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Mirroring and attunement: Self-realization in psychoanalysis andartMeg Harris WilliamsPublished online: 20 Jul 2010.

To cite this article: Meg Harris Williams (2010) Mirroring and attunement: Self-realization in psychoanalysis and art, Psychodynamic Practice: Individuals, Groups andOrganisations, 16:3, 357-360, DOI: 10.1080/14753634.2010.482224

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Mirroring and attunement: Self-realization in psychoanalysis and art, byKenneth Wright, Hove, Routledge, 2009, 212 pp., £60 (hardback), ISBN978-0415468299, £22.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-0415468305

This book is a welcome contribution to the theoretical background that liesbehind the current interest in the nature of reciprocity in the relationshipbetween analyst and analysand. It is an attractive book in its own right, itskeynote sounded by Rilke’s interpretation of the medieval tapestry of theLady with a Unicorn that is housed in the Musee de Cluny and is hereprinted on the book’s cover:

They fed it, not with corn,but only with the possibilityof being. And that was able to conferSuch strength, its brow put forth a horn [cited in prelims.]

The ‘horn’ is the individuality of the infant or individual whose sense ofidentity is adequately contained by the reflecting silver mirror held in themother-analyst’s hand.

The book comprises a series of essays written over many years.Wright’s central thesis is that the form which analytic language takes is asimportant as its content; and he advocates in particular that the languageof psychoanalytic discourse be enhanced by means of a greater appre-ciation of poetic language and indeed of the way art forms in generalcommunicate. Its main inspiration lies in the work of Winnicott, Stern andLanger; and others who play a key role are Wittgenstein, Bollas, Ogden,Suttie, Bion and Segal; while for the theory of art and poetry he draws onRilke, Heaney, Fuller and MacLeish. Chapter-heads invitingly include‘The search for form’, ‘Shaping the inarticulate’, and ‘Making experiencesing’, although the body of the book is primarily theoretical rather thandescriptive.

Essentially, the view of the analytic encounter which Wright espouses isthat in which the analyst is acknowledged to be as much an artist as ascientist, whose hope is to try to revivify a stalled developmental process bymeans of a mother-baby model of interaction – a fundamental sea-changesince the early days of psychoanalysis. Particularly welcome is the centralplace Wright accords to Susanne Langer, the philosopher of aesthetics whoclarified the distinction between presentational and discursive forms – adistinction so often ignored in psychoanalytic interpretations of art andliterature. The former embraces all types of autonomous symbol-formation;the latter is reserved for language in the ordinary referential sense of ‘talkingabout’ (as in Bion). It is thus a distinction which applies equally to thesituations of mother and child; analyst and analysand; muse (though Wrightdoes not use this term) and poet or artist; artist and art-appreciator.

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Wright believes that psychoanalysts and psychotherapists – at least intheir theory – have not concentrated sufficiently on nurturing the analyticequivalent of the maternal pre-verbal ‘resonance’ in which ‘shapes’ arecreated to hold the baby’s emotional experience; and that they are still over-concerned with correct ‘interpretation’ – something which he equates with a‘subtle knife’ (Pullman) that is liable to divide the patient from his true selfand replace it, Medusa-like, with a false face of stone (p. 4). Here he followsWinnicott’s warning against over ‘clever and apt’ interpretations that‘explain’ rather than ‘hold’ the experience (p. 189). He sees the pre-verbalas an artistic-maternal mode, and the verbal as a male-scientific one, andregards the proper function of interpretation as in effect a male-scientificconclusion to a self-defining process that should begin with building alibrary of ‘shapes’ (presentational forms), provided by the analyst-as-mother. He advocates a language that reflects the ‘being’ or the ‘aliveness’ ofa particular individual at a particular moment; above all, if possible, the‘inspiration of poetry’ rather than the ‘sobriety of prose’.

There is much here that practitioners in all schools, I believe, wouldagree upon. Wright’s extension to Winnicottian theory consists, he says, inmaking explicit the anticipatory nature of these ‘shapes’, which he sees asproviding a containing blueprint for ‘experience that does not yet exist’ (p.192). The mother thus pre-empts the shock of ‘any sudden impingement ofreality’, for this ‘is potentially traumatic and part of the mother’s role is tosee that this does not happen’ (p. 82). The emphasis on ‘cushioning’ marks adifference from the Kleinian ethic in which truth is essential mental food,and the self is considered to have no creative capacity of its own, andbecomes creative as a result of dependence on the internal objects of psychicreality, represented initially in infancy by the external mother.

Wright says the Kleinian view that projective identification is the ‘mainpathway’ in infant communication is ‘in my view not supported by theavailable evidence’ (p. 86). However he seems to equate projective identi-fication only with ‘evacuation’ and ‘aggression’, not with primitivecommunication. The model on which he says he relies for ‘infant research’is that of Daniel Stern, who considers ‘attunement’ to begin at 9 months(p. 168) – an age at which speech is already becoming evident – whereas theKleinian tradition would place it much earlier.

Since Wright’s argument is partly shaped through a dialogue ofcomparison and contrast with Kleinian theory, I felt it would have beenconstructive to explore more widely the work of those Kleinians who (inaddition to Segal) have focused on aesthetic and pre-verbal experience: forexample Meltzer, who likewise invokes Langer and Wittgenstein and thenon-lexical aspects of the psychoanalytic communication, and differentiatesthe iconographic from the compositional qualities of an interpretation(Melter, 1981, 1983). There is no mention of Adrian Stokes whose specialfocus is on mother-baby communication within the visual arts; or of

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Esther Bick’s method of infant observation and its role in a psychoanalytictraining. The findings from Bick’s method indicate the acquisition oflanguage is a feature of mother-baby communication, rather than a laterimposition of paternalism.

