The chemical refuge.

The addict seeks certainty, not pleasure. They turn chemistry into an oracle: "If I consume, I will be calm." The paradox: controlling produces total loss of control.

The chemical refuge.

Human uncertainty is unbearable. While we wait for responses that never come, we build altars to predictability. The addict doesn't seek pleasure: they seek certainty. In a world where others respond according to their own internal labyrinths, the substance promises a simple equation: consumption equals effect. The paradox is cruel: those who most need control surrender to the most absolute lack of control.

Psychoanalysis reveals that addiction functions as a primitive object relation, where the substance occupies the place of the primordial object that should have responded predictably. Chemical dependency reproduces the infantile fantasy of omnipotence: "If I do X, I will get Y." However, this false equation generates the most devastating paradox: the attempt to control produces total loss of control.

Contemporary clinical practice encounters subjects who have replaced the anxiety of encountering the other with the false security of the addictive ritual. The analyst must work with this radical solitude, helping the analysand tolerate the unpredictability of human desire. The cure involves accepting that others are not vending machines programmed to deliver responses.

Psychotherapy

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When molecules speak.

When metaphors fail, molecules promise to take charge. But no chemical can repair what language broke.

When molecules speak louder than metaphors.

The word, that privileged instrument that distinguishes us from other animals, experiences a technical defeat in addictions. Like a dam that gives way to a flood, language loses its regulatory capacity over jouissance and is replaced by chemical objects that promise to do its job better. This substitution is not accidental but revealing of a deeper crisis: we have reached a point where molecules synthesized in laboratories prove more effective than metaphors constructed over millennia of culture.

The phenomenon exposes a devastating paradox of the contemporary human condition. While we develop increasingly sophisticated linguistic systems—algorithms, artificial intelligence, semantic networks—our individual bodies require chemical bypasses to endure the symbolic complexity we ourselves create. Like engineers who build bridges so elaborate they need helicopters to cross the river, we produce languages so complex we need drugs to inhabit them.

The clinic receives the remains of this historical operation: subjects whose words have lost regulatory efficacy over their own internal economies. Each addiction testifies to the failure of a particular symbolic system, each substance replaces a conversation that could never take place. It's not that drugs are more powerful than words; it's that we have emptied words of their potency while filling drugs with expectations no molecule can satisfy.

Psychotherapy

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The cult of surplus.

We worship residues because we've lost access to real objects. Surplus became sacred when the substantial became inaccessible.

The cult of surplus.

We live in times where waste has ascended to the altar of collective worship. Our culture has radically inverted traditional hierarchies: what was once discarded after consumption now becomes the very object of cult worship. Like societies that build temples with garbage, we elevate to divinity that which should remain at the margins as natural residue of all human activity.

This operation reveals something disturbing about contemporary libidinal economy. Surplus is not accidental but structural: we produce it deliberately to have something to worship. Like obsessive collectors who accumulate empty wrappers, we develop sophisticated rituals around elements that traditionally didn't merit attention. Influencers showing their food waste, brands selling products designed to break, festivals celebrating waste itself: all testify to this cultural inversion where excess has become sacred.

The clinic receives the consequences of this inverted worship: subjects who have lost the capacity to distinguish between essential and superfluous, between nourishment and waste, between desire and compulsive accumulation. They drug themselves with residues of experiences they never fully had, converting leftovers into the main course of their emotional lives.

Psychotherapy

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