We devalue in others what we cannot bear to recognize in ourselves. Cruelty is always autobiographical. The broken mirror. We devalue in others what we fear most to recognize in ourselves. Like vampires fleeing from mirrors, we attack in the other precisely what confronts us with our own fragility. This defensive operation reveals an uncomfortable truth: we only wound where we have been wounded before, we only deny what we secretly long to possess. Aggression toward others is always autobiographical. The mechanism of devaluation builds castles on swampland. Each act of contempt toward others temporarily strengthens our ego, but paradoxically makes us more dependent on that same destructive operation. It's like burning furniture to keep warm: it works momentarily, but each combustion leaves us poorer, colder, more desperate to find something else to burn. Current clinical practice reveals that behind every systematic devaluer lives a child not recognized in their uniqueness. Analytic work consists of creating a space where that vulnerability can emerge without the compulsive need to attack the otherness of others. Only by recognizing our own wound can we stop inflicting it.

Consumer culture's achievement: not eliminating dissatisfaction, but making ordinary unhappiness feel like unbearable catastrophe, pathologizing the human condition itself as deficiency. When satisfaction becomes obligation. The analytic experience reveals a perverse shift: satisfaction has mutated from possibility into mandate. Contemporary subjects arrive in consultation not because they suffer too much, but because they cannot tolerate suffering at all. Every minor discomfort registers as crisis, every moment without pleasure as pathology. The culture promises total satisfaction while paradoxically rendering ordinary unhappiness unbearable: we have more access to pleasure than ever, yet less capacity to endure its inevitable absence. This creates what clinicians encounter daily—subjects who experience the gap between advertisement and reality as personal failure. The problem isn't that satisfaction eludes them, but that anything less than constant euphoria feels catastrophic. Consumer culture doesn't fail to deliver happiness; it succeeds in making normal melancholy intolerable, transforming existential lack into emergency requiring immediate pharmaceutical or commercial intervention. The cruelest aspect: this system feeds on its own failure. Each promise of total satisfaction raises expectations while lowering tolerance, creating subjects who need ever-increasing doses of novelty to maintain baseline contentment. The addict merely embodies this logic without pretense, choosing chemistry over the exhausting theater of perpetual consumer optimism.

The addict's tragedy: choosing chemistry's reliable repetition over humanity's unreliable surprise, they discover their perfect partner is also their executioner. The chemistry of solitude. The analytic experience reveals a disturbing substitution: the addict doesn't merely prefer the drug over people, they fundamentally reorganize the economy of trust itself. Where the neurotic suffers the unreliability of human desire, the addict finds salvation in chemical consistency. The drug never disappoints because it never speaks: it delivers its effect with mechanical precision, asking nothing in return except the body's continued availability. This transformation operates through a brutal logic: human relationships demand interpretation, negotiation, the anxiety of not knowing what the Other wants. The object-drug eliminates this unbearable uncertainty. It becomes the only Other who keeps promises, who arrives on schedule, who never asks uncomfortable questions. The addict hasn't abandoned society; they've simply found a more reliable partner in chemistry than in conversation. Yet this apparent solution conceals a deeper impasse: the drug's reliability is also its tyranny. Unlike human others who can surprise, disappoint, or transform us, the chemical bond remains static, repetitive, mortifying. The addict trades the risk of human unpredictability for the certainty of pharmaceutical servitude, discovering too late that the most trustworthy Other is also the most deadly.

We fall ill from an excess of ourselves. Absolute identity is an allergy: we are intolerant of our own selves. The pathology of absolute identity. Contemporary illness does not spread through contact but through isolation. ADHD, depression, and borderline disorders emerge when the subject becomes trapped in the echo chamber of their own subjectivity. We fall ill from an excess of ourselves, from an identity that has become a form of house arrest. The immunological paradigm presupposed external enemies that needed to be repelled. But when the threat is one’s own selfhood, the immune system collapses from lack of use. Without otherness to react against, the organism compulsively attacks itself: hyper-identity produces psychic autoimmunity, the self rejects everything it does not recognize as familiar, until it ultimately rejects itself. Contemporary discontent is born from the impossibility of being surprised by oneself. We live within closed subjectivities that have lost the capacity for genuine otherness. The current human condition is fundamentally allergic: we are intolerant of ourselves, unable to metabolize the difference that constitutes us.

