On: Seeing and Being Seen

Dear Sirs,

Having read John Steiner's article (2006), I should like to comment briefly on the clinical material, which, I feel, lends itself to being viewed from a different perspective: one which connects the theme of seeing, being seen and shame to the importance of the body in psychic development (Lombardi, 2002; 2003).

When Mr. A saw the loo door ajar and the toilet seat up, and later reported that he had peed, wondering the while whether the two were simultaneously thinking of each other, I would hypothesize that the patient was thus reflecting on having a body that pees, as something he had in common with the analyst. Reading this passage as a communication of the patient's discovery that he had a body, I would view it as a springboard for the entire subsequent evolution.

When the patient subsequently set about looking around, the analyst seemed to offer visibility to elements that characterized the patient's internal functioning. The detail that the papers were ‘more…than he had realized’ apparently referred to his perception of an inordinate clutter of thoughts in his own mind, keeping it, until then, in a state of saturation such that it prevented him from realizing that he had a body of his own. What left the patient ‘in a mess’ appears to have been his unawareness of his own corporeal existence, as a consequence of the lack of maternal reverie (Bion, 1962).

The motive power of clinical evolution here is the patient's discovery of his body, as well as his perception of the disharmony in his body-mind relationship (Ferrari, 2004), which had led him to obscure his own physical existence, or to deny it by means of shame (Lombardi, 2006). The intrusiveness to which Dr. Steiner refers at various points could be connected with the patient's tendency to present forms of physical excitation (unmodulated by thought) which are linked to his internal body-mind disharmony, rather than to a primarily relational event.

I am attempting here to bring out the importance of a mo