Slavery has become elegant. It no longer needs visible chains or masters with faces: it operates through algorithms that predict and shape our desires, through screens that keep us as willing captives. Power is no longer exercised through punishment but through seduction. Every 'like', every 'click', every digital interaction reinforces the invisible bars of our comfortable prison. The new control devices are so sophisticated that they make us believe we're freer than ever. We voluntarily share every aspect of our lives, gladly hand over our most intimate data, cheerfully build our own digital chains. Surveillance no longer needs spies: we have smartphones that do that work for it. The truly perverse aspect of this system is that it makes us love our servitude. We crave the next device that will monitor us better, we eagerly await the next update that will refine our consumer profile. Modern slavery doesn't just come with wifi included: it comes with a waiting list and fans camping outside stores to be the first ones to chain themselves.

Analytic work confronts us with an undeniable evidence: the market has taken the place of the ancient master. We no longer obey kings or dictators, but algorithms that predict our desires, metrics that evaluate our productivity, indices that measure our worth. The capitalist discourse operates as an invisible but omnipresent master, needing no whip because it has advertising. This new master is more efficient than any historical tyrant: it doesn't demand explicit submission, but makes us believe we freely choose our servitude. Each act of consumption is celebrated as an expression of individual freedom, while binding us more firmly to the chain of programmed desire. The market doesn't prohibit: it seduces, promises, incites. The true perversion of capitalist discourse lies in its ability to turn even rebellion into merchandise. Our protests transform into market trends, our discontent into business opportunities, our search for alternatives into new market niches. The modern master doesn't fear revolution: it packages and sells it at a discount.

No one lives outside discourse. From the moment we are born, we are captured by a network of signifiers that precedes and constitutes us. Language is not a tool we use: it is the very matter from which our social being is made. Even when we believe we are in silence, we are inhabited by the words of others. The analytic experience shows us that each symptom, each fantasy, each form of suffering is woven with the threads of social discourse. The analysand who believes they speak only from their personal history discovers, little by little, that their most intimate words are interwoven with the signifiers of their time, their class, their culture. There is no subjectivity that isn't crossed by at least one discourse. What we call "I" is, in reality, a crossing point where various discourses meet and knot together. Our singularity doesn't lie in being outside discourse, but in the unique way in which each of us inhabits and is inhabited by these discourses that constitute us. The true analytic act consists in making visible this invisible weave that sustains and determines us.

There exists a particularly dangerous contemporary fantasy: that of being able to remain "outside" of politics. As if a neutral position were possible, as if silence weren't already a way of taking sides. We are political beings in the same way that fish are aquatic beings: it's not a choice, it's our condition of existence. In every daily gesture, in every complicit silence, in every "I don't get involved in politics," we are already doing politics. The difference lies only in whether we are conscious of our position or if we prefer the comfort of believing ourselves neutral. We don't choose whether to participate in the political game, only if we do it actively or passively, if we swim with or against the current. The myth of neutrality serves perfectly the interests of established power. When someone says "I don't do politics," they are doing precisely the politics that the system needs: that of the passive spectator, the silent accomplice. The only real choice is between being conscious of our political position or letting others choose it for us.

Contemporary clinical practice reveals an uncomfortable truth: there is no neutrality in speech. Every word we pronounce is a position taken, a way of locating ourselves in the social field. When we speak, we don't just communicate: we establish power relations, defend symbolic territories, construct or destroy realities. Language is never innocent: it's a battlefield where each phrase can be both an act of resistance and of submission. Analysands who come to consultation usually believe their symptoms are purely personal, until they discover that their way of speaking (or staying silent) reproduces social discourses that run through them. Their words are trenches where they take refuge or from which they fire. Each session is a potential small revolution, where worn-out words can acquire new meanings, where imposed silences can transform into cries of freedom. The true analytic act consists in making visible this political dimension of speech. It's not just about interpreting symptoms, but helping the subject discover how their discourse positions them in the world. Each intervention by the analyst is also a political act: it can reinforce existing power structures or open spaces for new ways of speaking and being.

Contemporary clinical practice constantly confronts us with this uncomfortable truth: the power of the master's discourse resides not in its rationality or justice, but in its pure arbitrariness. It doesn't need to make sense to function; it functions precisely because it can dispense with meaning. Its authority doesn't emerge from the logic of its arguments but from its ability to impose itself without needing to argue. What makes this discourse effective is precisely its indifference to coherence or justification. The master doesn't say "this is so because..." but simply "this is so." The absence of justification isn't a weakness of this discourse but its strength: by not depending on reasons, it becomes immune to rational questioning. Power sustains itself in its own exercise, not in its legitimacy. The paradox is that the more arbitrary the command, the more effective it becomes. The master's discourse produces obedience not despite its senselessness, but because of it. Its ability to reign doesn't depend on its content but on its pure form of imposition. It's a discourse that seeks not to convince but to subdue, aspires not to truth but to dominion.

