can fix.

The wellbeing that can emerge from analysis isn't that of the perpetual smile or forced optimism. It's the deeper relief that comes from stopping lying to oneself, from being able to inhabit one's own contradictions, from making peace with that part of ourselves that doesn't fit into any self-improvement manual. It's a wellbeing that includes discomfort as a necessary part of truth.