TOUCHED
It occurs to me, working occasionally as a therapist as I do and attempting to honor the frequently simple‑minded „ethics“ of that profession (and of academic life as well), how unnatural‑‑ indeed, violative of natural human affinities‑‑ such ethics are, their perversity extending to the core of language itself. For is it any accident, really, that when we are truly moved by another human being we describe ourselves as being „touched,“ as if the physical act were merely an afterthought, a kind of certification of what has already taken place?
It is this very erotic nature of speech‑‑ of „connecting“ as a verbal, rather than purely physical act‑‑ which has always made the verbal professions (teaching, psychotherapy, religion) so charged with sexual possibilities, as the eros of recognition immediately suggests to its participants the eros of fusion. Being distant from you, wanting (and, in some professions, needing) to know you, I employ language‑‑ much as I would touch‑‑ to bridge the unbridgeable chasm between us. Shedding, in some manner, the modesty, the fierce privacy of the self, it is merely a small step further for me to shed the modesty of my garments, my restraint. Thus the frequently documented erotic fantasies of confessees concerning the invisible other of the Confession chamber.
What more, then, is touch at its best than the body attempting to mimic the soul’s movements‑‑ the hands and lips, the feet, attempting to follow the heart’s journey into the body?