Doubt in a world of certainties

Clinical experience reveals that certainty functions primarily as an anxiolytic: we cling to what we "know" not because it's true, but because it quiets our existential trembling. The contemporary subject abandons doubt precisely when it's most needed: during periods of accelerating change and complexity. This rejection of uncertainty creates a form of psychic rigidity that paradoxically increases fragility: the more desperately we grasp for solid ground, the more vulnerable we become to disorientation when that ground inevitably shifts.

The therapeutic process demonstrates how questioning our own convictions creates necessary flexibility: doubt becomes not weakness but strength, not indecision but protection against the seductions of dogmatism. This paradox appears throughout analysis: patients achieve security not through certainty but through tolerating ambiguity, recognizing that "knowing for sure" often conceals deeper defensive structures beneath its confident surface.

Societies, like individuals, manifest symptoms when certainty calcifies into ideology: totalitarianism emerges not from questioning but from its absence. Democracy requires precisely what makes it vulnerable: the capacity to doubt itself. The political subject thus exists in productive tension: committed enough to act, doubtful enough to reflect.