People seek analytical consultation because they suffer: something isn’t working as expected. It may be a traumatic event that disrupts a precarious balance with their environment and with themselves, or a persistent repetition of the same discomfort that shows that this balance never existed. In either case, what was previously tolerated becomes unbearable, and the subject seeks relief. This unbearableness has a name: the real. The real presents itself as a symptom, as anguish.
The Uruguayan poet and writer Mario Benedetti said: “When hell is other people, heaven is not oneself.” Freud had already shown something similar: that complaints directed at the world or others must, at some point, be redirected toward one’s own responsibility. The subject does not choose what happens to them, but they are responsible for how they interpret it and how they respond.
Thus, suffering only becomes an analytic symptom when the demand to be freed from it transforms into a desire to know. When you begin to sense that this pain has meaning, even an intimate joy, no matter how contradictory it may seem. And you want to know more, even if you resist at first. This is what we call subjective rectification.
Not everyone is able to take this step. Some shy away from the possibility. Hence the central value of preliminary interviews, where it begins to be determined whether analysis is possible for that particular subject.
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