We drug the body to silence what we don't know how to hear. Chemistry: provisional punctuation for biological texts no one taught us to read. Chemistry of silence Bodies speaking languages their owners cannot recognize. Where words fail, physical pain constructs cathedrals of precise and ordered symptoms that no dictionary translates. We search in pharmaceuticals and substances for interpreters of this incomprehensible monologue emerging from territories that predate language. Psychic suffering without symbolic representation materializes in aching flesh, inflamed tissues, protesting organs. Paradoxically, the more sophisticated our medical diagnoses become, the less we understand these bodily hieroglyphics. Like archaeologists facing inscriptions from extinct civilizations, we accumulate data while deeper meaning remains sealed behind impenetrable walls. Contemporary clinical practice receives these bodies suffering in pre-verbal dialects. The real challenge is not silencing symptoms but developing new grammars where pain finds translation without resorting to chemicals that mute the question. Between medicine that medicates and psychoanalysis that listens, these patients seek someone who can read the scores written in their cells.

We consume our ideals until they are extinct. Addicted to the sacred in portable format, we have lost the distance that makes worship possible. Liquid ideals Objects have become solutions. Where once there existed unattainable ideals that guided us from the heights, we now consume pills, powders, and pixels that promise to deliver in digestible format what we once pursued as horizon: instant transcendence, packaged connection, identity with barcode. Addiction is not excess but chemical transformation of the ideal: from external compass to internal fuel. Paradoxically, the more we attempt to materialize our ideals into tangible objects, the more their structuring function vanishes. Like someone trying to capture wind in jars: the very act of possession destroys what we intend to preserve. The void that addictive objects promise to fill expands precisely with each new acquisition that should reduce it. Contemporary clinical practice receives exhausted consumers of liquid ideals that evaporate after each dose. The true analytic work consists of restoring the distance between subject and ideal, reintroducing impossibility as a constitutive dimension of desire. Addiction converts horizons into destinations; analysis returns horizons to their guiding but unreachable function.

The word 'I' is a late elaboration; long before learning it, the child has already mapped their existence in a universe of sensations that define their boundaries. This sensory map is the true proto-language of being. First Inscriptions Before we acquire language to name ourselves, before reason elaborates complex narratives about our identity, the body has already begun to trace the primordial contours of being. This sensory cartography precedes any abstraction, any verbal construction of the self. We are first a tactile experience, a sensation of boundaries, a set of perceptions that delineate where I end and the other begins. The infant who cannot yet say "I" already experiences their separate existence through sensations: the hunger that tenses their entrails, the well-being that follows satisfaction, the pain that circumscribes a specific zone of their corporality. These sensory experiences constitute the raw material of consciousness. The skin, the material frontier between being and world, becomes the first canvas where identity is drawn through the registration of countless contacts, caresses, pressures, and temperatures. This primeval bodily inscription persists as a permanent substrate even when we develop more sophisticated representations of ourselves. Deep analysis reveals how, beneath layers of intellectual elaboration, this foundational somatic memory always underlies. Patients with identity disorders frequently manifest alterations in their body schema, evidencing that when the original bodily representation is distorted, the entire subsequent architecture of the self falters.

The body never stays silent; what varies is our ability to decipher its eloquent silence or interpret its desperate screams. Eloquence of silence We listen to words while ignoring symphonies. Our ears, trained to capture articulated language, remain deaf to the most ancient and constant discourse: that of the body. This tireless transmitter broadcasts without rest, sending signals that exceed any conscious censorship, revealing truths that words would never confess. Corporeality constitutes our first mode of symbolic existence, preceding speech and more honest than it. Paradoxically, the more we try to silence the body, the more eloquent its manifestations become: the physical symptom shouts what the mouth keeps quiet. Blushing betrays, trembling confesses, muscular tension reveals the internal battles we wage against ourselves. No social mask manages to completely silence this living text. The contemporary analyst knows they must develop bifocal listening: simultaneously attending to verbal content and the bodily narrative that accompanies, contradicts, or complements it. When both registers diverge, the body often carries the truth closest to the unconscious. Effective interpretation requires this double reading, this deciphering of a primitive alphabet that precedes any linguistic elaboration. Bodily silence contains the primordial grammar of being.

