Essays & Research

Must suffering be given meaning before it can become bearable? From Stoic responses to exile to religious explanations of loss, human beings have often sought consolation by placing suffering within a larger framework of meaning. Yet grief and pain frequently remain even after such explanations have been accepted. In this essay, I question the assumption that suffering must be justified or made meaningful before it can be endured. Drawing on Seneca, Susan Wolf, Thomas Nagel, Galen Strawson, and Lacanian psychoanalysis, I examine how meaning can shift from an account of reality into a therapeutic tool—valued less because it is true than because it provides comfort.

Can a political cause ever justify deliberately targeting civilians? Political violence is often defended through appeals to justice, liberation, security, or collective survival. This essay asks whether an allegedly just goal can make violence against civilians morally permissible. Drawing on Kant's principle that human beings must always be treated as ends rather than merely as means, I argue that targeting civilians instrumentalizes individual lives for a political objective. The essay then turns to Sartre's account of freedom and bad faith. Terrorism does not only end lives; it also destroys the unrealized possibilities contained within them while allowing perpetrators to escape responsibility by hiding behind ideology, authority, or collective destiny. The essay therefore challenges the claim that political ends can justify violent means. Whatever cause is invoked, deliberately attacking civilians denies their dignity, autonomy, and capacity to choose, undermining the very idea of a humane political order.

What does psychoanalytic treatment actually change? Debates about psychoanalysis often begin by asking whether it works. This essay argues that the more difficult question is what "working" should mean. Should successful treatment be measured through symptom reduction, improved emotional regulation, a more coherent personality, revised expectations about the world, or a transformed relationship to desire? I first examine contemporary evidence for psychodynamic and psychoanalytic treatment, including research on Mentalization-Based Treatment and Transference-Focused Psychotherapy. I then compare four accounts of therapeutic change: Peter Fonagy's emphasis on mental functioning, Otto Kernberg's theory of personality integration, neuropsychoanalytic models of predictive revision, and Jacques Lacan's account of the subject's relation to desire. Rather than treating these frameworks as simple competitors, I consider how they describe different layers of psychological transformation. The essay argues that psychotherapy should not be evaluated solely by whether distress disappears, but also by whether a person develops a different way of understanding relationships, inhabiting experience, and responding to unconscious desire.