Mirroring and Attunement: Self-Realization in Psychoanalysis and Art

Mirroring and Attunement offers a new approach to psychoanalysis, artistic creation and religion. Viewing these activities from a broadly relational perspective, Wright proposes that each provides a medium for creative dialogue: the artist discovers himself within his self-created forms, the religious person through an internal dialogue with ‘God’, and the analysand through the inter-subjective medium of the analysis.

Building on the work of Winnicott, Stern and Langer, the author argues that each activity is rooted in the infant’s preverbal relationship with the mother who ‘holds’ the emerging self in an ambience of mirroring forms, thereby providing a ‘place’ for the self to ‘be’. He suggests that the need for subjective reflection persists throughout the life cycle and that psychoanalysis, artistic creation and religion can be seen as cultural attempts to provide the self with resonant containment. They thus provide renewed opportunities for holding and emotional growth.
Mirroring and Attunement will provide essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and art therapists and be of interest to anyone working at the interface between psychoanalysis, art and religion.

Kenneth Wright is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Suffolk and a Patron of the Squiggle Foundation. A well known commentator on Winnicott, he lectures nationally and internationally and has published papers on psychoanalysis, the creative arts and religion. His book Vision and Separation: Between Mother and Baby (1991) was awarded the Margaret S. Mahler Literature Prize (1992).

Introduction. On Being in Touch. The Poetics of Interpretation. Deep Calling unto Deep. Making Experience Sing. Bion and Beyond. Words, Things and Wittgenstein. Shaping the Inarticulate. Embodied Language. The Search for Form. The Intuition of the Sacred. Recognition and Relatedness. The Silver Mirror.