True Names, False Nourishment: Lessons from Earthsea for Clinicians

“Freedom… is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan

I am currently on holiday reading the Books of Earthsea, recently recommended to me. I have been reflecting on the symbol of the labyrinth as part of a series of workshops I am running, exploring myths and fairytales I consider vital for navigating depth psychology theory. The Minotaur and the labyrinth are central among them, revealing the hidden rules, roles, and powers that shape groups, families, institutions, and even nations, and pointing us towards the threads that allow conscious movement through their complexity.

To me, the labyrinth has many faces.

In Greek myth, it is the place where the Minotaur waits, a creature born of secrecy, shame, and unspoken rage, fed by the tribute of the young. In Le Guin’s Tombs of Atuan, it is a darkness tended by the priestess who believes she serves the sacred, until a stranger shows her the way out.

In groups: family, community, therapeutic, professional, institutional, and even national the labyrinth can be the unspoken rules, the inherited roles, the Nameless Ones that shape our movements. We imagine ourselves as guides, yet often we are also its prisoners.

The question is not only how to escape, but whether we are willing to name what lives at its centre.

The Labyrinth and Its Keeper

In 1971, Ursula K. Le Guin published The Tombs of Atuan, the second book in her Earthsea cycle. It is the only one in the series that begins not with the familiar hero Ged, but with a girl, Tenar, taken from her family at the age of five, renamed Arha, “The Eaten One”, and given to the Nameless Ones. She becomes the high priestess of their dark labyrinth, a place of ancient tunnels and shifting shadows.

The labyrinth is hers to command, but she is not free. Its darkness is her inheritance, its rituals her daily bread. Her identity is built from the words of others, the myths and prohibitions of a religion that has swallowed her whole. She polices its borders and guards its secrets, all the while believing she is serving something eternal.

And then a stranger enters the labyrinth.

In the darkness, Ged does not battle her with spells or swords. He speaks to her. He asks questions. He tells her her true name. The encounter shakes the foundations of her world, revealing that the stone passages she thought were infinite are, in fact, a prison. Tenar must decide whether to stay in the familiar darkness or to walk out into the blinding light of a world she has never seen.

The Professional Labyrinth

When I trained as a clinical psychologist, I believed I was being handed the keys to freedom, the tools of thought, the depth of theory, the courage to walk into the minds of others and help them find their way out.

I did not know I was also being handed the keys to a labyrinth.

This labyrinth is not built of stone, but of frameworks, competencies, policies, and professional myths. It has its rituals, reflective practice, supervision, the correct language for reports. It has its sacred stories, evidence-based practice, inclusivity, advocacy. And it has its Nameless Ones, things we do not speak of because to name them would be to threaten the structure itself.

Here, the darkness is not literal but ideological. It is a darkness that flatters itself as light. We speak of critical thinking, but so often it is a performance, a curated posture of inquiry that feels like thought but never risks naming the thing that actually holds power.

In Le Guin’s Earthsea, to know the true name of a thing is to alter your relationship to it entirely. In the profession, we are taught to name distress, systems, and oppressions, but not to name the ways our own training, culture, and careers collude with them.

The Stranger in the Dark

My “strangers” were not visiting wizards, but sudden moments of disquiet, the kind that echo in your chest for years afterwards.

I realised that anything and everything can be a defence, even the interventions I loved, the insights I prized. What is healing for one patient can be a trap for another.

I realised that sometimes healing arrives when I am wrong, or when I am made the hated object. This is not about my ego, my cleverness, or my likability. It is about the patient’s freedom, which may require my undoing.

I realised how easy it is to mistake performance for care, to think that if my emotional reaction looks right, sorrow, outrage, solidarity, then I have done the work. But performative reaction is an illusion of power, like torchlight dancing on stone. It looks like action but changes nothing of the labyrinth’s design.

These moments did not come with applause. They came with a hollowing silence, the way the dark sounds when you hear a door open somewhere you did not know existed.

The Capture Disguised as Criticality

It is fashionable now to identify oppressive forces and offer these as explanations for distress. And this is vital work, to see clearly the systems that wound people is to undo part of their spell.

But what rarely follows is a pathway out, a call to find a place to thrive, to take ownership and agency. Instead, trainees and patients alike are invited to fight the good fight, to become political forces often on behalf of causes preselected by the prevailing ideology.

What is missing is the recognition that thriving into consciousness is itself political, that the most subversive act may not be to recruit others to your cause, but to build a life so rooted, so whole, that it no longer needs the labyrinth’s approval to exist.

Ask yourself, are you dedicating your professional development to enlightening others with the right kind of research or the correct formulating lens? Or are you insisting that your own development, healing, and clear-sightedness are the work?

The Nameless Ones

In Tenar’s world, the Nameless Ones are vast, ancient powers who accept human worship but offer nothing in return but fear.

In ours, the Nameless Ones are harder to see.

Fear,

Conformity,

Careerism,

Cowardice,

Pride,

Ego.

These are not listed in our competencies, but they run through our corridors like an underground river. Speaking them aloud is dangerous because it reveals our complicity. We are not only guides through the labyrinth, we are also its priests.

Even non-conformity can be a false name. Refusal to comply is now often performative, ripped jeans to work, swearing in the team meeting, rolling eyes at policy updates. Such gestures can get confused with courage or giving away power, as if the trappings of rebellion were the same as the risk of truth-telling and connection.

I wonder sometimes if the mess we call resistance is not defiance at all, but ego or pride. Much of this refusal to comply makes people unsafe, patients, colleagues, communities. It renders the rebel unconscious of the power they already hold. They imagine they are giving it away in protest, when in truth they are clutching it tightly, protecting it from scrutiny.

