Numinous

James Tobin, Ph.D.

Key Points

• The past may be historically complete without being psychologically complete. Certain experiences acquire dimensions of meaning only after we develop the emotional and existential capacities to perceive them.
• Memory is not simply the recovery of something previously known. A familiar memory can acquire new significance because the person remembering it has changed.
• Psychological development can change how we understand the people in our past. As we grow older, we may recognize feelings, struggles, and vulnerabilities in others that we were not capable of seeing earlier in life. These new perceptions can deepen our understanding without erasing what we originally experienced.
• Psychotherapy can bring us into contact with aspects of our lives that were previously unavailable to us. Such encounters may involve recognizing the limitations of what we had once been capable of perceiving.
• The numinous may arise when an ordinary autobiographical experience becomes briefly extraordinary. Something intimately familiar exceeds our established account of it, and we encounter our own lives with a mixture of recognition, estrangement, and wonder.

Several years ago, a patient whom I will call Michael, began a session by telling me about a photograph he had found while cleaning out his mother’s house. There was nothing remarkable about the picture. He was perhaps eight years old, standing beside his father near the edge of a lake. His father had one hand resting lightly on his shoulder. Michael was smiling toward the camera; his father was looking somewhere else. He had seen the photograph many times before, but now he could not stop looking at it.

His father had been dead for more than a decade. During treatment, Michael had spoken about him frequently: his reserve, his discipline, the disappointment that appeared whenever Michael performed poorly, the almost complete absence of physical affection. None of this was new. Michael had thought about his father for years and believed, with some justification, that he understood the relationship reasonably well. Yet something in the photograph unsettled him. He studied his father’s face for a long time and finally said, “He looks sad.” I asked whether he had ever thought of his father as sad when he was growing up. “Not really,” he replied. We sat quietly for a moment before he added something I have remembered ever since: “I don’t think I was old enough to see him.”

Nothing dramatic happened during the rest of the session. No forgotten memory emerged. Michael did not forgive his father, nor did the familiar account of childhood suddenly collapse. Yet during the months that followed, his father began appearing differently in his memories. The stern man at the dinner table remained stern, and the father who demanded achievement remained demanding, but other details acquired weight. Michael remembered his father sitting alone late at night after losing a job. He remembered overhearing his parents arguing about money. He remembered his father standing outside the hospital room in which Michael’s grandfather was dying, apparently unable to enter. None of these memories was new. What had changed was the person remembering them: the child had experienced the father, while the adult was becoming capable of encountering the man.

I have returned to Michael’s sentence because it seems to name something psychotherapy often reveals but does not quite have language for. We usually assume that if something important happened to us, its psychological meaning existed at the time and was either understood, misunderstood, repressed, defended against, or forgotten. Yet there may be another possibility. Perhaps certain meanings do not yet exist for us because the mind capable of receiving them has not yet developed. The experience occurs first, but the perceiver required to apprehend more of what the experience contains may arrive years or even decades later.

The Scene Had Not Changed

Psychology usually imagines development moving forward. Childhood establishes forms of attachment, expectation, defense, identity, and perception; adult life then carries those structures into new relationships. Psychoanalysis complicated this model from the beginning. Freud’s concept of Nachträglichkeit, usually translated as deferred action or afterwardness, suggested that later experience can alter the psychological significance of earlier events. The past acts upon the present, certainly, but the present also reaches backward and reorganizes the past. Psychological time does not move in only one direction. The concept has subsequently received considerable attention in psychoanalytic writing on trauma, memory, and temporality (Freud, 1895/1950; Laplanche, 1999).

The idea becomes more interesting when removed from technical language. A seven-year-old can experience his father’s silence but cannot necessarily understand humiliation, unemployment, marital despair, mortality, or the terror of failure in adulthood. A twenty-year-old daughter can experience her mother’s intrusiveness but may not yet possess the emotional capacities required to recognize the fear of abandonment beneath it. A thirty-year-old man can condemn his father’s emotional distance; at sixty, after confronting his own limitations as a husband or parent, he may encounter the same memory in a different number of dimensions. What was once visible as severity may later contain fear; what was experienced as indifference may also reveal incapacity; what felt like omnipotent parental authority may become recognizable as the improvised behavior of a frightened adult.

