Blog

Dr Rodolfo Llinas, a neuroscientist, was once asked for his opinion on eternal love and replied: "That is the preserve of geniuses alone". Outrageous as it may be, this statement nevertheless contains a grain of truth and offers a useful insight into how we assess romantic relationships. Llinas suggests that we should never take the success of our romantic relationships for granted. To envisage the highest form of intelligence at work in a couple’s future is to recognise ju

Cambalache, Enrique Santos Discépolo, 1934. Translation by Alberto Paz. That the world was and always be filth, I already know… In the year five hundred and six and in the year two thousand too! There always have been thieves, traitors and victims of fraud, happy and bitter people, valuables and imitations But, that the twentieth century is a display of insolent malice, nobody can deny it anymore. We lived sunk in a fuzz and in the same mud all well-worn… Today it happens it

The introduction of a special type of homosexual who exists "less exclusively beneath of Saturn’s outrider", whose material pleasures know "certain imperious localizations" and who "would shock most people by theur avowals" should, however, caution us against hastily equating the various characters that populate Proust’s theory of sexuality with analytical concepts such as identification, the ego ideal, object choice or the "melancholic formation of gender", until we have ass

Reich writes: "l’homme doit de souffrir au fait qu’il est la seule espèce biologique capable de détruire sa propre fonction sexuelle naturelle ". Let us set aside this meager, yet stinging observation that the English original is, on this point, far more categorical than its French version: "man is the sole biological species that has destroyed its own natural sexual function and is sick as a consequence of this." There are, in fact, two important differences whose scope exce

"There is nothing more disastrous than the encounter of two idiosyncrasies, mutually attracted by the incommunicable which they assert, and which thus sympathize with the exterior by virtue of a semblance of affinity, but which must to hate one another for the same reason as soon as one succeeds in imposing oneself on the outside by means borrowed from a set of conventional signs—hence by true or false adaptation to common sense—the reason for the other to cry out trea­son, s

According to the basic text of Narcotics Anonymous, a person is an addict when their life is controlled by drugs: “Our whole life and thinking was centered in drugs in one form or another—the getting and using and finding ways and means to get more. We lived to use and used to live. We are people in the grip of a continuing and progressive illness whose ends are always the same: jails, institutions, and death”. In the paragraph cited, the scientific-medical status of Narcotic

We know of an organism which, before becoming a plant, possesses a nervous system with a vestibular organ crowned by an eye, which in turn is mounted on a peduncle [Llinás, 2002]. Its entire life consists of filtering water and reproducing by budding. In its larval stage, it is equipped with a ganglion comprising three hundred cells which, like a central nervous system, guides it for a day, or even less, until it has finally found a comfortable spot where it can settle: “The

Psychiatry weaves the field of its practice around the madman and with its instruments (cold showers, the rotary chair...). We pretend to ignore this violence—primary in relation to said centering—that by wanting to "place him at the center," the psychiatrist adjusts, levels, flattens this field that madness destabilizes, at the very moment it fails to conjure its appearance: we never speak of the "madman" without making him a noun, without producing him in his place and, cro