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. Read more »