The forbidden question

You crossed oceans to escape yourself. The conflict traveled in your carry-on luggage. What were you fleeing that caught up with you?

The forbidden question.

There is an interrogation the migrant avoids: why did I really leave? The official answer—opportunity, adventure, love—conceals less presentable motivations. I fled from a suffocating mother, from professional failure, from a version of myself I could not bear. The new country promised reinvention without confrontation. Changing the scenery to avoid changing the script.

Gogolin identifies patients who migrated to escape internal conflicts by disguising them as external pursuits. Geographic movement postpones psychic movement. But the avoided conflict reappears with a local accent: the same dynamics, the same impasses, the same dead ends. The subject who fled suffocating relationships finds suffocating relationships on the new continent. They traveled thousands of kilometers only to find themselves exactly where they started. The distance covered did not modify a single centimeter of their interior geography.

The analyst asks what the analysand avoids: what were you running from that has now caught up with you? The answer inaugurates genuine work. Without that question, therapy perpetuates the flight.

Reading: Gogolin, N. (2021). Tolerance for non-understanding: Understanding and its limits – the confusion of tongues. En K. White & I. Klingenberg (Eds.), Migration and intercultural psychoanalysis: Unconscious forces and clinical issues (pp. 76–87). Routledge.

Psychotherapy

1h

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The martyr's alibi.

Your excessive devotion to others isn't love. It's cowardice disguised as generosity to avoid confronting your own desires.

The martyr's alibi.

The neurotic complains about having no time for himself. He lives sacrificed for others' causes, exploited by external demands, parasitized by everyone else. His schedule is filled with urgencies that aren't his own. But this excessive dedication isn't generosity. It's an unconscious strategy to evade the terror of confronting his own desires.

Psychoanalysis reveals a fundamental paradox: we give ourselves to others precisely to avoid giving ourselves to ourselves. Sacrifice functions as the perfect alibi. While I'm busy saving everyone, I don't have to ask myself what I truly want, what project terrifies me to undertake, what failure I fear facing. The other becomes a sophisticated excuse for one's own existential cowardice.

Contemporary clinical practice demonstrates that the martyr doesn't love others too much. He fears himself too much. He prefers the certainty of self-sacrifice to the uncertainty of his own causes. Sacrifice isn't devotion. It's flight disguised as virtue.

Psychotherapy

1h

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The broken mirror.

We devalue in others what we cannot bear to recognize in ourselves. Cruelty is always autobiographical.

The broken mirror.

We devalue in others what we fear most to recognize in ourselves. Like vampires fleeing from mirrors, we attack in the other precisely what confronts us with our own fragility. This defensive operation reveals an uncomfortable truth: we only wound where we have been wounded before, we only deny what we secretly long to possess. Aggression toward others is always autobiographical.

The mechanism of devaluation builds castles on swampland. Each act of contempt toward others temporarily strengthens our ego, but paradoxically makes us more dependent on that same destructive operation. It's like burning furniture to keep warm: it works momentarily, but each combustion leaves us poorer, colder, more desperate to find something else to burn.

Current clinical practice reveals that behind every systematic devaluer lives a child not recognized in their uniqueness. Analytic work consists of creating a space where that vulnerability can emerge without the compulsive need to attack the otherness of others. Only by recognizing our own wound can we stop inflicting it.

Psychotherapy

60

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