Abstract
‘Show and tell’ is a primary school activity wherein a child shows an object to the class and tells a story about it. I use this metaphor to understand group communication, with reference to Foulkes’ communicative hierarchy. I define ‘showing’ as bottom-up communication, which presents an object in search of a containing narrative. Conversely, ‘telling’ is formalized as top-down communication, providing a container in search of an object. I am concerned with what might happen, so-to-speak, if a child were to bring an object to the class only to sit in silence, or were to tell a story without bringing an object. With reference to clinical material from an analytic group, I describe instances of both kinds of communicative mismatch. I propose that the therapeutic work of the group balances showing with telling and vice versa, and in so doing fosters a more ‘joined up’ communication amongst the participants. Here, the conductor does well to have in mind an aphorism from creative writing: ‘show, don’t tell’.
The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. (Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 1932)
Introduction
S. H. Foulkes wrote that group analytic psychotherapy is synonymous with a process of ‘working towards an ever more articulate form of communication’ (Foulkes, 1948: 169). However, this credo of group analysis begs the question, what exactly did Foulkes mean by articulate communication?
When we describe a person as articulate, we imply they are able to speak fluently and coherently. Accordingly, Foulkes wrote that the goal of group analytic psychotherapy is to ‘translate the autistic symptom into a problem which can be verbalized’ (Foulkes, 1964: 74). Foulkes and Anthony (1957) describe a hierarchy of group communication, ranging from ‘bodily equivalents of emotions’ at the bottom, through to verbal and abstract languages at the top. They propose that the group’s ‘shared zone of communication’ will gradually rise through this hierarchy, until the group is able to converse freely (Foulkes and Anthony, 1957: 260–263). In this sense, Foulkes’ concept of articulacy seems to reflect a widespread tenet of analytic psychotherapy to put into words experiences that were formerly unspoken.
However, the verb ‘to articulate’ also means ‘to connect by joints’ (OED, 2023). It follows that articulate communication is also joined up communication. It seems Foulkes was aware of this older meaning of articulacy. As Foulkes and Anthony note: The group has to go downwards and deepen its understanding of the lower levels of the mind by broadening and deepening its vocabulary until every group member also understands these levels. Ideally the whole group should learn eventually to move over the whole range of our scale. (Foulkes and Anthony, 1957: 263)
Indeed, Foulkes and Anthony cautioned against intellectualized speech that remains unconnected with experience or feeling: ‘Intellectualized discussion is suspended, as it were, in mid-air, whereas true communication in the group is firmly rooted in the experience of the group, and grows from it’ (Foulkes and Anthony, 1957: 263).
In this article, following Foulkes’ reasoning, I suggest that articulate communication consists not simply in using words, but in matching message with meaning. Specifically, I argue that articulacy balances ‘telling’ with ‘showing’.
Some people will know ‘show and tell’ as a primary school activity where a child brings an object, and tells a story to the class about what that object means to them or where it came from. Following this example, I suggest that showing and telling are directions of communication. Showing presents an object in search of a story, while telling presents a story in search of an object. Here I am concerned, so to speak, with what might happen if a child were to bring an object to the class, only to sit in silence; or if a child were to tell a story to the class, without bringing an object.
I will illustrate these ideas using clinical vignettes, based on an analytic group, which has eight members, and has been meeting weekly for just over a year in an NHS psychotherapy service. Names and details have been changed to preserve anonymity.
Showing and telling as directions of communication
Foulkes wrote of communication in groups, ‘there is a double process going on from below upwards, as it were, and from the surface downwards’ (1975: 111). Remarkably, here Foulkes could equally have been describing contemporary theories of information processing in the brain. A prevailing view in neuroscience is that our nervous system is organized hierarchically, with sensory organs at the bottom, and the cortical surface of the brain at the top (Friston, 2010, 2018; Friston and Keibel, 2009). What is more, a theory of predictive coding proposes that the brain tries to match sensory data arising from the ‘bottom up’ with expectations sent from the ‘top down’ (Mumford, 1992; Dayan et al., 1995; Rao and Ballard, 1999; Friston, 2018). According to this idea, representations higher in the hierarchy serve as explanations for those at the level below (Kemp et al., 2007; Perfors et al., 2011; Tenenbaum et al., 2006).