Later understanding does not invalidate earlier experience. Michael’s perception of his father as frightening did not become mistaken because he could now see sadness. Nor does seeing the father’s vulnerability excuse whatever injury his severity produced. The development lies precisely in Michael’s increasing capacity to hold more than one perception without requiring one to abolish the other. The childhood perception remains true, but it is no longer required to be the only truth.

There is, however, a clinical complication worth considering. A patient who begins to understand an injuring parent may not necessarily be developing greater psychological freedom. Sometimes understanding becomes another way of accommodating to the parent. A woman who spent her childhood anticipating her mother’s distress may arrive in therapy with an elaborate understanding of her mother’s loneliness, deprivation, and emotional limitations. She can explain almost everything about her mother except why she herself remains so frightened of disappointing her. When she announces that she has finally come to understand her mother, the therapist might reasonably wonder whether the new understanding has enlarged her psychological life or merely provided a more sophisticated justification for surrendering it. Seeing more is not necessarily the same as becoming freer to see.

We might ordinarily call this maturity, but the word is too broad. Something more specific has occurred: the person has acquired new perceptual capacities. Development, in this sense, is not merely the accumulation of knowledge, better judgment, or improved emotional regulation. Parenthood may make certain aspects of one’s own parents visible. Illness may alter the meaning of the body. Bereavement may change the scale of ordinary domestic intimacy. Aging may alter the emotional proportions of ambition, regret, beauty, time, and opportunity. The facts remain where they were, but the mind available to receive them has changed.

An experience is not necessarily psychologically complete simply because it is over. Some experiences remain open because the person who lived them did not yet possess the capacities required to know fully what had happened. The event belongs to the past while portions of its meaning may still belong to the future.

What Time Makes Possible

A woman whose mother died when she was twenty had spoken often in treatment about the loss. She remembered the hospital, the funeral, the sudden practical responsibilities, and the strange unreality of returning to college afterward. She had mourned. She had thought about her mother for decades. Nothing in the history appeared inaccessible, and she did not experience herself as having avoided the loss.

Years later, her own daughter turned twenty. Around that time, memories of her mother began returning with unusual intensity, but their emotional emphasis had changed. She was no longer primarily remembering the young woman who had lost her mother. Instead, she found herself imagining her mother looking at a twenty-year-old daughter and knowing that she would not see what happened next. She became deeply distressed and initially described this as renewed grief, but that description seemed incomplete. Something genuinely new had appeared inside an old memory. At twenty, she could understand losing a mother. She could not yet understand what it might have meant for her mother to lose a daughter. That meaning required another twenty-five years of life.

This is one reason I have become cautious when patients say, “I’ve already dealt with that.” Perhaps they have. But the person who dealt with it may no longer be the person remembering it. A memory can become psychologically new because the self has changed around it. We usually imagine memory as retrieval, a backward movement in which the present reaches into storage and brings something forward. But certain memories seem to operate differently. They remain available, sometimes almost inert, until later experience supplies a dimension that could not originally be perceived. Contemporary research on autobiographical memory and its reconstructive character offers a complementary, though not identical, account of how present perspectives shape the recollection of earlier experience (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000).

Some memories seem to wait upon capacities that will develop only later. They are not necessarily buried, repressed, or forgotten. They may be remembered perfectly well. What remains incomplete is not the factual memory but the relationship between the memory and the person capable of receiving it. Grief, parenthood, erotic love, failure, age, illness, responsibility, or the recognition of mortality may eventually provide the missing dimension.

This does not mean that every trivial recollection contains a hidden message. Psychotherapy becomes absurd when every object in memory is treated as encrypted symbolism. But certain images survive with disproportionate vividness: a stairwell, a father’s coat behind a door, a mother standing at the kitchen sink, the smell of a car, the light in a childhood bedroom, someone standing at the end of a hallway. Whole years vanish while these fragments remain. Perhaps what persists is not always what has been most fully processed. Sometimes what persists is what has not yet finished becoming experience.

The Future Inside the Past

We ordinarily imagine that the future is open while the past is closed. The future contains possibility; the past contains facts. Historically this is true, but psychologically the arrangement is more complicated. A person we hated may become more complicated. A relationship we idealized may reveal injuries previously invisible. Something once experienced entirely as humiliation may later contain grief. A childhood adaptation once regarded as weakness may become recognizable as an intelligent response to an impossible situation.

There is something quietly subversive in this. It means that we do not merely carry earlier selves forward. Later selves continue altering what earlier experience can become. Adult development therefore may be less linear than the conventional language of stages suggests. We do not simply leave one period behind and enter another. We repeatedly circle back, carrying capacities acquired later into scenes lived earlier, and those scenes change because another consciousness has entered them.

