Botanists of escape.

We transform every sprout into an escape laboratory. Drugs don't alienate us from humanity; they reveal its unbearable weight.

Botanists of escape.

The universality of psychoactive consumption reveals an uncomfortable truth: we are the only species that systematically seeks to flee from its own consciousness. While other animals use plants to heal themselves, we convert them into portals toward altered states. This anthropological constant contradicts contemporary discourse that pathologizes what is actually constitutive: we need chemicals because language made us maladapted to our own bodies.

The phenomenon transcends geographies and cultures with a consistency that should alarm us. From Asian opium to American peyote, from Amazonian ayahuasca to Mediterranean cannabis, each civilization developed its particular pharmacy. This is not coincidence but structural necessity: the speaking being requires vacations from its own humanity. Drugs are not deviation but collective confession that existing consciously is unbearable without chemical intervals.

Only in territories where nature offers nothing to ferment, inhale, or chew do we find societies without psychoactive traditions. This exception confirms the rule: where plant life is available, someone has already experimented with transforming it into temporary escape. We are not addicts by pathology but by condition: natural chemists in search of alterations that momentarily return us to the lost pre-symbolic peace.

Psychotherapy

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Advertising as superego.

Sporting gods who promise to overcome castration through footwear technology.

Advertising as superego.

Sports brands manufacture commandments more effective than any traditional religion. "Impossible is Nothing" is not a slogan but a categorical imperative that rewrites the human condition: where there were once structural limits, there must now be infinite performance. Adidas sells sneakers but delivers complete cosmogonies, symbolic universes where impossibility itself becomes technical obsolescence surmountable with the right product.

This operation reveals the perverse genius of late capitalism: converting constitutive lack into correctable deficiency through consumption. What psychoanalysis identifies as structural castration—that impossibility that constitutes us as desiring subjects—marketing reformulates as a problem of insufficient equipment. Nike promises "Just do it" where human experience teaches "Just can't do it all." Brands occupy the empty place of the Name-of-the-Father, legislating on possibilities and limits.

The result is a generation living under advertising mandates more tyrannical than any traditional father. These new superegos don't prohibit but demand: they demand performance, they demand satisfaction, they demand transcendence of all limitation. Paradoxically, the promise of total freedom produces more sophisticated slaveries, where failing to be omnipotent is experienced as personal defect rather than universal condition.

Psychotherapy

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Beyond perpetual happiness.

We arrive seeking symptom relief. We leave as archaeologists of our own pain, excavating meaning from suffering's debris.

Beyond perpetual happiness.

Clinical work confronts us with a fundamental irony: patients seek therapy to eliminate symptoms but discover its true value only when abandoning the fantasy of absolute cure. Like someone entering a hospital for a broken bone and leaving with a complete physical examination, effective therapy operates through paradox—relieving symptoms while exposing deeper structural vulnerabilities that demand attention.

The analytic space functions as relational laboratory: precisely where patients reproduce their binding patterns, they encounter possibilities for transformation. Yesterday's protective defenses become today's suffocating limitations; narratives that once provided structure now impose restriction. Agency emerges not as absolute self-mastery but as capacity to inhabit ambiguity without disintegration—learning to dance with uncertainty rather than demanding certainty.

A truth insists in every clinic: feeling fully requires distance from feelings themselves. Patients who systematically flee pain end up anesthetized to all experience, emotional vampires unable to digest joy or sorrow. Therapy transforms us into archaeologists of our own suffering: we don't become immune to pain but learn to convert it into raw material for meaning-making.

Psychotherapy

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