We freeze the instant with substances to avoid being rewritten, while time continues running and we remain behind, immobile and obsolete. Anchored to the Instant Addicted to the same moment, we suspend the tyranny of time that mercilessly inscribes its novelty upon us. Faced with the vertigo of existing as perpetually rewritten tablets, the substance promises an eternal present where nothing changes while everything remains exactly the same. The chemical refuge protects us from the fundamental terror: being a surface where becoming inscribes its relentless cruelty. The addict constructs temporal paradoxes: the more immobile they remain in their jouissance, the more rapidly they disintegrate as subjects. Their body, transformed into a monument to a petrified instant, celebrates the absence of movement while deteriorating at devastating speeds. Physical destruction is the price for this peculiar victory over temporality that threatens to constantly transform us. Contemporary clinical practice confronts this existential dilemma disguised as a chemical problem. The analyst must reintroduce the temporal dimension where drugs have installed chemical parentheses, helping the subject tolerate the anguish of being a canvas modified by time. Learning to inhabit movement proves more healing than any artificial stability.

Drugs don't cure pain, they only silence the narrator. When we eliminate symptoms without listening to them, we amputate entire chapters of our history. Chemistry Without Metaphor The addict seeks direct happiness while discarding the very possibility of symbolizing their suffering. Like someone installing a bridge where a river should exist, they substitute the elaborative journey with a chemical shortcut that promises destination without travel. The discomfort is thus deactivated but not transformed, silenced but never truly heard. The libidinal economy of the drug user operates through this fundamental paradox: the more successfully they eliminate the symptom, the more radically they fail in their subjective function. While the traditional neurotic weaves compromises between desire and prohibition—constructing symptoms like building habitable houses on impossible terrain—the addict purchases prefabricated solutions that dismantle the very architecture of the desiring subject. Contemporary clinical practice faces this dilemma: how to reintroduce symbolic production where chemistry has installed shortcuts? The analyst must become an advocate for the symptom, defending the fundamental right to construct metaphors where the market only offers molecules. A subject without symptoms is a subject without text.

The true dysfunction is not in the penis that falls but in a culture that demands permanent erection as proof of subjective existence. Erections Without Desire Young men take blue pills to sustain encounters where their bodies no longer listen to what they desire. They seek tireless organs while their minds drift away from the erotic scene. Paradoxically, the more they guarantee physical potency, the more they demonstrate their subjective impotence to inhabit the encounter with the unpredictability of the other. Viagra functions as an orthopedics of desire in times where sexuality has mutated from experience to performance. This transformation reveals the perverse inversion of the Freudian mandate: we no longer repress the sexual to sustain culture but instead medicalize sex to comply with the contemporary imperative of mandatory enjoyment. The pharmacological success is a symptom of symbolic failure. Contemporary clinical practice receives subjects who confuse eroticism with hydraulics. Their chemically modified bodies execute perfect acts that do not concern them subjectively. The analyst faces the task of helping them reconnect with the dimension of desire they have outsourced to the pharmaceutical industry, restoring the dignity of a desire that includes the possibility of intervals, failures, and singularities.

The migrant does not cross borders: they reveal them. They do not destabilize countries, but fictions. They do not threaten our security, but the illusion that we were ever homogeneous. Their face does not demand compassion—it demands responsibility. 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).

The faces we encounter are not blank canvases but territories already in rebellion against our conceptual colonization. Every wrinkle, scar, and expression constitutes a silent insurrection against the interpretative molds we wear like invisible glasses. What is truly unsettling about the face of another is not its difference, but its resistance to becoming a confirmation of our everyday taxonomies. Levinas (2002) understood that the face is precisely that which exceeds any totalization. The fundamental paradox lies in the fact that the more we try to capture the other in our categories, the more it reveals itself as infinite, as an irreducible surplus. Each gaze is an ambush laid against our explanatory systems, a permanent escape from our classificatory archives that challenges the pretense of turning the human into interpretable data. The contemporary subject, trained in the rapid consumption of images, confuses seeing with understanding. We reduce faces to selfies, expressions to emojis, singularities to profiles. Our technological hypervisuality paradoxically blinds us to what Levinas called “the epiphany of the face”: that moment in which the other ceases to be an object and becomes an ethical mandate, an inescapable call that no algorithm can process. References Levinas, E. (2002). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority.(A. Leyte, Trans.). Sígueme. (Original work published in 1961)

Where public speech withers, the unconscious falls silent. Psychoanalysis is not just a victim of totalitarianism; it is its structural antagonist. The word is the primordial instrument of psychoanalysis, but not just any word. It is that which emerges without restrictions, the one that surprises even the person who pronounces it. The unconscious requires safe territories to manifest itself, just as a bird needs open space to spread its wings. Without guarantees of freedom, the repressed remains in the shadows. The analytic device operates under a fundamental contradiction: it demands limitless speech within a rigorously limited framework. This paradox is sustainable only when the social pact guarantees that no word will be punished for its disturbing content. The setting protects, but only democracy legitimizes that singular pact we call transference. Contemporary clinical practice confirms that under authoritarian regimes, psychoanalysis becomes deformed or disappears. When words must pass through the filter of fear, the analyst involuntarily becomes an accomplice to power. The unconscious, as an intimate territory, requires for its exploration the same oxygen as public life: the freedom to speak.