That perception involves such a ‘double process’ is illustrated by visual figure-ground phenomena (see Gregory, 1980). A well-known example is an image of two identical faces in profile, with their noses pointing towards each other, the negative space between which resembles a vase. Try as we might, it is extremely difficult to see the picture just as it is; rather, at any one time we see either faces or a vase, depending on which top-down interpretation gains the upper hand.
Thus, according to theories of predictive coding, our brains are engaged in a process of internal communication, which resembles the external communication Foulkes observed in groups. I propose that such communication is like a game of ‘show and tell’ wherein bottom-up messages are ‘shown’ to higher representational levels, which in turn pass top-down messages to ‘tell’ the lower levels what to expect.
In Bionian terms, higher levels of a representational hierarchy can be said to contain impressions communicated upwards from the levels below (Bion, 1962: 89, Bion, 1970). Within this view, showing and telling pertain to directions of communication in a container-contained relationship. Showing is the act of presenting data for explanation, while telling furnishes an explanation. Showing presents difference, telling finds similarity. Showing hopes for constraint, while telling constrains. Showing seeks a container, telling provides one. I suggest that meaning emerges in the exchange of showing and telling. That is, meaning consists of a relationship between data and theory, between parts and whole, between contained and container (Bion, 1962; Bateson, 1979).
Inevitably however, we have experiences we do not understand, without an internal representation to ‘tell us what they mean’. Likewise we have expectations that remain unmet, with ‘nothing to show for ourselves’. As a result, we outsource our showing and telling to others. Aspects of ourselves that we cannot put into words we show to others in search of explanation and, in turn, we tell each other stories in search of validation and reassurance. When this happens, the unit of meaning making becomes not an individual mind, but a dyad or a group. As Foulkes puts it ‘understanding, like communication, is a social process, [which] involves at least two persons’ (Foulkes, 1948: 169). In this manner, as described by Blackwell (1998), a group of people comes to act as a distributed receiver and processor.
Showing
‘Showing’ as an external communication happens when signals that have no receiver in the self are sent out into the world, in the implicit hope that they are received there instead. As Bollas (2018) describes in relation to his experiences of working with autistic and schizophrenic children: The autistic child cannot tell you how he feels, or what his psyche is made of; he can only show you . . . [he] may utter not a word, but his cries, dense preoccupied silence, and mimetic use of people is his language. (Bollas, 2018: xiv)
Bollas’ description resonates with Foulkes’ definition of neurotic symptoms as blockages in communication. ‘The language of the symptom’, Foulkes writes, ‘although already a form of communication, is autistic. It mumbles to itself secretly, hoping to be overheard’ (Foulkes and Anthony, 1957: 260). Such communications can be seen as attempts to express aspects of the self that are unfamiliar to the subject or, as Bollas puts it, ‘that part of the psyche that lives in the wordless world’ (Bollas, 2018: xiv).
‘Showing’ resembles the process that Klein referred to as projective identification (Klein, 1946, 1955; Ogden, 1979; Kernberg, 2018). As Bion outlines, projective identification entails an unconscious phantasy that it is possible to split off undesired or unrecognized parts of the self and put them into an object (Bion, 1962: 31). Bion claimed that this is the mechanism through which thinking begins (Bion, 1962: 83). That is, through projective identification, by finding a place to deposit unrecognized parts of the self, a person starts the process of accommodating them. Accordingly, I propose that ‘showing’ can be viewed (teleologically) as an attempt to render unexplained and unacceptable sensations explicable and acceptable, by finding a receiver for them outside of the self. As Bateson puts it, ‘it is the recipient of the message that creates the context’ (Bateson, 1979: 48).
Vignette
In the early stages of the group, a woman in the group, Aisha, sat for several sessions in silence. When others enquired as to how she was feeling, she gave only desultory responses, or said she did not really want to speak. Others became wary of asking her.
Analysis
We later learned that Aisha often felt excluded, ignored and misunderstood by others in her life outside the group. Whilst she could not give voice to her feelings, she could show the group quite clearly what it was like to feel excluded, by shutting us out from her inner world.
Over time, the group gently encouraged Aisha to say more about herself, through which she gradually came to experience the group’s curiosity as genuine and benign. At the same time she became more curious about her own internal world.
