The Gaze of the Other
From Dissertation to Essay
We do not discover ourselves alone.
From our earliest years, we learn who we are through encounters with other people. Before we are able to describe ourselves in words, we have already experienced faces that smile, voices that comfort, hands that carry us or push us away. The human being’s first understanding of the self does not arise in solitary reflection, but in relationship.
Shame is therefore not merely a private emotion.
It arises in the space between people.
We may feel guilt when we are alone. We may reflect on our actions, acknowledge that we have wronged someone, and take responsibility. Shame is different. It is often awakened when we imagine how we appear to another person. It lives in the experience of being seen—or in the fear of being seen.
Shame therefore always also concerns the gaze.
Becoming an Object
We sometimes say that a person “felt small.”
This expression contains more philosophy than we may realise.
Shame makes us feel that we are no longer acting subjects, but objects being assessed by others. We stop living from within and begin to observe ourselves from the outside. We see ourselves through the gaze we believe the other person directs toward us.
Sometimes this gaze is real.
At other times, it exists only in our imagination.
Yet its effect may be the same.
We begin to monitor ourselves. How do I look? What do they think of me? Did they hear my voice trembling? Did they notice how uncertain I am?
Shame turns us into observers of ourselves.
It is an exhausting way to live.
The Child’s First Mirror
A small child has no finished understanding of who they are. This understanding gradually develops through thousands of small encounters.
A smile may tell the child that they are welcome.
Comfort may tell them that their feelings are understandable.
A boundary may tell them that the world is safe.
In this way, the adult becomes a mirror.
Not a mirror that merely reflects the child’s face, but one that tells the child what value they possess.
Most parents and caregivers give the child many such experiences every day. They occur so naturally that we hardly notice them.
But when the child is repeatedly met with contempt, violation, or unpredictability, the mirror may offer a different image.
The child does not learn only something about the adult.
The child learns something about themselves.
When the One Who Should Protect Becomes the One Who Violates
This becomes particularly serious when the violation comes from the same person upon whom the child depends.
The child cannot simply reject the adult. Their whole life is connected to this relationship. If the adult is also the one who creates fear, an impossible dilemma arises.
How can the person who is supposed to protect also be the person who causes harm?
For a small child, it may be easier to ask the question differently:
What is it about me that makes this happen?
The explanation is then transferred from the adult’s actions to the child’s own worth.
Not because the child is reasoning logically.
But because the child is trying to preserve a world that must remain possible to live in.
A Gaze That Remains
Abuse and other serious violations come to an end.
But the gaze may remain.
Many people describe how, years later, they still feel watched. Not necessarily by the perpetrator, but by an inner judge who never seems to grow tired.
This judge comments on everything.
How one speaks.
How one walks.
What the body looks like.
Whether one deserves love.
Whether one has the right to take up space.
A person may therefore live in freedom and still feel imprisoned.
Not by external chains, but by a gaze that has become part of their own self-understanding.
The Countervoice of Recognition
If shame arises between people, it cannot be resolved solely within the individual.
It needs a countervoice.
Not a voice that denies what happened.
Not a voice that says, “Everything will be fine.”
But a voice that distinguishes between the person and the violation.
Between dignity and experience.
Between identity and action.
This is something other than positive thinking.
It concerns truth.
The truth is that a person may be deeply wounded without having lost their human worth.
Being Seen Anew
In social work, therapy, and other helping relationships, we often speak about the importance of being seen.
The expression may sound simple.
But being seen is not the same as being scrutinised.
Nor is it the same as being analysed.
To be seen means to be met as a human being whose experience is taken seriously without allowing that experience to define the whole person.
The person who has been violated does not primarily need an expert who can explain their life.
Many need another human being who can endure being present without looking away.
This requires courage.
Not only from the person who speaks.
But also from the person who listens.
The Mutual Gaze
Martin Buber wrote that the human being comes into existence in the encounter between I and Thou.
We are not merely consciousnesses that happen to pass one another. We are formed in relationships.
When the other person is encountered as a Thou, something arises that cannot be reduced to technique or method.
The other person does not become a project.
Not a diagnosis.
Not a problem to be solved.
But a human being.
This idea became important in the work on my doctoral dissertation. It helped me understand that shame is not only a psychological phenomenon. It is also a relational and existential phenomenon.
Recognition therefore cannot be reduced to a therapeutic method.
It is first and foremost a way of encountering another human being.
The Helper’s Own Gaze
This also applies to the helper’s relationship with themselves.
No one encounters another person with an entirely neutral gaze.
We all carry experiences, values, expectations, and prejudices. We never see the world completely as it is. We see it through the life we ourselves have lived.
Reflection is therefore an ethical necessity.
Not in order to become flawless.
But in order to notice when our own assumptions begin to obscure the other person.
The professional task is not to see everything.
It is to remain willing to examine how we see.
A Gaze That Creates Space
Through the work on the dissertation, I gradually became more concerned with a simple question:
What does a gaze look like when it does not create shame?
There is probably no single answer.
But perhaps it begins by refusing to make the other person smaller than they are.
By not reducing a human being to a diagnosis, a violation, a mistake, or a story.
By allowing the other person to retain the right to be more than what we already know.
Such a gaze does not romanticise suffering.
It does not ignore responsibility.
It does not minimise violations.
But it refuses to allow the violation to have the final word.
More Than the Judgement of the Other
Shame makes us believe that the gaze of the other is the final truth about who we are.
But no human gaze is infallible.
Not even our own.
We need people who see us more truthfully than shame does.
Not because they close their eyes to what is difficult.
But because they see more.
They see the person behind the self-accusation.
They see the dignity behind the shame.
They see the life that has not yet been fully lived.
Perhaps this is one of the most important tasks both in professional social work and in human relationships more generally.
Not to take over another person’s life.
Not to remove all pain.
But to encounter another human being with a gaze that makes it possible to believe that shame does not tell the whole truth.
Shame makes us believe that the gaze of the other is the final truth about who we are.
This essay was written in a conversation with OpenAI/ChatGPT
This essay is part of the series “From Dissertation to Essay” and is based particularly on the dissertation’s existential-dialogical perspective on shame, inspired among others by Martin Buber, as well as its discussion of recognition, relationships, and self-understanding in: Pettersen, K. T. (2009). An Exploration into the Concept and Phenomenon of Shame within the Context of Child Sexual Abuse: An Existential-Dialogical Perspective of Social Work within the Settings of a Norwegian Incest Centre. NTNU.
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