The void of life's project

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.