If we can cease to accept the visual metaphor as necessarily natural or intrinsic to the meaning of knowledge, then it is essential to inquire into the ways in which our reliance on it has informed and shaped this meaning – to ask what particular relation between us as knowers and the nature to be known is implied by such a metaphor, and to ask how that relation affects our conception of reality.

Evelyn Fox Keller & Christine E. Grontowski in “The Mind’s Eye”

Ah, Therapy-Speak… While my current research and writing is focused on Donna Haraway’s work on vision in Situated Knowledge and its relation to psychoanalysis, I have become curious about the expression “feeling seen”. What exactly do we mean by it, and what is its history?

After an inconclusive online search, I decided to start by looking up the much more modest question of when therapists began to use the expression in their writing. There wasn’t much to go off, so I focused my search on Pep-Web, which for us North American practitioners is our main access to academic and research publications.

That search returned a first appearance in a 1989 paper from Margot Waddel entitled “Gender Identity – Fifty Years on from Freud”.

A memory dating from this period recalled Laura literally cutting all figures of herself from family photographs. She could not bear to be ‘seen’ in the projected images of ‘happy family’ groups when she had never felt ‘seen’ as an individual in her lived experience of the family.

Margot Waddel in “Gender Identity – Fifty Years on from Freud”

It’s noteworthy that Waddel uses brackets in both in her literal reference to seeing (seeing a photograph) and the metaphorical extrapolation that follows (feeling seen as an individual). She must have already been aware of the contentious status of sight as a metaphor. For as the English Oxford Dictionary notes,

As the sense of sight affords far more complete and definite information respecting external objects than any other of the senses, mental perceptions are in many (perh. in all) languages referred to in visual terms, and often with little or no consciousness of metaphor.

That consciousness of metaphor seems to drift with the history of psychotherapeutic writing. Note how in the next appearance of the expression, some ten years later in a Jody Mesler Davies paper, the brackets around ‘seen’ have suddenly faded… Still, the framing of sight alongside what are also clear uses of metaphor (touching and nourishing) makes it clear what is happening. Here is Mesler Davies in 1999:

Although [Daniel] recalled feeling seen and touched and nourished, he also described a parallel experience of being too quickly penetrated and then exposed in his inability to reject my offer of warmth. He could acknowledge having seen through to a vulnerable place within me; how angry this made him, probably because of his mother’s depression; and how frightened he had been of seeing me, of feeling himself to be an equal, of feeling himself to be a man, of feeling his own potential to touch, penetrate, hurt, or overwhelm.

Jody Mesler Davies in “Cold Feet, Defining “Safe-Enough” Borders: Dissociation, Multiplicity, and Integration in the Analyst’s Experience”

Ten years separate these two appearances; but in the following decades, the expression gains prominence. A quick Pep-Web search logs 10 appearances in the 2000s, 18 in the 2010s and 38 in the 2020s.

Attachment theorists in particular seem to have played a part in popularizing the term. Dan Siegel uses sight as one of the 4 S’s of secure attachment: feeling seen, safe, secure and soothed.

I suspect that this popularization has brought with it a kind of smoothing out, since we mostly think of feeling seen as a positive experience today. But the first two papers above speak of a much more ambivalent experience, and one that is in both cases linked to gender. Seeing and watching, as the early Freud knew, were rich and complicated experiences often linked to sexuality.