The price of silence

Living under a totalitarian regime demands a painful exercise in psychic self-mutilation. To maintain an appearance of normality, the subject must perform complex internal surgery, carefully sectioning off those parts of themselves that could endanger their survival. This split is not merely an act of prudence, but a profound self-inflicted violence that fragments the integrity of being, creating watertight compartments between what is seen, what is known, and what can be said.

The supposed "well-being" achieved through this self-amputation comes at an exorbitant cost. Each day requires an elaborate exercise in selective amnesia, a sophisticated system of self-imposed blind spots, a precise choreography of silences and omissions. The person becomes an expert in the art of not seeing the obvious, of not naming the unnameable, of not feeling what must not be felt. This precarious balance consumes an immense amount of psychic energy, leaving little space for true personal development.

In this context, psychoanalysis encounters its fundamental limit. As a practice based on the possibility of saying everything, of freely exploring the darkest corners of the psyche, analytic work becomes practically impossible where speech is chained. Freedom of expression is not merely a political framework for psychoanalysis, but its most basic condition of possibility. Without the ability to name what is real, to articulate pain and truth, the analytic process becomes just another way of sustaining the split, rather than healing it.