A parent dies and a childhood argument changes. One becomes a parent and a remembered look on one’s mother’s face changes. One reaches the age a father was when he seemed impossibly old and suddenly discovers how young he had been. One suffers professional failure and sees differently a parent whose career once appeared merely disappointing. One experiences a child’s withdrawal and understands, perhaps reluctantly, something about a mother whose neediness had seemed only intrusive. The later life does not merely follow the earlier one; it becomes one of the conditions through which the earlier life can finally be perceived.

This does not mean that later interpretations are necessarily truer. Age confers no automatic wisdom, and retrospective understanding can distort as readily as immediate perception. The adult can sentimentalize the past, exonerate people who should remain accountable, or impose a coherence that never existed. What development makes possible is not a final interpretation but a larger field in which earlier interpretations no longer possess exclusive rights over experience.

The therapist’s participation in this process introduces another complication. Psychotherapy does not simply provide a neutral setting in which the patient discovers new perspectives. The therapist brings another subjectivity into contact with the patient’s established account, and that encounter may disturb what previously seemed settled. A patient describes a marriage as entirely loveless, yet spends twenty minutes recalling the extraordinary care his wife provided during an illness. When the therapist wonders aloud how these memories belong to the same marriage, the patient may feel misunderstood, even accused. The therapist has not necessarily offered an interpretation. Two accounts that had remained psychologically separate have been brought into collision. What happens next depends partly upon whether the patient can bear the disturbance without requiring one account to eliminate the other. Such moments are central to relational and intersubjective understandings of therapeutic change (Benjamin, 1990; Mitchell, 1988).

What the Poem Could See

Poetry has long understood this temporality more intuitively than psychology. The great retrospective poem does not merely remember well. It creates a field in which two consciousnesses can occupy the same scene: the person who originally lived the experience and the person who has become capable of seeing something different later. The distance between those two minds is not a problem the poem needs to solve. Very often, it is where the poem lives.

Anthony Hecht’s “A Hill” is almost a pure example of this structure. An ordinary childhood landscape returns after years of absence with an emotional force disproportionate to its narrative importance. The adult speaker does not recover a secret explanation that settles the image. The hill becomes psychologically alive because it has survived long enough to encounter another consciousness. What matters is not simply that the adult remembers what the child saw, but that the adult can now see the child seeing it. The remembered scene retains something that interpretation cannot exhaust.

That quality matters to psychotherapy because therapy can become too efficient when it assumes that every enduring image must eventually surrender its meaning. Sometimes an image becomes more psychologically valuable precisely because it resists final interpretation. The remembered hill, the photograph, the father’s face, the room at the end of a hallway may not be puzzles awaiting solutions. They may function more like enduring forms into which successive versions of the self bring different capacities for perception.

Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room” stages another version of the same phenomenon. A child sitting in a dentist’s waiting room suddenly confronts the bewildering fact of being an “I,” a separate person who nevertheless belongs to the same human world as everyone around her. The adult poet possesses capacities the child did not, but Bishop does not allow adult understanding to colonize the child’s astonishment. Both minds remain present, and this seems essential. Retrospective consciousness is deepest when the adult sees more without requiring the earlier self to have been wrong.

Seamus Heaney’s “Clearances” brings this structure into grief. Ordinary acts between mother and son—peeling potatoes, folding sheets, the small choreography of domestic life—acquire another emotional dimension after death. The memory does not become meaningful because Heaney discovers that these gestures secretly represented something else. Mortality changes their scale. What once belonged to the unnoticed repetition of daily life becomes irreplaceable precisely because it cannot occur again.

Larry Levis’s “Winter Stars” also returns to the father, but across a landscape altered by aging and illness. Distance, disappointment, tenderness, and mortality begin to occupy the same emotional space. The father becomes more complicated not because the poem reaches a kinder verdict, but because time has made more of him visible. Robert Hass’s “Meditation at Lagunitas” introduces still another difficulty: language allows us to recover and preserve the particular while simultaneously announcing our separation from it. His observation that “a word is elegy” captures the paradox with extraordinary economy. Naming brings experience closer by acknowledging that the thing itself cannot be contained by its name.

