2 Being open and looking on Fluctuations in everyday life and Psychology Vasudevi Reddy A few years ago, I was lecturing to first-year psychology students and mentioning Wittgenstein’s famous quote about psychology’s “experimental methods and conceptual confusion” (Wittgenstein 1953, p. 232). I enthusiastically endorsed this indictment of the discipline, then belatedly offered an inept defence, saying that Psychology’s was the most difficult of all domains of study. Later, I wondered what the students made of that. Did they actually believe this defence? Could it have made sense? As ordinary human beings untutored in Psychology’s claims and struggles, would at least some things psychological not seem obvious and easy? After all (and I knew this well) even babies have no difficulty grasping psychological phenomena, participating with others’ intentions and perceptions and emotions and expectations and practices appropriately and with relative ease. The phenomena that psychologists investigate are easy to break into and get involved with. On the other hand, one has but to look at the extent to which exciting new ideas take hold in psychology, only to fade in controversy within a decade or so, to become cautious about committing to its concepts. Psychology struggles with frequent disconnections between problem and method (Wittgenstein 1958)1 and indeed between problem, method, and theory (Costall 2002). What is it about things psychological that allows people to get involved with them, showing a degree of understanding that is direct and easy, but at the same time challenges us as psychologists in conceptualising, understanding, and theorising them? Could it be that this very openness of psychological phenomena – inviting involvement and changing shape with context and participation – sets up a difficulty for a scientific stance which approaches without involvement? In this chapter, I use Martin Buber’s distinction of the Thou and It modes of relating and knowing to explore the idea of openness – and its converse – looking on, detachment, disengagement. Buber has had a strong influence in some areas psychology– e.g., developmental psychology and the psychological therapies. Although criticised for, among other things, the imprecision of his I and Thou, his insights remain powerful and relevant. I argue that both being open and looking on are constantly fluctuating processes – ­openness lasts for moments and looking on is not as uninvolved as we might think. DOI: 10.4324/9781003189978-4 Being open and looking on 35 I am not referring to openness as an individual trait (as in the ‘Big 5’ personality traits) or to unrestrained self-disclosure (see Bochner 1981 for a critique), or indeed to a stance of neutrality. Rather, in Buber’s sense, I refer to openness as a specific kind of momentary relation between a person and an ‘other’ (whether a person, a thing, or an event). The everyday occurrence of moments of such openness are familiar and, though fleeting, can be crucial both developmentally and in terms of immediate meaningfulness. Moments of being open may be provoked by surprise or ruptures in normal patterns which are unexpectedly encountered or even deliberately created, as in playful teasing. Psychology as a discipline has largely (and problematically) committed itself to the other of these two modes – a kind of onlooking – as its method. I argue that for Psychology, as for people, recognising and using moments of openness and allowing fluctuating stances in its methods is the only way of approaching meaningful understanding of psychological phenomena. What is this openness? Being open necessarily involves a partial breaking of boundary between self and world. Whether one is captured by the magic of a sunset or the atmosphere of a cliff top or responding to the depths of another’s feelings, there is to some extent a porosity between oneself and this other person or event or thing. The notion of openness underpins the essence of, but is broader than, approaches to empathy and to discussions of the second person (Reddy 2018). It is both more and less demanding than an interactive criterion for second-person relations and undercuts many of the arguments surrounding the nature of empathy. Where many – e.g., Rogers (1980) – approach empathy as an accurate and acceptant perception of another person’s internal frame of reference as if one were the person, Buber’s focus is not on perception and not on being ‘as if’ the other, but on ‘meeting’ the other. Some discussions of empathy split it into ‘cognitive empathy’ versus ‘affective empathy’, looking at them as different aspects of perception and knowing, a split that sits uncomfortably with empathy as ‘meeting’. Ontogenetically, empathy was generally seen as beginning in the second year of life (Hoffman 1977, 1985); more recently, the developmental trajectories of empathic distress have been shown to differ widely, with empathic responses to distress seen even in some 3-month-olds (Paz et al. 2021). Perhaps most problematically, notions of empathy are built specifically around relatedness between subjects. It is possible, however, that the roots of intersubjective connection actually lie in broader ways of relating to the world, thus not presuming a complete boundary between the physical and the subjective in our relations with the world. We can think of openness at different levels – as large-scale atmospheres or situations which surround us and within which we move or as encounters 36 Vasudevi Reddy which involve us directly and focally. The two cannot be independent of each other. In his famous dialogue with Buber in 1957, Carl Rogers argued that the situation of therapist and client involved an inequality only when looked at from the outside, an inequality: “that really has nothing to do with the relationship that produces therapy” (Rogers in Kirschenbaum and Henderson 1989, p. 52, emphasis in original); from the inside, he – as therapist – believed that it was a meeting of persons on an equal basis. Buber’s answer was a profound disagreement. The situation would object to this, he argued, embodying an inequality and difference that could not be merely willed away. The situation here refers to the difference in the interpersonal concerns of therapist (focused on the client) and client (also concerned with the client). But Buber opens the door to a broader range of openness – towards the non-sentient as well. Atmospheres. One broad level might be an openness to atmosphere, to what psychologist Maya Gratier calls the “spaces between”. Using still photographs, she shows the way in which a complex relationality is evident in the spaces between persons and the world. Atmospheres, inevitably extended in space as well as over time, contain aspects that go beyond individual entities or subjectivities, and, connecting them by “a living fabric that weaves together the material, the sentient and the aesthetic” may be a fundamental condition for intersubjective experience (Gratier, in press). For the geographer Ben Anderson, similarly, we are open to the psychological qualities of even larger events and situations – what he calls affective atmospheres. He uses Karl Marx’s lecture in 1856 talking about the revolutionary atmosphere at the time: The revolutionary atmosphere Marx invokes is akin to the meteorological atmosphere in two senses; it exerts a force on those that are surrounded by it, and like the air we breathe it provides the very condition of possibility for life . . . a revolutionary atmosphere must come charged with a sense of danger and promise, threat and hope. (Anderson 2009, p. 78) Atmospheres surround and envelop us but remain on the edge of semantic availability (Anderson 2009). More recently, the idea of “social breathing” (Kaiser and Butler 2021) posits an automatic process in which like air, we unavoidably ‘breathe’ in the affective and intentional qualities of psychological events and relations with potentially long-term effects. This openness to the world and to anything that is ‘other’ or not self – is also fundamental to subjectivity, to being a subject in the phenomenological tradition. Citing Merleau-Ponty, Zahavi (2003, p. 6) puts it thus: subjectivity and world are, as Merleau-Ponty puts it . . . co-­dependent and inseparable. . . . Subjectivity is essentially oriented and open toward that which it is