When Reason Is Not Enough

Why Understanding Our Mistakes Does Not Free Us From Them

For decades, modern culture has been guided by a powerful assumption: that better thinking leads to better living. If we can refine our reasoning, identify our cognitive blind spots, and correct our errors of judgment, we should be able to make wiser decisions — personally, socially, and politically. Intelligence, in this narrative, is not merely a mental capacity; it becomes a promise of control, progress, and even moral superiority.

And yet, reality stubbornly resists this promise.

Highly educated individuals repeatedly make decisions they themselves recognize as harmful. Professionals trained to analyze risk expose themselves to unnecessary danger. Entire societies acknowledge the catastrophic consequences of their actions and nonetheless reproduce them. Knowledge accumulates, awareness grows — and repetition persists.

Why does this happen?

Why does understanding so often fail to liberate us from what we already know is destructive?

The modern faith in reason

The belief that knowledge leads to freedom is not accidental. It is one of the central pillars of modernity. From the Enlightenment onward, reason has been imagined as humanity’s primary tool for emancipation. Ignorance was seen as the root of superstition, oppression, and suffering; enlightenment, as the path toward autonomy and progress.

This project shaped science, education, politics, and psychology. To know more was to be freer. To think better was to live better.

Even today, this belief quietly structures how we approach personal development and social change. We assume that if people truly understood the consequences of their actions, they would act differently. We invest enormous energy in education, information campaigns, and awareness programs — often with the implicit expectation that insight alone will produce transformation.

But this expectation is increasingly difficult to sustain.

The contribution of cognitive psychology — and its limit

Contemporary cognitive psychology has played a crucial role in exposing the fragility of human reasoning. Research on cognitive biases, motivated reasoning, overconfidence, and self-deception has shown that intelligence does not protect us from error. In many cases, it amplifies it.

We now know that highly intelligent individuals can be especially skilled at rationalizing poor decisions, defending false beliefs, and constructing elaborate justifications for actions driven by non-rational motives. Intelligence, far from guaranteeing wisdom, often serves as a sophisticated defense mechanism.

Books such as David Robson’s The Intelligence Trap have made these findings accessible to a broader public. Robson’s work demonstrates, with clarity and empirical rigor, how smart people fall into predictable patterns of error — and how intelligence can become a liability rather than an asset.

This contribution matters. It reveals how reasoning fails. It dismantles the comforting illusion that intelligence alone is enough.

But it also brings us to a critical threshold — a point where explanation reaches its limit.

The unanswered question

If intelligence can fail, and if we can even recognize how it fails, a deeper question emerges:

Why do we remain attached to our failures even after we understand them?

Why does insight so often coexist with repetition? Why does awareness fail to produce change?

Cognitive models can describe the mechanisms of bias, but they struggle to explain the persistence of certain patterns — especially when those patterns are clearly harmful, consciously recognized, and repeatedly lamented by the subject.

At this point, something else must be considered.

Knowing is not the same as changing

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the gap between understanding and transformation is not a mistake in theory. It is a structural feature of human subjectivity.

Human behavior is not governed solely by conscious reasoning. Beneath our explanations lies another logic — one that does not obey coherence, utility, or even self-preservation. Psychoanalysis names this dimension the unconscious.

The unconscious is not a reservoir of ignorance waiting to be illuminated by reason. It is an active system of desire, fantasy, enjoyment, and repetition. It organizes the subject’s relationship to themselves, to others, and to the world in ways that often contradict conscious intentions.

This is why understanding a mistake does not necessarily dissolve it. In many cases, the mistake is not a cognitive failure, but a psychic solution — a compromise formation that allows the subject to sustain an unconscious position.

From this perspective, repetition is not irrational noise. It is meaningful.

Error as symptom, not defect

Psychoanalysis proposes a radical shift in how we interpret error. Instead of treating it as a defect to be corrected, it approaches certain errors as symptoms.

A symptom is not merely something that goes wrong. It is something that works — at a cost.

A destructive relationship may preserve a familiar fantasy of love or recognition. A compulsive decision may sustain a sense of identity. A self-sabotaging behavior may protect the subject from confronting an unbearable conflict. Even suffering can acquire a function.

In such cases, reason reaches its limit not because it is weak, but because it is not sovereign.

Purely cognitive approaches often overlook this libidinal dimension. They identify the error but miss the investment that sustains it. They attempt to remove the symptom without addressing what it resolves.

No amount of debiasing can dissolve a symptom that fulfills an unconscious function.

Contemporary examples of repetition

We see this dynamic everywhere.

In politics, voters support positions that contradict their own interests, even while articulating sophisticated critiques of those positions. In relationships, individuals repeat the same painful patterns while fully aware of their destructiveness. In professional life, people sabotage opportunities they consciously desire.

These repetitions are often described as irrational. But from a psychoanalytic perspective, they are not without logic. They are structured responses to unconscious conflicts.

Reason explains the pattern.Desire sustains it.

Why psychoanalysis still matters today

In an era increasingly obsessed with optimization, efficiency, and rational mastery, psychoanalysis insists on something deeply unsettling: the subject is divided.

We do not fully know why we do what we do — and this opacity is not a temporary flaw to be eliminated by better data or better techniques. It is constitutive of subjectivity itself.

Psychoanalysis does not oppose cognitive science. It does not deny the value of empirical research on reasoning and decision-making. Rather, it complements these approaches by addressing what they systematically leave aside: desire, enjoyment, fantasy, conflict, and repetition.

Where psychology asks how reasoning fails, psychoanalysis asks why failure persists.

This question is not nostalgic. It is profoundly contemporary.

The resistance to psychoanalysis

One reason psychoanalysis remains controversial is precisely because it challenges the fantasy of total control. It disrupts the comforting belief that human behavior can be fully optimized, predicted, and corrected.

In a culture that values productivity, self-mastery, and transparency, the idea of an unconscious — opaque, resistant, and irreducible — is deeply unsettling. It suggests limits where we would prefer solutions.

And yet, these limits are precisely where suffering speaks.

Beyond explanation

Real transformation does not begin with better arguments. It begins when the subject encounters the limits of reason and confronts what, in their own suffering, resists explanation.

This is the space psychoanalysis occupies — not as a doctrine, but as a clinical and theoretical practice that listens to what reason cannot resolve.

Understanding matters.But it is not enough.

Continue the Conversation

The questions raised in this article are explored in greater depth in my book:

When Reason Is Not Enough: A Dialogue with David Robson

In this work, I engage directly with contemporary cognitive explanations of error while defending the central place of the unconscious, repetition, and desire in human life. It is written for readers who sense that understanding our mistakes does not necessarily free us from them — and who wish to think beyond purely rational models of change.

Read the book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GHQHPHL6

About the Author

Deivede Eder Ferreira is a psychoanalyst, writer, and a member of the Associação Brasileira de Filosofia e Psicanálise (ABRAFP). His work focuses on the limits of rationality, the function of symptoms, and the role of unconscious desire in contemporary culture.

He is the author of Does the Unconscious Desire Determine the Way We Die?, in which he introduces the Theory of Phantasmatic Death, a contemporary psychoanalytic framework that explores how unconscious desire structures not only subjective experience, but also the symbolic logic through which individuals relate to risk, finitude, and mortality.

His research and writing seek to position psychoanalysis as a living and necessary theory within current global debates on rationality, behavior, and human suffering.

Read the book on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0G35RQLZB