“There are only two tragedies in this world: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it” (Oscar Wilde).
There is darkness within the desire that haunts many. In its rawest form, desire is a predatory entity whose constant pursuit can haunt both the individual and society. Therefore, we try to subdue, regulate or suppress it. However, there is a hidden cost. When the desire is gone imagination and rather than the emotional life being symbolically altered, it not only diminishes our psychological vitality but may leave the body more vulnerable to disease. Between infinite expression and repression lies a third path: symbolic elaboration, the psychological work that transforms desire into mental vitality that helps sustain mind and body.
The temptation of purpose
The evidence of purpose is compelling and valid. Researchers are studying in Japan two — roughly “what makes life worth living” — found that adults without it had a 50 percent higher risk of dying over a seven-year period.1 2026 year meta-analysis Nearly half a million participants confirmed a global model: purpose in life was associated with a roughly 30 percent reduction in mortality risk, even after controlling for behavioral and clinical risk factors.2 Purpose seems to keep us alive. What could be dangerous about it?
A goal, as Aristotle understood, is never a goal you set. It was the inner movement of the living being toward its full expression—the telos, the inner movement bound to the organism itself. 3 But modern goal science has replaced this with something more subtle: conscious intention, goal orientation, a reason to get out of bed. The scales that produce these impressive death statistics do not measure Aristotle’s prosperity. They measure whether you can articulate your plan.4 And a plan, no matter how serious, is not the same as the deep spiritual vitality that keeps the body alive.
The problem is that purpose and spiritual vitality are not the same thing. Clinicians working in psychosomatic medicine noticed this decades ago. Pierre Marty and the Paris School of Psychosomatics described patients who were goal-oriented, efficient, and even highly functional, but whose bodies were at risk. He called them cognitive style operational thinking: mechanistic, devoid of reality-based thinking fantasydevelop imaginatively and emotionally.5 It is like a mind that is only purposeful. According to the Paris School, when an emotional experience can no longer be processed psychologically, the risk of serious physical illness increases.5
A closely related construct of alexithymia—difficulty in identifying emotions, narrow imagination, externally oriented thinking—is consistently associated with somatization. chronic painand medically unexplained symptoms.6 Thus, somatization can be understood as the body’s expression of what the mind cannot symbolically develop—an emotional arousal that finds no outlet in imagination, language, or relationship.8 A person can have all the reasons to live and still lack the spiritual vitality to do so. What is missing is not the goal. What is missing is desire.
Desire and its symbolic life
If purpose without spiritual depth weakens the body, what protects it? Marty believed that it was the mind’s ability to visualize symbols—the ability to transform raw emotional energy. dreamsrather than allowing images and meaning to be expressed through the body.9 Rosenberg called this process a “life preserver” and noted that when it fails, the body becomes progressively weaker.10
Clinical evidence supports this view. Improving mentalization – reduces the ability to understand the mental state of oneself and others depression, worryand physical symptoms during psychosomatic rehabilitation.12 Short-term psychodynamic psychotherapyit restores symbolic and emotional processing, significantly reduces physical symptoms, and benefits last over time.13 Even expressive writing—putting feelings into words—can reduce physical symptoms. In one study of 277 kidney cancer patients, it improved physical activity and reduced symptoms over 10 months.14
The processes that protect the body are surprisingly simple. One of them is daydreaming, which occupies 30-50% of waking life and is intensified when close relationships are focused on. happinesslove and connection.15 They include creativity, closenessand the naming of feelings is the symbolic life of desire, which allows the mind, not the body, to have emotional experience.
Wilde’s paradox of not getting what you want is as tragic as not getting what you want cynicism. This is a clear description of the nature of desire: desire is never ultimately satisfied, and that is its power. Tragedy is not in desire. It is the belief that doing will end the desire, or worse, stop wanting at all. What Aristotle called an end was never an end—it was a living movement toward perfection. Modern science has preserved the word but lost the action. This action is desire. The recipe is not to leave you goals but tending to the inner life that sustains them—dreaming, feeling, letting the imagination do its quiet, vital work. Your body will listen.
