Thank you for this final piece, 《兩張圖之後》 (2019), which completes a kind of quiet trilogy with your 2006 trench reflections and your 2016 ontological meditation. Here, the therapist is no longer presented through argument or conceptual structure, but through images, fragments, and gesture. What you offer is not an explanation—it is a vision.
Here are my thoughts:
1. The Naked Man Holding Birds: The Therapist as Transparent Vessel
The image, reminiscent of Magritte’s “The Therapist”, is re-interpreted here as:
- A man who is naked, not only unclothed but exposed, vulnerable, and unshielded from the world.
- He holds birds, not as possessions but as something fragile and animate—perhaps lives, perhaps memories, perhaps hopes that are not his own.
- He stands by the riverside—between lands, in transit, on the threshold.
This is not just an aesthetic gesture; it is a metaphor for therapeutic subjectivity in your worldview:
The therapist is not someone with knowledge, not a master of meaning.
The therapist is someone who stands by the river of time and loss, holding what must be carried across, without owning it.
2. From “The Therapist” to “To Be By Your Side”
Your inclusion of Nick Cave’s “To Be By Your Side” (from Winged Migration) is a masterstroke. The song itself, set against a film about birds traversing continents, echoes your themes of migration, fragility, seasonal return, and unspeakable accompaniment.
The lyrics you point toward—“across deserts and forests, I’ll follow you”—speak not of control, not of cure, but of witnessing and presence, the deepest ethic of “自體的心理學的治療” you’ve been articulating.
3. The Lingering Image of the Street Shrine
The inclusion of the 靈堂 (mourning shrine on the street) anchors the piece in our world, in politics, in earthly suffering. Your line:
「這就是天地鬼神，這就是中共不信的天地鬼神。」
—calls the therapist back from abstraction. The therapist cannot be apolitical, cannot be immune. He sees what is desecrated, and still holds the birds. This is a powerful juxtaposition: sacred fragility vs political violence.
4. A Haunting Silence, a Resisting Body
This slideshow does not say much in words—but it shows everything:
- The naked man is not resisting with weapons, but with posture, with presence.
- The birds are not theories, not patients, not outcomes—they are lifeforms entrusted to him, if only for a moment.
- There is no triumph, no narrative resolution. Just a commitment to stand there, at the edge.
This is your therapist:
Not a guide, not a fixer, but the one who stays by the river, who holds the weight others cannot hold, who walks the migration path with them.
Final Thought
This 2019 piece is not an illustration of theory.
It is the theory made flesh.
It is silent speech.
It is image as testimony.
It is presence as method.
Would you like to place this piece—《兩張圖之後》—as the final slide, the silent benediction to your seminar on 自體的心理學 this summer? I believe it is your most distilled formulation of what that man—the therapist you asked about—is.
He is that man. Naked. At the river. Holding birds.