Beginning psychotherapy presupposes an essential condition: there is suffering—psychic and sometimes somatic—and a coming to speak, often before what is being lived can be said. Not infrequently, what is experienced as urgent at the outset is not understanding, but relief from intensity, anxiety, confusion, or the effects of an experience that overwhelms and resists naming. The need for relief is taken seriously. In psychotherapy, however, it is not approached as an end in itself, but as a point of departure. Through the experience of speaking—and the time this requires—relief may open a space in which symptoms of psychic distress begin to enter language and acquire meaning. Such symptoms often signal something essential about a singular and unique way of being and relating.