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This is a thought-provoking and wide-ranging book. It begins and ends with the stated focus on the face and the role of vision in the development of the self, the ways in which they facilitate differentiation and create separate-ness, and the ways in which emerging consciousness and symbolization are used both to maintain and to bridge that separateness. A second, less explicit, theme is the growing separateness within, the gap between the inarticulate bodily instinctual and need-bound experiences, and the disembodied patterns of symbols that occupy our conscious selves, mainly in the form of spoken or thought language. Wright also links the development of this latter separateness to visual contact with the parents and views it as proceeding at the cost of sensing, touching, and doing.
This second separateness actually pervades the book itself: The reader may look at the author's thinking and follow his interesting reasoning along a myriad of branching and intertwining paths, but there is almost no concrete clinical context to keep abstract thought symbols in touch with the