La anoréxica no sufre de falta de apetito sino de un apetito perverso por la ausencia misma. Mientras otros buscan saciar el hambre, ella la cultiva meticulosamente, transformándola en objeto de consumo. No rechaza simplemente la comida; más bien consume activamente el vacío, haciendo del "no comer" un acto positivo, una ingesta ritual de la nada. Cuando decimos a estos pacientes "come algo", malinterpretamos radicalmente su posición: ya están comiendo algo —están comiendo precisamente nada— y este "nada" tiene para ellos una sustancialidad más real que cualquier alimento concreto ofrecido en el plato de la preocupación familiar. La paradoja se revela cuando comprendemos que la anoréxica no está vacía sino rebosante de plenitud. Su rechazo a la comida no proviene de un estado de carencia que busca llenarse, sino de una saturación insoportable que exige vaciamiento. Cuando nos dicen 'toma esta comida y ponla en tu cuerpo', fallamos en observar dónde están: en un estado de plenitud que requiere evacuación. Es como si la anoréxica estuviera ya tan ocupada por la presencia masiva del Otro materno que no queda espacio alguno para existir como sujeto separado; su rechazo alimentario es un desesperado intento de crear un espacio habitable dentro de ese exceso sofocante. En términos lacanianos, podemos comprender este fenómeno como una subversión de la dialéctica presencia-ausencia que constituye todo objeto. Para que algo devenga objeto de deseo, debe poder ausentarse; solo lo que puede faltar puede ser deseado. La anoréxica invierte esta lógica: en lugar de desear lo que falta, hace faltar lo que otros desean para ella. Convierte la ausencia misma en presencia, el vacío en sustancia, la carencia en posesión. Su deseo no es de comida sino de control sobre el propio cuerpo como último reducto de autonomía frente al Otro omnipresente que amenaza con devorarla a ella, paradójicamente, con sus ofertas de alimento. El síntoma anoréxico revela con brutal claridad cómo el objeto humano nunca es natural sino siempre cultural, nunca orgánico sino simbólico. Si en la bulimia vemos la oscilación caótica entre la incorporación y la expulsión, en la anorexia encontramos la estabilización perversa de este conflicto mediante la fetichización del vacío mismo. La anoréxica ha encontrado un objeto perfecto: uno que no puede perderse porque es precisamente la pérdida misma convertida en posesión. Su tragedia es que este objeto mortífero la posee a ella más de lo que ella lo posee; cada gramo perdido es aparentemente una victoria subjetiva que, sin embargo, la acerca progresivamente a su desaparición como organismo. La clínica contemporánea nos enseña que el tratamiento de la anorexia no consiste en llenar el vacío sino en vaciarlo de su mortífera sustancialidad. No se trata de hacer comer al sujeto —intento que solo refuerza la resistencia— sino de separar la nada de su valor de goce, permitiendo que emerja un vacío diferente: no el de la muerte sino el del deseo. El analista opera aquí no como quien alimenta sino como quien permite un ayuno diferente: el ayuno simbólico que separa al sujeto de esa nada devoradora para abrir el espacio donde pueda surgir otra relación con la falta, una que no exija el sacrificio del cuerpo en el altar del vacío sustancializado.

We all harbor a smuggler within who traffics forbidden goods between expectation and disappointment. We witness its operation in each failed relationship, in every object that loses its luster once possessed, in each achievement that becomes insufficient the moment it's reached. We cross psychic borders carrying promises of satisfaction that vanish at our touch, convinced that next time will be different. The paradox lies in how our smuggler exists precisely because our inner customs pretends not to see it. Right when we obtain what we desire, we activate the secret mechanism that nullifies its value. The new smartphone, the partner attained, the job promotion: all reveal their imposture once possessed. Yet we repeat the cycle, feigning surprise at each new disappointment. The analytical experience reveals that this border trafficking isn't a defect to correct but the very structure of desire itself. Recognizing the smuggler doesn't mean stopping it, but establishing a different pact: one where the goods no longer promise impossible completeness, but acknowledged fragments of necessarily partial enjoyment. Only then can we inhabit the border without the anxiety of crossing it.