Navigating existence as a being that speaks doesn’t come without disorientation.

Sometimes an encounter may be lived both as fantasy and entrapment. Repetition may become a reminder of pain—or pain itself may become the reminder that something insists on repeating. One’s go-to remedy may be strong enough to reshape the circle into an image of a cure.

Other times, the act of “saying” might be downplayed as an act and stick to meanings and narratives that are alienating of the speaker. Words might appear as pointers, as image, as a strike, as memory, as affect and surprise… or sink into the dark elements of what is impossible to say. Desire may be read as absolute impossibility, something to defend against in the name of a bodiless ideal. Symptoms, anxiety, inhibitions may mark or erase the limits of what we didn’t know we actually knew.

Will there be a final answer before a pause that is pregnant with your own questions? Will guilt determine value regardless of the recognition choices being made? Will adaptation and relief suffice for one who has something to say?

I am a Brazilian psychoanalyst practicing in Nashville and Director of the Research Laboratory on Psychoanalysis and Translation at the International Institute of Psychoanalysis (IIP). I work with analysands internationally and domestically in Portuguese, English, and Spanish.

Here is a form for when the time to speak comes.