Foreword

In this set of essays, John Steiner continues the explorations he began in his excellent Psychic Retreats (1993). His chosen task remains intensive scrutiny of those pathological organizations of defences and compromised gratifications that establish and maintain psychic immobility. Narcissistically fragile analysands rely on psychic retreats to protect them from the torments of unbearable anxiety. In Seeing and Being Seen: Emerging from a Psychic Retreat, Steiner analyses the complex network of motives that require analysands to resist any inclination to exit their retreats. Many of these motives are organized around an acute fear of moving toward extremes: in one direction lies paranoia; in the other, melancholia.

Steiner bases his creative and integrative efforts on previous contributions by Freud, Melanie Klein, Rosenfeld, Bion, Hanna Segal, Betty Joseph, Hans Loewald, Michael Feldman, and Ron Britton, to mention only those names that stand out. Additionally, he puts forward fresh ideas on the feelings of embarrassment, shame, and humiliation to which one is vulnerable in settings where one cannot avoid seeing or being seen. To develop this set of themes, he draws on the contributions of a variety of analysts, including self psychological analysts and feminists.

Special mention must be made of Steiner’s emphasis on the subjective experiences involved in beginning to change. What does it feel like to emerge from a psychic retreat? To be the subject of another’s gaze? How does feeling humiliated affect one’s sense of strength and purpose? Which feelings are continually stimulated by being seen

physically and psychically by the analyst? Which are “the words for it” — that is, the words that can help the desperate analysands feel understood and safe? Analysts already have an abundant stock of words they use in their own discourse on the process and problems of change, such as anxiety, envy, loss of omnipotence, dependence, separation and mourning, guilt, and the l