There's a frequent confusion that current clinical practice compels us to clarify: discourse is not simply language. While language operates as a formal system of signs and rules, discourse is that point where words intertwine with desire, where grammar meets subjectivity. We don't speak just with linguistic code: we speak from our wounds, from our voids, from the identifications that constitute us. Language can be studied as an abstract structure, but discourse always implies a subject who is at stake in what they say. Every time we speak, we don't just transmit information: we reveal our subjective position, our unconscious identifications, our singular way of inhabiting the symbolic world. Discourse is language traversed by desire. What constitutes us as subjects is not the mastery of a linguistic system, but our unique way of being caught in discourse. The analysand doesn't suffer from poor use of language: they suffer from their position in discourse, from the place from which they speak and from which they are spoken. Analysis operates precisely in this dimension, where saying always exceeds what is said.

The contemporary subject emerges from university transformed into a figure: so many accumulated credits, so much acquired market value, so much debt incurred. It's no coincidence that we use the same term -credit- for both passed courses and financial debt. The university no longer forms subjects: it produces credit carriers, calculable units of potential value in the labor market. This transformation of the student into a walking credit reveals the true function of today's university: converting knowledge into a quantifiable commodity and the subject into its bearer. We don't study to know, but to accumulate credits. We don't learn to transform ourselves, but to become more "creditworthy," more financeable, more sellable in the competencies market. The paradox is that these credits that supposedly qualify us, actually disqualify us as thinking subjects. We leave university marked, yes, but not by knowledge but by a mercantile logic that reduces all knowledge to its exchange value. True education should begin precisely by questioning this reduction of knowledge to credits.

The capitalist discourse operates as a relentless programmer of our desire. It doesn't limit itself to selling us objects: it installs in us the feeling that we need them, that without them something is missing. Like a perverse algorithm, it anticipates our "desires" before they even arise, creating a perpetual thirst that no object can truly quench. What contemporary clinical practice reveals is the trap of this device: each consumer object promises a satisfaction that, being unattainable, pushes us toward the next object in an infinite chain. It's not a cycle of desire but of jouissance: that paradoxical satisfaction which, in its compulsive repetition, produces more discomfort than pleasure. The latest iPhone isn't an object: it's a gear in this machinery of jouissance. The paradox is that this system doesn't work despite its failure, but because of it. Each unfulfilled promise of satisfaction pushes us to seek the next object, the next gadget, the next experience that promises to be "the definitive one." Capitalism doesn't sell products: it trades in promises of completeness that, in failing, fuel their own continuity.

The true analytic act begins with a necessary forgetting: the analyst must set aside everything they think they know about human suffering, theories of the unconscious, therapeutic techniques. Not because this knowledge isn't valuable, but because theoretical knowledge can easily become a screen that prevents hearing the radical singularity of each analysand. Contemporary clinical practice is saturated with experts who have answers for everything, who diagnose and prescribe before really listening. Psychoanalysis proposes something radically different: a space where the analyst's not-knowing allows the analysand's unconscious knowledge to emerge. The difference between analyzing and indoctrinating lies precisely in this capacity to suspend our certainties. Every time an analyst believes they know too much about what's happening to their analysand, they're closer to indoctrination than analysis. True analytic listening requires this continuous emptying of one's own certainties, this willingness to be surprised by what the other brings, this capacity to keep alive the question of what's singular in each case.

Psychoanalysis radically distinguishes itself from the contemporary wellness industry by what it doesn't promise. It doesn't sell magical recipes for happiness or instant formulas for success. Its proposal is more modest and, paradoxically, more ambitious: the possibility of encountering our truth, however uncomfortable it may be. It doesn't offer a life instruction manual, but rather a space where questions can unfold. This position directly contradicts today's self-help market, saturated with promises of immediate transformation and guaranteed happiness. While personal development "gurus" sell packaged certainties and prefabricated habits, psychoanalysis proposes something more unsettling: the exploration of those dark corners of the soul that we prefer to keep in the shadows. While self-help sells packaged happiness, psychoanalysis proposes a modest truth: real wellbeing means embracing the parts of us that no success manual can fix. The wellbeing that can emerge from analysis isn't that of the perpetual smile or forced optimism. It's the deeper relief that comes from stopping lying to oneself, from being able to inhabit one's own contradictions, from making peace with that part of ourselves that doesn't fit into any self-improvement manual. It's a wellbeing that includes discomfort as a necessary part of truth.

The unconscious is not a repository of repressed contents nor a dark space where we store what we don't want to see. It is an active force that structures our experience, operating constantly in every act, every word, every dream. Like electricity running through a house's circuits, the unconscious is invisible but determines what can be turned on, what can function, what can manifest in our psychic life. It is this invisible force that divides us as subjects: between who we think we are and what manifests despite ourselves, between what we want to say and what escapes us in every slip, between our conscious intentions and the real effects of our acts. This is not a flaw to be corrected but our most intimate condition: we are subjects precisely because we are divided by this current that runs through us and exceeds us. The subject is divided between conscious and unconscious domains shaped by the signifier, the law, language, and culture. Like electricity, the unconscious doesn't need to be "discovered" to operate - it's already functioning at every moment, producing effects, generating short circuits, illuminating unexpected areas of our experience. Analysis doesn't seek to "find" the unconscious, but to learn to read its manifestations that are already there, visible to those who know how to look.