THERAPEUTIC APPROACH

Contemporary life is marked by persistent injunctions to enjoy and by unremitting demands for consumption, speed, productivity and efficiency. Promises of rapid transformation and immediate relief from suffering are everywhere: life is presented as something that can be organised, measured and brought under control, as though uncertainty, rupture and loss were not intrinsic to the experience of living.

 

Within this climate, psychic suffering is often treated as a dysfunction to be corrected or a symptom to be eliminated. Generalised solutions—particularly those circulating online and through social media—leave little room for the singularity of each person’s history and for the circumstances in which suffering takes shape. What happens, however, when what makes someone suffer does not yield to these promises?

 

Drawing attention to these pressures does not entail a wholesale condemnation of contemporary life or the idealisation of some better past. The very means that make life easier and broaden the range of choices available may also shape the ways in which one is called upon to desire, enjoy and respond to one’s distress. The question is not whether these are good or bad, but how they become inscribed in the singular life of each person.

 

Psychotherapy is not the only possible response when a person encounters an impasse in life. As I approach it, however, it offers a space in which what has become difficult can be put into words without being immediately reduced to a problem requiring correction. In this respect, it stands apart from the logic of immediacy. This does not mean overlooking the need for relief.

 

People often come to therapy when something has become difficult to bear: anxiety, bodily distress, recurring impasses in relationships, a sense of being stuck, or an experience that remains indistinct and difficult to put into words. A request for relief is taken seriously, without assuming that it fully accounts, from the outset, for what brings someone to therapy.

 

The therapeutic process, however, is not confined to restoring “function” or eliminating the symptom. It allows time for what is at stake for this particular person in what brings them to therapy, and for what returns and insists. It does not assume that every difficulty conceals a cause waiting to be uncovered, or that a final explanation could exhaust what is involved.

 

My practice draws on existential psychotherapy and Lacanian psychoanalysis, not as collections of techniques, but as ways of approaching psychic suffering, speech and each person’s singular position. Therapy is shaped case by case and is not organised around a predetermined model of mental health or an external norm defining in advance what form of existence is viable for this particular person. Therapy may have a direction without prescribing how someone should live.

 

Existential psychotherapy attends to fundamental dimensions of human existence—freedom, choice, responsibility, loss, solitude and anxiety—as they emerge in each person’s speech. They are not imposed as themes, nor are they used to provide universal explanations. Questions—rather than ready-made answers—can arise when someone is no longer required to measure their life against a given account of how it ought to be lived.

 

Lacanian psychoanalysis approaches the symptom not only as a message awaiting decipherment, but also as a singular way of knotting together the body, speech and a mode of satisfaction that does not necessarily coincide with pleasure. A symptom may cause suffering and, at the same time, function as a solution, even when that solution has become costly or restrictive. Therapy does not aim simply to eradicate it, nor does it suppose that meaning can exhaust it.

 

The way a person suffers is not separate from the time in which they live. The surrounding culture offers words, models and objects through which expectations and modes of satisfaction are organised. The symptom, however, is not merely a reflection of the social environment. It carries something that cannot be generalised: the way in which, for this person, their history, certain words and the body have become bound together.

 

Therapy allows someone to speak in their own time and in their own way. Speech does not simply come afterwards to describe an experience already formed. It may touch and shift something in the way an experience has become bound up with the body and continues to return with a particular weight. The knowledge that may emerge in therapy remains partial and is not supplied by the therapist as a ready-made explanation. It takes shape through the person’s own speech, sometimes when their words say more than they intended to say—or say something different. There is no requirement to say the “right” things or to arrive quickly at conclusions. Hesitations, contradictions, pauses, repetitions and what initially seems disconnected can all find a place. A word, an interruption or an unexpected association may open something without closing it.

 

Over time, what persists or repeats does not necessarily disappear; it may, however, cease to impose itself in the same way. Change cannot be programmed, nor can it take the same form for everyone; its direction and outcome cannot be prescribed in advance. It may consist not in the disappearance of the difficulty, but in inventing a different way of living with what cannot be eliminated, so that it no longer exacts the same price.

 

The therapeutic process promises neither an ideal life nor complete self-knowledge, harmony or the absence of difficulty. Its aim is not to master what escapes. It may, however, open up some room for freedom in relation to the way suffering and repetition have organised someone’s life, as well as a different relation to others, to their own desire and to what persists without being fully explicable. That, in itself, is not insignificant.