Your feed is curated to confirm what you already believed. Your mind does the same with the foreigner—long before the internet existed.
The inner algorithm.
Social media didn't invent the echo chamber—it simply digitized something that always existed in the mind. Long before the algorithm showed us only what we want to see, we were already filtering reality to confirm our prejudices. The news feed simply replicates an ancient psychic mechanism: seeing in the other only what we deposited there.
Today we share outrage against racism while our body crosses the street when someone "suspicious" approaches. We sign petitions for migrants' rights and simultaneously feel relief when the flight isn't full of "a certain type of people." The contradiction isn't conscious hypocrisy—it's the clash between what we think we believe and what actually operates on autopilot. The like doesn't dismantle prejudice; sometimes it just disguises it as virtue.
The current challenge isn't having the right opinions in public but examining the reactions that occur before we can edit them. Internal racism isn't cured with hashtags—it transforms through uncomfortable honesty about what we feel when no one is watching.
Reference:
Davids, M. F. (2021). Ethnic purity, otherness and anxiety: The model of internal racism. En K. White & I. Klingenberg (Eds.), Migration and intercultural psychoanalysis: Unconscious forces and clinical issues (pp. 11–29). Routledge.
A pause isn’t a waste of time, but a recovery of lost time. Silence heals what speed makes sick.
Challenging immediacy.
In the whirlwind of our digital age, where immediacy reigns supreme, psychoanalysis emerges as a bastion of reflection. It proposes a concept revolutionary in its simplicity: the pause. This is not sterile inaction, but a vital space for the flourishing of deep thought, an oasis in the desert of hyperconnectivity.
This psychoanalytic pause invites us to slow down, to dive into the depths of our being. It's a precious time to unearth those uncomfortable, painful questions that are buried under the flood of notifications and the tyranny of constant productivity. In this space, our most intimate concerns can finally breathe, expand, and be examined with the attention they deserve.
By embracing this pause, we challenge the culture of perpetual availability. We recognize that the true richness of existence lies not in the quantity of immediate responses we can offer, but in the quality of the questions we dare to ask. Psychoanalysis reminds us that in the silence of the pause, we can find the seeds of a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
Methadone is state-issued drugs for addicts. A chemical fix for a chemical problem. The subject remains absent—now with a prescription.
Fighting fire with gasoline.
Methadone is the pharmacological solution to a pharmacological problem. One drug to treat addiction to another drug. The logic is impeccable in its circularity: if the problem is chemical, the answer must be chemical. The subject disappears twice: first into heroin, then into its legal substitute.
This strategy reveals something about our era: we prefer to manage symptoms rather than interrogate them. Methadone doesn't cure; it administers. It keeps the addict functional without ever asking what they sought in the substance. It's harm reduction elevated to health policy. The State becomes an authorized dealer, dispensing regulated jouissance to prevent unregulated jouissance.
Contemporary clinical practice receives subjects who have been medicated but never spoke about their addiction. They arrived at a counter, not a consulting room. The question of desire remains indefinitely suspended by the substitute's efficacy. The subject stays absent—now with a prescription.
References Loose, R. (2011). Modern symptoms and their effects as forms of administration. In Y. Goldman Baldwin, K. Malone & T. Svolos (Eds.), Lacan and Addiction: An Anthology (pp. 1-38). Karnac Books.