The discovery of the self through the other

In a meeting of two gazes, there is a mutual act of being reflected. It is not the kind of reflection one encounters in a mirror—passive, mechanical. If another person were to reflect you like a mirror, you would most likely feel disturbed and begin to disappear—almost as if the other were consuming you by taking your gestures, your expression, your posture.

In a meeting of two gazes, there is discovery. Being discovered by the other is also discovering oneself—the other’s gaze becomes a mischievous, creative kind of mirroring. As Thomas Ogden writes in What Alive Means: “An individual cannot grow up in a healthy way without another person whose responses help her see who she is.” It is an exciting, open-ended, and always challenging play.

Meeting the other (including a non-human other) is always an act of discovery. When there is no curiosity, only certainty—a rigid projection of one’s own assumptions onto the other—true meeting does not occur and may become a harmful, erasing experience for the one subjected to the projection (not to mention the sad state of mind of the one who projects). The other ceases to be an opportunity to learn about oneself and becomes, for instance, a hedgehog closed in upon itself, a steel wall from which everything rebounds without penetration, or a black hole that destroys by swallowing.

We want to be seen for who we truly are, so as to feel alive and keep learning, for I believe the infinity of ways in which each person discovers themselves is what makes them who they are. Even if you think you know who you are now, you must keep playing the game—the opposite amounts to a frozen state of non-change, something that does not appear alive.

Ogden refers to Winnicott, for whom “being alive is a ‘creative’ activity; in being alive (as opposed to surviving), one is all the time imaginatively creating oneself.” And yet, there is no change without something unchanging; if we are in a process of discovering, we must be discovering something: “Feeling real is more than existing; it is finding a way to exist as oneself, to relate to objects as oneself, and to have a self into which to retreat for relaxation.” Call it a soul if you wish—like a jellyfish it holds a form made of water, with nerves that spread like roots and branches to touch the world and itself.

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[Photo above by Sergey Filimonov @videoprolab]

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