ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author develops a few very personal ideas on the relationship between the eyes and the mind in psychoanalytic psychotherapeutic work with children and adolescents. He makes use of material from different sources: clinical material from the initial assessment meetings with a seven-year-old boy, not particularly ill and therefore quite ready to get to know his emotions and his deepest thoughts. The author discusses two poems by R. Tagore, one on the birth and the other on the death of a child, to exemplify how a poet can observe and give shape to certain fundamental human experiences. The silence of the jungle, like the silence of the mother, becomes the signal that somewhere, invisible potential enemies are hidden, whose presence can be revealed only by the rustling of the grass or the plunk of a branch that breaks. For the child there is something unsaid or inexpressible, secretly dangerous, which lives in the mind of adults.