not, and it is exactly in this openness that it reveals Being open and looking on 37 itself to itself. What is disclosed by the cogito is, consequently, not a self-contained immanence or a pure interior self-presence, but an openness toward alterity, a movement of exteriorization and perpetual self-transcendence. Being open towards alterity goes hand in hand with the expressive nature of the world in general and of subjectivity in particular. Dan Stern’s conceptualisation of vitality affects (Stern 1985) points to one way in which this happens: all actions contain and communicate contours of meaning through changing patterns of energy, of tempo or vitality that give them their form. These patterns are available to perception, not necessarily at a conscious level, and can influence the perceiver with a rapid complexity revealed in studies of kinematics and movement dynamics (Ansuini et al. 2014). We easily pick up the difference between and (most importantly) are differently affected by, for instance, a slowly widening smile versus a quick grin, or the jerkiness of restless movements versus the smoothness of calmer actions. Taking this further, these qualities of movement must also exist in the movements of nature, the ferocity of storms, the whispering rustle of poplars in a breeze, and so on, contributing to the fabric of our connection in space and time. Even in infancy, the qualities of action are detected and adjusted to in complex ways; neonates are sensitive to different rhythms of tapping, for instance (Brazelton 1986) and rhythms of movement are often synchronised between interactants in complex ways (Feldman et al. 2011). The musicality of all actions is fundamentally communicative (Malloch and Trevarthen 2009; Mazokopaki and Kugiumutzakis 2009). Observed public events can be shared and reflected in the physiological rhythms of witnessing individuals – heart rates of watchers, for instance, reflecting the actions, risks, and traumas of those they watch (Konvalinka et al. 2011). This openness is inescapable, even, on occasion, to the sadist, the abuser, or the terrorist. One particularly gruesome example of unavoidable openness comes from an unlikely source. Rudolf Hoess, the infamous commandant who was responsible for the notorious ‘arbeit macht frei’ narrative and the gas chambers of Auschwitz tells in his bizarrely honest autobiography (written at the suggestion of an interviewer in prison) about one incident when he saw a young girl who, although unconscious, survived the gassing. He writes of being utterly taken aback by his own visceral reactions – illness and vomiting – saying that he did not, till the present day, understand why he reacted that way. Despite his total conviction about the justice and value of the extermination policy, he was unable to avoid being open to the humanity of the girl. Encounters. Being open at a finer-grained level of one-to-one encounters has to be seen within the context of such openness to atmospheres, spaces, structures, and rhythms. Intersubjective openness cannot be understood separately from our understanding of openness to atmospheres and larger events. 38 Vasudevi Reddy One crucial approach to what it means to be open is that of Martin Buber (1958). Although his familiar distinction between the I-Thou and I-It modes of relating and knowing is about individual rather than atmospheric encounters, these modes are not restricted to relations between subjects. His first example of I-Thou relations is in fact between a person and a tree. By acknowledging the possibility of I-Thou relations with non-sentient entities, even if different in some ways, Buber forces a greater breadth in conceiving of openness in individual encounters. There are two critical aspects of openness as I-Thou relating: presence and transience. Presence is central to the unconstrained openness that is the hallmark of I-Thou relations. Moving away from a focus on therapeutic empathy, Carl Rogers, later in his life, raised the idea of presence: I am inclined to think that in my writing I have stressed too much the three basic conditions (congruence, unconditional positive regard and empathic understanding). Perhaps it is something around the edges of those conditions that is really the most important element of therapy – when my self is very clearly, obviously present. (cited in Geller and Greenberg 2012, p. 30) Presence in Buber’s writings involves a unity of being. To be present is not just to feel a response (while your thoughts may be battling elsewhere) or just to focus attention and thought (while you are emotionally absent). To be present, you need to be a unity encountering the other. Similarly, the encountered other (whether a person, event, or thing) needs to be met as a whole – not partially and not as a collection of features or attributes. Just as the melody is not made up of notes nor the verse of words nor the statue of lines, but they must be tugged and dragged till their unity has been scattered in so many pieces, so with the man to whom I say Thou. I can take from him the colour of his hair, or of his speech, or of his goodness. I must continually do this. But each time I do it he ceases to be Thou. (Geller and Greenberg 2012, p. 15) As soon you adopt a dissecting stance – towards a person or a sunset or a sculpture – you are no longer present in that encounter; your relation has slipped into an I-It mode. Intriguingly, not only is the I-Thou not possible unless you are in the present, but presence is itself tied to being in a Thou relation; “The present arises only in virtue of the fact that the Thou becomes present . . . . the I faced by no Thou, but surrounded by a multitude of ‘contents’ has no present, only the past” (Geller and Greenberg 2012, p. 18). The barrier to Thou relations in encounters might, therefore, come from either direction – from not being present or from the other’s unavailability as a Thou. Being open and looking on 39 This kind of openness is unavoidably transient for Buber. The different modes of relating are dynamic processes and fluctuations are a given. I-Thou relations not only cannot last, but can exist only in moments. “This is the exalted melancholy of our fate” he says, “that every Thou in our world must become an It. It does not matter how exclusively present the Thou was in the direct relation” (Geller and Greenberg 2012, p. 21). It is the intensity of I-Thou moments which is self-destroying: “It is not possible to live in the bare present. Life would be quite consumed if precautions were not taken to subdue the present speedily and thoroughly” (Geller and Greenberg 2012, p. 32). The fluctuations between Thou and It modes can be rapid, not always in clear succession but confusingly tangled, with Thou moments fleeting and rare: “The particular Thou, after the relational event has run its course, is bound to become an It. The particular It, by entering the relational event may become a Thou” (Geller and Greenberg 2012, p. 32). It is all too easy to find examples of shifting away from Thou relations in our daily encounters. In the middle of a passionate embrace, a stray perception of the shape of the other’s face might break the passion but perhaps be pushed away. A laugh out loud with a stranger may be followed by a thought about how easy it is to laugh with strangers – a thought which interrupts but then adds to the pleasure of the laugh. A political complaint against the buffoon who runs the country may be accompanied by the worry that you have to be careful whom you say this to. What is involved in this apparently less desirable mode of I-It relations? Two features stand out. It is safer. And it is instrumental. For Buber, being in an I-It relation cannot involve the whole being – and in not being whole there is less risk; the individual gives him/herself less wholly, stands apart and considers, as it were, does not put him/herself on the line. If you are unable to withhold something of yourself in a relation (as in I-Thou relations) – the interpersonal risk is huge. You can be broken easily. In contrast, I-It relations involve an objectifying of the other – a making of them a ‘thing’ – and an instrumentality. You could see the other only in terms of a specific purpose (or ‘cause’, as Buber puts it). For example, you might see and address the child who walks in the kitchen door solely in terms of his