The necessary fiction

There exists a fundamental fiction that sustains the analytic process: the illusion that the analyst knows, that they possess the answers the analysand seeks. It's a mirage that installs itself from the first consultation, when the analysand arrives seeking someone who can decipher their distress, who can read the enigma of their symptoms. The analyst neither denies this supposition nor confirms it. They simply allow it to operate.

This "subject supposed to know" is not a malicious deception, but a necessary artifice for analytic work to unfold. It is the pivot around which transference revolves, the motor that drives analysis. The analysand speaks, associates, remembers, moved by this belief that there is an Other who can understand what escapes them.

The paradox is that this knowledge supposed to be in the analyst is, in reality, the unconscious knowledge of the analysand themselves, who has yet to recognize it as their own. The analyst merely lends their presence, their silence, their listening, so that this truth can emerge. At the end of analysis, this mirage must fall so that the subject can recognize that the knowledge was always within them.

The price of truth

We live in an era obsessed with eliminating anxiety. The wellness industry promises to free us from all discomfort, fill every void, suture every crack in our existence. As if anxiety were a manufacturing error that could be corrected with the right technique, the correct pill, the precise mantra. A promise as seductive as it is impossible.

Psychoanalysis doesn't join this chorus of serenity sellers. It tells us something more uncomfortable: anxiety is the price we pay for recognizing the lack that constitutes us. It's not a defect to be corrected, but the signal that we are close to a fundamental truth about our condition. It's the trembling we feel when imaginary certainties crack and we glimpse the void that dwells at the center of our being.

What analysis proposes is not to eliminate this anxiety, but to transform our relationship with it. To learn to inhabit it not as a catastrophe that must be avoided, but as a compass pointing toward our most intimate truth. Anxiety thus becomes not something to overcome, but an inevitable companion on the path toward a more authentic existence.

The necessary discomfort

The mental health market is saturated with promises of inner peace and social harmony. They sell techniques to "manage" anxiety, "overcome" depression, "adapt" to the demands of modern life. It's the contemporary fantasy of an existence without conflicts, where every disturbance can be neutralized with the right manual. A sweet lie that keeps the social machinery running.

Psychoanalysis proposes something radically different: it doesn't come to pacify us or turn us into model citizens, but to confront us with the very core of our distress. It doesn't seek to silence symptoms or domesticate our drives, but to understand what truth these signs of our internal struggle are shouting. It's a journey to the roots of conflict, not to resolve it, but to inhabit it more authentically.

The analytic proposal is uncomfortable precisely because it renounces easy solutions. It doesn't offer peace, but understanding; it doesn't promise adaptation, but truth. It goes beyond "feeling better" to question why we need to feel better in the first place. It's an invitation to confront that inner battle that no mindfulness technique will ever resolve.