Vision and Separation between Mother and Baby - Kenneth Wrig

Vision and Separation between Mother and Baby - Kenneth Wright - Jason Aronson, Inc. - 9780876685594 - 2dehands - Als Nieuw - Hardcover - Ken Wright has written a marvelous book. His central thesis is that the gaze between mother and baby provides both medium and metaphor for the child to find itself and the other. The zone of the mutual gaze becomes the space of working and reworking, of the establishment of symbols, language, metaphor, and structure. "Wright moves with intellectual vigor and ease back and forth between the world of infant research and psychoanalytic theory on the one hand, and poetry and philosophy on the other-always on an ideological edge which balances inner and outer experience. With Winnicott he notes that the mother's face is grasped only through the eyes and that her face has a central role in the formation of the self. From here he pursues a logic which takes us from the first experience of self as the object of the mother's gaze towards the increasingly complex building of structure during development, as the self becomes a subject which gradually begins to form its own world. "Through a large pan of the book, Wright pursues the issues of how self and world are structured in a reciprocal way. He has interesting and original insights. For instance, he notes that the unconscious is a "no place"-that is, the no place where the mother is not. He pursues the description of die ways in which the young child does not fit for the mother, and mat this lack of fit is therefore left in a residual unconscious space of the child's mind. Thus he builds a theory of consciousness as a space for things which have fit widi the mother, while the unconscious is a 'blind man's space'-a place where first the light of mother's face goes out and, subsequently, the light of her understanding.