Stare

Sustained facial gazing mediates the most intense form of interpersonal communication… Researchers have found that extremely long gazing periods on the part of the mother towards her infant are a common occurrence and that the infant’s gaze reliably evokes mother’s gaze.

Schore establishes prolonged mutual gazing between mother and infant as the neurobiological substrate of the most intense interpersonal communication, making the stare the foundation of early self-development.

Schore, Allan N., Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, 1994thesis

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One cannot stare at the sun very long, and Sheila on many occasions looked away and avoided her dread. But she was always able to return to it, and by the end of therapy had made major shifts within herself.

Yalom uses the inability to stare at the sun as the governing metaphor for the human incapacity to sustain confrontation with existential terror, framing therapeutic progress as repeated, partial approaches to what cannot be fully borne.

Yalom, Irvin D., The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy, Fifth Edition, 2008thesis

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As you stare at the exit gates and await her imminent arrival, your brain is busily issuing thousands of predictions based on your concepts, in milliseconds, all outside of your awareness.

Barrett employs the act of staring as a phenomenological lens through which to demonstrate that even passive visual fixation is saturated with unconscious predictive construction of meaning and emotion.

Barrett, Lisa Feldman, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017thesis

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Like those who stand in the street and stare at the people passing by, so they too wait and stare at thoughts that others have thought.

Nietzsche, through Zarathustra, deploys staring as a figure for the passivity of the merely spectatorial intellect — scholars who consume the thoughts of others without generative engagement of their own.

Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883thesis

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She heroically worked with her acrophobia over a period of several months by taking an elevator to increasingly higher floors, and walking to the end window in order to stare out over the city.

Hollis reads a patient’s sustained staring from height as both a desensitizing behavioral exercise and a symbolic confrontation with the vertiginous depths of her own unlived vocation.

Hollis, James, Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places, 1996supporting

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Each party acts in the safety of the knowledge that one’s behavior is not being noticed (or controlled) by the others; this safety provides an autonomy and a freedom that would be impossible if each continuously dwelled on the fact that others observe one’s behavior.

Yalom identifies the implicit social contract against sustained observation of others as a precondition of personal freedom, implicitly marking the stare as a socially transgressive and psychologically exposing act.

Yalom, Irvin D., The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy, Fifth Edition, 2008supporting

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He is the kind of man who is True — the face of a human being, the emptiness of Heaven. He follows along and keeps tight hold of the True; pure, he can encompass all things. If men do not have the Way, he has only to put on a straight face, and they are enlightened.

The Zhuangzi passage touches obliquely on the transformative power of a directed, composed facial regard — a face held steady — as the medium through which the man of Complete Virtue transmits enlightenment without speech.

Watson, Burton, The Complete Works of Zhuangzi, 2013aside

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