I Wish That You Could Stay a Little Longer: Seeing the Image in Psychoanalysis (original) (raw)

5 This article is about the experience of seeing in psychoanalysis. It is a realm of sensation that has been minimized since Freud privileged hearing and the word over the image. I discuss Diana Fuss' study of the architecture of the first psychoanalytic office and Debra Roth's argument for restoring the value of the surface to have a flow between exterior and interior. I present the work of the 10 philosopher, Merleau-Ponty, emphasizing seeing preceding language and the importance of the image for the psychoanalyst. Paying attention to what is seen in dreams, photography, and the psychoanalytic office may bring the analyst into a more vulnerable and fully realized mutual participation with the patient. I have often had the thought that language was not my first language. Seeing was. I saw before I 15 knew. Becoming a photographer, and even a psychoanalyst, emanated from this primary capacity to relate to the world. Early images were my first vocabulary. I can still picture the view out of the window looking onto the firehouse across the street of my first childhood home. A small bookcase that my father built is readily visualized. It had graduated steps on one side that I could sit upon, and the shelves contained mine and my sister's books and toys. Although never formally trained and not 20 especially talented, I have sketched and drawn the world that I have seen around me, since my early childhood. I stuttered as a boy and saw a speech therapist in elementary school. The part of the speech therapy that is most memorable consisted of looking at myself in the mirror, practicing exercises of using my tongue to try to touch my nose, then my chin and then forming it into a hot dog roll. These are all evocative images for me. They connect me to the visual and sensual parts of 25 my childhood, the shame of having trouble speaking and the shy gratitude to that now anonymous speech therapist for helping me to communicate more comfortably. Patients have told me of very early images and other sensory experiences that are strongly and emotionally recalled. A man who was given up at birth by the woman who bore him and was then adopted shortly thereafter, claims to remember as an infant, a strange smell in his new home that accompanied the image of his adoptive 30 mother. He said that he must have known anxiously that he was in the wrong house with the wrong pairing. Multisensory environments are routinely employed for individuals previously isolated by their perceptual disabilities. There is also evidence that multisensory experience aids in learning and retention (Shams & Seitz, 2008). Psychoanalysis can be thought of as a complex learning experience 35 involving emotional, cognitive, and behavioral domains. In this metaphor of learning, the task is to unlearn or relearn the unfulfilling and destructive, relationally held patterns that are maintained outside of awareness. In this article, I emphasize the importance of seeing in psychoanalysis. It is but one dimension of the multisensory experience that is contained in the encounter of analyst and patient and room. I 40 think that this area has frequently been overlooked. The visual field I concentrate upon is the physical existence and appearance of analyst and patient and the object-filled space in which analysis takes place. What surrounds and faces analysts, as they sit in their offices, are essential components