Showing, the baby and the parents
Nowhere is our reliance on showing more obvious than in infancy. A hungry baby does not know that the gnawing sensation in her stomach means something called hunger. Nor can a baby tell her mother or parent that she is hungry, she can only show this through movements and cries.
A key theme in psychoanalytic theory is that, in early life, we need our parents to give structure to our experiences, that is, to help us link showing with telling. Winnicott (1967), for instance, beautifully described what might happen when the infant chances to look at the mother’s face: What does the baby see when he or she looks at the mother’s face? I am suggesting that, ordinarily, what the baby sees is himself or herself. In other words the mother is looking at the baby and what she looks like is related to what she sees there. (Winnicott, 1967: 151)
Here, Winnicott captures a recursive relation between mother and baby: the baby looks at mother, whose face reflects what she sees in the baby. The baby finds aspects of herself in the mother’s response and begins to know them there first (see also Fonagy et al., 2007; Gergely, 2018). Winnicott (1967) suggests that this early reciprocity sets the template for making sense and meaning out of the world.
In the language of the present essay, the meaning making activity that goes on between baby and parent is a game of ‘show and tell’. The baby ‘shows’ its feelings, having no narrative through which to tell of them. The parent converts this into a ‘show and tell’; they show for example that hunger can be soothed, and that there is a story to tell about it. Through this, the baby develops her own capacity to show and tell.
Gesture-speech mismatches
A further illustration of this two-way exchange derives from the experimental study of development in school-aged children. In keeping with Piaget’s developmental theory (Piaget, 1950), S. Goldin-Meadow and colleagues found that six-year-old children tended to say that a tall, narrow glass contained more water than a wide, shallow dish of the same volume, ‘because the glass was taller’ (Goldin-Meadow et al., 1993). Yet, at the same time as explaining this in words, some children indicated with their hand shaped like a ‘C’ the narrow diameter of the glass, and then the wider diameter of the dish. Goldin-Meadow reasoned that these children conveyed in their gesture the beginnings of an understanding that was not yet verbally accessible. Supporting this idea, children who showed such ‘gesture-speech mismatches’ were more likely to benefit from instructions about interpreting volume than were children who did not exhibit mismatches (Goldin-Meadow, 2009).
Throughout life, like Goldin-Meadow’s children, we show through gesture and body language things that we partly know or feel but which remain unsaid. Viewed teleologically, our gesture-speech mismatches seem to anticipate further instruction, metaphorically reaching out to someone else to ‘join the dots’. Showing cries out for a story to be told: a richer one than is being told already.
Telling
I define ‘telling’, in the group context, as an attempt to explain something to another person, or to make others conform to one’s expectations. For instance, we often adopt narratives that give definition to the self, which we tell others in search of validation. A person may find security in followers or admirers or might develop a habit of providing instruction or counsel to others. In all such instances, the key quality is of structuring, sometimes soothing, but also of constraint. I suggest that a preponderance of ‘telling’ in the group is often linked to False Self dynamics, as described by Winnicott (1960).
Telling and the False Self
Winnicott (1960: 145) proposes that, through the mother’s providing for the baby’s needs and delighting in their spontaneous gestures, the baby comes to learn that her needs can be met, and has the feeling that she has caused this to happen. Winnicott suggests this illusion of omnipotence forms the basis of the infant’s capacity for spontaneous expression and creative action, which he refers to as the ‘True Self’. However: ‘The mother who is not good enough . . . repeatedly fails to meet the infant gesture; instead she substitutes her own gesture which is to be given sense by the compliance of the infant’ (Winnicott, 1960: 145, emphasis added).
According to Winnicott, the infant’s need to comply with the mother’s intrusive gesture forms the basis of a ‘False Self’. In other words, the infant internalizes an expectation about how to be, an expectation that has the quality of ‘telling’, and which is set apart from the self. Thus, the False Self contains an aspect of the mother’s wishes.
Winnicott (1960) recognized that it is a common scenario for the False Self to be tied up with intellectual activity. That is, a possible defensive response to the threat of intrusion by the object is to withdraw from the world of feelings and people altogether. Comparison can be drawn with Fairbairn’s concept of schizoid personality, wherein an ‘anti-libinal’ ego, which eschews dependence on others, is split off and separated from the ego proper (Fairbairn, 1940; see also Kohut, 1971: 80).
