Editor’s Note: Scratching the Surface: What Does How We Look Have to Do with Who We Are?

Psychoanalytic Dialogues is happy to present three papers by Sarah Schoen, Jean Petrucelli, and Susan Sands, originally presented at the IARPP 2022 meeting in Los Angeles. Their panel, Scratching the Surface: What Does How We Look Have to Do with Who We Are? elaborates a relational perspective that charts distinctions between interiority and exteriority without relying upon the framing device of language. In their theoretically rich and personal papers, we are drawn into clinical space that features the interactive yet nonverbal, unspoken and not-always conscious dimensions of the body’s appearance.

Schoen, Petrucelli, and Sands explore how interiority may or may not show itself on the body and, by extension, express interiority outwardly. Appearance, how do I look?, is mediated by many factors: clothing and manner of embodiment, fashion, adornment, and other indicators of the felt sense of the body. For Schoen, Petrucelli, and Sands, gaps in what is verbalized and what is felt – and gaps between what is shown, what is seen, what is said, and what remains hidden – point to unspoken dimensions of intersubjective commerce that demarcate interiority and exteriority. Such gaps may be witnessed in frank displays of affect (or its absence) and at times when words are severed from affective vitality but interiority nevertheless expresses itself through gesture, posture, and gait. At these moments, the “verbal,” rather than offering a rich domain of symbolic expression, serves only to empty experience of personal meaning and narrative defaults to matters of image, role, or normative expectations.

Making sense of the bridge between internal and external expression of the body – how inner life and externality can feel either connected or disconnected, integrated or fragmented, interpenetrating or severed – is a problem with a long history in psychoanalytic theorizing that has mostly emphasized lacunae in language and the mirror of culture. Likewise, studies of embodied gender a