At some point, you have to realize you are in the desert—you have to face solitude. There’s no one else around—not because others are physically absent, but because the responsibility for speaking, deciding, and acting cannot be outsourced.
No one is born in a void. We learn to speak using words that we received from others—from our parents, our community, and society; and carried within them, we inevitably inherit the echoes of the desires, the values, and the logic of those who introduced us to language. Initially, we are literally spoken by language; we unconsciously adopt meanings and ideals that were passed down to us.
While today’s society encourages us to remain there, constantly seeking a new guide or “influencer” to define our reality, there comes a moment when you must detach and find your own way. You must realize that you are not exactly the same as those who came before you or those who stand above you.
Others may advise, prescribe, or choose for you, and at times their guidance may indeed be sound. Yet, that wisdom belongs to them, not to you. Fundamentally, no one can access your unconscious in your place. Ultimately, it is only you who can attempt to say something personal and authentic.
Even in psychoanalysis, this holds true. The analyst can listen, wait, and question. But only you can free associate to see what emerges, letting words outpace what you already think you know.
Solitude is the moment you realize that nobody can be the guarantor of your thoughts, feelings, and desires—and you start taking ownership of your own saying. This is the first step toward analysis: the moment you stop seeking answers in others and begin to risk speaking in your own name.
The Threshold of Analysis
Psychoanalysis is not inspirational quotes or influencer self-help that shields a wounded ego by insisting on how “good” you are and how unfair the “bad people” have been.
This refusal of ready-made comfort is the threshold of psychoanalysis. In almost every other approach—from self-help to behavioral therapies, from coaching to religion, and even in the tactics of pickup artists—there is always someone pointing out the “right” way, the right thing to do or say.
Analysis does the opposite. It invites you to suspend certainties and instead start questioning the desire that may be hiding behind even your complaints. It is a harder, perhaps less appealing path than other counseling methods, spiritual practices, or self-help solutions because it doesn’t aim to comfort and doesn’t provide ready-made answers; yet, in the long run, it is the path that enables change.
Recognizing you are in the desert means you are no longer entirely organized around dependency: in your solitude, you can no longer simply be abandoned, persecuted, or “let down.”
Across many narratives, the desert appears at precisely this kind of threshold. From the forty days of trial in religious stories to modern tales of exiles and wanderers, to the solitary path of a monk crossing an empty landscape, it is the place where familiar supports fall away and a subject is forced to confront what remains when no external authority can decide in their place.
Crucially, solitude is not isolation; it does not mean you must rely solely on your own resources and self-control—that is just another trap. Solitude is the condition where you lean on your unconscious rather than on the continuous support of others or the brittle armor of your own willpower. And this allows you to stand alone and to enter relationships where you can recognize the other as truly other than you—not a “mini-me,” not an alter ego who merely reflects your own logic.
Solitude and the Other
Loneliness is the painful feeling of being cut off. Often, it is the sensation that there is a “me” on one side and “the others”—the world—on the other; it is the feeling that while others form a group or a community, you are excluded, perhaps for personal or ideological reasons. Solitude, however, is a more radical condition. It acknowledges the unbridgeable gap between “I” and “You” that exists always. It is a structural issue, not a personal failure; it is a gap that cannot be filled.
You touch solitude the moment you begin to question your own speech: Where does it come from? Is this what I truly desire, or just what I believe I want? Solitude is the condition for discovering something about you and what works for you, your dreams, your specific logic—distinct from the noise of the world or the comforting narratives of the ego.
Yet, something at our core remains mysterious. There are things we can never fully explain, just as there are truths others can never fully grasp. That gap, that misunderstanding between us and others, is not unfortunate. It is unavoidable. It is the space where we exist.
And precisely because of this, we cease loading our relationships with massive projections and expectations, allowing us to be with others without being crushed by their presence or their absence.
The Third Dimension: The Unconscious at the Center
To be an analysand is to analyze this gap. Much of our psychic suffering arises because we are trapped in the Imaginary—a hall of mirrors where we are obsessed with our self-image or paralyzed by what we imagine others expect.
The trap, however, is that we do not recognize this as imaginary. We mistake fantasy—and at times, even delusion—for external reality; we believe what we perceive is objective truth. Consider, for example, someone who is convinced that “everyone is silently judging me” at work, when in fact they are mostly encountering the severity of their own internal critic, which they then read into the faces and silences of others.
Analysis breaks the loop of the Imaginary by helping us realize that what we think we see, believe, and know is primarily the product of a discourse and a desire that are unconscious—meaning they belong to us, yet remain foreign to us, and in a twisted way are often encountered as something external, coming from others.
Psychoanalysis allows us to go beyond the image precisely by accessing this unconscious dimension.
This is why, unlike other approaches, analysis is unique. It places neither the Ego—conscious thought, rationality, or the search for comfort found in self-help—nor “the others”—how to manage relationships, social norms, or doing “the right thing”—at the center of listening.
Instead, it places the unconscious at the center. It is from the unconscious that meaningful, personal knowledge comes, along with the solutions to problems and the creative inventions of life.
Becoming an analysand means exiting the binary opposition of “me versus others”. It requires starting to speak in the first person—because analysis is a talking therapy that demands the courage to speak—but also to listen. To listen here means to understand analytically, to grasp something Other within one’s own words.
When you begin this analytic work, speech is set back in motion. Certainties are shaken, unconfessable thoughts find a voice, and static statements are dismantled to reveal a dynamic narrative. As this story transforms, reality itself—relationships, work, dreams—begins to shift, for the word does not merely describe the event; it anticipates it.
In doing so, you enter a unique path, much like life itself, because for everyone the trajectory evolves in a way that is singular and unrepeatable.
We may all confront similar questions—about life, death, love—but the life, the events, and the answers you find to these questions evolve singularly. They unfold according to the particular logic of each subject and the specific time of speech. No master—and no algorithm—can guarantee this path or its outcome. What matters is that you remain in relation to your own unconscious desire and speech, for this is the condition for not being entirely governed by loneliness, anxiety, disappointment, or regret.