dirty shoes, or respond to a colleague’s distress purely in terms of corporate damage limitation, or the behaviour of a participant in a study only in terms of the study protocol. There may be extreme situations where it is impossible to escape from instrumentality. Buber talks of Napoleon, for example, as a demonic Thou for whom everyone and everything round him was an It, an instrument for his cause. Crucially, from a developmental perspective, this instrumentalisation of relations can harshly transform the self. As a result of only seeing others as Its, we can become an It to ourselves: the Thou that does not respond, that responds to Thou with It, that does not respond genuinely in the personal sphere, but responds only in his own sphere, his particular Cause, with his own deeds. This demonic 40 Vasudevi Reddy Thou, to which no one can become Thou, is the elementary barrier of history, where the basic word of connection loses its reality, its character of mutual action. (Geller and Greenberg 2012, p. 54) Closely related to the notion of an I-Thou relation is the idea of ‘moments of meeting’. Within modern developmental psychology, the notion is most prevalent in the psychoanalytic writings of the Boston Change Group, but common more broadly in discussions of therapy and communication. Moments of meeting are fundamentally dialogic – co-experiential rather than monologic and, in contrast to most definitions of communication, are not focused on the knowledge and skills within individuals (Cissna and Anderson 2008). Although individual histories and knowledge can always intrude – e.g., in cultural preconceptions of what babies are like and what they need – and although moments of meeting are not predictable or automatic, they can occur from the earliest moments after birth and are developmentally crucial (Bruschweiler-Stern in press; Lyons-Ruth et al. 1998). ‘Moments of meeting’, too, are literally momentary; they are moments in a process, not something that, once achieved is held, but events that arrive and depart fleetingly. They can end for different reasons – by infelicitous talking about the moment, by re-assertions of individuality, or by a selfprotective disengagement (Stern 2004). Not being open, then, can damage the self. To be a perpetual onlooker to others, or an instrumental user of others, leaves even the onlooker impoverished. There might be many developmental and existential routes into habitual ‘using’ or onlooking modes of being. Tolstoy’s opening lines in Anna Karenina may hint at this point. “Happy families are all alike” he wrote, but “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” (Tolstoy 2004 [1875], p. 1). Routes into closedness could come from the inevitable entry of the ‘word’, of naming or categorising and become easily a focus on the categorisation system to the exclusion of the particular. This is certainly a familiar phenomenon and risk within scientific ventures, but also easily possible within everyday relationships. We must all have experienced meetings where we have been seen as a member of a category rather than as an individual and are addressed as such “Oh you academic types always . . .” or “(you) Oriental people tend to be . . .” or other more subtle versions of this. Also familiar must be instances when our emotions – fears or anxieties – might rapidly freeze us into denial of the other, into a barricading of oneself behind practicalities or ritualistic responses. Whatever the route, in all of these ways of adopting an instrumental stance of not really being present in the encounter but of merely looking on, there is an absence of open connection with the other, an absence of meeting, an inability to be present, to respond openly, to see, hear, or know the other as a whole. For psychology, whose job it is, arguably, to know people, this absence of openness seems as though it would be a crucial problem. Being open and looking on 41 Psychology as onlooking Some current arguments about methods in psychology involve debates about the manner in which the scientist should relate to the phenomena in question. By and large, psychology has adopted an onlooker methodology, one that has been deeply problematic for it (Schilbach et al. 2013; see also Webb et al. this volume). A spectatorial account of social knowing has been central to the Western intellectual tradition (Dewey 1950) influencing how psychologists believe they should come to know their ‘subjects’. The 19thcentury invention of the scientist as a new professional identity (Costall 2010) caused psychology particular problems because of the dual identity of psychologist and person, and led to the development of ‘estrangement as method’. To deal with this dual identity, the New Psychology had to transform the ‘non-psychologists’ into ‘nonexperts’. One important way that this was achieved was to transform the intimate knowledge people have of one another (and of other animals) into a disqualification. Engagement, closeness, and care were no longer to be regarded as a secure basis for true psychological knowledge. (Costall and Leudar 2011, p. 43, emphasis in original) James Sully famously commented on the inappropriateness of mothers as informants even if – or especially if – infected by the scientific enterprise: “Her mental instincts impel her to regard her particular infant as phenomenal in an extra-scientific sense” (Sully 1881, cited in Costall and Leudar 2011, p. 43). Precisely opposed to this idea of ‘estrangement as method’ is John Macmurray’s dictum that the way to understand persons is through personal relations (Macmurray 1991 [1961]), a dictum which has, however, never really been taken on board by the mainstream (Reddy and Morris 2004). The estranged or spectator view of social knowing has also characterised psychologists’ theories of how children come to know others; the ‘theory theory’ of social understanding, for instance, posits an analytic, conceptual and even theoretical route to making sense of other subjects (Reddy 2008). The psychologist’s use of estrangement as method in science seems to have spilled over into estrangement as developmental theory. However, even in the determinedly impersonal settings of experimental psychological laboratories, experimenters find themselves unable to be as detached as they think they should be, doing the personal bits with experimental subjects off the scene (e.g., in the waiting rooms or in the lobbies) but not reporting it. The appearance of detachment and impersonality in the laboratory experiment is belied by – and in fact the experiment itself made possible by – the interactions that happen in the laboratory ‘waiting rooms’ (Costall 2010). Perhaps most infamous is the (possibly apocryphal) example of the Harlow maternal deprivation studies in which it later emerged that at least one of the research assistants was going down to the baby macaques in the middle of the night to give them a hug. 42 Vasudevi Reddy Outside the experimental laboratory, too, the first-year student of observational research methods was taught not to intervene with participants in the normal course of things, to try to be part of the furniture or as unobtrusive as possible. Where experimental methods require the removal of intervening variables, observational methods try to remove the observer. Before the advent of video cameras, this was difficult – but still deemed necessary. As a PhD student doing a pilot study for home observations of interactions between 7-year-olds and their parents, my trust in uninvolved objectivity came a real cropper. It was my first pilot family; there I was with notebook and pen, all very friendly, but now I was taking notes, my eyes very surreptitiously (I thought) following the middle child of the three in the family. It was not long before I realised that my covert observations were quite clearly not covert, and the target child became the target of sibling teasing leading to a distressed throwing of a glass of milk over his own head, revealing not only their awareness of my intentions but also my own inability as a would-be psychologist to take account of theirs. This would not happen now – not because we have given up the idea of detached observation – but because we have simply become much better at being covert! One-way mirrors and GoPro cameras appear to change the communicative responsibility of the observer