““What was she asking me? That was, I thought, all I needed to know. That was my profession, after all; if one could never know the answers, once could, at least, know the questions. There were so few to know. Among my patients, every quandary and confusion proceeded from one of the few, the elemental questions: What can I change and what must I accept? Of what, of where, of whom am I the issue? Can the past be touched? Can it be healed? That, as I had understood it, was my task as an analyst: not to answer the unanswerable question, but to accompany my patient to the threshold of the mystery. It was not the answer that healed. Indeed (I thought), belief in answers was the root of all anguish. What healed was the articulation of desire, the act of setting it down, laying it out, offering it up. I believed that it was only in uttering its question - not in receiving the answer - that the soul came into being, released into longing, which is its native element. In such a way I believed myself to be the midwife of the new soul, a creature squalling and alive because hungry and exposed. You see now how I have been repaid for such a belief, such a presumption. See with what new and terrible questions I have been repaid, questions demanding an answer: Who is the killer of Jessica Burke? Where is my daughter?””
