Between being and being seen

Abstract: To see, to be seen, to see that you are seen, these are experiences that are composed and de-composed in a succession of excitations, identifications, projections, wounds, grievances. They are experiences that may follow the path of processes of elaboration, or can turn into fixed, traumatic landmarks, which become markers of identity. Experiences of psychic construction are composed and de-composed around the gaze, starting from the mother’s gaze that returns to the child the “digestible” forms of its own sensations. In the experiences specific to psychoanalysis with children, this sometimes appears in a form that preserves, or rather returns the violence of the first interactions, in which the efforts to identify one’s own outline, one’s own boundary, passed through the forms processed by the mother’s gaze. Such a psychoanalytic experience acquires particular accents when it takes place in an institutional environment, specific to orphaned or abandoned children, as was the case with Alexandra.