Are You Seeing Anyone?

Caravaggio's "Narcissus"

Intimacy is to know and to be known on the inside.   Erik Erikson  placed intimacy right after identity in his sequence of human development.  Identity is based on the Latin root idem meaning same.  Having an authentic identity means that we allow ourselves to appear on the outside as we really are on the inside. 

Erikson suggests that this task of identity normally takes place in our teenage years; that having achieved that task, we move on to intimacy, belonging to someone or something that resonates with us, that stirs our identity

, that moves us inside, calls us to be who we truly are.  We come to realize who we are: our gifts, our capability, our potential.   And we face two choices.  We either become “stuck on ourselves” like Narcissus, focusing on ourselves, on how we appear, or we focus on others.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall….

I think you’ll agree that it’s not as simple as that, not an either/or.  Don’t we all vacillate between identity and intimacy?  We have mirrors, don’t we, and sometimes they are our enemy.  When we are young, we look for zits; later we’ll look for wrinkles and gray hair.  If we are cursed with a long mirror, we can find lots more evidence of our perceived imperfections, and can regress from the dance of intimacy to the crawl of identity and ego.  We can, like Narcissus, be stuck looking into the pool while others live life.

How do I look?

I can remember my mom, when I was a little kid and thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world, asking my brother Danny and me, “Are my nylons straight?”  She would turn her back to us so we could see the seams on her nylons (back when they were sewn from nylon fabric rather than woven as they are now) and crane her neck, trying to see them herself.  We’d coach her on the seams and then tell her what she (as do we all) wanted to hear: “You look pretty, Mommy!” 

I realize now as I write that there was a lesson in this.  When we told her she was pretty, she felt it. She could step away from the mirror, step away from the pool, and go on being who she was.  And she could see others.  We’d walk into Cinquegrana’s Grocery and she’d call to the lady at the counter, and old man Cinquegrana would come out and smile.  They would light up because she saw them.  She was free to.  She knew she was beautiful.

Saved by faces.  I don’t know that I learned this lesson well.  Too often I’m distracted by my own self-doubt, unable to look at others.  Rather than accept the affirmation of the Affirmation Queen with whom I live, I think I can manage this ego thing myself, and so Erikson would observe me with one eyebrow up, noticing that I’m vacillating between identity and intimacy.  I’m saved from my distraction not by any act of will or flash of insight, but by faces.  It is the gift of faces that call me to intimacy, as I see in them the person’s own struggle with their own worth, when they look into my eyes and see a mirror, a mirror that is not their enemy.  Their eyes are to me the windows to their souls, to their innermost selves.  I get to tell them that they are beautiful inside, and watch their faces for a glimmer of memory.