Object Under His Gaze: Where Psychoanalysis Meets Existential Freedom

I watch the way I become object under his gaze. The therapist. The one who is paid to see me. His office is minimal. Deliberate in that way meant to be neutral, as if by removing enough of himself, I might have room to become.

I can feel the theory moving behind his eyes. The mechanisms of psychoanalysis turning like clockwork while I sit in my uncomfortably comfortable chair and try to make myself legible. I wonder sometimes which parts of me he's cataloguing, which symptoms, which patterns. I wonder who he thinks I am when I'm not here.

He asks me what I'm thinking.

I say nothing because everything feels like the wrong answer.

Sometimes speaking feels like a setup, like there's a trapdoor underneath each word, waiting to drop me into a darkness that will suddenly explain everything. And isn't that what I'm supposed to want? The explanation? The why of it all?

There's a violence in being witnessed before you're ready. A kind of exposure that feels like going outside without your skin. I wonder if psychoanalysis understands this, that sometimes the interpretation arrives before the patient is prepared to hold it. That sometimes meaning is forced upon experience too soon, and in the forcing, something true gets lost.

Freud and his followers, searching for the hidden underneath. As if the self is archaeology. As if we are ruins to be excavated. As if what lies beneath the surface is always more real than what we show. I think of all the hours I've spent trying to dig below my own foundations, as if the deeper self is always the more authentic one.

Meanwhile, the existentialists sit in their Parisian cafés smoking cigarettes down to the filter, saying no, no. There is no hidden truth. There is only what we do. Only action. Only choice. We make ourselves in each moment through what we choose, not through what we uncover.

I remain caught between these philosophies. Between depth and surface. Between the unconscious and choice. Between determinism and freedom.

So I sit in silence with him watching me.

The silence stretches until it feels like something physical between us, a third presence in the room. It's in these moments I feel most seen and most concealed. Most present and most absent. The contradiction doesn't escape me.

Sometimes I wonder if this is what it means to be alive, to simultaneously know and not know yourself. To be both the one who hides and the one who seeks. The analysand and the analyst. The object and the observer.

He shifts slightly in his chair, and I wonder if he's growing impatient with my silence or if he's settling in for the long haul. I wonder if he knows that sometimes I'm silent not because I don't want to speak but because I don't know how to translate the language of my interior into something another person could understand.

I've studied enough to know the theories. I understand the mechanisms they think make us who we are. The repetition compulsion. The death drive. The way we recreate our original wounds in new relationships, as if by repeating them enough times, we might finally master them. As if by walking into the same trap over and over, we might one day disarm it.

I understand how we supposedly manufacture meaning in a universe indifferent to our existence. How we construct purpose where there is none. How we create values in a world without inherent value. How we choose in a void.

Understanding the theories doesn't make living any easier.

I've read Lacan on the mirror stage, how we form our first sense of self through misrecognition. Seeing our reflection and thinking: that's me. Beginning our existence with a fundamental error, mistaking an image for a self. I've always been disturbed by this idea, that identity begins with a mistake. That we are founded upon an illusion.

And I've read Sartre on how other people turn us into objects. How their gaze reduces us, fixes us, pins us down like butterflies to a board. How their seeing creates a version of us we cannot access but cannot escape. How hell is other people not because they're cruel but because they reflect us back to ourselves in ways we cannot control.

I've wondered if this is what happens in therapy. If I become object under his gaze. If his seeing creates a version of me I cannot access but cannot escape. If the process itself replicates the very wounds it claims to heal.

But I keep coming back. Week after week. The same time. The same chair. The same silence that eventually breaks into words that feel at once too much and not enough.

Sometimes I think we're all just talking to ourselves while pretending to talk to others. That language itself is a kind of violence, forcing the unspoken into speech, compressing complexity into linearity, translating the untranslatable.

Sometimes I think the things that matter most are precisely those that cannot be articulated.

He asks me again what I'm thinking, and this time I try to answer.

I tell him I'm thinking about thinking. About watching myself think. About how even my most private thoughts feel performed sometimes, as if there's an audience even in my own head. As if I'm never truly alone with myself.

He nods, and I wonder what theory he's fitting this into. What box he's placing me in. I wonder if he's thinking about narcissism or dissociation or just the general human condition of self-consciousness.

I wonder if he's making a note to bring this up again later, to trace connections between this moment and something I said weeks ago that I've already forgotten. I wonder if he remembers me better than I remember myself.

This is the strange intimacy of therapy, to be known by someone who knows only what you tell them. To be seen by someone who sees only what you show them. To be understood through a framework you may not share or even understand.

The existentialists would say this is freedom. That I am creating myself through what I choose to say and not say in this room. That I am responsible for the self I present. That my anxiety in the face of this freedom is natural but not an excuse.

