Vision Without Sight

The Polarity Of Light and dark is a structuring principle of human thought. It is a basic pair from which much else emerges in the development both of cultures and of individuals. The opposites of light and dark are closely related to day and night, birth and death, male and female, good and evil, front and back, sacred and profane, upper and lower, and many others. Often one side of each pair is considered good and its opposite is bad and to be avoided. An important example is the fact that consciousness is often symbolised by light, and unconsciousness is feared as is its representative, darkness.

Of all the human senses, touch is the most primitive and sight is the most important. From time immemorial, the eyes have been symbolic of light and of life, just as the absence of light is symbolic of darkness, death and evil. The power of these symbolic associations has, therefore, given the loss of sight an aura of death, evil, shame, fear and even castration.

The eyes have long been considered to be the windows of the soul. The ancient Egyptians believed that the sun and the moon were the eyes of heaven, with the sun being the right eye and Logos consciousness, and the moon being the left eye, representing Eros consciousness (POPE 16). In many cultures, the right eye has represented aggression and masculinity; likewise, the left eye has represented passivity and femininity. Examples of these meanings can be found in such common phrases as ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ and ‘to kill with a look’. The eyes have symbolically represented not only ego consciousness but also the total self (Ibid. 16). In the English language, the homophony of the ‘eye’ and the pronoun ‘I’ indicate the ancient cultural origins of this association.

In a more practical way, eyes and eye contact for most people are an important part of sexual life. This fact is only infrequently mentioned in the literature of visual impairment. In the psychological literature and in my own clinical experi