Education, mental health and the arts all share a concern for human beings and for how they live their lives. Living one’s life, and living it well, has always been a challenge – life never simply happens. But what the particular challenges are, differs from time to time, from location to location, and even from individual to individual. In both education and mental health there is a strong pressure to think of being human as a technical problem that in some way can be ‘fixed’ by powerful, research-based interventions. Also arts are quickly turned into an instrument for fixing problems. While such fixing may be possible, and may appear to be quite successful from one perspective, it clearly runs the risk of turning students and clients into objects – things to be acted upon, rather than.