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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