The forbidden question

You crossed oceans to escape yourself. The conflict traveled in your carry-on luggage. What were you fleeing that caught up with you?

The forbidden question.

There is an interrogation the migrant avoids: why did I really leave? The official answer—opportunity, adventure, love—conceals less presentable motivations. I fled from a suffocating mother, from professional failure, from a version of myself I could not bear. The new country promised reinvention without confrontation. Changing the scenery to avoid changing the script.

Gogolin identifies patients who migrated to escape internal conflicts by disguising them as external pursuits. Geographic movement postpones psychic movement. But the avoided conflict reappears with a local accent: the same dynamics, the same impasses, the same dead ends. The subject who fled suffocating relationships finds suffocating relationships on the new continent. They traveled thousands of kilometers only to find themselves exactly where they started. The distance covered did not modify a single centimeter of their interior geography.

The analyst asks what the analysand avoids: what were you running from that has now caught up with you? The answer inaugurates genuine work. Without that question, therapy perpetuates the flight.

References Gogolin, N. (2021). Tolerance for non-understanding: Understanding and its limits – the confusion of tongues. En K. White & I. Klingenberg (Eds.), Migration and intercultural psychoanalysis: Unconscious forces and clinical issues (pp. 76–87). Routledge.

Psychotherapy

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Mutual, not reciprocal.

Love doesn't balance out. Some days you hold everything while I fall apart. That asymmetry isn't the problem—it's what makes the bond alive.

Mutual, not reciprocal.

We believe that to love is to balance the scales. That giving three means receiving three, that holding the other requires being held in equal measure. But this mathematics of affection isn't love—it's emotional accounting. True love doesn't calculate, doesn't demand symmetry. Some days you carry all the weight while I can barely hold myself together. Other days, I show up whole and you arrive fragmented.

Psychoanalysis distinguishes between the reciprocal and the mutual. The reciprocal demands equivalences: if you receive X, you return X. The mutual accepts the constitutive asymmetry of the bond. Paradoxically, it's in that disproportion where the connection becomes authentic. We don't love in mirrors. We love from our own lacks, our own impossibilities. That's why love isn't fair—it's true.

Contemporary clinical practice witnesses couples who separate because "one gives more than the other." But no real bond survives under the tyranny of equity. Love that counts, that measures, that demands symmetry, doesn't love. It only trades in affections.

Psychotherapy

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The martyr's alibi.

Your excessive devotion to others isn't love. It's cowardice disguised as generosity to avoid confronting your own desires.

The martyr's alibi.

The neurotic complains about having no time for himself. He lives sacrificed for others' causes, exploited by external demands, parasitized by everyone else. His schedule is filled with urgencies that aren't his own. But this excessive dedication isn't generosity. It's an unconscious strategy to evade the terror of confronting his own desires.

Psychoanalysis reveals a fundamental paradox: we give ourselves to others precisely to avoid giving ourselves to ourselves. Sacrifice functions as the perfect alibi. While I'm busy saving everyone, I don't have to ask myself what I truly want, what project terrifies me to undertake, what failure I fear facing. The other becomes a sophisticated excuse for one's own existential cowardice.

Contemporary clinical practice demonstrates that the martyr doesn't love others too much. He fears himself too much. He prefers the certainty of self-sacrifice to the uncertainty of his own causes. Sacrifice isn't devotion. It's flight disguised as virtue.

Psychotherapy

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