In such constructions, intellectual and/or fantasy activity ‘stand in for’ connections with bodily feelings or other people. Imaginative ‘top-down’ activity (telling) takes the place of connections with ‘bottom up’ feelings (showing). In a group context, this might manifest as group members’ continually telling stories, or analysing events, with little discernible connection to the life of the group, or to feelings in the here-and-now. Such communication is that which Foulkes and Anthony described as ‘suspended as it were in mid-air’ (Foulkes and Anthony, 1957: 263).
Vignette: ‘Fed and watered’
Aurelie is a woman in her 50s. She described her childhood as having been ‘fed and watered, but that was about it’, speaking to an emotional deprivation. She longed for a closer connection with her father. She said the only way of communicating with him was to dispute points of fact. When she reached adolescence, her mother tended to disparage or dismiss her interest in romantic relationships. She felt that, in this way, her parents kept their relationship with her within tight constraints. She withdrew to her bedroom for most of her teenage years.
Analysis
Aurelie’s astute, and sometimes exacting, analyses in the group often helped others with problem solving. Over time however, she began to realize that this way of communicating (through telling) came at the expense of her attending to her own emotional needs, which she described as ‘spending a lot of time chewing over other peoples’ angst, rather than looking at my own’. She was able to link this to how, in her childhood family, emotions were rarely put into words. She recognized her tendency to withdraw into silence in the group when she felt misunderstood, just as she had done in adolescence.
Telling and psychologizing
Echoing Winnicott, M. Glasser (1986, 1992) describes how the child may be used as a narcissistic object for the parent. In such instances, the parental projections might be experienced as overwhelmingly intrusive: ‘The object is invariably regarded as engulfing, or enveloping, or intrusive . . . in essence the belief is that the object will take him over totally to the point of annihilating his separate identity and existence . . .’ (Glasser, 1986: 9).
As a result, the object is internalized (introjected), without being incorporated into the infant’s self-representation, a configuration Glasser referred to as the ‘core complex’ (Glasser, 1986, 1992). We might say that in such instances, the parent’s telling and/or showing threaten to annihilate the nascent self. Either the parent makes demands to which the child cannot supply an adequate response, or the parent’s shows exceed the child’s sense-making capacity.
Glasser (1992) described how a possible response to core complex anxieties is for the child to play a role, so as to comply with the intrusive object. For example, a person may become adept at being a helper or container for others. Group members prone to this empathic form of telling may find themselves in the role of the ‘conductor’s assistant’.
Vignette: ‘Child psychologist’
Sara, a woman in her late 20s, described the need, whilst growing up, to be constantly alert and responsive to her mother’s unpredictable behaviour. She likened this to having become a ‘child psychologist’. She reprised this role in the group, being quick to step in to explain and interpret others’ situations.
Analysis
Sara later reflected on her tendency to take up a caretaker role in the group. She told the group that she realized that she quite often felt the need to control others’ emotions—this stemmed not only from a worry that she would get hurt, but that everyone else might be upset too. She linked this to having felt continually unsafe as a child, needing to anticipate and soothe her mother’s changeable moods.
In summary, when telling is excessive, immediacy of sensory experience and spontaneity of action are lost. In the group, this may feel as if group members are sitting round a dining table, politely reprimanding each other on their manners, or discussing matters of the day, without eating a morsel of food. Alternatively, group members may be busily engaged in being good therapists for each other, whilst avoiding the immediacy of relating in the here-and-now. This can lead to the group-as-a-whole functioning as a kind of ‘False Self’. However, in such groups, all the while the False Self is busy telling, the True Self longs to show itself.
Showing and telling in the group
I suggest that the integrative work of the group balances showing with telling and vice versa. With help from the conductor, the group will naturally tend to point out where showing is prominent, and more steady analysis is needed, or where there is excessive telling, calling for greater sensitivity and connection to the raw material of experience. Through such a reciprocal exchange, group members reclaim unintegrated parts of themselves (Foulkes and Anthony, 1957: 150).