and reduce (but do not remove) the extent to which we might make the observed feel like ‘objects’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962).2 The scientist observer, therefore, in contrast to the scientist experimenter, now remains better hidden in her onlooker role, but the determined non-involvement might afford subtler impacts as well as providing a barrier to a full grasp of events.3 Most of psychology, however, does insist on putting on the garb of the detached and unemotional experimenter/observer/onlooker. As Daniel Lehrman puts it, the model of science adopted is that of the behaviourist rather than of the natural scientist, in which the attitude to the experimental subject is not born of interest in the person as a behaver, but interest in the behaviour as something separate from the person (Lehrman 1971). The psychologist as scientist is also seen as distinct from psychologist as person, suggesting that the removal of the psychologist-person from the study of subject-person’s behaviour was irrelevant to the behaviour. A psychologist who could be utterly humane and sensitive in daily life (Lehrman gives the example of Skinner) could believe nonetheless that his/her own perception of reality is irrelevant to the analysis of behaviour. This separation of the person from the science (both within the psychologist and within the subject of study) results, Lehrman argues, in a vast psychological literature in which the reader can find out neither what happens in the subject, nor what happens in the experimenter and in the training of psychologists (of psychologists!) who gather from Being open and looking on 43 their surroundings that emotional detachment from the material with which they work is a pre-requisite for success. (Lehrman 1971, p. 463, emphasis in original) While this detached attitude may well be only a garb, belied by actions on the ground, sometimes psychology’s management of the onlooker role is painfully real: take the example of still-face studies. To summarise for those who do not know the developmental psychological literature: prior to the 1970s and 1980s, there was a major debate about whether babies of 2–3 months were really engaging in non-verbal conversations with adults. When they gazed and smiled and cooed in exchanges, was it merely the adult’s timely interjections which created the illusion of a conversation (that is, were these exchanges really intersubjective, or was the infant responding merely to the behaviour of the other, reacting but not feeling a response)? One test solution was the still-face experiment. These were planned with the best of intentions – to prove to the sceptical audience that it absolutely did matter to very young infants, whether their parents treated them as conversational partners rather than merely as creatures to be fed and kept warm and to show that infants even at 2–3 months could sense unresponsiveness, withdrawal, and – to some extent – genuineness in their parents. What it required was for the happily conversing mother to suddenly become unresponsive, to keep gazing at the infant in a pleasant way, but, literally, as an onlooker; they were asked precisely not to be present to the infant. I tried this once with my first child. In all innocence, I suppose, to show to the great unbelievers that babies do have feelings and are affected by the relevance and quality of others’ responses and non-responses, we tried to capture in photographs the changing facial expressions for a book. Why didn’t I know better? Shamini was about 6 weeks old. . . . In the middle of a good smiley ‘chat’ when she was lying on the bed and I was leaning over her, I stopped, with my face pleasant but immobile, and continued looking at her. She tried to smile a bit then looked away, then looked back at me and tried to chat, then looked away again. After maybe 3 seconds I couldn’t stand it any longer and, smiling, I leaned forward and hugged her, saying “Oh, you poor thing!” At this, she suddenly started crying. Her reaction was a turning point for me. I was shocked. And very moved. I didn’t know she cared. Neither reading about the research nor even, subsequently, watching . . . videos of still-face experiments, told me as much as this experience. (Reddy and Trevarthen 2004, p. 11) So why didn’t I know better? Perhaps I had not really believed the phenomenon was real, nor known what it would be like. At any event, the hurt I inflicted – and experienced – was powerful enough to stop me from 44 Vasudevi Reddy ever doing a still-face study. Onlookers can cause damage as well as be damaged. Ironically, this (my) bizarre (attempted) refusal to engage made me understand the engagement in a deeper – because more painful – way. A methodology for psychology that requires that the psychological scientist be unaffected by psychological phenomena seems absurd. But despite that absurdity, we (as scientist-persons) do carry on trying to act as lookers-on in relation to our phenomena (see also Webb et al. this volume, for similar practices in animal studies and behavioural ecology). Onlooking in everyday life “The onlooker has the best view” goes one folk saying, implying that a position of detachment – of impartiality and equal access to all points of view – gives the best way of knowing. But who really (apart from some naïve would-be psychologists!) is an onlooker? Perhaps typically, one looks to the ­spectators at sports as onlookers, but even here, onlooking is very far from a passive or uninvolved activity. Onlookers are very much participants in the game; the absence of spectators changing the nature of the play – as was often reported in the controversial 2021 Olympics in Japan during COVID19 when only the sportspersons were physically present. Certainly at the start of the Games, the participants were complaining about it not feeling right, although by the end, they had gotten accustomed to the virtual reality of spectators. Or take the example of British tennis player Emma Raducanu, in her first surprising rise to fame during the 2021 Wimbledon matches, speaking with a charming joy at feeding off the (physically present) crowd’s support during the matches. Or take our own experiences of relying on student audiences in lectures – sometimes to our great discomfort when the faces are inhibited and unexpressive – and the difficulty that we all face in online lectures when the audience is completely hidden. Even when seeking to be invisible the spectators or student audiences are definitely not mere lookers-on. But perhaps these situations are not fair choices – after all, sport and lectures require spectators and audiences. One might look instead to people on the street – observing an interaction perhaps or observing some fracas – as being the archetypal onlookers. The example of the 18th-century Parisian flaneur might spring to mind here (Tester 1994). Despite Baudelaire’s description of the flaneur as a passionate observer (who left the boredom of household life to walk about entranced on the streets of Paris observing the multitude), there was clear expectation that the spectating was without emotional involvement with the observed spectacle. The flaneur was anonymous, essentially ‘empty’, and the passion was for the process of watching. Back to modern-day city streets – where there seems to be simply no call on you to be involved – uninvolvement is precarious. Let me give some examples: I was walking down the aisle of a little corner shop some years ago, looking for something for lunch. As I turned the corner of one aisle, Being open and looking on 45 there was a pushchair parked there with a toddler in it – maybe 2 years old at most. She had long blond curls and large eyes, and was strikingly pretty. As our eyes met, I couldn’t help smiling, and she smiled back. I was startled by that encounter. Perhaps as much by my own inability to not smile as by the thought that that little girl’s world must be absurdly full of positive encounters with strangers. The fact that I smiled stopped me from being just an onlooker – I was clearly not ‘just looking on’ – I acted in relation to her – and it was a meeting of subjectivities. But what if she had indeed not been so pretty as to draw an inadvertent smile out of me – would I have more comfortably called myself an onlooker then? The lack of a smile could in fact qualify me for involvement