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The contributions in this book are by analysts and therapists from a wide variety of countries working with both children and adults. They have all, in individual ways, found ‘aesthetic conflict’ a useful frame of reference in terms of illuminating the significance of clinical observation, understanding countertransference responses, or practising the psychoanalytic method itself.
| Editor | Meg Harris Williams |
|---|---|
| ISBN | 9781912567034 |
| Format | Paperback, e-Book, Print & e-Book |
| Page Extent | 288 |
| Publication Date | June 2018 |
| Subject Areas | Aesthetics, Psychoanalysis |
Donald Meltzer coined the term ‘aesthetic conflict’ to describe the emotional complexities of the ‘apprehension of beauty’. It had its roots in art, literature, infant observation, and above all, in clinical experience. This concept affirmed and illustrated Bion’s formula of L, H, K (Love, Hate, and Knowledge), together with its negative (minus L, H, K) as a revision of Klein’s fundamental emotional dynamics of Envy and Gratitude. As such, any emotional situation may be read in terms of either struggling with or retreating from the aesthetic conflict that occurs naturally at all key points of psychic development.
Meltzer could be said to have encapsulated the essence of Bion’s post-Kleinian trajectory when he wrote that ‘If we follow Bion’s thought closely, we see that the new idea presents itself as an emotional experience of the beauty of the world and its wondrous organisation.’
The contributions in this book are by analysts and therapists from a wide variety of countries working with both children and adults. They have all, in individual ways, found ‘aesthetic conflict’ a useful frame of reference in terms of illuminating the significance of clinical observation, understanding countertransference responses, or practising the psychoanalytic method itself.
Introduction
Meg Harris Williams
1. Seduction and aesthetic conflict
Didier Houzel
2. Love in the countertransference
Mariza Leite da Costa
3. On aesthetic transference
Izelinda Garcia de Barros
4. A fox in a castle of words
Marina Vanali
5. Rekindling the spirit of growth: an aesthetic encounter
Ellie Roberts
6. Aesthetic conflict and infant observation
Deborah Morley
7. The aesthetic conflict in everyday life
Jennifer Kunst
8. A child’s vicissitudes over the aesthetic conflict
Marisa Pelella Mélega
9. The role of the paternal function in the aesthetic experience
Gianna Polacco Williams
10. The beauty of development and the ugliness of stagnation
Irene Freeden
11. ‘I see not feel, how beautiful they are’
Dorothy Hamilton
12. Narcissus rejects: the surrender to beauty
Neil Maizels
13. How the aesthetic conflict comes to life
Lennart Ramberg
14. Nobody’s boy: beauty as an element in psychic recovery
Dawn Farber
15. Transference-love and its vicissitudes
Avner Bergstein
16. The barbed-wire hole of despair: retreat from aesthetic conflict
David Brooks
17. Passion and anti-passion in the Bion-Meltzer ethical-aesthetic model
Renato Trachtenberg
18. Concerning aesthetic reciprocity
Maria Haydée Castellaro de Pozzi
19. Aesthetic conflict in couple therapy
Barbara Bianchini
20. The aesthetic impact of transference spaces
Lucía Rey de Castro
21. The Lamb and the Tyger: aesthetic experience and the K-link
David Mayers
References
Name index
Subject index
Meg Harris Williams, a writer and artist, studied English at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford and art at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, and has had a lifelong psychoanalytic education, working closely with Donald Meltzer. She has written and lectured extensively in the UK and abroad on psychoanalysis and literature. She is a visiting lecturer for AGIP and at the Tavistock Centre in London, and an Honorary Member of the Psychoanalytic Center of California. She is married with four children and lives in Farnham, Surrey.
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