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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