Blog Post
What is therapy for?
12th December 2025
Freud's answer to this question is deliberately deflating. The aim of psychoanalytic treatment, he said, is to transform "hysterical misery into common unhappiness." At first reading this sounds almost perverse — a definition of success that includes the word unhappiness. But the more you sit with it, the more precise it becomes.
Symptoms, for Freud, are not malfunctions. They are utterances — incoherent ones, spoken by the body because they cannot yet be spoken in words. The conversion symptom, the compulsion,
the inexplicable anxiety: each is saying something that the subject has not yet found a way to say directly. The body becomes a kind of reluctant spokesperson, carrying meaning it was never designed to carry.
Lacan pushes this further. The symptom is not merely a disguised communication waiting to be decoded; it is structured like a language, woven from the same signifying material as the rest of the subject's unconscious life. It has a logic, a position in the subject's economy of desire, a relation to the Other. To treat it as a problem to be removed — through technique, reassurance, or behavioural rehearsal — is to silence a voice
without hearing what it was trying to say.
The aim of therapy, on this account, is to relieve the body of the job of speaking. To take what has been forced into symptom and return it to speech — not to explain it away, but to give the subject a different relation to it. As the unspeakable becomes speakable, the symptom loosens its grip. Not because the difficulty has been resolved, but because the subject no longer needs an emissary.
This is not a cure into happiness. It is a return to the common unhappiness of being human — which is, Freud quietly implies, quite enough to be going on with.