removed from ‘anything goes’. Throughout his life Bion consulted the workof whichever group he thought could throw light on his enquiries – mathe-maticians, scientists, philosophers – and in his later work he drew on themystics in deepening his thought about openness. At the same time we canask whether he makes it particularly hard for the establishment to respondcreatively. After all, who would talk to the British establishment aboutpsychoanalysis using concepts like ‘godhead’?

The British interest in Bion is largely, although not exclusively, in his workon ‘K’ and the Bion Today book is an excellent introduction to and study ofthe earlier part of Bion’s work. However, it barely addresses and noticeablyundervalues the other half of his work conceived when he left Britain. It isthis aspect of his work that has caught the attention of psychoanalysts andscholars in South and North America, Italy and elsewhere; and the currentbook on Bion Today would be well complemented by a second volumewhich covered these developments.

Finally, who is this book for? The Introduction by Mawson and many ofthe papers are exemplary in their clarity and, as a result, the book would beaccessible to people who do not know anything about Bion. At the sametime it has the depth and enough rough edges to hold the attention of thosewho know a great deal about him.

N. Abel-HirschUnit 13 Apollo Studios, Charlton Kings Road, London NW5 2SB

E-mail: abelhirsch@Waitrose.com

References

Bion WR (1962a). Learning from experience. London: Heinemann.Spillius EB, editor (1988). Melanie Klein today, vol 1. Mainly theory. London: Routledge. (The NewLibrary of Psychoanalysis).

Mirroring and Attunement: Self-Realization in Psychoanalysis and Art

by Kenneth WrightRoutledge, London and New York, 2009; 212 pp. £23.99 paperback

Kenneth Wright describes his first book since Vision and Separation (1991)as ‘‘an extended reflection on Winnicott’s holding environment’’ (p.14).Maternal holding as the basis for the symbolic development on whichself-realization depends is the lynchpin for his discussion of clinicalpsychoanalysis and of the place of art in human experience. The child’s psy-chological development from dependence to separateness and individuationderives from the environment mother but Wright reads Winnicott’s (1967)late paper on mirroring and the mirror role as a shift from a bodily-based(instinctual) paradigm – baby at breast – to one located in sociality: babyand mother are in touch through their interactive responses as registered infacial clues. This shift anchors his interest in non-verbal communication andthe transmission of otherness through attunement. An infant first has tocome into being; then he or she has to go on being. Both states are linkedwith holding and both are central to this account of the consulting room

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and the quality of exchanges there, especially their non-verbal aspects. FromSuzanne Langer (1953) he takes the idea of analysis, and of making andexperiencing art, as processes of finding ‘forms’ for human feeling; the taskof the analyst is ‘‘seeking to provide containing forms for unrealized ele-ments of the patient’s emotional life’’ (p. 9). The book is organized aroundclinical examples and studies of artists or writers. Wright argues for prever-bal communication as based in shared images or patterns, and there is somereference to representational art (painting) but the main focus is on lan-guage. There are extended discussions of poets, poetic forms of language,particular theorists, and particular processes in analytic practice.

Wright’s thinking is firmly based in his own practice and the analyst’scontribution to what happens in an analysis is returned to again and again.The first chapter, ‘On Being In Touch’, insists that expressing and conveyingemotion are vital to the work of the consulting room, yet expressing anemotion does not necessarily convey that emotion or lead to affective con-tact. The shifting emotional contact between patient and therapist, and itsrelation to both the patient’s own varying responses to his ⁄ her own feelingsand to the therapist seem more dependent on tone of voice and word sensi-tivity, on the way things are said rather than what is said. For the author,these non-cognitive aspects of therapy lead to a theory of technique as atheory of emotional containment that encourages the development of thepatient’s own mental containment.

Wright is simultaneously fascinated by words and how they are used,and cautious and wary of what they can do in an analysis, especially intheir interpretative forms. He distinguishes words that explain and wordsthat embody and evoke (p. 36) and the latter is his interest as is the rela-tion between words and experience. A verbal action (say, an interpretation)is no guarantee of the kind of communication on which emotional contactdepends (p. 19) and Wright is concerned with how to enable another’sview, that of the analyst, to be experienced, by the patient, as a reflectionon his or her experience, rather than a transformation of it. This returnshim to the preverbal infant and the forms of communication establishedbefore the advent of language, an instrument whose externality to the indi-vidual suggests to Wright that it too is open to possible early impingement.Language acquisition itself demands a firm basis in adequate preverbalcontainment if it is to be experienced as facilitating rather than limiting, asencouraging creativity rather than killing it off. In proposing that languageconstrains the child rather than offering a means of future development, Iimagine that Wright has in mind a link with a Winnicottian true selfnotion (‘‘experience being less available and less robust, the word couldmore easily usurp its place’’, footnote, p. 5). The work of the consultingroom depends on the analyst’s receptivity and capacity for containment,building upon forms of knowledge and experience accumulated preciselythrough non-verbal communication.