I imagine that most therapists would concur with Wright’s warningagainst premature dogmatic interpretation; although it might be arguedthat, since interpretation will always be the basic medium for an analysis, itwould be more effective to expand this term to include the various ‘maternal’resonances and styles of delivery which an analyst may use in practice,rather than narrowing it to refer to the final or ‘correct’ diagnosis of asituation (always a chimera). There are other similar matters of nomen-clature in the book, which I feel are symptomatic of our culture’s relentlessdemand for ‘new ideas’ when really they are personal reformulations.For example, in a chapter titled ‘Bion and beyond’, ‘attunement’ has muchin common with Bion’s ‘attention’ or indeed ‘at-one-ment’ (Bion, 1970). Itall seems to come under the heading of what is traditionally termedtransference-countertransference. The idea of ‘imaginative identification’(p. 85) is similarly present in projective-introjective communication; and thebaby who ‘anticipates a responsive other’ (p. 153) would be described byBion as having a ‘pre-conception’.

Ultimately, indeed, I confess that I found the content of the book alittle disappointing: not because of the theoretical conceptions, but becauseof the insubstantiality of the author’s own examples, whether from eitherclinical work or art appreciation. One chapter for example begins with thevery promising design to use Aristotle’s Poetics as a model forinvestigating ‘the different forms of language that analysts use in talkingto their patients’ (p. 27); but this is not borne out in practice – there is nosuch examination of therapeutic ways of talking. At another point,speaking of how to cultivate a playful poetic capacity, Wright suggests thathe might find it appropriate to relay a line of poetry if it came to mind (p.131), but there is no actual example to make this real or vivid. One of therare clinical illustrations is of a woman who asked a question about a newchair in the consulting room (p. 133). Here I was surprised not by theanalyst’s response, which seemed ‘normal’, but by his view of what acorrect, classical response should be: it seemed unnecessarily rigid,indicative of some indoctrinating paternalist superego such as that in‘law and the father’ (p. 156).

Perhaps one of the problems with any collection of papers going backover a long period, during which the author has been working out his ownideas, is that it is liable to be repetitive. This does not matter if each paperhas its own clinical, literary or dream-material – its own ‘images’ – to whichthe reader can relate directly, simultaneously with the author’s exposition.Wright recognizes that this is ‘intrinsically difficult’ and says it is beyond thescope of the present work (p. 119). All the same in a book which advocates a

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language of images, and aims to ‘focus on the visual arts’ (p. 155), one mightwish for fewer reformulations and more to be drawn out of the illustrations.The book itself could be more of a presentational form. In the relativeabsence of the analysis of particular examples, there is a tendency to fallback on hypothesis: such as that about the life-circumstances that make anartist, which Wright attributes to a ‘deficit brought about by maternalfailure’, in the face of which the artist ‘attempts to create a responsivemedium that is now under his own control’ (p. 69).

To return to the Lady with a Unicorn, which is central to the book’stheme and is taken to stand as a ‘metaphor for the psychoanalyticenterprise’ (p. 186). We might like to see how the author’s personalresponse has been constructed – how it has led him to this conclusion. Theovertly erotic implications of the image could be considered: the lance-likehorn mirrored in the lady’s erect hair-plait; the mirror-face echoing theshape of her own face and of her lap; the red lips of its upturned skirtsuggesting aspects of creation and containment that are not entirely safeand smooth. The unicorn, hooves in her lap, is (despite his supplicatingposture) dangerous; and the Lady knows it yet is, perhaps, prepared toreceive it and renounce her maidenhead. Her rope of hair is erect andmirrors the lover’s horn. The reflection in the mirror is impossibly small –it is a different creature from the full-grown unicorn. ‘Those nurturing’,says Wright, ‘lovingly imagine what the creature will be like’. Even so, thefact is that any new baby is a shock – a ‘stunning experience’ as MarthaHarris puts it (Negri & Harris, 2007, p. 2). The ‘possibility of being’ has asharp side for all concerned. Yet perhaps pain and disintegration do notautomatically result in developmental deficit. Bion’s ‘catastrophic’ changedoes not refer simply to a trauma to be cushioned and avoided, but to anopportunity for new life and for learning from experience, not just for thebaby but also for the parents. The ‘thousand natural shocks that flesh isheir to’ (Hamlet) are the integral, integrating ground of life’s rich redtapestry.

References

Bion, W. (1970). Attention and interpretation. London: Tavistock.Harris, M., & Negri, R. (2007). The story of infant development. London: Karnac &

Harris Meltzer Trust.Meltzer, D.M. (1981). Does Money-Kyrle’s concept of misconception have any

descriptive power?, reprinted in A. Hahn (Ed.), Sincerity: Collected papers ofDonald Meltzer (pp. 496–51). London: Karnac (1994).

Meltzer, D.M. (1983). Dream life. Strath Tay, Perthshire: Clunie Press.

Meg Harris WilliamsEmail: meghwilliams@tiscali.co.uk

� 2010, Meg Harris Williams

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