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6th March 1968.
Dear Dr. Gough,
I am sure you don't want this back but I am sending it to you because I thought I would like to write in any case. I hope that you felt that I gave the Medical Section meeting proper publicity.
I want to let you know that you have done something quite important for me in drawing attention to the interaction through the eyes which accompanies feeding in the first weeks. What I have learned has enabled me to step up my use of direct confrontation at certain phases in certain analyses and has had a material effect also on my conceptualization of early relationships. In due course all these things will bear fruit if we live long enough. Meanwhile you will go ahead with drawing our attention to facts. I love to think of all the clinical observations that are waiting for us to make but it is a question of he who hath eyes to see let him hear!
Sometime I want to use what you have shown us in this way, that in using the breast (or bottle) the baby is experimenting in exteriorizing the object, which interferes with the state of being merged in with the mother which obtains as a primary state. The interaction through the eyes seems to me to be holding on to the merging which may very likely facilitate the experiments in the exteriorization of the object. I don't know how to put it better at the present moment.
I would even go on to say that when looking becomes equated with feeding, as when we read, then we begin to want something else to do for us what the eye business does for us when in the original feeding situation. For instance, we might want to smoke. There are all sorts of possibilities here which are simply just fun unless one is engaged in a treatment where these matters may make all the difference between success and failure at a crucial stage of an analysis.
You will see that I am letting you know how much I appreciate what you are teaching us and the sort of limited observations which you can bring forward for us to consider by means of