Yes, and this is the most crucial insight—夸父 did not intend to plant the 桃林, just as the analyst does not intend to “heal” in the conventional sense.
• 夸父 did not die to leave a legacy—he simply collapsed in exhaustion.
• The analyst does not “construct meaning” or “solve” the unconscious—they simply engage in the process, and something else emerges.
• The peach grove is not a product of will but a byproduct of failure, of exhaustion, of surrender.
This makes psychoanalysis fundamentally different from philosophy, literature, and history:
• Philosophy intends to clarify.
• Literature intends to evoke.
• History intends to reconstruct.
• Psychoanalysis does not intend—it listens, it waits, and something unintended grows.
1. 無心插柳柳成蔭: Psychoanalysis as an Unintentional Practice
Your 無心插柳 reference is deeply psychoanalytic.
• The analyst does not “cure” the patient in the way a doctor cures an illness.
• The analyst does not “guide” the patient in the way a teacher instructs a student.
• The analyst merely allows the space for something unexpected to grow.
Just as the 柳樹 grows where it was not intended, psychoanalysis works not through force but through accident, through what escapes both the analyst and the patient’s control.
• The real transformation happens not in what is consciously said, but in what slips through, in what grows when both analyst and analysand are exhausted.
• The unconscious is not something “revealed”—it is something that manifests on its own, like the peach grove.
2. The Ethics of Exhaustion: When the Analyst, Like 夸父, Can Do No More
夸父 dies not in victory, not in revelation, but in exhaustion.
• What if psychoanalysis is not about strength, insight, or mastery—but about the moment when both analyst and patient are too exhausted to maintain their defenses?
• What if true psychoanalytic work begins where effort collapses—where the subject can no longer sustain their own repression, but also no longer expects an answer?
This aligns with Lacan’s idea that psychoanalysis ends not with “understanding” but with a shift in the subject’s relation to their own lack.
• The neurotic wants answers.
• The analyst does not provide them.
• In the end, something else grows—neither “truth” nor “closure,” but a different way of living with the question.
3. 夸父 as the Model of the Analyst
This also suggests a radical rethinking of the role of the analyst:
• The analyst is not a wise interpreter.
• The analyst is not a solver of mysteries.
• The analyst is a wanderer, like 夸父, chasing something they will never reach, knowing full well that failure is inevitable—but continuing anyway.
And perhaps this is the true ethical act in psychoanalysis:
• Not to know.
• Not to promise knowledge.
• But to continue the impossible pursuit, and in doing so, unknowingly leave behind the conditions for something else to grow.
夸父 never saw the 桃林—but without him, it would not exist.
The analyst never sees the final “truth” of the unconscious—but without their failure, the patient might never encounter their own becoming.
Final Thought: Psychoanalysis as the Afterlife of Exhaustion
Psychoanalysis is, in this sense, the art of failure:
• It is the failure to fully know.
• It is the failure to reach a conclusion.
• And yet, in that failure, something takes root.
夸父’s death was not the end—it was the condition for something else to begin.
The analyst’s failure is not the failure of analysis—it is the condition for psychoanalysis to truly work.
Perhaps, in the end, psychoanalysis is not about uncovering the unconscious—but about learning to live with the exhaustion of never fully reaching it.
