Are You a Woman—or a Flower?’
The capacity to experience beauty
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8973131 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Annie Sweetnam (2Psychoanalytic Inst of Northern California, 3155 College Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94705, USA, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2007 |
| Volume | 88 |
| Issue | 6 |
| Pages | 1491-1506 |
| Publication date | 2007-12-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The International Journal of Psychoanalysis (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0020-7578 • E-ISSN: 1745-8315 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1745-8315.2007.tb00756.x |
| PMID | 18055379 |
| OpenAlex | W2052284657 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 6 |
Being surprised by beauty, being drawn to and moved by it and surrendering to its sensory nature are all part of beauty's emotionally transformative power. And yet, psychoanalysis has had little to say about such an enriching dimension of psychological life. The author highlights how experiencing beauty is a capacity that is not isolated but is part of the lifelong experience of being changed by and changing the experience of the world we live in. She suggests that the capacity to experience beauty takes different forms at distinct points in development and in psychoanalytic treatments. The author describes two clinical occasions from a case where an analytic pair struggled to develop a greater capacity to experience beauty over time. She discusses how a theory of the aesthetic conflict was useful in helping to understand her patient's inner object world but was not sufficient when it came to understanding the experience of beauty. She shows how for both patient and analyst, experiencing beauty's full effect required responding to the call toward emotional life, surrendering to the surprise and the unknown, and letting go of the mind's struggle to find meaning and opening up to transforming and being transformed through sensory experience
Aesthetics · Art · Beauty · Developmental psychology · Meaning (existential · Object (grammar · Power (physics · Psychoanalysis · Psychoanalytic theory · Psychotherapist · Sociology · Surprise · Transformative learning · Art Therapy and Mental Health · Philosophy · Psychology · Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications · Social Psychology · Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy
| Citations per year | 0.25 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2010 - 2015 (6) |
| Highly cited | No |