Whose Wings Are You Wearing? Icarus, Illusion and Clinical Work

Sometimes in clinical work a particular myth starts to preoccupy me. For a while it was Rumpelstiltskin. Lately it has been the Greek myth of Icarus. One familiar psychoanalytic reading comes from Stephen Mitchell’s 1986 paper The Wings of Icarus, which uses the myth to explore narcissistic illusion. I have been reworking it through a more contemporary group-analytic and institutional lens.

For those who do not know the story, the myth of Icarus is really a story about his father, Daedalus. Daedalus is a master craftsman, trapped on an island prison. To escape, he fashions wings from feathers and wax for himself and his son. When teaching Icarus how to use them, he warns Icarus not to fly too high or too low: avoid the burning sun, avoid the heavy sea mist. Icarus listens, but once airborne he is dazzled by the sheer joy of flight. He rises higher and higher until the wax melts, the wings come apart, and he plunges into the sea.

The story is most often told as a timeless cautionary tale about hubris: Icarus’s youthful exuberance and reckless defiance of his father’s wise limits embody excessive pride, a warning against unchecked ambition that ignores caution, wisdom, and the need for balance. Fly too high in pursuit of lofty exhilaration, the myth reminds us, and fragile social construction will melt under reality’s heat, sending us plunging into ruin. But the longer I work in groups, the less interested I am in Icarus’s overreach and the more I find myself preoccupied with the social life of the wings themselves. Who actually built them? How were they imagined and resourced? What kind of relationships surround their making? And what happens when our only way of staying close to the people we love is to keep flying on wings that were never of our own design?

Icarus does not design or build the wings he flies with. His father does. His father’s craftsmanship carries its own desires: his wish to escape, his ingenuity, his fantasy that cleverness can outwit captivity. The wings are not a neutral experiment. They are saturated with a father’s need for his plan to work.

This is often how narcissistic illusion shows up clinically. Not simply as a private fantasy lodged inside one person, but as something shared and handed down, a piece of relational equipment. A child learns, often wordlessly, that in this family they must be exceptional so that a parent can feel redeemed; that they must adore someone or risk collapse; that “we” are the clever ones, the kind ones, the enlightened ones, and without that shared identity there is nothing to stand on. These are wings. They lift the child into proximity with the parent’s heart, but they also fix the altitude and the route. To stay attached, the child must keep participating in the illusion: I am special, you are flawless, we are not like those people.

Later, in the consulting room, the same wings reappear under the name narcissism. The patient who must be admired to feel real. The patient who must treat the analyst as perfect to feel safe. The patient who can only relate through a glittering merger in which we are uniquely alike, uniquely misunderstood, uniquely right. From a relational perspective these are not only defences or unmet developmental needs. They are also ways of staying in contact with loved objects. To drop the illusion can feel like losing a parent, a partner, a group, or like plunging straight into the sea.

From a group-analytic point of view, Icarus is never just an individual tragedy. He is a group phenomenon. No one flies alone. Wings are built inside families, teams, professions, and institutions. Someone is lifted, someone steadies the flight, someone else stays on the ground. Groups unconsciously decide who will carry hope, brilliance, and risk. They share the fantasy of flight and later disown the fall. When the wax melts, it is rarely only one person who drops. Something collapses in the emotional weather everyone has been breathing.

I am also drawn to Icarus’s sister, Phaedra, who reminds us of another dimension of this collective drama. Where Icarus embodies the danger of soaring too high, Phaedra shows the cost of desire that is too close to home. She is dreamt by her husband into the role of mother to his son, while her own longing is to be the son’s lover. Her story is not only about forbidden love, but about how groups organise silence, projection, and blame. In families and institutions alike, someone is often dreamt into a stabilising role while simultaneously becoming the carrier of unacknowledged longing or shame. Phaedra holds what cannot be spoken for the group, and her collapse reverberates through the collective just as surely as Icarus’s fall.

Together, Icarus and Phaedra show how groups distribute risk and desire. One is chosen to fly, another to burn with longing, each carrying a piece of the group’s fantasy. When either collapses, the tremor is felt far beyond the individual.

Psychoanalysis has traditionally split over how to respond to these wings. One strand, tracing back to Freud and developed by thinkers such as Kernberg, treats narcissistic illusion as fundamentally defensive. Illusions cover shame, envy, aggression, and dependency, and the analytic task is to expose their brittleness and cost. In that spirit we might say to Icarus: these wings are wax, they will not hold, you are not a god and neither am I. The risk is that this can feel like ripping the wings off in mid-air.

Another strand, often associated with Donald Winnicott and Kohut, sees narcissistic illusion as part of healthy growth. Grandiosity and idealisation are treated as the soil of creativity and self-cohesion. The analyst offers a steady, receptive atmosphere in which these illusions can unfold and gradually soften. Here we might say to Icarus: feel the thrill of flying; after years of hiding your wings, let’s see what it is like to feel magnificent together. The risk in this position is collusion. We may enjoy the adoration more than we realise. We may like being the genius father, the indispensable supervisor, the idealised analyst, and find ourselves stabilising the very wings that keep old patterns in place.

