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Journal of Psychological Therapies: Volume 5 Number 2 / Full Issue £16.99 – £24.99

A Place for Beauty in the Therapeutic Encounter

Author: Dorothy Hamilton

£14.99 – £20.99

A Place for Beauty in the Therapeutic Encounter is written for all psychotherapists, counsellors, and psychologists who practise under the broad banner of psychoanalytic thinking.  It is also for anyone who loves beauty and wants to think more about its place in the mind.

Author

Dorothy Hamilton
ISBN

9781912567782
Format

Paperback, e-Book, Print & e-Book
Page Extent

142
Publication Date

January 2021
Subject Areas

Aesthetics, Psychoanalytic Theory
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Description

A Place for Beauty in the Therapeutic Encounter is written for all psychotherapists, counsellors, and psychologists who practise under the broad banner of psychoanalytic thinking. It is also for anyone who loves beauty and wants to think more about its place in the mind.

‘This book re-opens an investigation: that of the nature of inner space, and of the place held within it by the experience of beauty. The author looks at the relation of loss to the awareness of beauty, and at the part played by the perception of beauty in the structuring of the world. She looks into the regions of darkness and light surrounding any apprehension of beauty.
Relations between desire, knowledge, love, and hate play a part in this study, and some of the psychoanalysts that she discusses have made this explicit. She takes Freud’s elliptical comment “psychoanalysis … has scarcely anything to say about beauty”, and gives a stage setting to the drama hidden within it.’
Bernard Burgoyne, Emeritus Professor of Psychoanalysis at Middlesex University

Contents

Contents

FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE – Elusive Beauty
CHAPTER TWO – Beauty Recognised
CHAPTER THREE – The Rise of the Aesthetic Perspective: Before Bion
CHAPTER FOUR – The Rise of the Aesthetic Perspective: Bion and Beyond (1)
CHAPTER FIVE – The Rise of the Aesthetic Perspective: Bion and Beyond (2)
CHAPTER SIX – David: Aesthetic Conflict
CHAPTER SEVEN – Beauty and Knowing (1)
CHAPTER EIGHT – Beauty and Knowing (2)
CHAPTER NINE – Mary: The Beauty of the Method
EPILOGUE
REFERENCES

About the Author

About the Author

Dorothy Hamilton is a Professional Member of the Association for Group and Individual Psychotherapy (AGIP), formerly its chair; a member of the College of Psychoanalysts; and Honorary Fellow of the UK Council for Psychotherapy.
In a former career she taught emotionally and behaviourally disturbed children; she was co-founder of PACT (Parents, Children and Teachers), the home learning initiative, co-writing Methuen’s Parent, Teacher, Child and Learning at Home. She took an MA in the Psychology of Religion at Heythrop College, gaining a distinction for her work on mapping the language of psychoanalysis to that of religious experience. She has taught, given papers and published on a wide range of psychotherapeutic subjects, often with a bias toward metapsychology, and in a variety of settings. Amongst these, she ran a series of conferences on ‘Psychoanalysis and the Nature of Consciousness’, of which many of the papers were published in the British Journal of Psychotherapy. Groups she has run include a clinical support group at the Nordoff Robbins Music Therapy Centre and a staff group at Holloway Prison.

5 reviews for A Place for Beauty in the Therapeutic Encounter

  1. Frederick Stanwood, College of Psychoanalysts UK –

    ‘Dorothy Hamilton’s monograph offers the reader a sweeping, yet concise, journey through the intricacies of beauty as a concept in psychoanalysis and more widely. She concludes her analysis with a strikingly beautiful account of a patient’s emergence into, and use of, beauty.’

  2. Lindsay Wells, Association for Group and Individual Psychotherapy –

    ‘I was excited to discover this way of experiencing patients’ material. The book is beautifully written and the subject treated concisely and passionately. It is presented it in such a way as to be truly useful for psychotherapists. This book adds something unique to existing theory and practice.’

  3. Annette Tomarken, Honorary Research Fellow, University of Kent –

    ‘Few writing in the field of psychoanalysis would comfortably be able to refer within the space of two or three pages to figures as diverse as Montesquieu, Hume, Socrates, Schiller, Keats and Plato. Yet all readers will know at least some of these names and thus appreciate all the more this unique and, indeed, beautiful study of the function of beauty in the complex processes of both psychotherapy and life.’

  4. Isabel Clarke, Paradigm Explorer 2021/3 –

    This is a small book that tackles a huge subject. On the face of it, beauty in the context of psycho analysis should not be so monumental, particularly since, as the author’s survey of its place in the main canon of that subject (Freud, Klein et al.) reveals, it is rarely mentioned, and is only featured in the work of less well-known authorities such as Melzer, Likierman and Milner. For Hamilton, however, beauty is an intriguing iceberg of a topic, and exploration takes her well below the waterline. […] explores a theme of depth and complexity with admirable clarity.

  5. Patricia Townsend, British Journal of Psychotherapy 38, 1 (2022) 176–200 –

    Hamilton’s book is wide ranging and fascinating, bringing in a plethora of quotations from an extraordinary variety of sources. She makes a strong case for beauty to be more widely recognized within the practice of psychoanalysis and lends her voice to those of Bion, Meltzer and Harris Williams in calling for psychoanalysis to be seen as an art form.

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