The Complexity of Gaze

The gaze is a conjugated movement of the eyes, which has evolved phylogenetically in the different species, with the initial and prevalent purpose of exploring the external environment. In the higher mammals, in addition to this function, in the course of evolution, the property of conveying and interpreting complex emotional states has been added, necessary for the communication processes between individuals, as well as for the construction of inferences on the mental states of others. The systemic interest of this topic consists in the fact that the mechanisms that regulate eye movements, and the multiple meanings of the gaze, are located in that subtle interface that separates neurology from psychiatry, materials that are at the same time indivisible due to the same substrate of origin, but infinitely distant on an epistemological level. In this theoretical reflection, both the complex neurological regulation and the different functions of eye movements, such as postural adjustments, will be analyzed, as well as the psychopathological meaning and the phenomenological description of the gaze in psychiatry, in an attempt at a holistic view of the phenomena described. The systemic conceptualization of this work, and its reference to multiple systems, consists in the fact that the theme of the gaze can be analyzed through two theoretical models that belong to different disciplines, but which interface in the construction of a common phenomenology, almost as if a point of view continually fluctuating between the two systems should be acquired.