by Gary Borjesson
1. Attention vs. Recognition
Patients in therapy sometimes worry the therapist only cares about them because they’re being paid to care. Freely bestowed attention, on the other hand, would reassure them that they are worth paying attention to because of who they are, not just because they can afford to pay. This worry is the more understandable for being in the narrow sense true. After all, if a patient refuses to pay their bill, the therapist will stop seeing them—which seems to confirm their worst fears.
It’s a truism that we live in an economy where attention is measured, bought, and sold. But it’s not attention that a patient ultimately wants. Nor for that matter is it what any of us wants from others we care about. What we want is recognition. The patient’s fear is based partly on conflating attention and recognition. In a world where social media and AI rely on this same conflation, it’s not exaggerating to say that clarifying the difference between attention and recognition has become a matter of basic psychic hygiene.
For example, receiving the attention of a therapist, or getting a hundred ‘likes’ for a post we’ve written, may feel good and seem to be what we wanted. But often we’re not satisfied because we don’t just want a therapist who pays attention, we want one who recognizes our true situation, who sees us as we are. Likewise, beneath the desire for ‘likes’ is a yearning to be seen and liked for who we are. In short, we want the recognition that can come through the medium of attention.
This way of putting it suggests a reason for our confusion, as attention is a necessary but not sufficient condition for recognition. By buying attention, we can, as it were, buy the conditions for recognition. But recognition itself cannot be bought or sold, except in counterfeit forms like flattery and deference. By its nature, recognition can only be freely bestowed. For example, a friend of mine was striving to be a chess master. He taught me how to play, though I never played enough to become any good. I could have told him he was a great player, and for all I knew he might have been; but this “recognition” would mean nothing, since I was unqualified to judge. Yet the recognition of a grandmaster would mean a lot. Now, he could pay a grandmaster to teach him, and thereby secure the conditions for being recognized. But he could not buy the recognition itself, anymore than paying someone to give you their Nobel Prize will confer the recognition that prize represents. Recognition is actual only when freely given by someone with the standing to give it.
2. The Perils of Recognition
Another source of confusion goes to the heart of what’s at stake in recognition. Put simply, we’re often ambivalent about being seen or recognized for who we really are. As long as my friend only played chess with me, he could if he wanted flatter himself that he was a great player! But he could only know that he was great—only bask in the actual glow of recognition—if he let his playing be seen and freely judged by a master. Herein lies the peril, and hence the ambivalence. For the master might also ‘recognize’ him as a mediocre player, thereby dashing his hopes of greatness.
One thing you learn as a psychotherapist is that where there’s confusion, there’s also often ambivalence, which in turn can operate as a defense against being seen. The patient who worries aloud that the therapist only cares because they’re being paid may actually fear getting what they want, which is to be truly seen and thus more truly cared for. Similarly, someone on social media may be showered in likes, yet dissatisfied because they’ve crafted a persona to please the algorithm, rather than daring to be seen as they are.
When I was first in private practice, I saw a woman for three months before she abruptly ended the therapy. She sought therapy because her adult son had cut off most contact with her. They had been close throughout his childhood, but now in his late twenties he was blaming her for his mental-health problems. She was “confused” and wanted help understanding what was going on. When I got curious about how her son saw her, she answered in broad strokes but became defensive when I invited exploring it further. She reminded me that she wasn’t paying me take her son’s side, and that, after all, he was the one with mental-health problems.
She valued my attention so long as it reinforced her view. But she grew defensive at the prospect that I, like her son, might see her differently than she saw herself. Ironically, one of the reasons her son was angry was because she was refusing to recognize him, as doing so would require making herself vulnerable enough to consider her part in their difficulties. Her unwillingness to do so was why her son had limited contact with her, and why he had told her that if she wanted to have a relationship with him, she should see a therapist. To her credit, she had taken his advice.
The reason she gave for stopping was that therapy was expensive and that she didn’t think she was getting anywhere. Then she added, poignantly, that with her husband in treatment for cancer and so many other stresses in her life, she didn’t think she had the energy to get very far in therapy anyway. She instinctively saw she wasn’t ready to be as vulnerable as she’d need to be in order to examine herself in relation to her son. I respected her decision, and told her as much, saying my door was open if and when she felt ready.
3. The promise of Recognition
The promise and peril of recognition are the same: to be seen for who we are. “Being seen” is a basic human need as well as a spiritual aspiration. Infants and children fail to thrive in the absence of attunement and mirroring. Likewise, it’s impossible to obey the Socratic exhortation to know ourselves unless we dare to be seen and known by others.
In Hegel’s telling, the desire for recognition drives our psychic development generally. The same desire that leads a child to say, “Look at me!” also leads us to seek coaches, mentors, teachers, therapists, and friends—those capable of holding a mirror that in turn helps us see ourselves better. It helps our relationships if we can see our part in them clearly, as my patient’s son was challenging her to do. If she could rise to the occasion of seeing herself through his eyes, she’d know herself better. This is not to say she would have to agree with his view. It is to say, however, that she’d have to reckon with it.
Hegel called the path of Spirit’s development a “highway of despair” because it includes the painful work of examining and abandoning along the way those false beliefs and opinions that prevent us from moving forward. My patient’s comment about not having the energy for therapy can be read as showing she wasn’t ready to abandon the idealized story she was telling me (and him) about his childhood. No doubt she would have been glad to recognize her son’s point of view…if she hadn’t feared that the price of recognition was being seen as a bad mother.
The lack of mutual recognition between mother and son is an obstacle to their being on good terms. But this very difference also supplies the motive force for them being on better terms, if they can work it through. Indeed, psychic development as Hegel describes it in the Phenomenology of Spirit is a process of working through such differences toward a more true, mutual view of the situation.
Let me wrap up with an illustration. Recall the patient who worries that paying for attention might result in counterfeit recognition—that the therapist only appears to care for them. From a psychoanalytic perspective, the patient is projecting their own fear of being unseen and unlovable onto the therapist. The projection is a defense and an obstacle to seeing the true situation. Moreover, it’s likely to be operating in their other relationships, making intimacy hard to develop and sustain—as was the case for my patient.
One thing good therapy provides is the conditions for taking back such projections, that is, for recognizing and removing the obstacles to seeing our true situation. Owning the projection—“I was afraid you didn’t care; I see now that paying you doesn’t mean you don’t”—transforms the relationship by transcending the difference dividing them. No longer does the patient feel unseen, and no longer does the therapist have to suffer the appearance of being greedy and selfish. Instead, they mutually recognize the same truth.
Taken to its dialectical conclusion, we arrive at friendship, the relationship most characterized by freely bestowed mutual recognition among equals. Thus as a patient takes back their projections, they become more capable of intimacy and friendship—with themselves and others. Likewise, if mother and son can work through their differences, they in effect become more than mother and son: they become friends.
Note: I have altered identifying details to preserve patient confidentiality. Interested readers can find more of my work on the art, science, and philosophy of alliances at my Substack, garyborjesson.substack.com
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