The Basic Situation

Let's say a baby is born and one of her eyes needs a surgery. So they do the surgery and it goes well and the eye is going to be totally usable, but it's gonna take a little bit of time for it to heal. If that eye is kept covered during the healing process, the baby will learn how to live without it.

She’ll look for the path of least resistance and work her life around the functional absence of the eye, meaning her growing sense of self will not include the eye that’s covered. The eye that is working will get wired-in, along with everything else she can sense and feel, into her map of what’s possible.

But later down the road, let’s say the second eye is healed and it gets uncovered. Now there is a problem because even though the surgery worked to make the eye potentially functional, it’s not actually functional because it’s not part of the bigger picture she’s already developed of herself.

So there’s an interesting tension between how she’s learned to use herself and this new element that is her eye but not part of her self image.

If she is going to use that second eye in any meaningful way, it’s going to require her to engage with a process of re-learning (and un-learning) how to use her whole self. She’s going to have to figure out how to take apart and reintegrate the system of habits and coordinations she made with just the one eye, which is actually really hard because that’s the “good enough” set of habits she’s come to depend on.

Even if it seems obvious from the outside that two eyes are better than one, to the kid it doesn't feel that way. In fact, she may feel that learning to use the second eye is so inconvenient it’s almost unthinkable, and there’s a good chance she won’t do it if left to her own devices.

This is a schematic example—of course, real world children can be in situations that are significantly more complex. But this hypothetical captures something fundamental about the basic situation I’m working with as a Feldenkrais practitioner, which is the incomplete self-image. If I were working with a child like this, I would be trying to create conditions for her to learn to use her second eye. More generally, I would be suggesting ways for her to re-organize the elements in her brain-body system to become more herself.