THE MAGICAL HEALING POWER OF RECOGNITION

October 11, 2026

A woman experienced chronic pain due to endometriosis. She spent five years visiting doctors who barely recognised her agony, until she met a physician who understood her condition, her suffering. Suddenly, her pain reduced. She started to respond to treatment. The acknowledgment that her pain was real, altered her psychological state and her relationship to her own body. She began her journey of healing. CURIOUS CASE OF THE ELEPHANT MAN Joseph Carey Merrick was born on August 5, 1862, in Leicester, England. He was born a healthy child. Yet at the age of 5, his body began to disfigure. As he grew further into deformity, he was paraded around England as a freak and was cruelly nicknamed as the Elephant Man. Medical treatment could not help him. What altered the remaining years of his life were the encounters with people of standing who chose to recognise him as an individual. The actress Madge Kendal often brought him the works of Shakespeare and even read to him. Princess Alexandra of Wales likewise him personally and encouraged the nobility to do the same, sending him cards and gifts he treasured for the rest of his life. The most quoted line associated with Merrick’s story, his declaration was that he was not an elephant, not an animal, but a man. His transformation in his final years, from a man who hid his face in public to one who received visitors with quiet dignity, is difficult to attribute to anything but the accumulated effect of being recognised. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF HEALING William James, the father of modern Psychology, understood this with extraordinary precision. In The Principles of Psychology, wrote that a person has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognise him and carry an image of him in their mind. He then observed that a man’s social self is wounded when he is not noticed by those whose recognition he values. To his own consciousness, James wrote, he is almost as if he does not exist. (York University) This explains why one person may be indifferent to the praise of a thousand strangers, yet devastated by the silence of one parent, spouse, teacher, child, mentor or friend. In a letter of 1896, James wrote “The deepest principle of Human Nature is the craving to be appreciated.” Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper, described the desire for reputation or prestige as including respect from others, recognition (Psych Classics). Yet the need begins in the infant’s search for a responsive face. Edward Tronick’s “still-face” work showed how deeply a child depends on emotional response. When an infant first receives warmth from the caregiver and then suddenly encounters a still, unresponsive face, the child tries to re-engage, becomes distressed, and shows disorganisation (Frontiers). Before a child knows language, he knows the mother’s face, the father’s delight, the teacher’s attention, the elder’s blessing — these become early mirrors. Through them, he begins to feel real. Therefore, when a child is repeatedly unseen, something more serious than sadness may occur. NEUROSCIENCE OF BEING SEEN In a 2003 Science study, Naomi Eisenberger, Matthew Lieberman and Kipling Williams used fMRI during a social exclusion task and found that the brain systems involved in social distress overlap with those associated with physical pain (PubMed). The nervous system may receive it as injury. Recognition is one of the languages through which belonging is communicated. When someone listens, remembers, acknowledges, responds or appreciates, he tells the other: you have a place in my field of consciousness. SCRIPTURES AND THE QUAKER PRINCIPLE Quaker practice offers perhaps the most systematic spiritual architecture built entirely around recognition. The radical claim embedded here is that recognition of the divine in another person is owed prior to any judgment of merit. The Quaker testimony of equality became historically entangled with abolition of slavery, the ordination of women as ministers, since each of these causes required society to recognise personhood in those it had been trained to see as lesser. Quakers also developed a specific communal technology known as the clearness committee. When a Friend faces a difficult decision a small circle of trusted people gathers not to give advice, but to ask deep and hard questions without evaluating, the answers, trusting that the individual carries an inner light capable of finding its own way once the noise of outside opinion is removed. The philosopher Axel Honneth says that human selfconsciousness depends on recognition, and that recognition has different levels, including love, legal respect and social esteem (Routledge Rep). In practical terms, a person needs love to feel emotionally secure, respect to feel morally equal, and esteem to feel that his contribution has value. This is why invisibility damages people differently in different places. A child needs loving recognition. A citizen needs dignified recognition. A spouse needs recognition of sacrificeA woman may run an entire household and still feel that her existence is taken for granted. Indian civilisation, at its best, understood this through the discipline of seeing. The instruction of the Taittiriya Upanishad — “matr devo bhava, pitr devo bhava, acarya devo bhava, atithi devo bhava” (regard the mother, father, teacher and guest as divine) (Psych Classics). Do not let the mother become ordinary because she is always present. Do not let the father become invisible because his labour is silent. See the sacred standing before you in human form. This is where spirituality becomes daily life. The great failure of human relationships is non-recognition. Much wrongdoing begins with making the other invisible. The servant becomes “staff.” The citizen becomes “file.” The child becomes “marks.” The spouse becomes “duty.” The old parent becomes “responsibility.” The poor become “crowd.” But the hunger to be seen has its own danger. The unseen child may turn into the adult who performs endlessly. The ignored daughter may become the woman who mistakes attention for love. The belittled son may become the man who seeks power not for service, but to silence an old humiliation. One unhealed hunger becomes many outward compulsions. This is the samskara of invisibility. A samskara is memory that has learnt how to become behaviour. THE PRACTICE For seven days, notice where your hunger to be seen arises most strongly. Is it before a parent? A spouse? A superior? A sibling? A child? Do not condemn the hunger. It is an old prayer. Sit with it. Each morning, place your hand upon the heart and say quietly: “I see the part of me that waited too long to be seen.” Then repeat a sacred word — Waheguru, Ram, Om, or any Name that brings the mind into reverence. During the day, perform one good act without announcing it. Also recognise one person who is usually invisible. Thank the guard by name. Listen to a child without correcting him. Ask an old parent about something from his past. They Watched Me for Fourteen Months, Then Someone Saw Me A patient of a mental illness describes how being recognised after fourteen months of being a ‘case’ helped him to heal. Physician and researcher Dean Ornish, who reviewed decades of medical evidence, concluded that if a pharmaceutical drug produced the same outcomes as love, and recognition, every doctor in the country would prescribe it. This is perhaps the sharpest available formulation that recognition behaves, in measurable outcome, like a medicine that cannot be bottled (Psychology Today). Heaven is encapsulated in empathy, in the simple recognition of another human, his being. As we start to recognise another’s pain, another’s simple contributions, a quiet miracle begins. People begin to be seen as individuals. That may be one of the finest forms of healing. Parneet Sachdev, IRS is the Chairman of Real Estate Regulatory Authority and a leading author.