The storm earlier this week and especially the images of trees falling down on cars, houses and unfortunately also people evoked memories of a dramatic event in New York in May 1988.
In broad daylight, a huge 35-tonne construction crane suddenly collapses. Unlucky Birgitte Gerney is trapped under large pieces of steel, both her legs shattered.
While heavy machinery is working to remove the pieces of twisted steel around and from her body, firefighter Paul Ragonese holds her hand for 6 hours. The touch of a strange man gives her hope and forms a wall against the oncoming waves of panic and despair.
It is still an iconic image for me, the example that of all modes of human communication, physical touch is the least distant or most intimate and therefore, literally and figuratively, the most penetrating, the most powerful.
Unsolicited touching of others is in a dubious light
Since the emergence of the Metoo movement, unsolicited touching has come to be seen, if not in a negative, at least in a dubious light. Too much in my opinion. If I can at least go by what Paul’s uninvited grabbing and subsequent holding of Brigitte for hours must have meant to her. Or what the research of the psychologist Hubble and others on the effect of touch in prescribing healthcare treatments has shown.
Hubble and his team trained doctors and psychologists to touch some of their patients at least twice (a hand on an arm), while instructing the patients themselves on what to do for the treatment to be successful.
Patients who were touched during the instruction, on average, complied better with the instructions and rated the contact more positively than patients who were not touched.
A waitress who briefly touched a customer at checkout received a larger tip
Incidentally, in some male patients, the tension as a result of the touch increased rather than decreased, regardless of whether the practitioner was male or female. Certain men may have more difficulty with passivity, in the sense of receiving physical touch.
In any case, this is indicated by a study that the psychologist Thayer of New York University conducted in a number of restaurants into the effect of the touch of male customers by waitresses on the size of the tip. A waitress who briefly touched a customer’s hand or shoulder at checkout received, on average, a considerably larger tip than a waitress who kept ‘a distance’.
When Thayer then investigated what the “tip effect” was when the person serving was a man, he found no difference between touching and not touching. What he did find was that some male clients showed a clearly visible tension response when touched by a man.
That raises intriguing questions. Would Paul Ragonese also have held the hand of the trapped man if it had been a man and in that case would the trapped man have allowed another man to touch for hours?
I hope for the men of this world that the answer to both questions is unconditionally positive.