Psychotherapy lives inside this same paradox. We need words because experience that cannot be represented remains difficult to contemplate, yet words are not the experience. “My father was sad” does not contain the father beside the lake any more than an interpretation contains a childhood. The deepest poems do not solve this problem. They become capacious enough to live inside it, allowing language to approach experience without pretending to exhaust it.

Perhaps this is why poems change as we age. We say that we understand them differently, but sometimes understanding is not quite the right word. A poem may have been holding an emotional reality that the younger reader did not yet possess the life required to receive. The poem has not become more intelligent, nor has its language changed. The reader has become more available to what the poem could already see.

When the Ordinary Becomes Irreplaceable

Psychotherapy often returns to ordinary scenes rather than to events already recognized as psychologically important. A father prepares coffee. A sister drives home from work. A child watches someone leave a room. A couple sits silently at breakfast. A family eats around a table after an argument nobody mentions. Such scenes are easily overlooked because ordinary life is difficult to perceive while we are inside it. Familiarity lowers the perceptual demand. The house will be there tomorrow, the child will remain small, the parent will answer the telephone, the body will continue performing its ordinary functions.

Only later does the scene become visible as a scene. This is one of memory’s cruelties: we often perceive the preciousness of an ordinary moment only after the conditions that made it ordinary no longer exist. Yet something more interesting than nostalgia can occur. Nostalgia wants the past back and tends to polish what it retrieves. Belated perception does something more difficult. It allows the past to become more fully what it was, including aspects that may make it less comforting.

A mother peeling potatoes may become more tender in memory but also more tired. A father once remembered only as authoritarian may become frightened, ambitious, socially constrained, emotionally undeveloped, and still authoritarian. A childhood home remembered as secure may also become recognizable as a place where certain feelings could not be spoken. The later consciousness does not necessarily improve the past or make it more forgiving. It increases its resolution.

This distinction matters because psychotherapy can too easily become an enterprise in retrospective benevolence. Understanding the frightened person inside the injuring parent does not erase the injury. Context is not acquittal. Indeed, greater perceptual capacity may sometimes make the past more painful because it allows us to perceive not only what was done to us but what was unavailable to everyone involved. Tragedy often becomes visible only after blame has ceased to occupy the entire field.

The Autobiography Keeps Moving

The more I practice psychotherapy, the less persuaded I am that anyone possesses one true autobiography. There are facts, certainly. Reality matters, memory distorts, and some narratives are more accurate than others. Self-deception does not become truth merely because it is psychologically useful. Yet factual chronology cannot exhaust the meaning of a life because the significance of an event depends partly upon the consciousness from which it is viewed.

There is the autobiography composed in childhood, the one created in adolescence, the one organized by first love, career, marriage, parenthood, betrayal, divorce, illness, success, failure, aging, and grief. Each places different experiences in the foreground. A biography records what happened; an autobiography attempts something different, asking what happened has become. The answer cannot remain fixed because the person answering does not remain fixed.

Psychotherapy participates in this process not by allowing people to invent whatever story feels preferable, but by reorganizing attention. One scene moves forward while another recedes. Two events separated by thirty years become psychologically adjacent. A detail once regarded as incidental begins to carry weight. The way a mother looked at the patient is placed beside the way the patient now looks at her own son. An old memory appears beside yesterday’s argument, and each alters the perceptual field surrounding the other.

This is one reason psychotherapy sometimes resembles an artistic practice more closely than it resembles historical reconstruction. A photographer frames. A painter alters figure and ground. A filmmaker places two scenes beside one another and changes both. A poet returns to an image until its scale changes. Therapy can work through similar operations of arrangement. Nothing in the factual record needs to change, but arrangement changes perception. Loewald’s account of therapeutic action offers one psychoanalytic foundation for understanding how the past becomes reorganized through new experience in the present (Loewald, 1960).

The patient’s life in treatment is therefore not the life itself. It is a rendering of the life, and the rendering changes because the person capable of rendering it changes. This does not make autobiography fictional. It makes autobiography developmental. We continue becoming the consciousness through which our own history can be seen.

The Self Was Never Waiting to Be Found

If autobiography remains open, identity cannot be entirely fixed. Contemporary psychology often speaks of finding the self, discovering the authentic self, or returning to the person one “really” is beneath adaptation. The metaphor is archaeological: remove enough defensive debris and the original self appears. I increasingly doubt that identity works this way, and the fantasy of an original self may obscure something more interesting about development.

