Shimmering Minds, Shifting Light

Frank Godwin illustration from The Blue Fairy Book by Andrew Lang, 1921

The throat of a pigeon, every last feather effortlessly scattering the morning light. The glimmer of a butterfly’s wing, its path across the sky fluttering from ordinary to opal. An oil slick, quietly revealing the stained-glass dream of the pavement. The shimmering sheen of a soap bubble, carrying the breath and gaze of a child as its colors fold into each other in the open air.

Iridescence is the phenomenon where a surface appears to change color depending on the angle of light and the position of the observer. This spectral play of colors is caused by microscopic structures that interfere with light waves, splitting and reflecting them in multiple directions.

She says, The world

is a story that keeps beginning.

In it, you have lived severally disguised:

bright ash, dark ash, mirror, moon;

a child waking in the night to hear the thunder;

a traveler stopping to ask the way home.

—Li-Young Lee, “The Undressing”

More mirage than monument, iridescence calls from the space between things—between surfaces, between moments in time, between the heard and the seen. It is the shimmering shards of life that elude capture. A color not quite a color, the voice that departs after the words are spoken, the dream that flickers and fades in the light of morning.

Between what I see and what I say,

Between what I say and what I keep silent,

Between what I keep silent and what I dream,

Between what I dream and what I forget:

poetry.

—Octavio Paz, “Between What I See and What I Say…”

Oftentimes, psychoanalytic psychotherapy takes on a quality of iridescence, as thought and meaning emerge over time and in the space between patient and therapist. When following the lead of free association (i.e., say everything that comes to mind), the words that surface might not make sense until taken in the context of all the other words, thoughts, feelings, and actions that surround them. In this way, words tend to iridesce, shifting in meaning as patient and therapist slowly walk around them throughout the session—and over the course of a treatment.

This particular process of meaning-making in psychoanalysis calls to mind Freud’s idea of Nachträglichkeit. Often translated as “deferred action” or “afterwardness,” it describes the way meaning is not fully present in the moment of experience but is retroactively constructed. A childhood event might seem meaningless when it happens, only to acquire deep significance years later. The seemingly innocuous slip of the tongue that opened the therapeutic hour only assumes its full meaning when read in the context of the moments that followed. Just as the iridescence of a beetle’s shell shifts in relation to the observer’s position, meaning is not fixed but transforms over time, like a memory that glows differently depending on the light of the present.

One might consider the unconscious itself a gleaming example of iridescence. It speaks, but in slips; it reveals itself, but never directly. Like a soap bubble catching light, its meaning shifts the moment one tries to pin it down. And if one’s attempts become too heavy-handed, it pops, disappearing before our very eyes. Freud called dreams the “royal road” to the unconscious, but it’s no simple highway. It is a shadowy, circuitous, and beguiling path beset with distortions, double meanings, and surprise.

Ever the dim beginning;

Ever the growth, the rounding of the circle;

Ever the summit, and the merge at last, (to surely start again,)

Eidolons! eidolons!

—Walt Whitman, “Eidolons”

British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion’s concept of reverie—a mother’s ability to contain and transform an infant’s raw, unthinkable sensations and emotions—is another example of psychoanalytic iridescence. Reverie is not a fixed structure but a state of openness, an attunement that shifts as new experiences emerge. Thought, for Bion, is never solid. It is something forever arriving, something atmospheric that can only exist in the movement between minds. Like iridescence, reverie is luminous yet intangible, forming and dissolving in response to the environment at hand.

It comes in waves

In waves, in waves

And yet there remains

A deep abiding betweenness

That surrounds us with its restraint

Effulgent, supernal, enduring

—Scott Ray, “In Waves”

Contemporary psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden speaks of the analytic third, a co-created field of experience that forms between patient and therapist. This field—composed of the conscious and unconscious dynamics of the dyad—fuels exploration, transformation, and meaning-making in the therapeutic process, reflecting the idea that life occurs not in isolation but within the relational dance between self and other. Many people enter therapy because they feel stuck in repetitive relational patterns, shackled to internal scripts that they seem to act out again and again. The iridescent nature of the analytic third offers a transformational space where old meanings flicker and morph, opening up the possibility for new ways of being and becoming.

Psychoanalytic psychotherapy, at its best, is not about fixing meanings but about letting them shimmer—about seeing how the light changes as the unconscious shifts, as desire moves, as memory refracts. It is not about grasping truth but about learning to move with its iridescence. It’s about attunement, patience, and deep listening to the as-yet-unspoken, unseen, and elements of yourself shimmering, just beneath the surface, waiting to be carried forward.

Yes my brother I know,

The rest might not, but I have treasur’d every note,

For more than once dimly down to the beach gliding,

Silent, avoiding the moonbeams, blending myself with the shadows,

Recalling now the obscure shapes, the echoes, the sounds and sights after their sorts,

The white arms out in the breakers tirelessly tossing,

I, with bare feet, a child, the wind wafting my hair,

Listen’d long and long.

—Walt Whitman, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”