with the little girl’s gaze (in a negative way), as much as the effect on the girl of my lack of expression. And if I had looked at her but had not met her eyes? To what extent would the not meeting of eyes be the act of someone outside the situation rather than of someone not interested enough to meet eyes? It is common enough on urban streets that we avoid gaze and its subsequent duties of politeness as if relieving us of all responsibility – but it can still carry a moral connotation – e.g., when we avoid the gaze of beggars. The scary direction of this question seems to be that there may be no escape from participation: onlookers may not really be onlookers even when they think they are. The role of onlooker is defined partly by expectations and is therefore a cultural definition. Certainly, cultural beliefs about the role of unconnected others – whether in a public bus or on the street or in the home – can influence not only who is legitimately a participant in a situation and who is not, but also what effect their non-participation has. In the UK, one might legitimately expect people on the street to be largely irrelevant to us, going about their business, not engaging even with direct gaze, unless necessary. A Spanish friend visiting the UK for the first time came back from a walk in the city and told her host how friendly the British were – how they all smiled at her in greeting. Her host was baffled. The realisation only came later – this Spanish friend walked everywhere looking at people directly with interest and the people in question were forced to smile in the otherwise awkward moment of mutual gaze. She had turned potential onlookers into persons who engaged. Even on the street, therefore, the role of onlooker is precarious, threatening to fall into direct involvement at any moment. What about when we are removed in space, as well as time, from others? For everyone who has ever cried in a movie or shouted at the television during a political debate, it will be obvious that although a physical remove 46 Vasudevi Reddy might disrupt the literal mutuality of the event, it cannot stop your involvement. Take this example: It is 2002 and there are communal riots in Gujarat with the largely Hindu police force shamefully turning a blind eye or even taking sides. A photograph in a newspaper shows one Muslim shopkeeper, his shop destroyed by looting and violence all around, his eyes filled with tears, his palms joined in a hopeless plea, looking directly at the camera begging for intervention. That front page picture hit viewers hard. Even now, thinking of it, my breath stops and sympathy for his anguish and helplessness follows – as does the guilt at being a part of the fabric that allows such pain. To call myself an onlooker in this episode is somehow to miss the point. His eyes looked at the camera, towards me; his feelings aroused a response in me, the exchange left me acutely self-aware and suffused with feelings of guilt and shame. I was drawn into involvement by his act and his gaze to the viewer. Technically, I would be an onlooker rather than a participant. But the either-or categorisation does not do the involvement justice. The man was to me a Thou. He was looking at ‘me’ and pleading – I was open to him with a wholeness that was unquestionable. Even if for a moment. Buber is explicit – even when talking about an I-Thou relation with an inanimate entity, a tree for instance – that the I-Thou is a mutual relation. “Let no attempt be made to sap the strength from the meaning of the relation”, he says; “relation is mutual” (Buber 1958, p. 15). It is just as real a relation even though a different one. “The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no value depending on my mood; but it is bodied over against me and has to do with me and I with it – only in a different way” (Buber 1958, pp. 14–15). In a similar way, my relation with that photograph was real. It was not a real physical entity but rather a print (and so, in this way, different from the tree or a sunset), but this is a relatively minor difference. It involved past knowledge of that direct look, those teary eyes, that gesture (something that is involved in all our other meetings with people). The difference that is not minor, however, is the extent to which we may not be able to “give and accept the Thou” (Buber 1958, p. 13) from the tree or the photograph in the same way as with sentient beings who can respond. The mutuality is present, but restricted. Our momentary connections with photographs or videos or events seen at a distance can in this way of looking at things, still be I-Thou encounters; we may have a sense of mutual relation with the other as a Thou even without being able to influence the other. The onlooker might be gripped within an encounter of subjectivities with all its risk and sacrifice. Being an onlooker4 seems to actually allow the potential of being directly connected to the looked-upon events. Observing others’ errors in a task at a physical distance – in a virtual reality setting – induces matching theta wave oscillations in the observer (Spinelli et al. Being open and looking on 47 2018). Similarly, watching others’ expressions of pain or other emotions can activate brain regions similar to those activated during first-hand experience, but is also influenced by knowledge of the context (Martini et al. 2013). Heart rate fluctuations while watching a ritual fire walker also show synchrony between the performer and the spectator if the later was related in some way – but not if unrelated (Konvalinka et al. 2011). To some extent, the role of onlooker might actually be more difficult than that of participant when faced with others’ pain (Fischer et al. 2014). In the words of T S Eliot: moments of agony . . . are likewise permanent With such permanence as time has. We appreciate this better In the agony of others, nearly experienced, Involving ourselves, than in our own. For our own past is covered by the currents of action, But the torment of others remains an experience Unqualified, unworn by subsequent attrition (T.S. Eliot 1963 [1941], p. 209) In very different contexts, therefore, and at very different ages, it would seem that onlookers are not ‘mere’ onlookers: they are neurologically, emotionally, and morally connected, both influencing and being influenced by the others upon whom they are looking – and the onlooking, too, is a dynamic and changing stance. Openness to others, therefore, is not reserved for participants in interaction. It comes and goes even in the most unlikely non-interactive and onlooking situations. Surprise and ruptures: encountered or created There are many reasons for the occurrence of I-Thou moments, among them perhaps shared ground and trusted spaces for engagement. But one spur is the occurrence of surprise or rupture of some pattern, of the “natural attitude” (Salamon 2018, p. 10) which causes you to do a double take. Buber speaks strongly about surprise as the mark of genuine conversation: for what I call dialogue there is essentially necessary the moment of surprise . . . The dialogue is like a game of chess. The whole charm . . . is that I do not know and cannot know what my partner will do. I am surprised by what he does and on this surprise the whole play is based. (Buber, transcript of the Buber-Rogers Dialogue, in Kirschenbaum and Henderson 1989, p. 57) He is talking about the potential for surprise – the unscriptedness of an engagement that allows each participant to be surprised by the other – as being necessary for genuine connection to emerge. But the occurrence 48 Vasudevi Reddy of surprise also acts in itself as a prompt for a return to I-Thou relating. ­Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the making strange of ordinary things or the rupture of the natural attitude of Schutz and Husserl (Salomon 2018) points to the power of surprise in jolting us into connection and to violate what Throop (this volume) calls the experience of empathic limits. In a similar way, Daniel Stern’s ‘now moments’ (Stern 2004) are like collisions which – unplanned and indeed unplannable – startle us into recognition of some break in expectations, some tear in the normal fabric of events, and which often precede moments of meeting. That is, the break or the tear acts first to still us and then allow the possibility of openness. Take the following example within a business interaction I am at Heathrow airport, my flight derailed by storms in the United States which were disrupting connecting flights. After much to-ing and fro-ing between different airline desks, one official tries to sort out the tickets. He is pleasant but business-like, barely looking at me. He looks South Asian, too. He asks me, without looking up from his monitor, what sort of visa I have (this depends on whether I have a British or Indian passport). I answer and then explain, unnecessarily, that I never changed my Indian passport, and then awkwardly add – perhaps because of the uncomfortable one-way nature of the interaction – “Difficult to give up your identity . . .”