Social mirrors. Tove Jansson’s Invisible Child and the importance of being seen

This article examines the experience of being seen and analyzes its central role in the formation of a coherent sense of self. Tove Jansson’s short story from 1962, ‘The Invisible Child’, serves as the red thread of the article, and the story is analyzed in the light of Donald Winnicott’s work on social mirroring. The analysis is enriched by the psychoanalytic insights of Veikko Tähkä and Heinz Kohut, and complemented by Axel Honneth’s philosophical elaborations as well as by recent developmental findings as presented by Vasudevi Reddy. The article is divided into an introduction and three sections. After summarizing Jansson’s story in the introduction, the first section elaborates and examines different senses of social invisibility. The second section assesses developmental factors that promote social invisibility and highlights the importance of being seen. The third and final section interprets Jansson’s story as an analogy to an intensive therapeutic process, while pinpointing those elements that facilitate the restructuring of a disturbed sense of self. As a whole, the article thus discusses an issue that is often simply taken for granted in discussions of empathy and interpersonal experience: social visibility.