The answer I prefer to this question is: that therapy is about learning to love. Not romantic love, but the slow, perhaps effortful movement from a self-centred position to a participation in the world out there.
We all begin life organised around our own needs. Freud described the infant as a creature of primary narcissism, and much of our subsequent development is the gradual work of stepping outside that centre. Therapy recapitulates this developmental task. It’s a movement from a narcissistic position, of being governed purely by one’s own needs, to a position where others can be known to us as they are, not as extensions or threats or idealisations.
Stephen Grosz, in the book Love’s Labour, suggests that love requires a willingness to know and be known, to give up the illusion that the other exists to mend our past or complete some internal story. Love, in this sense, is not a feeling but a discipline: the discipline of seeing reality more clearly. Therapy practises this discipline first in the consulting room, where the patient slowly discovers who they are and who the therapist is, and what it costs to let another person matter.
Freud once wrote that analysis aims not at bliss but at “transforming hysterical misery into common unhappiness.” It’s a bleak line, but it contains a truth: therapy doesn’t promise a life without pain. Instead, it seeks a life that is not ruled by old compulsions, distortions, or self-absorption. One in which ordinary unhappiness becomes tolerable because one is no longer entirely alone inside it.
Therapy hopefully helps us learn to step out of the closed circuit of the self, see others as separate and real, and care about them without losing sight of oneself. The labour of becoming able to live also in the world, not only in ourselves.
Image credit: Giulia May
