Therapy, Art, and the Limits of Knowing Ourselves

There’s a quiet fear that follows some people into therapy: the worry that too much introspection will kill their instinct. That digging too deeply into the self might trap them there, turning life into a loop of over-analysis. There is a grain of truth to it. At its worst, therapy can become self-referential, a kind of emotional echo chamber where nothing changes, only churns.

But that isn’t good therapy.

Good therapy doesn’t lead us inward and keep us there. It clears the path so that what lives inside us. Our desires, instincts, creativity and vitality can move more freely. It doesn’t kill the Id, that Freudian force of raw instinct and drive. If anything, it refines our relationship to it.

I heard Joanna Lumley once say that young people shouldn’t try to "find themselves" through thinking or introspection, but by doing. By living. That rings true, and it doesn’t just apply to youth. Maybe we all need to turn away from the vanity mirror now and then and find ourselves in motion. In creation. In risk.

Nick Cave, in one of his deeply reflective letters, responded to a woman from Norwich who asked about grief. His answer wasn’t clinical. It was poetic. He spoke of grief as a wound that opens us. Not to self-knowledge, necessarily, but to beauty, to art, even to the divine. He wasn’t telling her to figure herself out, but to stay close to the ache, to let it move through her and make something.

In his view, the wound itself becomes a portal — not to certainty, but to a larger, more mysterious life. And that resonates deeply with the kind of therapy that honours, rather than fixes. That bears witness to our pain, rather than pathologizing it. That makes room for transformation without needing everything to be understood.

There’s something deeply important there. Therapy doesn’t promise neatness. It doesn’t offer final answers. It doesn’t try to solve the mystery of who we are. Because maybe that mystery isn’t meant to be solved. Maybe it’s meant to be honoured.

And perhaps the fear of over-analysis is overhyped. We’re not going to "over-know" ourselves. It’s not possible. There will always be parts of us that are unconscious, symbolic, mysterious. That’s not a flaw, it’s a feature.

Maybe we all need to turn away from the many mirrors of the modern world now and then and find ourselves in motion. In creation. In risk.

Good therapy, I think, aligns with that. It doesn’t cage us in self-analysis, it helps us move more freely through the world.

The work doesn’t end with understanding and maybe it doesn’t end at all. Maybe the point is simply to keep showing up: not just to the self, but to the relationship, the risk, the unknown.

To live it, not solve it.

And maybe that’s what good therapy does, helping us step away from all the reflections of who we’re supposed to be, and return to something more original. Not the image, but the instinct. Not the performance, but the pulse.

The place where art begins.