Outsiderness

Emotionally severely suppressed in a childhood in which there had been little tolerance for her developing a mind of her own, she was always anguished and timidly suspicious when facing the world at large. She had survived childhood by living as if in the underground, and it had taken years of difficult psychoanalytic work before she could consider that the world might ever be other than a pervasively dangerous place. So it was, and so, she had felt, it would always be. Yet in our work together she came at long last cautiously to risk regarding the world from a different point of view. Her wariness was voiced in her words, “All right. I'll look at reality—but only as a tourist.”

“Only as a tourist.” In some ways, that is as good as it gets. As loving as our childhoods might have been and as secure as our places in the adult world might seem to be, still our mastery of our selves as well as our sense of well being is always at risk. We may feel at ease in navigating the world, but we were born into a strange universe and venture forth as immigrants into an existence in which we live always, at least in part, “only as tourists.”

However, even a tourist can settle, assimilate, and move from immigrant status to full citizenship. One man in his time not only plays but also contains many parts, parts that are simultaneously true even though they may be contradictory, parts that keep alive varied senses of himself and diverse ways of being. An infant can feel at once both magically powerful and terrifyingly helpless. A child can feel at once secure in the warmth of family love and frighteningly vulnerable to the unpredictability of power. An adult can feel confident approaching the world at large and at the same time know that his or her very sense of being was shaped by the strangeness of the universe into which he or she came into being.