Borders exist precisely where we most insist on denying them: not between nations, but in our perception of the other. The migrant does not destabilize economies, but certainties; they do not threaten resources, but the illusory homogeneity with which we upholster our inner selves. Their true crime is not crossing geographic lines, but transgressing the boundaries of our self-understanding. The “irrevocable freedom” that Levinas (2002) attributes to the foreigner functions like an inverted mirror: while we reinforce physical walls, it is our mental constructs that collapse. Paradoxically, the more we try to protect our collective identity from the “invader,” the more we reveal its fictional and fragile nature. The migrant exposes the contingency of the values we believed to be universal and eternal. Today, we desperately try to reduce the migrant to a statistic, a media tragedy, or an abstract threat. Anything but recognize them as the bearer of a face that, in Levinasian terms, imposes an ethical responsibility prior to any political construct. Physical fences are mere symbols of deeper boundaries we refuse to examine. References Levinas, E. (2002). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (A. Leyte, Trans.). Sígueme. (Original work published in 1961).

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.

We worship residues because we've lost access to real objects. Surplus became sacred when the substantial became inaccessible. The cult of surplus. We live in times where waste has ascended to the altar of collective worship. Our culture has radically inverted traditional hierarchies: what was once discarded after consumption now becomes the very object of cult worship. Like societies that build temples with garbage, we elevate to divinity that which should remain at the margins as natural residue of all human activity. This operation reveals something disturbing about contemporary libidinal economy. Surplus is not accidental but structural: we produce it deliberately to have something to worship. Like obsessive collectors who accumulate empty wrappers, we develop sophisticated rituals around elements that traditionally didn't merit attention. Influencers showing their food waste, brands selling products designed to break, festivals celebrating waste itself: all testify to this cultural inversion where excess has become sacred. The clinic receives the consequences of this inverted worship: subjects who have lost the capacity to distinguish between essential and superfluous, between nourishment and waste, between desire and compulsive accumulation. They drug themselves with residues of experiences they never fully had, converting leftovers into the main course of their emotional lives.

The most dangerous overdose isn't chemical but existential: believing we can eliminate forever the lack that constitutes us. The overdose of the absolute. There exists an intoxication more deadly than any substance: the fantasy that we can experience the All. While chemical overdoses collapse organic systems, the "alloverdose" collapses the very structure of desire that keeps us alive as subjects. This existential overdose doesn't kill the body but something worse: it kills the lack that allows us to keep desiring, seeking, living in the incompleteness that defines us as human. The alloverdose reveals the deadly core of late capitalism: it doesn't sell objects but the promise of total saturation. Like children who believe they can eat the entire candy store, contemporary subjects pursue experiences that promise to definitively exhaust existential hunger. But hunger is not a problem to solve but a condition to inhabit. When we promise to eliminate it completely, we produce monsters: subjects who have lost the capacity to desire because they believe they have found formulas for absolute satisfaction. The clinic receives victims of this conceptual overdose: people who consumed so much the idea of plenitude that they lost access to partial pleasures, imperfect encounters, incomplete satisfactions that constitute the real texture of human life. They have overdosed on the infinite and no longer know how to inhabit the finite that we are.

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.

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.

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.

We drug sadness instead of changing the conditions that produce it. Chemical euphoria: confession of lives that give no real reasons for joy. Euphoria without reason. Party substances reveal the celebratory poverty of our time. When circumstances don't justify joy, chemistry manufactures it by pharmacological decree. MDMA, cocaine, and amphetamines artificially construct states that once emerged from real events: shared triumphs, loving encounters, collective achievements. Today we celebrate celebration itself, emptied of content but chemically inflated to simulate plenitude. This euphoric demand denounces a structural deficit: we live lives that don't generate authentic reasons for joy. Like actors who need stimulants to play happy characters, we resort to drugs that allow us to feel what our concrete existences don't provide. The paradox is brutal: chemicals designed to intensify extraordinary experiences now compensate for the absence of experiences worthy of intensification. The phenomenon reveals how late capitalism produced subjects who must consume their own emotional states. We no longer wait for life to provide us reasons for joy; we directly purchase joy disconnected from its natural causes. Contemporary parties are laboratories where artificial moods are experimented with, simulacra of celebration that confirm precisely the absence of that which would deserve to be celebrated.

The death of god left us chemical orphans. We search in drugs for limits that dead authorities can no longer trace. Freedom without limits, bodies in chains. The fall of traditional authorities promised to free us from millennial oppressions, but delivered us to more subtle and omnipresent tyrannies. Where once a father, a god, or a law marked clear boundaries—painful but navigable—we now inhabit a desert of infinite possibilities that paradoxically paralyzes us. Without symbolic coordinates to organize desire, bodies desperately seek in chemistry the limits that culture stopped providing. This operation reveals a devastating clinical truth: absolute freedom doesn't liberate but enslaves in more refined ways. Like children in an infinite toy store, the total absence of restrictions produces not joy but unbearable anxiety. Contemporary subjects don't celebrate the fall of prohibitions; they drug themselves to endure the vertigo of a world where "everything is permitted" means nothing is truly oriented. Substances function as prosthetic limits that defunct authorities used to provide. The clinic receives the remains of this historical operation: subjects who consume chemical structures because they lost access to symbolic structures. Each addiction testifies to the failure of an ideal, each dose recalls a father who didn't know how to say "no" at the precise moment. It's no coincidence that the most "free" generations in history are also the most medicated: freedom without coordinates produces bodies that need chemicals to endure their own indetermination.

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.

In a world where every moment must be monetized, where productivity is worshipped and efficiency reigns supreme, psychoanalysis emerges as a radical act of resistance. It proposes something almost heretical in our accelerated culture: the deliberate suspension of time as we know it. Here, in the analytic space, time isn't measured by output or profit, but by the slow unfolding of psychic truth. The rushing thoughts and frenetic pace of modern life are invited to decelerate, to find a different rhythm. This psychoanalytic temporality operates in direct opposition to the capitalist imperative of constant production. It suggests that meaningful change and authentic insight emerge precisely in those moments when we dare to be "unproductive" in conventional terms. The seeming inefficiency of free association, the apparent waste of silence, the meandering path of exploration - all these become valuable tools in the excavation of personal truth. In this space, pauses are not empty time to be filled, but fertile ground where something new can emerge. The paradox that psychoanalysis reveals is that our deepest truths can only surface when we stop trying to force them into existence. By creating a sanctuary where time flows differently, where the pressure to produce is lifted, it allows for the emergence of something more authentic than what any rushed process could generate. This "unproductive" time becomes, ironically, the most productive space for discovering one's own truth - a truth that can't be hurried, measured, or monetized.

We consult experts to confirm what we've already decided. Modern medicine: technical validation of imaginary self-diagnoses. Doctors without patients Modern symptoms transform the very structure of medicine: we no longer find sick people seeking treatment but healthy subjects demanding optimization. The new epidemic consists of individuals who do not tolerate imperfect states and who categorically reject any sensation that does not coincide with their ideal of perfect functioning. The traditional model of diagnosis and treatment collapses when the patient arrives with precise demands and technical knowledge about their internal states. Central paradox of our time: the more diagnostic instruments we develop, the less authority remains for those who should interpret them. Like someone who hires architects to follow exactly the plans they themselves have previously drawn. Contemporary clinical practice receives subjects who seek not understanding but certification of an already established self-diagnosis. The real therapeutic challenge is not solving the symptom but reinstalling the question that this symptom tries to silence. How to transform demands for technical solutions into inquiries about the existential position that makes these solutions necessary?