There is the self created by one relationship, the self required by another, the self we later judge, the self we later mourn, the self we may eventually forgive, and the self we have not yet accumulated enough life to understand. The frightened child does not disappear when the adult becomes courageous. The ambitious young man remains inside the older person who has become suspicious of ambition. The daughter who hated her mother remains present inside the woman who later becomes capable of compassion. None of these selves possesses exclusive rights to the person. Philip Bromberg’s work on self-states and the capacity to stand between different aspects of subjective experience provides a useful psychoanalytic parallel (Bromberg, 1998).

Psychological development may therefore consist partly in changing the relationship among the people we have been. The task is not to determine which one was authentic but to acquire enough psychological room for several versions of oneself to remain recognizable without one having to invalidate the others. This is more difficult than it sounds because a stable identity often depends upon a stable past.

If my father changes psychologically, then the self I built in opposition to him may have to change as well. If the failed marriage becomes more complicated, the identity of innocent victim may no longer contain the entire experience. If an adaptation I despised becomes recognizable as once necessary, my relationship to my own history changes. Reinterpreting the past therefore does not leave the interpreter untouched. The autobiography changes, and the autobiographer must change with it.

The Life That Happened Without Us

Winnicott’s paper “Fear of Breakdown,” later developed by Ogden, contains an unsettling proposition: some experiences may have happened without having been fully experienced when they occurred. The future catastrophe we fear may in part refer to something already endured but not yet psychically available. Whatever one makes of the proposition in its strongest psychoanalytic form, it opens an important question about the relationship between living through something and becoming capable of experiencing what one has lived through (Ogden, 2014; Winnicott, 1974).

We usually imagine the unlived life as the road not taken: the career not pursued, the relationship not entered, the country not visited, the child not had. But perhaps there is also an unlived dimension inside the life that actually happened. There is the childhood we survived without being able to perceive what it cost, the parent we knew before we could see the adult behind the parental role, the years with young children that seemed exhausting until they were gone, the marriage before illness, the ordinary body before pain, the friendship before death.

These moments cannot be restored, and psychotherapy does not return us to them. Any suggestion that the past can now be relived correctly risks turning treatment into sentimentality. Yet later consciousness can sometimes allow an earlier experience to become psychologically lived in another sense. The event is not restored; something in it is finally received. What had occurred historically acquires a psychological presence unavailable at the time.

Perhaps this is why grief itself develops. We do not simply mourn the same person repeatedly. We become capable of mourning things we did not yet know enough to lose. The child mourns the mother he needed, the adult may later mourn the woman she was, and the aging adult may eventually mourn the life she herself never had. The object of grief changes because perception changes.

What Experience Could Not Contain

I have struggled to find a word for what occasionally happens when an ordinary autobiographical scene suddenly acquires this enlarged psychological reality. Insight is too cognitive, recognition sounds too complete, and meaning is so broad that it scarcely distinguishes the experience. The word I keep returning to is numinous.

Rudolf Otto used the term to describe encounters with the mysteriously other, experiences marked by awe, fascination, and dread; Jung later brought the term into psychological thought. I mean something less explicitly religious, though perhaps not entirely less strange. The numinous in psychotherapy may be an encounter with one’s own life after that life has ceased to be entirely familiar. Something intimately ours becomes briefly other enough that we can see it (Jung, 1938/1969; Otto, 1917/1958).

A mother folding laundry, a father driving home, a child standing beside a lake, our partner asleep beside us: nothing supernatural enters these scenes. What changes is the observer’s relationship to them. Years later, we may perceive something in these ordinary moments that we were not yet capable of appreciating while they were occurring. Familiarity, which had once allowed us to move through these experiences without giving them much thought, gives way to a deeper awareness of what they contained.

That is the numinous quality I am interested in: the experience of recognizing that something intimately known was never fully seen. It is not revelation in the sense of discovering a concealed answer. It is closer to discovering that the familiar exceeds the forms in which we had previously understood it. One’s own life becomes briefly larger than one’s account of it.

A patient in her late fifties was describing the years when her children were small. She had been an exhausted mother, frequently overwhelmed by the competing demands of work, marriage, and parenting. Her recollections were familiar, often affectionate, and occasionally regretful. During one session, she remembered standing in the doorway of her young son’s bedroom while he slept. She could see the room quite clearly: the small bed, a lamp shaped like an animal, the peculiar arrangement of stuffed toys against the wall. She had stood there many times, relieved that another difficult day was over. But now, as she described the scene, she stopped speaking. After a long silence, she said, “I had no idea that was my life.”

