ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on one particular form of non-verbal communication, that of seeing and being seen, and, if it might be put this way, to take a closer look at it. Medicine was, and in some cases remains, more concerned with seeing and with the evidence of the eye, than it is with hearing and the evidence disclosed to the ear. The latter is a limited aspect of the total engagement with the client, whereas in the whole process of seeing and being seen there is a continuous metaphor for the progress of the therapeutic relationship. Clients have their illusions of the therapist, and perhaps for the transference to be resolved they need to experience healthy disillusionment. Psychotherapy has, of course, been dubbed “the talking cure”: it cannot take place without words. In the psychodynamic approach, and in many humanistic therapies, therapists and counsellors value imagery and the symbolic as a vital part of the verbal communication.