. There is no response for a moment, then he says in an even tone, hardly looking up, “It’s all in your mind”. His words shock me. They conflict with his reserved manner and are unexpected. And perhaps because of this jarring out of place-ness, they feel like a sudden touch, a recognition of me as a person. His rejection of my clumsy revelation seems to strangely confirm who I am. Everything seems to change after that – the interactions which follow between me and his other colleagues seem lighter, easier, and more jocular. I feel like a real person. In this example, the fluctuations in connection are evident. There are the interactive routines – the practicalities, the business that needs to be discussed – and then there are moments when a channel seems to open between the two interactants and they connect genuinely but briefly. The example is very ordinary; if one were not looking out for it, it would fade out of consciousness – and memory – rapidly. But it is not unusual. The official could be seeing their interactant as a sort of representative of their task – not as a person but as a functionary. Alfred Schutz calls this an interaction of contemporaries rather than of fellow-men (Schutz and Luckman 1974). The other in these engagements stops being seen as an individual, but as anonymous, only as member of a ‘type’: “In contrast to the way I grasp the conscious life of a fellow-man the experiences of mere contemporaries appear to me as more or less anonymous events” (Schutz and Luckman, p. 75). To contemporaries, we have a they-orientation (as opposed to a thou-orientation); “as long as they conduct themselves Being open and looking on 49 factually as postal employees, policemen, etc. My partners in they-relations are types” (Schutz and Luckman 1974, p. 77). Or to put it another way, these persons are being used as objects of some kind (Daanen and Young 2013). In the example there was an event – a movement between finite provinces of meaning in Schutz’s terms, a surprise or rupture, which broke through the typicality, derailed the pattern and demanded the possibility of a thou-orientation. This is not limited to official interactions. You may be busy and focused on a task or an anxiety; you might converse with your husband or colleague or neighbour in a friendly-enough fashion in the service of your focus, but you are not really seeing them. Until perhaps they protest or joke or react unusually. It is only when the reaction stops you in your tracks that you can see your previous stance for what it is and your perception of them as Its in the service of your busy-ness. And if you do get jolted and see them differently, you have the potential for a brief I-Thou connection, a moment of meeting. Roland Barthes’ notion (Barthes 1981) of being pierced by the ‘punctum’ in a photograph can happen in interactions, too. The Augenblick moments described by Peluso (this volume) are also examples of these connections – momentary, powerful, and transformative. The Thou-It dichotomy starts to weaken and even fail – when one looks at the rough and tumble of playfulness. Surprise or ruptures can also be deliberately created in playfulness showing fluctuations of stance in which the I-It seems inadequate as a descriptor. Playful teasing is a perfect example of deliberate rupture, leading to a higher level of connection and mutual understanding. You cannot tease (playfully, at least) without creating some sort of rupture, some sort of surprise. Infants tease others playfully before the end of the first year of life in different ways even at this age, ranging from offering and withdrawing objects just as the other reaches out, to playfully disrupting another’s actions to deliberately pushing the boundaries of newly learned domestic dos and don’ts (Reddy 1991, 2007, 2008). In many of these interactions, the adult ‘victim’ of the tease may be startled by the infant’s provocation and then, recognising its motive, respond with laughter or intensified positiveness. In the act of teasing, the infant teaser’s relation to the other shifts – from being with the other, attuned, sharing, participating, to being at the other. The act of isolating an aspect of the other – their physiognomy or thoughts, expectations, or intentions – and highlighting or challenging them e.g., by disrupting, playfully distorting, or violating, can suspend the whole-person Thou-ness of the previous enjoyable engagement, by a stepping back and a new focus on this one aspect of the other. In Buber’s terms, this has to be seen, at least momentarily, as an I-It relation, a fluctuation of stance away from the Thou to the It and back or as a sort of tangle between the two. Take the case of the 9-month-old infant, sitting in a highchair at a family mealtime, playing the newly grasped ‘game’ of giving and taking objects with her father. She pauses in after many repetitions of the giving and taking, 50 Vasudevi Reddy and with a half-smile offers the object, whipping it back as the father obediently reaches out for it, and repeats the offer and rapid withdrawal with a broader smile. The father responds with sudden laughter and a recognition of her cheeky intention by demanding the object (Reddy 1991). The give-and-take game has changed now to a new level. Or take the case of an invalid grandfather on his bed (Reddy 2008), watching his grandson sitting on his haunches on the floor, playing with his cars; bored, and wanting to connect, he uses his walking stick to prod the child, knocking him off his haunches. The child responds with brief irritation towards the grandfather, then resumes play. The sequence happens again. After a couple of times, the child gets up to fight the grandfather and the whole interaction ends up in shared laughter and enjoyment. But what is the shift actually? Here it is from no connection at all, boredom and separateness, the grandfather desiring connection but perhaps testing the child’s possible reactions instrumentally – and therefore treating the child as an It – but resulting eventually in a real and enjoyable I-Thou relation. The shift could be seen as leading towards Thou-ness. So also in infant playful teasing, the brief stepping back to create a rupture can lead to a deeper level of connection after it (Nakano 1996) – and is less like an I-It mode of relation than an It in a bracketed Thou frame. Rosenzweig’s criticism – that in setting up the I-It, Buber gave the I-Thou a cripple for an opponent – seems very appropriate here (Zank and Braiterman 2004). Stern describes what happens in talking therapies a lot of the time as ‘moving along’ – the stuff that probably has to happen to set up the ground for possible moments of meeting. The moving along involves a distance and a caution perhaps, even rituals, but may not involve seeing the other as an It – more like a holding of the breath, treading water, suspending relation, and waiting. There is much we do not yet understand about fluctuating stances, of the temporal nature of openness and about the nuances of closedness (Stawarska 2009). The key point in these examples is that continuous fluctuations in modes of relating, created by unexpected or deliberate ruptures of normality, can lead to a sudden “sense of not having been there before with this person” (Doug Brandon, personal communication, University of Portsmouth). Thou moments are vital; encountering ‘the eternal butterfly’, to use Buber’s image, stops us from seeing others or the world only as instruments and ourselves as no more than their users. They change us. Or rather, they can change us if we recognise them. Given their ephemerality, they can fade into oblivion very