The void of life's project

Contemporary clinical practice confronts us with a new type of suffering: that of the subject who survives without horizon, who breathes without feeling truly alive. It's not so much a classical depression as an existential emptying, where the future has ceased to be a space of possibilities to become a grey extension of the present. The question "what do you want to do with your life?" no longer summons a project, but generates a dull anguish at the impossibility of imagining anything worthwhile.

This emptying is not an individual accident but the product of an era that has reduced existence to mere productivity. When the only possible project is to "be successful" according to external metrics, when the future is reduced to performance objectives, the very capacity to desire becomes atrophied. The subject finds themselves trapped in a perpetual present, fulfilling goals they haven't chosen, pursuing a success that doesn't belong to them.

Psychoanalysis proposes something radically different: not to fill this void with prefabricated answers, but to create the conditions for each person to rediscover their own capacity to desire. It's not about prescribing meaning, but about accompanying the process where each subject can find, in their uniqueness, what makes life worth living. The true cure isn't in "fixing" the subject to function, but in allowing them to awaken to their own desire.

Theory is not identity

There is a radical difference between studying a theoretical body of work and turning it into an identity badge. When someone rushes to declare themselves a "Lacanian," "Kleinian," or any other "ian," they're revealing more about their need for belonging than their commitment to critical thinking. Theory thus becomes an identity shelter, a mark of distinction that protects against the anxiety of thinking for oneself.

Real work with theory requires a radically different position: that of someone who approaches a body of thought to study it, question it, put it to the test. It's not about finding a master to swear loyalty to, but about confronting ideas that help us think better. A theorist's work is precisely that: work to be worked with, not an emblem to wear.

The hasty declaration "I am an ___ian" functions as a defense against the uncertainty of true thinking. It's more comfortable to adhere to a borrowed identity than to sustain the tension of thought under construction. The real challenge is to maintain a living relationship with theory, where study doesn't crystallize into identification and thought doesn't fossilize into doctrine.

The mirage of cause

We cling to causality like a life preserver in the midst of existence's chaos. We construct perfect explanatory chains, where each effect has its clear cause and every event its necessary reason. It's the fairytale we tell ourselves to sleep peacefully, the illusion that everything has an explanation if we look carefully enough.

But between cause and effect there always opens an unexplorable abyss, a lack that no explanation can fill. No matter how much we refine our theories or how deeply we delve into our analyses: there always remains that mysterious space, that logical leap that no causality can explain. It's the blind spot of our explanatory systems, the place where reason stumbles upon itself.

This lack is not a defect in our understanding, but the mark of the real that insists on escaping our causal networks. It's the reminder that there is something in existence that stubbornly resists being captured by our explanations, that mocks our attempts to domesticate mystery with chains of cause and effect.