Pain that speaks.

Chronic pain doesn't seek cure but listening. When will we learn its secret language?

Pain that speaks.

Chronic pain is the body's idiot savant: mute before medicine, eloquent to the unconscious. While clinical protocols seek to silence it with drugs and techniques, it stubbornly insists on its encrypted message. It's not organic rebellion but writing in the flesh: what remained marked as indelible letter from the primordial encounter with the Other. Where we expect to find pure dysfunction, we discover signifier.

Paradoxically, those who suffer most are those who most need their pain. Like the destitute embracing his rags, the "chronic patient" identifies with his symptom until making it identity. Pain then functions as passport before the Other: "Recognize me because I suffer, care for me because I'm broken, exempt me because I grieve." Healing threatens to leave him orphaned of recognition. Who would he be without his distinctive pain?

Contemporary clinic doesn't aim to eliminate pain but to transform it into sinthome. It's not about curing but allowing the subject to inhabit his symptom without submitting to it, assuming his painful singularity as what anchors him in the world without completely determining his desire.

Psychotherapy

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Symptom or sinthome.

Are you slave to your symptom or artist of your sinthome? The difference is radical: suffering vs creation.

Symptom or sinthome.

The symptom is the spoiled child of the unconscious: it screams, demands attention, promises revelations if we coddle it enough. We come to analysis believing the symptom is our enemy to eliminate, never suspecting it can transform into our most intimate companion. The difference between suffering the symptom and inhabiting the sinthome marks the boundary between neurotic complaint and the assumption of desire.

To identify with the symptom is to live as its hostage: "I am depressive, I am anxious, I am addicted." The subject reduces itself to its ailment, turning failure into total identity. Paradoxically, the sinthome operates in the opposite way: we are not our symptom, but we include it as part of our irreducible singularity. It's the difference between being possessed by a demon and domesticating it to work in our favor.

Contemporary clinic doesn't seek symptom elimination but its transformation into sinthome. The analysand learns to take distance from what determines them, to choose how to relate to it. It's not about curing but creating: making the symptom a personal work of art that sustains desire without crushing it.

Psychotherapy

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From meaning to symptom.

Work no longer sublimates: it reproduces. The modern office is the new couch where the symptoms of the 21st century unfold.

From meaning to symptom. Work once promised to be the stage where the subject would fulfill itself, where the drive would find its civilizatory channel. Today, offices have become involuntary consulting rooms where each employee displays their own gallery of symptoms. Sublimation has yielded ground to compulsive repetition. Where once there was creation, now there is automation of malaise.

The paradox is revealing: the more work processes become technified, the more archaic psychic suffering becomes. Burnout is nothing but the contemporary version of melancholia, yet stripped of its poetic dimension. Alienated work produces subjects alienated from themselves, trapped in the illusion of productivity while consuming themselves internally.

Contemporary clinical practice receives patients who speak of work as of a toxic relationship from which they cannot escape. The work symptom has become the new hysterical symptom: expression of a malaise that finds no words, only failed acts disguised as efficiency.

Psychotherapy

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