True hospitality does not occur when we open our door to the stranger, but when we allow their strangeness to open unknown doors within us. Hospitality as abyss: When the other dwells within us. True hospitality is an art that goes beyond a mere act of welcome; it embodies a deeper understanding of vulnerability and the complexities that accompany the presence of the foreigner. As Derrida articulates, authentic hospitality requires an openness toward the unknown and a recognition of the uncertainties that arise when encountering someone different from oneself (Derrida, 2000, p. 129). It challenges us to confront our prejudices and the possible discomfort that may accompany the act of receiving another into our lives. Therefore, hospitality is not merely about offering a space or a meal; it is about cultivating a relationship that respects the individuality and identity of the foreigner. This hospitality invites us to break down barriers of familiarity and normality, embracing instead a shared humanity that recognizes the unique experiences and perspectives of the foreigner. It compels us to consider how our own identities are enriched through this engagement with others. Ultimately, genuine hospitality transforms both host and guest by fostering dialogue and understanding. This encounter can lead to personal growth and an expanded cultural memory, enriching our sense of community and connection. Thus, true hospitality is not just a welcome, but a profound act of commitment that honors the complexities of human relationships and the valuable lessons they hold. References Derrida, J. (2000). Of hospitality. Stanford University Press.

We rest to produce, vacation to perform better. Psychoanalysis defends the radical pause: stopping without economic justification. The subversive pause. Contemporary culture transforms rest into deferred productivity: we sleep to perform, vacation to return energized. Even our most intimate moments serve economic imperatives. This perverse logic colonizes the unconscious, converting leisure into labor's fuel. The weekend exists solely to make Monday tolerable. Psychoanalysis proposes radical suspension: the pause without productive justification. "Why do I do what I do?" dismantles automatic action chains. This question reveals how often we act from alien mandates rather than authentic desire. The paradox emerges: only by stopping do we truly move forward, discovering genuine purpose beneath imposed efficiency. The contemporary clinic receives subjects exhausted not by living, but by constant performance. Modern symptoms manifest as desire's evacuation under productivity's weight. The analytical pause becomes subversive act—defending the right to question without economic justification, to think without immediate utility.

Explore What lies hidden beyond your conscious thoughts. The desires that influence your decisions without you realizing. The internal forces that guide your actions and relationships. Who you really are when you're with others. Analyze That feeling that something is missing in your life despite your achievements. The emotional voids that no experience seems to completely fill. Why you keep searching for something more even though you don't know exactly what it is. The moments when you wish for a different life than the one you have. Examine The problematic situations that repeat themselves in your life. The behavior patterns you can't escape from. Why some experiences both attract you and make you suffer at the same time. The discomfort you feel when facing unknown aspects of yourself. Recognize How the words you use reflect and shape your way of seeing the world. That sometimes you can't find how to express what you really feel. That truly speaking and being heard can transform your experience. How understanding your own story opens paths toward change.

True love is that beggar who gives away his hunger. Like two voids learning to dance together. The shared lack is the only honest gift. Love places us in an impossible position: we offer precisely what we lack to someone who does not request such an offering. We extend our empty hands with the promise of fullness, while the other, also inhabiting their own emptiness, does not recognize what we attempt to give. This fundamental contradiction constitutes the very essence of the amorous encounter, where two absences try to complement each other without ever completely succeeding. Paradoxically, it is this exchange of lacks that sustains the bond. Like two blind people describing a color neither has seen, we build together a necessary fiction. Love persists not despite this impossibility, but because of it; its power resides precisely in the unresolvable tension between what we seek and what we can actually obtain, between the fantasy of completeness and the reality of misencounter. The analytic experience reveals that this economy of shared emptiness is perhaps the only possible space for genuine love. It is not in complete satisfaction where love finds its dwelling, but in the mutual recognition of our lacks. By embracing this condition, we discover that loving is not possessing or completing, but accompanying the other in the perpetual dance between desire and absence, between hunger and giving.

