And the discomfort comes not just from strangers. For Americans in Mexico, for example, where the social distance appropriate to friendship measures out differently, conversations with the native-born involve a constant backing away. The touching of naked, sexualized regions of the body, usually the last stand of personal space, ordinarily dissolves into intimacy. David Watts understands the physician's need to distance himself from this pattern through a psychological self-examination that serves as supplement to the physical one he performs on his female patient. The poet does not content himself with the easy assumption that the personal and the professional naturally exist on different ontological planes.
Sexual feelings are too universally active to be so easily dislocated.
Watts does not depend on the good repute of professional status to dismiss his patient's fears, because, for him, professional detachment is a goal, not a given. The poem dramatizes complex issues of mutuality, in part through a struggle within its own vocabulary. The resulting tension between formal language and jargon gives a sense of the patient's fears of excessive professional indifference as well as of its unwarranted opposite, uninvited intimacy. Given these fears, both doctor and patient need to be on better terms, a social not a professional phrase, and one that implies a relation between equals. The better terms require, among other things, that the physician honor the intimacy with a proper respect for its real meaning in order to deny any potentially unsettling false, sexual meaning for the patient.