I asked what she meant. She seemed unable to explain. She had known perfectly well that she was raising children, that the years were passing, that her son would eventually grow up. She had not been indifferent to him or unaware of the importance of motherhood. Yet the remembered scene had acquired an almost unbearable reality. The woman standing in the doorway had been so occupied with getting through the day that she could not have experienced what the older woman was now encountering: that those particular years, with that particular child, in that particular house, were occurring only once. She was not simply missing her son’s childhood. She was encountering a period of her own life that she had inhabited continuously without ever having been able to see from outside it.

What struck me was that she did not seem to be asking for an interpretation. Nor did she appear to be searching for a lesson about appreciating the present. Something more disorienting had occurred. The remembered scene seemed to have acquired a reality independent of the woman’s account of it. She could recognize every detail and yet felt that she was encountering the scene for the first time. She knew the woman in the doorway was herself, but she could no longer inhabit that woman’s consciousness. The younger mother could not have known what the older mother now knew, and the older mother could never return to the conditions under which the younger one had lived. For a moment, the two women seemed to regard one another across an unbridgeable distance.

This is the distinction I would draw between insight and the numinous. Insight ordinarily makes something more intelligible. A person recognizes a pattern, discovers a motive, or finds language for an experience that had remained obscure. The numinous may move in the opposite direction. Something previously intelligible becomes unfamiliar because its reality exceeds the explanation through which it had been known. The woman had not discovered what motherhood meant. She had encountered the irreducible fact that an entire period of her existence had taken place without her ever being able to apprehend it in the way she now could.

There is something almost frightening about such moments. We generally depend upon the assumption that our lives belong to us because we are the ones living them. Yet being present for an experience does not guarantee that we possess the capacities required to perceive its significance. We can occupy a marriage, raise a child, inhabit a body, or live beside another person for decades while remaining unable to apprehend dimensions of what is occurring. Only afterward, sometimes when the conditions of the experience have disappeared, does another form of consciousness become available. The disturbance lies not in discovering that the past concealed a secret, but in recognizing that our participation in an experience never guaranteed our full possession of it.

After the Trial

If there is an emotional achievement associated with this kind of development, I do not think acceptance quite names it. Acceptance often sounds too much like settlement, while forgiveness carries its own problems. Some things should not be forgiven, and requiring forgiveness as evidence of maturity can become another form of violence. Integration describes something important about this process, but it does not quite capture the emotional experience of encountering one’s own life with a new appreciation for its complexity.

The word I find myself wanting is reverence. I do not mean reverence for everything that happened or for everyone who participated in it. Cruelty does not become sacred because it occurred in childhood, betrayal does not become admirable because it produced growth, and suffering requires no gratitude. I mean reverence for the complexity and irreducibility of a life, including the parts that resist our preferred explanations. Such reverence does not require reconciliation with those who injured us, nor does it require abandoning judgments that remain necessary.

The frightened child, the furious adolescent, the difficult mother, the withholding father, the failed marriage, the ambition, the betrayal, the body, the mistake, and the person one was before one knew what one knows now all belong to the same history. Reverence means becoming able to look at these without immediately arranging them into prosecution and defense. It is not acquittal. It is what can become possible after the trial has ceased being the only available form of understanding.

This may be what separates reverence from self-esteem. Self-esteem asks whether the self is good enough and remains, in that sense, tethered to evaluation. Reverence suspends the demand for a final verdict long enough for a larger reality to appear. Sometimes that larger reality is less comforting. We may see more clearly how we injured someone, discover that a grievance protected us from grief, or recognize that a parent can become more understandable without becoming less responsible. A failed relationship can become more tragic because we can finally see what both people could not give. Reverence does not make the past kinder; it permits the past to become larger than the judgment we once required it to sustain.

The Photograph Looked Back

Near the end of his treatment, Michael mentioned the photograph again. By then we had spent considerable time talking about his father. The man had not become gentler in retrospect, and Michael had not relinquished his anger, nor should he have. What had changed was the requirement that his father mean only one thing. The father could remain demanding and emotionally unavailable while becoming frightened, disappointed, sad, and mortal.

Michael told me that he had placed the photograph on a bookshelf in his study. I asked him why. After a moment he said, “I don’t know. I suppose I want to keep looking at him.” The answer seemed important because earlier in treatment Michael had wanted to understand his father. Now he seemed capable of something slightly different. He could look without requiring the looking to terminate in a final explanation.

