Black Eye

A blow, a push, an impact — and your eye discolours. Blue, violet, sometimes nearly black. The swelling presses, your field of vision narrows, and for days you carry the trace of a collision in your face. Medically, a black eye is a hemorrhage into the tissue around the eye socket. Burst blood vessels that discolour visibly under the thin skin. Harmless, as a rule. But conspicuous — visible to everyone who looks at you.

The psychosomatic perspective asks an unfamiliar question: why there? Why the eye — the organ with which you perceive the world? And why precisely now, in this phase of your life? A black eye is never only an accident. It is a collision — in the outer world as in the inner. And it marks a point at which something becomes visible that you would have preferred to keep hidden.

The black eye is a mirror. It shows outward what is simmering within.