Sometimes ‘telling’ has the upper hand in this feedback process. As Foulkes and Anthony put it: [the group members] will see that just as they can tell someone else what they think or feel about him (or her), they must also tolerate being told the same sorts of things . . . They come to realize that the person who makes an observation, speaks as much about himself as about the other person, and that by pointing out something, whether correctly or incorrectly, to another person, he helps the latter’s self-knowledge. (Foulkes and Anthony, 1957: 157)
However, as Foulkes notes, the mirror provided by others also ‘shows’ a person aspects of themselves of which they were previously unaware (Foulkes, 1964: 81).
Vignette: ‘Show and tell’
Dylan is a man in his mid 50s. When his mother was unable to look after him, at the age of five, he was sent to Germany to live with his father. Dylan fell out of regular schooling, and spent long periods of time alone as a child.
In earlier sessions, Dylan would often dress flamboyantly. It seemed to me that Dylan’s clothes were attempts to cover himself in a maternal love that he had missed, in the hope that this ‘second skin’ would percolate inwards and give him a greater sense of a genuine existence. His clothing also ensured that was noticed, and hinted at his rich internal fantasy world, developed in long periods of loneliness and isolation.
Others in the group speculated that Dylan’s dramatic clothing could be a way of making up for earlier losses, however he brushed off these interpretations. Eventually his dismissal of interpretation met with challenge from Aurelie.
Dylan, slowly and deliberately, took out a box of snorting tobacco, and took a sniff of it. When others wondered whether this was not bad for his nose, he shrugged off their concern. Aurelie responded, ‘You show us all this stuff, but it’s all false—it’s like you get our interest up and we ask questions, but then you just say ‘I dunno’ or you brush it off—it’s like a wall goes up. You aren’t willing to reflect about yourself—the point of being here is to be able to think about yourself!’.
Dylan responded, flatly, back to Aurelie, ‘I don’t know why, but I always seem to find you criticizing me here. This is just what I do, it’s lighthearted—‘show and tell’.
Analysis
Both Dylan and Aurelie struggled to put their feelings into words. Dylan showed himself off to the group through theatrical gestures, but was at a loss to explain or analyse these. Aurelie was adept at telling, but kept her feelings hidden. Both group members longed to have the shadow side of their communication brought into the open: one for a clearer narrative to give his shows substance, the other for the confidence to show more of herself. The exchange could be seen as a plea for a more joined up language, in which analysis and spontaneous gesture could meet.
In the subsequent session, Dylan said that Aurelie’s challenge had reminded him of how his mother used to criticize or belittle his hobbies or interests. Aurelie went on to say that Dylan reminded her of her father, with whom she felt she could never have a genuine conversation, because he ‘only ever talked to his mates about cars and football’. In effect, she felt she could not show herself to her father. Through these associations, the two group members began to find shared ground: neither had felt that their parents nurtured their creativity. As the group matured, Dylan gradually began to talk more about his internal world, and Aurelie recalled her own childhood exhibitionism.
In the foregoing vignette, ‘showing’ consists of an attempt to be noticed, to make up for a feeling of recognition that is insufficiently installed in the self (Kohut, 1966; Kohut, 1971; Glasser, 1992). In this exhibitionist form of showing the ‘True Self’ effectively says, ‘Look at me!!’ hoping for the response, ‘Yes you! You are wonderful and real!’ (see Winnicott, 1960: 150). In such instances, the person may internalize a parental (or societal) demand to suppress such displays, however the demand retains a quality of telling off. Through exhibitionist behaviour, i.e., by showing off, the person leaves others to do the telling off, thus re-externalizing the intrusive demand and briefly restoring coherence to the self. In this case, the group discovered that showing off and telling off were two sides of the same coin.
Eventually, through this process of mutual showing and telling, group members start to make sense of each other. As Bateson puts it, the discovery that two languages are mutually translatable ‘is itself an enlightenment’ (Bateson, 1979: 79). Here, the two languages in question are the wordless, experiential language of showing, and the constructive or instructive language of telling.
Show, don’t tell
‘Show, don’t tell’ is a well-known aphorism in creative writing. The advice is thought to originate from the playwright A. Chekov. ‘You’ll have a moonlit night’, Chekov wrote in a letter to his brother, ‘if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball’ (Yarmolinsky, 1954: 14). The aphorism is a pertinent one for group analytic therapy, where too much telling can hinder therapeutic progress.
