The Missing Alma

It's been said of Giacometti's sculptures that they express not so much themselves as the distance between themselves and their viewers. I understand this to mean that they express the perceptual distance that is brought about by desire. Longing for the desired object intensifies our sense of distance from it, and renders that space infinite and impossible to traverse. The same was true of being with my patient Alma. Her presence suggested a distance that seemed impossible to cross.

At first I thought that the sense of untraversable distance had to do with her beauty, and more particularly, with the state of “objecthood” that beauty confers. When I first saw her I was reminded of the poet Shelley's word-pair “mute marble.” I thought at the time that the experience of being with her was akin to an experience with a statue at a museum—the sort of experience one would never describe as “shared” or as an experience of spending time together, even though you certainly do spend time in the same space. An experience very much rooted in the subject/object relation, hindering the emergence of an intersubjective one.

Beauty, particularly of Alma's otherworldly and unyielding kind, often seems to erect around itself a sort of invisible barrier which appears to emanate from the object itself, as though a door is being closed in your face. Aesthetic perfection suggests a completeness upon itself, a self-possession, and a self-sufficiency. Thus, inherent in its allure is a gesture of exclusion—and the sensation of loneliness is never far off.

Indeed, coming across beauty, in particular the beauty of the human form, people assume that there is nothing they can add to, or enhance, about it and feel superfluous around it. Moreover, there is a tendency to feel that their engagement with it is liable to spoil or contaminate it, since their gaze is always ineluctably connected to their bodies, and as such is never pure. Indeed, the shelter from the threat of the real of the body that beau