“Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” — Ecclesiastes 1:2
The Void Beneath the Surface
There is a quiet despair that can live within even the most functional, successful, and outwardly fulfilled lives. This despair is rarely shouted—it is sighed, shrugged, hidden beneath routines, progress, or even purpose. In the therapy room, it can settle like fog. Not always dramatic, but unmistakably present.
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The question arises quietly but dangerously: What is the point of all this?
The Dangerous Question and the Therapist’s Own Vanity
The question of purpose is often deferred in life—replaced with plans, ambition, children, relationships, or therapy itself. But eventually, for some, the scaffolding collapses. Clients may arrive at therapy when that collapse has begun or when it is already complete. The drive that once fueled their life—career success, family roles, intellectual mastery—suddenly feels meaningless. And therapy, if idealized as a path to healing or growth, can become yet another expression of vanity.
As therapists, we may unconsciously enter into this same fantasy. We hope to help, to repair, to facilitate meaning. But the despair lives in us too. We are not immune to the questions that torment our clients. As Wilfred Bion warned, the analyst must surrender the desire to “know” or “understand” too quickly. He advocated for “faith in the analytic process,” which includes tolerating not-knowing—sitting with the utter absence of meaning when it arises.
This is not a position of helplessness, but of depth. As Bion writes, “The analyst must suspend memory, desire, and understanding,” and that includes our desire for hope, direction, or outcome. Therapy becomes not a cure, but a shared witness to the void. Which really, may only be possible when there is a strong sense of hope internalised.
Transference, Countertransference, and the Fantasy of Meaning
In therapy, unconscious hopelessness is often enacted through transference. The client may feel the therapist holds the key to a life of meaning, expecting them to reawaken a purpose that feels lost. But this projection—this fantasy of the therapist as redeemer—can be quietly destructive.
For the therapist, the corresponding countertransference may take the form of pressure: the need to “restore” the client, to inject meaning into an otherwise barren psychic landscape. Here, Donald Winnicott’s idea of holding becomes vital. Holding does not mean comforting, nor does it mean offering answers. It means staying. Remaining. Facing what feels unfaceable without fleeing into technique or cheerfulness.
When both therapist and client are able to endure this hopelessness without disavowal, something changes.
Ecclesiastes and the Therapeutic Collapse of Illusion
Ecclesiastes names what most of us dread: the futility not just of failure, but of success. It is not that we don’t achieve—it is that achievement itself cannot ultimately satisfy. "There is no remembrance of former things,” the Preacher laments, “neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.” (1:11)
This is a chilling truth, and one that therapy must occasionally confront. Psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden has written about the “analytic third”—the space created by therapist and client together, where new understanding emerges. But before this emergence, there is often collapse: the collapse of self-image, of illusions of control, of the fantasy that therapy or life itself will deliver us to lasting peace.
And in that collapse lies a strange hope.
Despair as a Portal to the Sacred
The deepest therapeutic work may involve not change, but surrender. Not triumph, but humility. As analyst Marion Milner observed, the psyche’s longing is not for answers, but for a capacity to stay with inner experience—however painful. To stop avoiding what feels meaningless and to discover, paradoxically, that it is in that confrontation where something meaningful can begin.
Despair, when faced and not bypassed, becomes a threshold. Ecclesiastes never resolves into optimism, but it does conclude with reverence: “Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.” (12:13)
Whether one reads this literally or metaphorically, it suggests that meaning cannot be self-generated indefinitely. The ego must collapse. Purpose must be relinquished before it is transformed.
In clinical language, this is not far from what Jung meant when he described the necessity of encountering the “shadow,” or what Bion evoked with the idea of O—ultimate truth, unknowable yet real, which can only be approached through surrender, not mastery.
Conclusion: Facing the Void Together
There is something sacred in the moment when therapist and client face the void together. When neither clings to false hope. When both are willing to admit that sometimes life does not make sense, and that therapy may not rescue us.
But it is also in this shared space—of hopelessness survived—that a deeper form of hope begins to stir. Not the hope of progress, but the hope of presence. Not the hope of outcome, but the hope of truth.
And sometimes, through the cracks of despair, something greater shines through. Whether one calls it God, a Higher Power or the Soul, or simply Being—it arrives not because we chased it, but because we stopped running.
"To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” (Ecclesiastes 3:1)
Perhaps therapy at its most honest is not a search for meaning, but a willingness to sit with its absence—and to discover, in time, that we are not destroyed by it but reconnected to our true purpose.
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