Describing individual psychoanalysis, Bollas (2018) puts forward the view that working through begins when the analysand has exhausted telling: During the early weeks of an analysis, both the analysand and I are usually taken up with the patient’s narrative of his reasons for having sought help, and he ‘presents’ his life history. This presentation of one’s life to the other is a quite special event for the analysand, and its character is as much marked by its eventual dissolution as it is by its early pertinence. For after a while the patient finds he has nothing more to say. (Bollas, 2018: 277)
It is at this point, Bollas suggests, that free association really begins, and in which the transference emerges (Bollas, 2018; see Freud, 1912, 1914). In the current terminology, the analysand begins to show the analyst what is going on.
Similarly, in the group context, C. Garland suggests that the analytic work of a group proper begins when the group stops talking about the problems that ostensibly brought them to therapy, and instead embraces a more spontaneous communication concerning the life of the group. As Garland writes, ‘perhaps the new member senses that “just going on talking about it [the problem]” isn’t making any difference . . . (Garland, 1982: 6)’. Instead, Garland argues, the therapeutic effect of the group rests on old patterns being shown in a new setting, where different contingencies apply.
In this regard, interpretations from the conductor that simply ‘tell’ the group what is happening are likely to promote dependency. Foulkes was well aware of this possibility and cautioned against what he called ‘plunging’ or aggressive interpretations (Foulkes, 1975: 117).Instead, by balancing telling with showing and vice versa, the conductor models a more joined-up communication (see Dalal, 1995), an articulacy that group members internalize over time. Thus, the conductor not only ‘joins the dots’ for the group, but also the group members find in the conductor and in each other examples of how to do so for themselves. This idea echoes Bion’s suggestion that it is the internalisation of a relationship between container and the thing contained that forms the basis of the infant’s capacity to think (Bion 1962: 90): The relationship between mother and infant described by Melanie Klein as projective identification is internalized to form an apparatus for regulation of a preconception with the sense data of the appropriate realization. (Bion, 1962: 90)
Just as the developing infant installs in its own mind a model that formerly belonged only to the infant-mother dyad, group members each acquire an individual understanding that was previously only collective.
To facilitate this development, the conductor must accept they will often be lost in the swirling mists of the group process, only occasionally finding their head above the clouds. As Winnicott writes, ‘I have always felt that an important function of the interpretation is the establishment of the limits of the analyst’s understanding’ (Winnicott, 1963: 189). Or, as Bollas puts it: ‘[the analysand] appreciates the analyst’s fundamental unintrusiveness (particularly the analyst not demanding compliance) not because it leads to freedom of association, but because it feels like the kind of relating that is needed to become well’ (Bollas, 2018b: 10).
Conclusion
By encouraging a movement between showing and telling, analytic groups do just what the French mathematician Henri Poincaré described good theories as doing, that is, they ‘unite elements long since known, but ‘til then scattered and seemingly foreign to each other . . . [this] enables us to see at a glance each of these elements in the place it occupies in the whole’ (see Bion, 1962: 72). This articulation between figure and ground is part-and-parcel of perceiving anything at all. Without this reciprocal process, we would either be lost in the details of the world, being unable to see the metaphorical wood for the trees, or lost in reverie and theory, being unable to see the trees for the wood.
In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the prince is asked by his mother the queen why he has worn the dark clothes of mourning for so long after his father’s death. ‘Why seems it so peculiar with thee?’ she asks, in other words, why is he making such a show of it. Hamlet responds: Seems, madam? nay, it is, I know not ‘seems’. ‘Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black, Nor windy suspiration of forc’d breath, No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected havior of the visage, Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, That can denote me truly. These indeed seem, For they are actions that a man might play; But I have that within which passes show, These but the trappings and the suits of woe.
Hamlet protests his clothes may seem to say something about his grief, but there is more to tell. My clothing, he says, cannot express the depths of my internal world. Contained in his gesture-speech mismatch however is a poignant paradox: the peculiarity with which Hamlet wears his clothes—the very show that he dismisses as false—hints at the part of him he cannot express. It is this communication that his mother picks up on. ‘These suits don’t define me’, he tells his mother; at the same time, through the peculiar manner in which he is wearing them, he shows her that he has an inner world. Like Hamlet, our communication is disjointed: we both show and tell, seeking to be known better.