Bion is his other major influence, especially his account of containment.Wright agrees that projection and introjection are early communicative routes,but he regards them as far less essential than does a theoretical Bion with hisKleinian foundations. Wright proposes that the adult patient’s recourse to

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projective identification, a non-verbal communication, originates in themother’s lack of receptiveness. While, theoretically, Bion maintains projectiveidentification as primary, in Wright’s reading, a clinical Bion also endorsesthe infant’s rage and resort to projective identification as reactive. Wrightrelates the patient’s ‘imperviousness’ to his or her own affective states to anoriginal imperviousness on the part of the mother. It is maternal containmentthat enables mental containment and the growth of mental structures.

From his own interest in Wittgenstein and British philosophy, and withthe aid of Ray Monk’s biography, Wright, reading as a psychoanalyst, seesWittgenstein’s early and late philosophy and the interruption in theirevolution linked to the philosopher’s own lateness in talking (he was 4), itsprobable place in his early family history, and a resultant ‘‘difficulty inintegrating language with preverbal experience’’ (p. 101) based on Wright’sreading of the damaging effects of his father’s words. ‘Maternal modes’ oflanguage and meaning (preverbal) precede (paternal) verbal communicationand their fate is replayed in Wittgenstein’s own biography and his twodifferent philosophical accounts of language and meaning.

A broader interest in symbolic forms and their potential modelling onearly interaction – the baby finds a form for its own inner state in theanswering forms provided by the mother – leads Wright to propose the artobject as a structure of non-verbal symbols. His interest is in why artistsmake art and what both visual art and, especially, poetry, have to offer.While distancing himself from a model based on psychobiography and subli-mation (Freud) and one that understands artistic activity as impelled by theneed for reparation of early damaged internal objects (Segal), he too relatesthe artist’s activity to early experience, but he emphasizes it primarily asa way of the artist’s holding him ⁄ herself together in the face of earlydeprivation. This also links art and psychological health, not as a matter ofreparation of internal destructiveness, but of deficit and compensation forthe early relationship with the mother. The need to repair remains. BothPeter Fuller’s description of the artist, Natkins’s, canvas as ‘‘a surrogate forthe good mother’s face and a more reliable provider of responsive formsthan the mother of infancy’’ (p. 144) and Wright’s own chapter on Rilke,‘Let Experience Sing’, support such a reading. But does the making orenjoyment of art always derive from deprivation? In this there is the exten-sion of holding to what the art object does for us and to its parallels withthe transitional object, ‘‘a mix-up of subjective experience and actual physi-cal object’’.

Wright’s frequent references to the transitional object acknowledge itsimportance as the first not-me possession, an object found and created bythe baby, but his argument about art emphasizes the object’s subjective valuein its standing in for the mother, ‘‘the memory of earlier experiences with themother’’ (p. 142). If this symbolic association, for Winnicott less significantthan the transitional object’s not-me status, remains available to the adult, itenables a creative encounter with living. Art here is the artist’s attempt toreproduce (or improve on) the earliest resonant forms made availablethrough maternal responsiveness. The artist’s chosen medium provides acontinuing encounter with the mother’s initial recognitions, a struggle to cre-

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ate a medium more adaptive and responsive to need than the original other,and then, through this medium, to create an object that more fully containsand realizes the artist’s self (p. 52). The artist has particular skills but theymay be a necessity to make forms that fit experience.

In this selection of papers spanning almost two decades, Wright’s owndevelopment as an analyst and a psychoanalytic thinker is traced throughhis openness to describing his own affective states and his own questionsabout communication. It is an enquiry into how the recognition of oneperson by another, and by himself, may be facilitated and a discussionof the technical forms that can make this possible psychoanalytically.It seems appropriate that the penultimate chapter, ‘Recognition and Relat-edness’, is a rumination on love, one of the bases of Wright’s chosenprofession.

Unfortunately he has been badly served by Routledge, his publisher, inthe almost total absence of any editorial input that would have enhancedthe book’s internal coherence. Since the chapters were written for particularevents, their collection inevitably involves repetition; a committed publisherwould have ensured that the considerable strengths of this book could beread cumulatively. As it is, similar arguments are often repeated as if for thefirst time, to the detriment of their value and to the irritation of the reader.

Lesley CaldwellPsychoanalysis Unit, University College London, London WC1E 6BT

E-mail: l.caldwell@ucl.ac.uk

References

Langer S (1953) Feeling and form. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Winnicott DW (1967). Mirror role of mother and family in child development. In: Playing and reality,111–18. London: Tavistock, 1971.

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