easily, their occurrence barely remembered, their effects stunted. If recognised and stayed with, however, they can deepen understanding and transform us. Perhaps Buber’s sense of the tragedy and melancholy of our relations could be re-framed: the real tragedy may be not that these moments pass, but that even when they occur, we do not know them for what they are and what we could become. Being open and looking on 51 Fluctuating relations in psychology, too? What can Thou moments and fluctuating modes of relating teach psychology? For Buber, recognising the two-fold nature of knowing in relations between people is crucial for understanding how we know persons. In other words, to know persons, psychology needs to acknowledge both modes of relating and somehow incorporate both into all of its investigations. The problem of course is with the idea of Thou moments: does psychology need them? The nature of knowledge creation – of naming, systematising, and theorising – is inevitably an It mode of relation. Events, experiences, feelings, and thoughts can be hardened into ‘things’, banished into being ‘objects’ in Buber’s terms. Although this is also the case in relations with people, it is in the nature of science that this has to be the case. “For that is how knowledge comes about, a work is achieved, and image and symbol made, in the midst of living beings” (Buber 1958, p. 37). However, the conceptual object which hardens into a ‘thing’ contains within it the capacity to change back and be lived in present-ness. And here we (as psychologists) then have a choice – we can come to terms, as Buber puts it, with the world of It in such a way that we only continue to use, rather than live, the ‘thing’ we have created. That is, instead of engaging with it we look on and instead of accepting it as it is, we turn it to our own account. Or, we can return the object, the ‘thing’ or the It, again to its raw state of being – as a real and effective act of knowing between people. We do not need to leave, use, appropriate, and conquer as It that which has become It. It is the returning of these objects of knowing back to Thou relation which allows knowledge to be “real and effective” (Buber 1958, p. 37). Psychology’s troubled history of attempts to develop a methodology suited to its subject matter have often resulted in tensions between the extent to which psychologists may or may not allow personal relations to enter method and theory. Without question, the power structures of science are unbalanced – the more quantitative or normative methods (Watts 1965) – hold most of the cards, the money, and the prestige. ‘Hard’ science scoffs at the particularity and local nature of ‘soft’ qualitative methods. The huge advantages of a more objective It mode of knowing make it seem pointless to spend time on responding to the objects of knowledge in a Thou mode, making the moments of the Thou appear as strange lyric and dramatic episodes, seductive and magical, but tearing us away to dangerous extremes, loosening the well-tried context, leaving more questions than satisfaction behind them, shattering security – in short, uncanny moments we can well dispense with. For since we are bound to leave them and go back into the ‘world’, why not remain in it? (Buber 1958, p. 32) 52 Vasudevi Reddy Buber’s answer to this very reasonable ‘why’ question is that instrumentality kills the moment, the present. The hardening of our psychological objects into things removes us from live relation. As persons, our knowledge would be destructive and meaningless if we only engaged in instrumental and objective It relations. Can this be true for psychology’s knowledge of persons, too? Many research ventures in psychology begin from personal encounters, even though the scientist’s training imposes a forgetfulness about this. It is embarrassing to write – “I saw this in my child” or “I felt so happy seeing this” or “my child did this incredible thing”. It is easier by far to keep it impersonal and to appear to look at things impersonally. Even if one overcomes the embarrassment of admitting an observation of one’s own child, admitting emotion about it is really taboo: one could reveal that one found this so interesting or puzzling or curious or odd – all acceptable investigative feelings, but no more (see also Webb et al. this volume). I cringe now on hearing an old interview of mine in which I was asked about my experience of the birth of my first child. My response was basically about how “interesting” she was! Although many studies begin from the personal, they do not often stay with it or come back to it. Is this a problem? Take the example of one phenomenon with which I am familiar from the start. My son was about 4 months old. I leaned forward to pick him up from a baby chair, and as my hands contacted his torso and back, I could feel the back had already arched in tension. The experience of and the curiosity about this anticipatory back-arching stayed. Many years later, I found a method of measuring that anticipatory tension in the body and designed a study with colleagues (Reddy et al. 2013). It was going to be a smart, clean experimental study with controlled variations in the adult’s direction of approach (a number of degrees to the side versus straight forward) and in whether she had her arms out with control of all confounding variables such as facial expression, gaze direction, and vocalisations (all kept pleasant but uniform) by the adult. The simplest solution was to have the same experimenter conduct all the trials with all the infants. The equipment was purchased, the lab was set up, the infants were recruited, and off we went. It was a disaster. The babies just looked at us and did nothing. There were several options facing us in our depression. We could have gone for a slightly older age group of babies. We could abandon the whole study. We could re-think our experimental controls.5 The memory of feeling that back-arching in my fingertips was powerful, however, and we went for the last option. We got the mothers involved in the approach task and reduced the number of variables we wanted to examine. This was a fortunate choice. Optimism re-asserted itself over the next weeks: we could see clear evidence of the phenomenon earlier and in ways we had not expected, and we became cocky again. There were a few mothers who didn’t quite follow our instructions (which were simple, we thought: first chat as you would normally, then make Being open and looking on 53 the approach from the front and only when the baby is looking), and one in particular who kept teasing the baby with approach and withdrawal, and whom we tried to ‘manage’ and contain. Once we got our wonderful data, and started number crunching, our connection to the phenomenon became even more distant – we didn’t need the personal stories anymore and had to make an effort to re-engage with its meaningfulness from time to time. The data are still wonderful, but one wonders what could have been if we had allowed it freer reign. Shortly after, a wonderful Japanese study was published on the same phenomenon – styles of maternal pickup approach to slightly older infants and their responses, described in the context of intersubjective tactile communication and the desire for contact (Negayama et al. 2015) – much richer Thou relations were permitted into the phenomenon. Personal involvement with developmental phenomena has always yielded rich observational data, although much criticised, ignored, and not cited by major writers. In this domain, at least, claims about infant intersubjective capacities have, after decades of scorn and dismissal, often been accepted within the scientific orthodoxy. Trevarthen’s claims about primary intersubjectivity and conversations with 2-month-olds is the prime example of this (Trevarthen 1974, 1979). The phenomenon is, ironically, exactly about I-Thou engagement between infant and mother. Dismissed even by the most sympathetic critics as claiming too much too early (e.g., see Stern 1985 or Mahler et al. 1975) thirty years after its description, and after enormous amounts of research going down blind alleys and harsh tests, the phenomenon is now part of textbooks. Conflicting findings between observations of infant skills at home, for instance, and experimental findings of infant lack of skills in the laboratory are common: