The Limits of Quick Fixes
In a world that rewards speed and certainty, the slow, uncertain work of psychotherapy can seem unnecessary — even indulgent. Why spend time searching for meaning when algorithms promise instant answers, or when a mood can be expressed with a single emoji?
Yet the problem isn’t that we need more sophisticated algorithms to distil our existence. It’s something far more radical than that.
Our very being is constructed upon a system that is inherently flawed: language.
There is an impossibility in language that we’re all reeling from. Words can never fully carry what we mean. No word exists in isolation; each depends on others to define it, and those words depend on still more. Meaning slides along this chain, never fully captured, always slightly out of reach.
That same slippage exists in us. We speak, but what we mean is never exactly what we say. Some parts of experience resist language altogether; feelings that sit at the edge of words, suffering that’s always on the tip of the tongue but can’t quite be said.
Psychoanalytic psychotherapy gives space to that gap: not just for meanings to emerge, but for the meaning-less side of experience to be recognised. It’s not only about understanding symptoms, but also about finding a way to express what can’t be understood. In that space, speech circles what has no name, and slowly, something in us begins to shift.
Psychoanalytic psychotherapy matters because it insists on these contradictions and paradoxes. In a culture that reduces us to follower counts, tidy images, and digital affirmations, it defends the right to be uncertain – to be human.
To be human is to be incomplete and imperfect. Psychoanalytic work honours that truth. It doesn’t promise wholeness, but something more valuable: the possibility of living with what can’t be tidied away.
More on Psychotherapy Book an AppointmentRecommended Reading:
- Éric Laurent: Symptom and Discourse
- Bruce Fink: A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis
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