1. Response by Tom Mcdonnell
- Author
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Belinda Sharp, Nathan Field, and Trudy Harvey
- Subjects
Wright ,Poetry ,Aesthetics ,Interpretation (philosophy) ,Face (sociological concept) ,Sensibility ,Psychology ,Variety (linguistics) ,Gaze - Abstract
In this chapter, the author hopes that he can make a resonant response to Kenneth Wright's evocative and poetic paper with its strongly autobiographical flavour. He too feels that the mother’s face, and indeed the total experience at the breast are at the roots of our spiritual and creative life. The Medusa-like gaze of a mother can, as it were, turn the infant’s mind to stone, whether that look comes from within mother, or is projected into her by the infant as an interpretation of the absence he sees in her face. Religion, at least, the institutionalized variety, does not come off well in Ken Wright’s paper. He experienced it as stifling, negative, and non-life-enhancing, so that in his childhood a growing sensibility to nature offered him a bulwark against the harsh superegoish depredations of religion.
- Published
- 2018
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