children cannot tell lies before 4 years of age (yes they can); infants cannot point to show before 18 months of age (yes they can); infants cannot show self-conscious affects before 18 months (yes they can); and so on (see Reddy and Morris [2004] for some examples of such conflict in the study of infant social understanding). One might argue that empirical contradictions are a part of science, that these ‘discoveries’ are a part of scientific development. But these are only discoveries for some – even less convincing than the ‘discovery’ of America by Columbus. There has got to be a better way to do psychological science than to spend millions of hours and pounds chasing hypotheses derived from logical arguments alone; a way which does not involve dislocating psychological phenomena from their sources of meaning. To come back to Wittgenstein’s verdict of psychology’s conceptual confusion: the interpretation of this verdict has largely been that Wittgenstein is picking up on psychologists’ frequent assumption that in naming their concepts, they have somehow escaped from bias; that they forget the extent to which psychological phenomena are part of the language and culture of the scientist and are constituted by the very linguistic distinctions and practices used to understand them (Bredo 2006). But it is not only 54 Vasudevi Reddy linguistic practices which constitute psychological phenomena: the scientist’s personal involvement in any psychological phenomenon – which must vary enormously in degree and kind – must also be fundamentally part of the named, defined, and studied phenomenon. The openness of such phenomena allows us to know them and to know them in a certain way. To paraphrase a conclusion about the co-constitution of culture and mind (Shweder and Sullivan 1993), psychology and psychological phenomena make each other up. To not recognise this is a good part of the conceptual confusion. Just as persons suffer from an absence of Thou relations, psychology has been hampered as a science from its attempts to be distant from its subject matter, not valuing sensitivity to the scientist’s emotional responses, and allowing many phenomena to pass us by. Twentieth-century psychology places little emphasis on these moments of connection and certainly does not sensitise us to their occurrence in our scientific process. De Jaegher’s impassioned plea for recognising loving as a valid way of knowing (De Jaegher 2021) might take another twenty years to be properly heard. Although much psychological research might – and indeed must – begin from personal relevance and remembered Thou relations, by prioritising obedience to the rituals of method over sensitivity to moments of meeting, we seem to veer into many scientific blind alleys and a frequently dull science. The only way forward is to keep re-grounding our analyses in the experience of the phenomenon, and vice versa, re-experiencing the phenomenon in the face of the analysis. To just start research with this experience then to leave it behind is futile – both modes of relation need to ‘talk’ to each other through the process of understanding. They cannot simply merge – their difference is irreconcilable and cannot be submerged in an integration; it is their fluctuation that keeps phenomena present. To come back to Buber’s terminology, the psychologist needs to make and re-make the phenomenon a Thou (the I of the psychologist changing in each shift) from its inevitable slipping into an It. Psychology’s methods problem is not one of how to embrace detachment. It is one of accepting that detachment itself as participatory (even looking on co-constitutes phenomena). Nor is it a problem of how to create the particularity of Thou moments in its science: we cannot plan for these moments or force their occurrence. The problem we face is one of recognising them when they do happen during our studies, giving them space to be and allowing our knowledge to develop through them. The tragedy for psychology, too, is of not recognising the moments and not realising how they can transform our science if we let them in to science. We are still wading as if through treacle in understanding how being persons should relate to our being scientists, how to do what ordinary folk manage in their daily lives: fluctuate between moments of openness and periods of routine, ritual, and looking on. Being open and looking on 55 Notes 1 Wittgenstein (1958, p. 232): The confusion and barrenness of psychology is not to be explained by calling it a ‘young science’; its state is not comparable with that of physics, for instance, in its beginnings . . . . For in psychology, there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion. The existence of the experimental method makes us think that we have the means of solving the problems which trouble us; though problem and method pass one another by. 2 Merleau-Ponty (1962, pp. 360–361): The other person transforms me into an object and denies me, I transform him into an object and deny him, it is asserted. In fact the other’s gaze transforms me into an object, and mine him, only if both of us withdraw into the core of our thinking nature, if we both make ourselves into an inhuman gaze, if each of us feels his actions to be not taken up and understood, but observed as if they were an insect’s. This is what happens, for instance, when I fall under the gaze of a stranger. But even then, the objectification of each by the other’s gaze is felt as unbearable only because it takes the place of possible communication. 3 Being excluded from participation – even in a relatively trivial activity such as a ball tossing game in a laboratory – can rapidly (within 4 minutes!) cause dejection (Williams 1997; Zadro et al. 2004). Even when repeated as a 6 minute online ball tossing game, and told that they were playing with computer-generated players, participants who were excluded reported lower levels of belonging, control, self-esteem and meaningful existence. Even more bizarre, even when participants were told that the excluding persons were ‘reading from a script’ about whether to include or exclude them, they reported lower levels of belongingness, control, meaningful existence and enjoyment and higher levels of anger and (in relation to exclusion by the computer) hurt feelings, even if the exclusion was known to be pre-scripted. The slightest hint of ostracism, it seems, is felt as a depleting experience which undermines otherwise rational reactions to situations. 4 Within fields as far apart as sports psychology and business studies, the categorical boundary around the onlooker is being taken apart empirically. Within the business world, an onlooker is defined as someone inside the organisation to whom another individual’s actions are visible but who is not involved in their activities. Very reminiscent of Sartre’s watched Peeping Tom, the presence of the onlooker to a wrong-doing can induce strong self-conscious affect – shame, guilt, fear, and embarrassment – and reduce wrongdoings (Farshadkhah 2020; Farshadkhah et al. 2021). But onlookers’ awareness of wrong-doing in others can have the opposite effect – it can enhance their own wrong-doing (Ferguson and Barry 2011). Even in the field of sports – where one might argue that the boundary between an active player and the passive spectator is beyond question – the boundary is far from clear. There is an in-between space between player and spectator where the onlooker can violate their own role, commenting on and attempting to direct actions, and where the player’s awareness of this involvement then influences their play (Maurer et al. 2015; Kimble and Rezabek 1992; Kappen et al. 2014). 5 One could argue that the psychological experiment is much like the deliberately created rupture in playful teasing – testing to see ‘what happens if’. However, the frame is totally different: the focus in the playful teasing is entirely on the particular other and they can maintain the Thouness of the encounter. Experimental procedures can do this, too (variations in methods in studies of neonatal imitation are a good example of this) – but with much greater difficulty. 56 Vasudevi Reddy References Anderson, B. 2009. Affective atmospheres. Emotion, Space and Society, 2: 77–81. Ansuini, C., Cavallo, A., Bertone, C. and Becchio, C. 2014. 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