Seeing and Being Seen: Emerging from a Psychic Retreat

John Steiner's new book is a collection of previously published papers bound together by a detailed overview. He is concerned with patients who have entered into what he termed “psychic retreats” in his well-known earlier work of that title (Steiner, 1993). He says that the “chief new idea” of the present work is that “emerging from a psychic retreat leads to a feeling of being observed” (p. 10). While living within the retreat, patients feel sheltered from their objects’ view, and from within these hiding places their view of their objects is likewise not clear. The two parts of its title refer to seeing one's objects as they are—as a whole—and to being seen by them. Steiner is concerned with the quality of the experience of being seen, and in particular with the dangers of embarrassment, shame, and humiliation to which patients fear they will be subjected when they begin to emerge from their retreats.

He cites many clinical examples to illustrate this shame and humiliation, but none is more affecting, eloquent, or horrifying than the words of the German judge Daniel Paul Schreber, whose illness became famous after Freud analyzed his memoirs. In his delusional state, Schreber expressed the extreme sense of degradation that patients fear will be their lot upon emergence from their retreats:

In this way a plot was laid against me, the purpose of which was to hand me over to another human being after my nervous illness had been recognised as, or assumed to be, incurable, in such a way that my soul was handed to him, but my body—transformed into a female body— …

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was then left to that human being for sexual misuse and simply forsaken, in other words left to rot …. Always the main idea was to forsake me, that is to say, abandon me; … to allow my body to be prostituted like a female harlot, sometimes by killing me and later by destroying my reason. (Schreber, 1903, p. 63; emphases in original)

The present work is a direct outgrowth of Steiner's earlier work. The first pa