The psychoanalysts would say this is resistance. That I am hiding from myself. That what I don't say is more important than what I do. That my reluctance to associate freely reveals the very things I need to confront.

I say I don't know how to be honest without performing honesty. That I don't know how to speak without listening to myself speak. That I don't know how to be seen without watching myself being seen.

He says this is where we begin.

I think about beginning. About how many times I've begun and begun again. About how beginning itself feels like repetition at this point. Another cycle. Another attempt. Another failure waiting to happen.

I think about time. About how therapy bends it. Compresses it. Extends it. Fifty minutes that sometimes feel like five and sometimes like five hundred. I think about how time in this room doesn't move like time outside this room. How here, we're somehow in the present and the past simultaneously. How here, chronology collapses.

I think about the transaction at the heart of this relationship that we pretend isn't there. About how his insight is tied to my ability to have it paid for. About how this makes it both more and less real somehow.

I think about how he will go home at the end of the day to a life I know nothing about. How he will carry pieces of me with him, mental notes, maybe even actual notes. How I will exist in his mind when I'm not here. A case. A story. A collection of symptoms and patterns.

I think about how I will go home carrying pieces of his interpretations. How they will work on me without my knowing. How I will digest them slowly, unconsciously, over days and weeks. How they will change me in ways I may never fully understand.

I think about how much of this process happens outside of awareness. How much happens in the spaces between sessions. In dreams. In the way a phrase suddenly returns while I'm washing dishes or waiting for the uber.

He is watching me think. I am watching myself being watched.

This double consciousness feels familiar. It's how I move through the world most days, both in an experience and outside it, participating and observing simultaneously. Present and absent. Here and not here.

The existentialists might call this bad faith, this refusal to fully inhabit my freedom, this pretense that I am not choosing each moment. This denial of my responsibility for my own existence.

The psychoanalysts might call this splitting, this division of the self into observer and observed, this internal fragmentation, this inability to integrate experience.

I call it Tuesday at four o'clock.

I call it the best I can do right now.

He asks me what I want from these sessions, and I don't know how to tell him that I both want to be seen and am terrified of being seen. That I both want to speak and am afraid of what I might say. That I both want to change and am uncertain what would remain of me if I did.

I don't know how to tell him that sometimes I think my symptoms are my self, and the prospect of losing them feels like a kind of death. That sometimes I think my wounds are my identity, and healing them feels like erasure.

I don't know how to tell him that sometimes I suspect there is no core self beneath all the layers. That sometimes I fear if we peel back enough defenses, enough masks, enough protective coverings, we'll find nothing at all at the center. Just emptiness. Just absence. Just silent space.

The existentialists would nod. They'd say yes, there is no essence. Only existence. Only what we make of ourselves through choice and action in a world without intrinsic meaning.

The psychoanalysts would disagree. They'd say the self is there, buried under defenses, waiting to be excavated, integrated, made whole.

I remain suspended between these possibilities. Between the vertigo of radical freedom and the comfort of hidden truth. Between the terror of meaninglessness and the hope of coherence.

He notices I haven't answered and repeats the question. What do I want from these sessions?

I say I want to understand. But even as I say it, I know it's only partly true. Understanding has never been enough. I've understood things intellectually that I could not integrate emotionally. I've understood patterns I continued to repeat. I've understood wounds I couldn't stop reopening.

He asks what else.

I say I want to be different. But that's not quite right either. Different how? Different for whom? Different by whose standards? The desire itself feels suspiciously like self-rejection. Like a continuation of the very patterns I claim to want to escape.

He waits.

I say I don't know. And this feels closest to the truth. I don't know what I want. I don't know who I would be if I were healed. I don't know what wholeness would look like for someone who has lived so long in fragments.

The session is ending. I can feel time condensing, accelerating. All the things I haven't said pressing against my throat.

He tells me we'll continue next week, and I nod as if next week is a certainty. As if continuity is something I can count on. As if this conversation isn't just another in an endless series of beginnings that lead nowhere.

I gather my things. Schedule the next appointment. Step back into the world where time moves differently. Where I am not the center of anyone's attention. Where my silence goes unnoticed.

I wonder what traces of him will stay with me this week. What interpretations will work their way into my dreams. What questions will surface unexpectedly while I'm doing something mundane.

I wonder what traces of me will stay with him. If I'm interesting enough to remember. If my struggles stand out among her other patients or if I'm just one more person trying to make sense of an essentially senseless existence.

I wonder which of us has it right, the existentialists with their vertigo of freedom or the psychoanalysts with their archaeology of the self.

I wonder if it matters.

I walk home through streets filled with people all carrying their own contradictions, all caught in their own repetitions, all making their own meaning or failing to. All choosing in each moment who they will be, consciously or not. All revealing and concealing simultaneously.

All of us fractured. All of us whole.