I had a lively conversation with a French psychoanalyst, Claude. We exchanged thoughts about what psychotherapy is about. At a fragile yet deeply honest moment, we looked at each other; more than fifty years of shared experience gazed back, and we quietly admitted that we didn’t know. There are rare moments in life when we must simply bow to the mystery of being human on this planet.

Then he showed me a painting he had created the day before. “My unconscious painted it,” he said. And I wondered, how different would it look if his conscious mind had held the brush?