The paternal function has nothing to do with the biological father or traditional paternity stereotypes. It's a fundamental psychic operation: the introduction of the 'no' that makes life in society possible. Like a traffic light that frustrates but saves us from chaos, the father is that function that introduces the necessary limit, that cut that tears us away from the mortifying jouissance of imaginary completeness. Contemporary nostalgia for a "strong" paternal authority reveals precisely the confusion between the real father and the paternal function. We don't need more authoritarian fathers: we need the function of the limit to operate, the one that allows us to desire precisely because not everything is possible. The paternal 'no' isn't a capricious prohibition but the very condition of our freedom. The paradox is that we can only build something of our own from this fundamental frustration. The paternal law, by prohibiting certain immediate satisfactions, opens the space for desire and creativity. Without this structuring 'no', we would remain trapped in a limitless jouissance (enjoyment) that, in its very excess, would annihilate us.

The market wants us to believe we desire objects, when in reality what we seek is the gaze of the other. We don't buy things: we buy the way we imagine others will see us when we possess them. The latest iPhone isn't a phone: it's the promise of belonging to that place where others desire us. The trap is perfect because we confuse the object with what we truly seek: the desire of the other. This is the paradox that capitalism masterfully exploits: it sells us objects pretending they are what we desire, when in reality what we want is for others to desire our desire. The market functions as an infinite mirror where desires reflect and confuse themselves, where each new product promises to be the key for others to look at us as we want to be seen. Desire is never direct or simple: it's always triangulated by the other's gaze. We desire what others desire, and we desire it precisely because others desire it. This is the uncomfortable truth that marketing hides: there is no purely individual desire, all desire is social, all desire is political. We are desiring subjects because we are desired subjects.

Vulnerability is not a weakness we can overcome nor a condition we can choose: it is the very structure of our subjectivity. Like a city that has let its walls fall, the subject is fundamentally exposed, open to the wounds that come from encountering the other. This radical openness precedes any conscious decision or voluntary act; it is the primordial mode of our existence. The contemporary fantasy of an armored, self-sufficient self is precisely that: a defensive fantasy against this fundamental truth. We are not vulnerable by accident or by default: vulnerability is the very condition of being alive, of being able to be affected, of being able to feel and relate. The self is, at its most intimate core, a wound that never heals. This constitutive openness, this impossibility of closing ourselves completely upon ourselves, is what makes every significant experience possible. Only because we are vulnerable can we love, learn, transform ourselves. True strength does not consist in denying this condition, but in consciously inhabiting it, in making our fundamental wound a source of encounter and creation.

The face of the Other is not simply a configuration of physical features or a social mask: it is the irruption of a radical alterity that precedes any attempt at understanding or categorization. Before we can assign it meaning, even before we can defend ourselves from its presence, the face has already interpellated us. It is an opening that emerges from beyond form, a manifestation that exceeds the visible. This manifestation constitutes the first discourse, not because it articulates words, but because it establishes the very possibility of all dialogue. The face speaks in a language older than words: it is both plea and command, vulnerability and authority intertwined. It confronts us with an ethical demand we cannot evade, a call that constitutes us as responsible subjects before any conscious decision. What is revealed in the face is the impossibility of reducing the Other to our categories of understanding. It is an opening that appears in the opening itself, an enigma that asks not to be solved but responded to. The face speaks to us precisely from this irreducibility, from this fundamental resistance to being converted into an object of our knowledge or our power.

The symbolic power of the word transcends its communicative function: it is presence that illuminates, that transforms the ominous into habitable. It's not the content of speaking that sustains, but the very act of enunciation as testimony of presence. The voice of the Other operates as a beacon in darkness, not for what it says, but for the very fact of its emergence in the void. Language reveals here its most fundamental function: creating bridges between solitudes, converting the threatening space of absence into habitable territory. The word functions as an organizer of experience, as a constructor of psychic reality. It doesn't simply transmit information: it establishes the very coordinates of what is possible, thinkable, livable. In this phenomenon condenses the deepest truth about language's function in subjective constitution: its capacity to transform reality by the mere act of naming it, to make present what is absent, to convert chaos into cosmos. The word doesn't just describe the world: it creates it, organizes it, makes it habitable. It is light that not only illuminates, but constitutes what is illuminated. - In the beginning was the Word (John 1:1)

There exists a subtle form of domination disguised as absolute devotion: turning one's availability into a chain that binds the other. The subject who makes themselves indispensable isn't giving, but capturing. Under the mask of infinite generosity lies a control strategy that turns the other's dependence into a justification for one's own existence. This sacrificial position not only suffocates the other but functions as a resistance against one's own becoming. By constructing our identity around being indispensable to others, we build a fortress against our own development. The limitations we impose on ourselves, disguised as virtue and sacrifice, become obstacles not only to our growth but to the freedom of those we claim to love. True availability paradoxically requires the capacity to not be necessary. Only when we renounce the fantasy of being indispensable, when we assume the risk of being dispensable, can we really be present for the other without turning our presence into a prison. Being oneself implies allowing the other to be themselves as well.

