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It is the body and it alone, because it is a two-dimensional being [this means that as embodied we are both sensible and sentient] that can bring us to the things themselves [to participate in the world with others], which are themselves not flat beings, but beings in depth, inaccessible to a subject that would survey them from above, open to him alone that, if it be possible, would coexist with them in the same world. … If it touches and sees, this is not because it would have the visible before itself as objects: They are about it, they even enter into its enclosure, they are within it, they line its looks and its hands inside and outside. If it touches them and sees them, this is only because, being of their family, itself visible and tangible, it uses its own being as a means to participate in theirs, because the body belongs to the order of the things as the world is universal flesh. [Merleau-Ponty, 1964, pp. 136–137]
Ed Tronick’s work helps us a great deal with the messiness of clinical and theoretical psychoanalysis. It is, indeed, a body and bodies that are part of the mess. That Tronick helps with this mess may not sound like much of a compliment, but for me this is one of the highest compliments I might pay to either a researcher or practitioner of psychoanalysis.
If research outcomes could be described in terms of the dichotomous categories of tragic versus romantic versions of psychic and human functioning, Ed Tronick’s findings are deeply embedded in the romantic. According to Tronick’s conclusions, relationships have a level of plasticity, uniqueness, and an embedded indeterminacy, even as one braces for one’s tendencies for repetition. What could be a more exciting credo for psychoanalysis than the notion that change processes must be determined and explored within every dyad, particularly regarding change that is not based on implicit relational affects and intentions? Although all psychoanalysts base their work on the notion that things are overdeterm