The photograph could hold the father’s hand on his shoulder and the father’s gaze somewhere else. It could hold care, distance, sadness, fear, childhood, and mortality without forcing one element to become the official meaning of the scene. The photograph had not changed, but neither was it the same psychological object Michael had looked at as a child. A different perceiver now stood before it.

Perhaps psychotherapy sometimes changes an autobiography in precisely this way. We begin wanting answers: Why did this happen? What did my parents do to me? Why am I like this? What does this memory mean? These questions matter, and sometimes they lead somewhere indispensable. Yet another capacity may eventually develop. We become able to remain before an image, a memory, a person, or a period of our own life without requiring it to resolve into a single account.

Michael had been right that he was not old enough to see his father. The child had known the man through what the man required of him, what he withheld, and what he made him feel. Only decades later could Michael begin to encounter a person whose life had been unfolding beyond the child’s awareness. The father became more complicated without becoming innocent, and Michael’s anger remained justified without remaining sufficient.

There was something particularly moving about Michael’s wish to keep looking at the photograph. He was not trying to recover the father he had lost, nor did he seem to be searching for evidence that the relationship had been different from what he remembered. The photograph had become interesting to him in another way. It contained a man he had known all his life and whom he was only now beginning to encounter.

I sometimes wonder how many such encounters remain possible within an ordinary life. The people we have loved, resented, depended upon, or taken for granted may remain unfamiliar to us in ways we cannot yet imagine. The same may be true of the people we ourselves have been. We cannot return to the conditions in which those earlier lives were lived, and there is no reason to suppose that later understanding will necessarily make them more consoling. But we may become capable of seeing what had previously been beyond our perception, including what is difficult, irretrievable, or impossible to explain.

The photograph remained on Michael’s shelf. His father’s hand still rested on the boy’s shoulder, and his gaze was still directed somewhere beyond the camera. Michael had looked at this image since childhood. Only now did he seem to realize how much of the man beside him he had never seen.

About the Author

James Tobin, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist based in Irvine, California with more than two decades of clinical experience. He earned his undergraduate degree magna cum laude from Harvard University, M.F.A. in creative writing from Indiana University, and doctorate in clinical psychology from The Catholic University of America. He subsequently completed postdoctoral training at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where he served as a staff psychologist and Clinical Instructor.

Dr. Tobin maintains a private psychotherapy practice, working with adults, couples, and individuals navigating complex relationship difficulties, developmental transitions, grief, trauma, and questions of identity and meaning. His clinical approach draws upon contemporary psychodynamic and psychoanalytic psychotherapy, particularly relational and intersubjective perspectives, attachment theory, and developmental psychology.

His writing explores the ways psychological life is shaped by relationships, memory, unconscious processes, and the evolving capacities through which individuals understand themselves and others.

Website: www.jamestobinphd.com

Disclaimer

This essay is intended for educational and reflective purposes and does not constitute psychological diagnosis, treatment, or individualized clinical advice. The clinical material is presented to illustrate psychological ideas; identifying details have been altered or material adapted to protect confidentiality. The experiences and processes described are not universal, and psychotherapy does not necessarily lead to the particular forms of understanding discussed here. Individuals seeking help with emotional or relationship difficulties should consult a qualified mental health professional.

References

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Bollas, C. (1987). The shadow of the object: Psychoanalysis of the unthought known. Columbia University Press.

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Freud, S. (1950). Project for a scientific psychology. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 1, pp. 283–397). Hogarth Press. (Original work written 1895).

Jung, C. G. (1969). Psychology and religion. In The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 11). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1938).

Laplanche, J. (1999). Essays on otherness (J. Fletcher, Ed.). Routledge.

Loewald, H. W. (1960). On the therapeutic action of psycho-analysis. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 41, 16–33.

Mitchell, S. A. (1988). Relational concepts in psychoanalysis: An integration. Harvard University Press.

Ogden, T. H. (2014). Fear of breakdown and the unlived life. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 95(2), 205–223. https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-8315.12148

Otto, R. (1958). The idea of the holy (J. W. Harvey, Trans.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1917).

Winnicott, D. W. (1974). Fear of breakdown. International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 1, 103–107.

Selected poems discussed:

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Hass, R. (1979). Meditation at Lagunitas. In Praise. Ecco Press.

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