Everyone needs healing?
11th April 2026
'Everybody needs healing.' The idea may be good business for therapists — but is that really true?
It seems to me to rest on two propositions, both of which deserve scrutiny.
The first is that therapy can cure people.
But cure is the wrong word. What therapy can actually do is bring the inarticulate speech of the symptom into language — making it less necessary. The symptom isn't an illness to be eradicated. It's a solution, of sorts: a way the psyche manages something it can't otherwise say. When that something finds words, the symptom becomes less urgent. That's not a cure. It's a translation.
The second proposition is that therapy can deliver happiness. Here, Freud is instructive. His famously modest therapeutic ambition was to return patients from hysterical misery to ordinary unhappiness. This is often read as pessimism. I think it's
something closer to honesty. Neurotic suffering has a strange coherence to it — it localises and dramatises a pain that is, at its root, simply the human condition: finitude, loss, desire that is never quite satisfied. Therapy doesn't dissolve that condition. It removes the symptom that was, expensively, managing it — and returns you to what everyone else has to live with.
That isn't obviously progress. So why would anyone choose it?
Because ordinary unhappiness is, on balance, preferable to hysterical misery.
Not because it hurts less — it may not — but because it is shared. Ordinary unhappiness is the common currency of being human. It connects us to others rather than isolating us inside a private dramatic narrative. And crucially, it leaves desire free to move — toward work, toward love, toward meaning — rather than locked in the repetitive circuitry of the symptom.
This is, incidentally, where psychoanalytic thinking and Buddhist philosophy quietly
converge. Both suggest that suffering
intensifies when we resist the fundamental unsatisfactoriness of existence. The symptom is one form that resistance takes.
Therapy, at its best, loosens that resistance — not by solving the problem of being human, but by making it more bearable to live with.
So: does everybody need therapy? Probably not. Most people manage their symptoms well enough. But for those whose symptoms have become unmanageable — or quietly, persistently limiting — therapy offers something real. Not happiness. Not cure. Something more honest than either: the possibility of living more fully inside a life that was always going to be, in part, difficult.
That's a modest promise. It's also, I think, a true one.