The ethics of accompaniment

The analyst's ethics demands a profound renunciation: the abandonment of any desire to direct, shape, or determine the analysand's life path. Unlike a mentor who guides or a teacher who instructs, the analyst embraces a unique position of companionship that consciously resists the temptation to lead. This ethical stance requires a continuous practice of restraint, acknowledging that true liberation emerges not from guidance, but from the space to discover one's own way.

The beauty of this relationship lies in its inherent temporality. The analyst walks alongside the analysand with the clear understanding that their presence is provisional, that the journey together will naturally conclude when it is no longer needed. This awareness transforms the analytical relationship into something rare in our directive world: a space where one can simply be, without the pressure to conform to another's vision or expectations.

Perhaps the most liberating aspect of this ethical position is the deliberate refusal to tell another what to do with their life. In a world saturated with advice, opinions, and prescriptions for living, the analyst offers something far more valuable: the freedom to discover one's own truth, to make one's own mistakes, and to find one's own path. This restraint becomes a powerful form of respect for the analysand's autonomy and capacity for self-determination.

The price of silence

Living under a totalitarian regime demands a painful exercise in psychic self-mutilation. To maintain an appearance of normality, the subject must perform complex internal surgery, carefully sectioning off those parts of themselves that could endanger their survival. This split is not merely an act of prudence, but a profound self-inflicted violence that fragments the integrity of being, creating watertight compartments between what is seen, what is known, and what can be said.

The supposed "well-being" achieved through this self-amputation comes at an exorbitant cost. Each day requires an elaborate exercise in selective amnesia, a sophisticated system of self-imposed blind spots, a precise choreography of silences and omissions. The person becomes an expert in the art of not seeing the obvious, of not naming the unnameable, of not feeling what must not be felt. This precarious balance consumes an immense amount of psychic energy, leaving little space for true personal development.

In this context, psychoanalysis encounters its fundamental limit. As a practice based on the possibility of saying everything, of freely exploring the darkest corners of the psyche, analytic work becomes practically impossible where speech is chained. Freedom of expression is not merely a political framework for psychoanalysis, but its most basic condition of possibility. Without the ability to name what is real, to articulate pain and truth, the analytic process becomes just another way of sustaining the split, rather than healing it.

Victory as human defeat

In the relentless narrative of contemporary capitalism, the imperative to "be a winner" has profoundly transformed our relationship with others. We no longer see our fellow humans as companions in the human experience, but merely as obstacles to overcome, stepping stones to trample in our ascent to the summit of success. This metamorphosis of perspective turns every human interaction into a potential battle, every encounter into an opportunity for domination.

The neighbor vanishes as a subject and materializes only as a marker of our own triumph. Their function is reduced to being the living testimony of our superiority, the broken mirror reflecting our "victory." In this perverse zero-sum game, personal affirmation is achieved only through the negation of the other, turning the construction of our own greatness into an exercise in the systematic demolition of others' humanity.

This destructive logic reveals the central paradox of our era: in the obsessive pursuit of individual success, we lose precisely what makes us truly human - the capacity to recognize and value humanity in others. Victory thus becomes a form of existential defeat, where the "winner" ends up reigning over a desert of authentic human connections, celebrating a triumph that is, in reality, evidence of their own spiritual impoverishment.