We do not live by facts alone

Iain McGilchrist’s argument (“The madness of the West”, 16 May) that contemporary culture has become overly dependent on abstraction, categorisation and information resonates strongly with my experience as a psychotherapist.

In psychotherapy, people rarely suffer from a lack of information about themselves. More often they suffer from a lack of meaning. They arrive burdened by stories of conflict, hurt and loss, yet the deepest truths of their experience are frequently not accessible through explanation alone. They emerge first through bodily sensation, image, dream, gesture and metaphor – what Christopher Bollas called the “unthought known”.

McGilchrist’s description of the right hemisphere’s capacity to attend to context, relationship and lived experience captures something essential about therapeutic work. Before emotional suffering can be understood, it often needs to be contained within a relationship capable of receiving it.

Meaning arises not through analysis alone but through attentive encounter. As McGilchrist writes, we mistake information about things for acquaintance with them.

One of the most powerful tools in psychotherapy is metaphor. A client may describe a “ball of pain” in the chest, a storm at sea, a frightened child hiding in the shadows. Such images often carry emotional truth long before it can be articulated in ordinary language.

The task is not to impose interpretation but to remain curious enough for meaning to reveal itself. Through this process the implicit becomes explicit and the previously unthinkable becomes thinkable.

McGilchrist reminds us that human beings do not live by facts alone. We need relationship, imagination, beauty, symbol and story. I see daily how healing occurs when a person feels deeply understood by another and discovers words, images or metaphors that resonate with their embodied experience.

PHILIPPA SMETHURST, DUNS TEW, OXFORDSHIRE

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