Work no longer sublimates: it reproduces. The modern office is the new couch where the symptoms of the 21st century unfold. From meaning to symptom. Work once promised to be the stage where the subject would fulfill itself, where the drive would find its civilizatory channel. Today, offices have become involuntary consulting rooms where each employee displays their own gallery of symptoms. Sublimation has yielded ground to compulsive repetition. Where once there was creation, now there is automation of malaise. The paradox is revealing: the more work processes become technified, the more archaic psychic suffering becomes. Burnout is nothing but the contemporary version of melancholia, yet stripped of its poetic dimension. Alienated work produces subjects alienated from themselves, trapped in the illusion of productivity while consuming themselves internally. Contemporary clinical practice receives patients who speak of work as of a toxic relationship from which they cannot escape. The work symptom has become the new hysterical symptom: expression of a malaise that finds no words, only failed acts disguised as efficiency.

Chronic pain doesn't seek cure but listening. When will we learn its secret language? Pain that speaks. Chronic pain is the body's idiot savant: mute before medicine, eloquent to the unconscious. While clinical protocols seek to silence it with drugs and techniques, it stubbornly insists on its encrypted message. It's not organic rebellion but writing in the flesh: what remained marked as indelible letter from the primordial encounter with the Other. Where we expect to find pure dysfunction, we discover signifier. Paradoxically, those who suffer most are those who most need their pain. Like the destitute embracing his rags, the "chronic patient" identifies with his symptom until making it identity. Pain then functions as passport before the Other: "Recognize me because I suffer, care for me because I'm broken, exempt me because I grieve." Healing threatens to leave him orphaned of recognition. Who would he be without his distinctive pain? Contemporary clinic doesn't aim to eliminate pain but to transform it into sinthome. It's not about curing but allowing the subject to inhabit his symptom without submitting to it, assuming his painful singularity as what anchors him in the world without completely determining his desire.

Are you slave to your symptom or artist of your sinthome? The difference is radical: suffering vs creation. Symptom or sinthome. The symptom is the spoiled child of the unconscious: it screams, demands attention, promises revelations if we coddle it enough. We come to analysis believing the symptom is our enemy to eliminate, never suspecting it can transform into our most intimate companion. The difference between suffering the symptom and inhabiting the sinthome marks the boundary between neurotic complaint and the assumption of desire. To identify with the symptom is to live as its hostage: "I am depressive, I am anxious, I am addicted." The subject reduces itself to its ailment, turning failure into total identity. Paradoxically, the sinthome operates in the opposite way: we are not our symptom, but we include it as part of our irreducible singularity. It's the difference between being possessed by a demon and domesticating it to work in our favor. Contemporary clinic doesn't seek symptom elimination but its transformation into sinthome. The analysand learns to take distance from what determines them, to choose how to relate to it. It's not about curing but creating: making the symptom a personal work of art that sustains desire without crushing it.

The addict seeks certainty, not pleasure. They turn chemistry into an oracle: "If I consume, I will be calm." The paradox: controlling produces total loss of control. The chemical refuge. Human uncertainty is unbearable. While we wait for responses that never come, we build altars to predictability. The addict doesn't seek pleasure: they seek certainty. In a world where others respond according to their own internal labyrinths, the substance promises a simple equation: consumption equals effect. The paradox is cruel: those who most need control surrender to the most absolute lack of control. Psychoanalysis reveals that addiction functions as a primitive object relation, where the substance occupies the place of the primordial object that should have responded predictably. Chemical dependency reproduces the infantile fantasy of omnipotence: "If I do X, I will get Y." However, this false equation generates the most devastating paradox: the attempt to control produces total loss of control. Contemporary clinical practice encounters subjects who have replaced the anxiety of encountering the other with the false security of the addictive ritual. The analyst must work with this radical solitude, helping the analysand tolerate the unpredictability of human desire. The cure involves accepting that others are not vending machines programmed to deliver responses.