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Nearly a year before I was asked to review Ken Wright's book, one of my patients who had been in analysis with me for over five years ‘awakened’ from her reverie on the couch and said, ‘My mother told me that she cried all the time she was breast feeding me.’ Apparently, her mother had lost in death a member of her immediate family during the pregnancy and only nine weeks before the birth a beloved sibling had also died suddenly.
My own feeling when she announced this was a shattering pain, but also a mental confusion - as if I couldn't ‘see’ to put pieces together. The studied avoidance of my patient's looking at me, but also her report that looking ‘out’ at the world was painful - for either she was drawn to ‘see’ the pain in others or others appeared in monstrous terrifying forms - was characteristic of her behaviour and her mental state of mind.
For some time after her announcement I tried in my own reverie to ‘see’ what an object, distorted by tears, would look like to a baby - what objects look like when refracted by water. I also mentally sought after the image of a baby seen by the mother through tears - and what an infant grasps across a distance; what is conveyed or gets mirrored - cracked - distorted….
From Wright's scholarly and at times elusive but elegant book, I quote a single line from the epilogue that is beautifully simple:
The mother's face (dare I say it and thereby challenge the breast its pride of place) is the most loved object in the child's universe.
—and, from the clinical example I started with, also the most feared object in the universe.
Upon this ordinary common-sense observation that the face, and in particular mother's face, is a significant focus of preoccupation for the infant, Dr Wright discusses self-development and the conception of self as a symbolic structure that arises out of self-object differentiation.
Dr Wright is a member of the Independent Group of the British School; he is essentially phenomenological and highly influenced by