Real laughter is not simply an emotional release valve, as the entertainment industry would have us believe. It is an event that shakes the very foundations of our subjective construction. In that instant of loss of control, when laughter possesses us, something of our most entrenched certainties begins to waver. The rational ego, the one we believe we govern, reveals itself in its precariousness. This moment of bodily insurgency against our habitual defenses has something revealing: it shows us we are not who we think we are. Authentic laughter breaks with the illusion of self-control, with the fantasy of coherence that sustains our image. It's an involuntary reminder that there is something in us that escapes our domain, that rebels against our attempts to maintain a facade of seriousness and control. That's why true laughter has something revolutionary about it: it not only challenges the established social order but subverts our own internal order. In that instant of abandonment to the jouissance of laughter, we are momentarily liberated from the tyranny of our identifications, our assumed roles, our everyday masks.

The contemporary fantasy of completeness sells us a fundamental lie: that the good life consists of having everything, filling every void, satisfying every need. It's the illusion that there exists a point of arrival where desire finally quiets down. But the human mind doesn't function by necessity like a machine requiring fuel; it operates by desire, that perpetual motor that feeds precisely on what it doesn't have. Desire is always desire for something else, for what's missing. It's not a lack that can be filled, but a force that emerges precisely from the difference between what we have and what we want. This gap is not a defect to be corrected but the very space where vitality emerges. Desire pulses, pushes, mobilizes precisely because it never finds its definitive object. True fullness, then, doesn't consist in having everything - an impossible and alienating project - but in recognizing and embracing what we lack. A full life is not a complete life, but a life that knows how to name its absences, that can inhabit its voids without desperation, that finds in lack itself the source of its movement and meaning.

Contemporary clinical practice confronts us with a new type of suffering: that of the subject who survives without horizon, who breathes without feeling truly alive. It's not so much a classical depression as an existential emptying, where the future has ceased to be a space of possibilities to become a grey extension of the present. The question "what do you want to do with your life?" no longer summons a project, but generates a dull anguish at the impossibility of imagining anything worthwhile. This emptying is not an individual accident but the product of an era that has reduced existence to mere productivity. When the only possible project is to "be successful" according to external metrics, when the future is reduced to performance objectives, the very capacity to desire becomes atrophied. The subject finds themselves trapped in a perpetual present, fulfilling goals they haven't chosen, pursuing a success that doesn't belong to them. Psychoanalysis proposes something radically different: not to fill this void with prefabricated answers, but to create the conditions for each person to rediscover their own capacity to desire. It's not about prescribing meaning, but about accompanying the process where each subject can find, in their uniqueness, what makes life worth living. The true cure isn't in "fixing" the subject to function, but in allowing them to awaken to their own desire.

There is a radical difference between studying a theoretical body of work and turning it into an identity badge. When someone rushes to declare themselves a "Lacanian," "Kleinian," or any other "ian," they're revealing more about their need for belonging than their commitment to critical thinking. Theory thus becomes an identity shelter, a mark of distinction that protects against the anxiety of thinking for oneself. Real work with theory requires a radically different position: that of someone who approaches a body of thought to study it, question it, put it to the test. It's not about finding a master to swear loyalty to, but about confronting ideas that help us think better. A theorist's work is precisely that: work to be worked with, not an emblem to wear. The hasty declaration "I am an ___ian" functions as a defense against the uncertainty of true thinking. It's more comfortable to adhere to a borrowed identity than to sustain the tension of thought under construction. The real challenge is to maintain a living relationship with theory, where study doesn't crystallize into identification and thought doesn't fossilize into doctrine.

We cling to causality like a life preserver in the midst of existence's chaos. We construct perfect explanatory chains, where each effect has its clear cause and every event its necessary reason. It's the fairytale we tell ourselves to sleep peacefully, the illusion that everything has an explanation if we look carefully enough. But between cause and effect there always opens an unexplorable abyss, a lack that no explanation can fill. No matter how much we refine our theories or how deeply we delve into our analyses: there always remains that mysterious space, that logical leap that no causality can explain. It's the blind spot of our explanatory systems, the place where reason stumbles upon itself. This lack is not a defect in our understanding, but the mark of the real that insists on escaping our causal networks. It's the reminder that there is something in existence that stubbornly resists being captured by our explanations, that mocks our attempts to domesticate mystery with chains of cause and effect.

The most common fantasy about analysis is that we will learn about ourselves there, like studying an instruction manual for our own psyche. One expects to accumulate reassuring knowledge that will allow us to better "manage" our life. Nothing could be further from what really happens in the analytic process. The true knowledge that emerges in analysis doesn't come to complete our understanding, but to puncture our certainties. This disturbing knowledge isn't added to what we already believe we know about ourselves; rather, it undermines those carefully built imaginary constructions. It's not knowledge that is learned, but one that erupts, that imposes itself, that emerges despite our resistances. It's a knowledge that destabilizes precisely because it touches something of our most intimate truth, the one we prefer to keep at a distance. The paradox of analysis is that its efficacy doesn't lie in accumulating more knowledge, but in allowing that disturbing knowledge that already inhabits us to emerge. It's not about building new certainties, but about making space for the old ones to fall, allowing something more authentic to arise from the cracks in our imaginary securities.