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Kenneth Wright is a nationally and internationally known lecturer and psychoanalyst. He is a well-known commentator on Winnicott and has published scientific papers on psychoanalysis, the creative arts, and religion. In 1991 he was awarded the Margaret S. Mahler Literature Prize. He is in private practice in Suffolk, UK.
In his well-crafted text, Mirroring and Attunement: Self-Realization in Psychoanalysis and Art, Wright develops relational theory, in depth, as it applies to art, religion, and the analytic relationship. He applies his theory to how the artist discovers himself through self-created forms, how the religious person discovers himself through an internal dialogue with “God”, and how the analysand discovers himself through the intersubjective medium of the analysis. He substantiates his theory of creative development by building heavily on Winnicott's theory of mirroring, Stern's theory of attunement, and Langer's theory of art. He explains how each of these theories is rooted in the infant's preverbal relationship with its mother. According to his adaptation of Winnicott's theory, he believes that the first creation of the infant is the adaptive breast giving the infant a sense of self. Wright believes that the mother's mirroring provides a repertoire of reflecting forms. Using the visual arts as his paradigm, Wright proposes that the artist, in an almost literal sense, manipulates specific materials to be the adaptive mother of infancy. He continues throughout the book to suggest that artistic activity is one way of repairing the original early deficit of attunement and mirroring by the artist creating his own containing forms. This book encourages one to stop and think about the intrapsychic development of creativity through a new lens of preverbal development. Wright discusses how the process of metaphorical techniques of image, form, and story can be authentic in an empathic bond in the analytic situation.
The author's style of writing is impressively