The Gaze of the Other: Who We Struggle With for Our Identity
How is our self-image formed? Why do we fear that the way Others see us might differ from how we see ourselves? Can these images ever match? And what does the gaze of the Other ultimately give us? Practicing psychotherapist Maxim Pestov explains.
We can spend a long time reflecting on how we perceive ourselves. It’s important to realize that our own gaze encompasses everything around us—except ourselves. Because we can’t see ourselves, we feel a lack of information and try to find answers from the outside. When disappointed, we attempt to repeat this experience, creating tension that attracts the gaze of the Other, hoping it will relieve us.
Interestingly, this desire often transforms into fear and avoidance of the gaze of others (hereafter: Others, the Other). The first type of fear arises when I suddenly become visible to the Other. For example, when I notice that someone is interested in me or singles me out among others, giving my outline a clear shape. In this case, a person fears that something unintended or hidden will become visible.
There’s also anxiety that my image—the way Others see me—will be very different from how I see myself. Then, there’s a large gap between my self-image and the image seen by the Other. It’s as if my photograph starts living its own life and competes with me for a place in the sun.
The gaze of the Other creates a difference between how I feel myself and how I appear to someone else. This split happens within our own psyche. No gaze of the Other will ever match my own. Therefore, each new gaze brings its own distortion and can even hurt us. Observing the process of being watched, a person is forced to do some work and determine how they appear through the prism of the Other’s gaze.
The inability to do this work without relying on the Other can lead to shame, caused by confusion and the inability to “grasp” the Other’s gaze and give it the desired content. We move between craving the gaze and fearing it.
We simultaneously deal with three phenomena: experiencing (feeling) ourselves, our idea of ourselves, and our image in the eyes of the Other. These experiences do not coincide. I experience myself as a certain constant reality that I encounter every morning. This reality is the result of observation and the way of observing, and for a while, these components are merged. The idea of myself appears when the result of observation separates from the way of observing and begins to exist independently. Then I make some conclusion about myself, inevitably missing something.
The gaze of the Other creates a different version of me, focusing on the aspects visible to them. Thus, the gaze of the Other promises not just to compensate for my own lack of information, but to reveal something else. In other words, the gaze of the Other changes my reality. In the future, I transform these changes into a new idea of myself, feel a new lack of information, and again turn to the outside gaze. But instead of compensation, I only get a new dose of deficiency, which I turn into an additional idea of myself. So, the desire to fill the lack leads to endless development. It seems that the lack (the unsymbolizable reality) needs to be filled, but in fact, it is this very pulsation that keeps us moving.
Development is possible precisely because every time we turn to the environment to return to homeostatic balance, we make a small miss. We try to bridge the gap between experience and idea by turning to the Other, but instead of the expected result, we get a new challenge.
But what we want to get rid of actually gives us strength. This unexpected paradox explains many dead ends we encounter when trying to perceive reality in everyday terms. The rational approach persistently excludes the existence of the unconscious. For example, we get upset when our desires worsen our quality of life, or we’re annoyed by errors and failures in our self-regulation. We try to bring ourselves to “normal,” not realizing that it’s precisely in these mistakes that we find access to our reality, which needs expression.
It’s no secret that the Other not only reflects me and helps me see myself from the outside. Their role in my life is much more fundamental. Remember the statement that the result of observation depends on the observer, and imagine that you are the observed. The Other not only reflects a previously invisible side of my self, but also creates it, observing and making this area visible to me.
We can all recall stories where the power of the Other’s gaze was evident. We feel trapped when caught off guard. All our subjectivity narrows to the small image in which we become visible. At this moment, we become an object, a set of arbitrarily assembled characteristics not only for the Other, but also for ourselves. On one hand, the Other is a necessary element in building our identity; on the other, we constantly have to struggle with this influence. Life ends up divided between two positions: from ourselves to the Other, and from the Other to ourselves.
It’s interesting to consider what happens when we play the role of the Other for someone else. After all, what I do in relation to the Other is not selfless. I see in the Other the lack that escapes me, and they, in turn, see not my lack, but their own. I catch their gaze to gain wholeness, but only increase the gap. So why do I need the Other?
It turns out that this is the only way to overcome the process of symbolic castration, when a field of subjectivity is separated and replaced by a symbol that points to absence but does not fully compensate for it. Symbolic castration occurs at an early age, when some forbidden desire is blocked by an insurmountable law. In such a situation, the Other becomes the embodiment of what is lost—more tangible than a word, but less accessible to possess, since they also do not coincide with how we see them or with whom we need.