The Nameless Ones are not always the establishment. Sometimes they wear torn denim and the right kind of radical posture.

The Minotaur and the Group-Analytic Labyrinth

The labyrinth has many faces. In Greek myth, it is the place where the Minotaur waits, a creature born of secrecy, violence, and shame, fed by the tribute of the young. Theseus enters the labyrinth, guided by Ariadne’s thread, to confront the creature and find a way out.

From a group-analytic perspective, the Minotaur is a symbol of the unconscious collective forces within a group, the hidden rage, the taboo, the shame that no single member owns, but that all must navigate. The labyrinth is not only physical, it is relational, symbolic, and emotional, a shared psychic structure.

Like Tenar in The Tombs of Atuan, group members can inhabit roles that feel predetermined, the keeper of secrets, the sacrificed, the observer, the disruptor. These roles can feel essential to the group’s survival, just as Tenar believes the labyrinth is hers to command.

The thread, like Ariadne’s or Ged’s presence, is the capacity for conscious reflection and intervention, the link that allows the group or the individual within it to navigate the unconscious currents safely, to confront the Minotaur without being devoured by it.

In professional settings, this metaphor highlights how easily groups can reproduce oppressive dynamics, rituals, and unexamined hierarchies, and how crucial it is for clinicians to maintain a thread of awareness, to hold the space where unconscious power, shame, or fear can be named and metabolised.

Choosing the Light

When Ged offers Tenar the chance to leave, he does not promise her ease. He tells her the world outside is vast, uncertain, and hard. And still, she chooses to walk with him into the light.

Le Guin reminds us, “Freedom… is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one.”

Leaving the labyrinth of clinical psychology, or rather learning to walk its passages without being owned by them, is not about resignation, nor about adopting the correct radical style. It is about seeing both the conformity that flatters itself as service, and the rebellion that flatters itself as courage, and naming them both for what they are.

It is about reclaiming the art of true naming, even when that means naming yourself, your fear, your pride, your careerism, your longing for approval.

It is about the quiet, daily work of building a life and a practice that does not require the labyrinth’s blessing to be real.

Out in the Sunlight

At the end of The Tombs of Atuan, Tenar walks into the open air for the first time since she was a child. The sun is overwhelming. The sea stretches out beyond anything she has ever imagined. There is grief for what she has lost, but also the first taste of her own becoming.

When I think of the profession now, I think of that moment. Not because I believe everyone must abandon it, but because we must all, in some way, learn to leave the tombs we have mistaken for home. Not to burn them down, not to decorate them with brighter slogans, but to know, in our bones, that the world is larger than the labyrinth, and to choose, again and again, to step into its light.

The Hunger of the Spell

Ged, in Earthsea, teaches that if you eat food created by a spell, you are left hungrier than ever. The body has been fed, but the hunger returns sharper, more insistent, more disorienting. It is an illusion of nourishment, a temporary filling that leaves the spirit wanting.

This is profoundly true of performative therapy. When a patient or trainee is met not with genuine presence but with a polished gesture, a rehearsed response, or the comforting posture of knowledge, they feel the effect immediately. They are seemingly fed, soothed, recognised, but the hunger remains. Infact, it intensifies. To have been falsely met leaves one ravenous.

And like anyone starved for long periods, the hunger can become an obsession. Food, or the appearance of care, can feel simultaneously necessary and alien. Something instinctive, vital, intuitive, has been dulled or suppressed. What was once spontaneous and alive has been muted, replaced by an artificial, performative nourishment that fails to connect to the self’s deeper needs.

I learnt that the illusion of control, presented as care, is just that, an illusion. True responsiveness, the kind that meets another human being fully, cannot be performed; it must be lived and attended to with humility, patience, and attention. One must be willing to allow the patient or trainee to lead some of the way, to trust that the direction of growth may not be the one we imagined.

This links directly to the labyrinth, both Tenar’s and the professional one. Just as the walls and passages can mislead, performative care can entrap. It can seduce with the appearance of guidance while leaving the person within hungrier, more confused, and more dependent on the illusory system. The second labyrinth, the one of rebellion and performative non-conformity, can replicate this effect. Clutching onto pride, ego, or ritualised resistance, we may appear to act freely, yet we remain bound by illusions of power and nourishment, the Nameless Ones quietly shaping our steps.

Learning to walk these labyrinths consciously requires noticing when the food offered is real and when it is a spell, when the guidance is genuine and when it is performative, when the light we follow is ours and when it is borrowed. It is an act of continual reflection, and of courage.

Choosing to Walk Into the Light

At the centre of every labyrinth, whether stone, myth, or professional culture, there is a choice. Ged shows Tenar that the darkness she has inherited is not eternal, that the Nameless Ones do not own her, and that her true name belongs to her alone. In therapy, supervision, and professional life, we encounter our own Minotaurs — the unspoken rules, the hidden hierarchies, the illusions of care and power. We are tempted by the spell of performative knowledge, by gestures that feed without nourishing, by rebellion that feels daring but is rooted in ego or pride.

Walking into the light is not easy, nor is it always comfortable. It involves noticing hunger, discerning nourishment from illusion, and following the threads that allow us to move with attention and presence. It is a slow, careful practice, sometimes faltering, sometimes illuminating. The labyrinth does not disappear, and the Minotaur remains, but we learn to walk alongside them differently. There is curiosity, there is awareness, and there is the quiet unfolding of consciousness, one careful step at a time. path, when we step out of the tombs, when we face the Minotaur not as victim nor as performance, we begin to live with clarity, integrity, and agency. The labyrinth does not disappear, but we no longer walk it as prisoners. We walk it as those who have learned the art of seeing, naming, and moving with consciousness, and in that, we are truly free.