The article takes us on a journey between art and psychoanalysis, on the borders of language, of the visible and the palpable, in relation to three periods of time, three places and three people: Kandinsky (Munich, ), Freud (Vienna, ) and Julia Kristeva (Paris, ). The article begins by evoking Kandinsky’s decision to abandon figurative realism in favour of expressing the inner life (“inner resonance”) in the wake of Turner and Impressionism. It then discusses Freud’s abandonment of the neurotica, the adoption of the couch and the method of free association, again reflecting a move away from external reality towards the inner life. Finally, it looks at Julia Kristeva’s idea of the flesh of words, which is another way of valuing the sensorial and instinctual drive dimensions underlying external reality and secondarized thinking. Like journeys, psychoanalysis is an experience of discovery that transforms thinking by opening it up to unexploited fields of thought.