Contemporary life is marked by persistent injunctions to enjoyment and by a continuous push towards consumption, speed, and efficiency. Discourses promising rapid transformation and immediate relief from distress prevail: eat this, buy that, do this in order to feel better, to become what one is expected to be. Life is often presented as something that can be organised, measured, and controlled, as if uncertainty, ruptures, and loss were not intrinsic to it.

 

Within this context, psychological suffering is frequently treated as a dysfunction requiring immediate correction, or as a symptom to be eliminated. Ready-made answers and universal solutions—particularly those circulating through the internet and social media—rarely take into account the singularity of each situation. The cost of this logic often becomes apparent, both psychically and somatically, through impasses that return and persist. Psychotherapy, as I approach it, situates itself at a distance from this logic of speed and immediate solutions. It does not aim to organise human experience or impose normative answers, but rather to create the time and space in which the question can be posed of what, for each person, gives meaning to the distress that brings them to therapy.

 

One often comes to therapy when something no longer functions as it once did. This may involve anxiety, tension, bodily discomfort, repeated relational impasses, a sense of stagnation, or something more vague and difficult to articulate. What is experienced as urgent is rarely understanding as such, but rather the need to endure what is happening, to reduce pressure, or to bring to a halt something that has become unbearable. This demand is taken seriously, though not treated as a problem requiring immediate correction. Often, precisely where the quickest solution is sought, there emerges the need to allow time and space for what insists on returning and generating distress, even when it cannot yet be clearly articulated.

 

My therapeutic work draws on existential therapy and Lacanian psychoanalysis, not as sets of techniques, but as ways of thinking about psychological suffering, speech, and one’s relation to self and others. It is a case-by-case approach, attentive to the singularity of each situation and to the particular way in which experience is lived and given meaning.

Existential therapy gives attention to fundamental dimensions of human existence—such as freedom, choice, responsibility, loss, solitude, and anxiety—when these emerge in speech. These are not treated as predefined themes, but are approached insofar as they become alive within the therapeutic encounter. Lacanian psychoanalysis offers a framework for understanding the symptom not merely as something to be eliminated, but as something bound up with speech, desire, and the position one takes in relation to one’s life. Therapeutic work does not aim at providing ready-made interpretations, but at creating the conditions through which the meaning of symptoms may come into question for the person themselves.

 

The therapeutic space is constituted as a space in which one may speak in one’s own time and in one’s own way. Not in order to say the “right” things, nor to reach conclusions too quickly, but in order to be heard and, above all, to hear one’s own speech differently. This space allows for hesitation, contradiction, pauses, and for what initially appears obscure or unintelligible. Within this openness, recurring impasses and the positions one takes in relation to others may be illuminated differently. Questions emerge not in search of ready-made answers, but inviting a different relation to what takes place.

 

The therapeutic process does not direct towards a predefined change nor towards an “ideal” way of living. Rather, it opens a space in which a shift may become possible in the way one relates to what causes distress and, gradually, in the assumption of responsibility for desire—without recourse to ready-made certainties.