A relational and group-analytic perspective asks a slightly different question. Not whether the illusion is good or bad, but what kind of relationship we are being invited into. Grandiosity and idealisation are communications. They ask us to admire in a particular way so that someone can feel real, or to be admired so that agency, conflict, and envy can be avoided, or to join a special “we” that protects against separateness. Illusion is not just in the mind. It lives between people. It organises who can question, who must know, who is allowed to be ordinary.

In groups this often shows up when someone arrives radiating competence. The group quietly allocates them the role of the golden one: the promising trainee, the reflective clinician, the one who really gets it. The pull is palpable. If we keep them aloft, perhaps they will save us, represent us, justify us. It looks flattering. It is also deeply imprisoning. Once in that position, there is no room to be lost or unsure. Uncertainty threatens the group’s shared fantasy that someone knows how to fly this thing.

In practice the work is rarely as simple as either applauding Icarus or shouting at him to come down. If illusions function as invitations, the analytic task is to respond in a way that honours the invitation while leaving room to move. That often means allowing a little idealisation, even enjoying the patient’s excitement about their own capacities, so the pattern can become visible between us. At the same time it means holding a quiet curiosity about what happens when we do not quite meet the script. When we forget, disappoint, or fail to admire in exactly the right register. What terror rushes in then, and whose face appears behind it?

It can feel like learning a dance the patient has been dancing all their life. To refuse to dance at all is usually experienced as rejection or contempt. To dance without ever wondering about the choreography is to confirm that this is the only way they can move with another person. Over time, both patient and therapist begin to learn about cost. The cost of always having to be dazzling. The cost of loving only those who will never see you as ordinary. The loneliness of a life organised around applause. The cost, on the other side, of staying forever in someone else’s shadow, of surrendering imagination and authority, of carrying a quiet fury turned against the self. And there is our own cost as therapists, in clinging too tightly to either position: the comfort of being admired, or the relief of being the one who punctures illusion.

Most of us inherit wings not only from parents but from institutions. Clinical psychology training, the NHS, professional bodies all carry their own narcissistic illusions. We are the compassionate ones in a cruel system. We are evidence-based and therefore beyond reproach. We are the brave critics of power. We are the inclusive future. These are not simply lies. They are organising fantasies that allow people to keep turning up under impossible conditions. Like Daedalus’s wings, they hold real skill and hope, and they also carry disavowed aggression, envy, shame, and grief.

I hear Icarus in newly qualified colleagues who carry the pressure to be the perfect NHS psychologist, the ideal antiracist practitioner, the endlessly reflective clinician who never harms. Flying on those wings is exhilarating for a while. Then something cracks: a complaint, a clinical error, a piece of blunt feedback, or the body finally saying no through burnout. Without spaces that can recognise both the function and the cost of these illusions, the fall is brutal. People blame themselves for not flying correctly rather than questioning the wings they were given or the height they were asked to maintain.

What feels increasingly difficult in contemporary therapeutic cultures is not the presence of wings, but the growing insistence that we treat them as if they are no longer provisional. When flight is taken as proof of truth rather than as an experience to be explored, curiosity can give way to affirmation, and affirmation can harden into doctrine. The invitation shifts subtly from “can you fly with me for a while?” to “you must agree that this is how flying really is.” In those moments, illusion stops being something we can play with and begins to function more rigidly. The danger is not that people want to fly, but that neither therapist nor group feels able to wonder aloud, gently, safely, about the wings themselves: how they were made, what they cost, and whether they truly fit everyone in the room. When that wondering becomes difficult to voice, symbolic space can thin, and the only choices left feel like collusion or rupture.

This is why reflective practice, supervision, and groups feel politically important to me. They can become places where we gently ask what fantasies we are keeping alive for our services and professions, what might happen if we flew a little lower, who we might lose, and who we might finally find.

I do not think the work is about living without illusion. That feels both impossible and undesirable. As Winnicott reminds us, the capacity to imagine, exaggerate, and play is part of feeling alive. The task is not to ground Icarus forever, but to help him develop a feel for the air. In the room that can mean allowing moments of shared wonder at a patient’s creativity or courage, and later wondering together what it costs to feel loved only in that register. It can mean accepting the pull to be wise and good for a while, and then letting some ordinariness show when there is enough trust, and seeing what longings or fears that stirs. It means not rushing to dismantle illusions that are only just becoming safe enough to appear, but also not treating them as sacred objects that must never be touched.

In groups it may mean naming, without humiliation, when we are flying on a shared illusion: that we are the only ones who care, the brave truth-tellers, the broken ones who can never leave. Naming not to strip meaning away, but to allow other stories to exist alongside.

When I sit with the Icarus myth now, I am less interested in the moral about flying too high and more drawn to quieter questions. Who made these wings for you? What did you gain by putting them on? What have they stopped you from feeling, knowing, or choosing? I am curious too about Daedalus and about the parts of us that build wings for others out of our own longings and fears, and that panic when they begin to fly differently.

Perhaps the work, for many of us, is not to abandon flight but to become more honest about the illusions that keep us aloft, and more playful about adjusting height and direction. We will all fall into the sea sooner or later. In the meantime, I wonder what it might be like to fly on wings that feel a little more our own: light enough to change, strong enough to carry some truth, and flexible enough to let others move beside us without burning up.