The Aesthetic Development: the poetic spirit of psychoanalysis

Essays on Bion, Meltzer, Keats

by Meg Harris Williams. Karnac, 2009

Few people would be better qualified than Meg Harris Williams to write this innovative and eagerly anticipated post-Kleinian book. Deeply versed in the opus of Bion and Meltzer, Harris Williams enhances the concept of ‘catastrophic change’. The analyst who ‘eschews memory and desire’ observes the subtle interplay of transference and countertransference (Meltzer’s ‘counter dreaming’) as it works through aesthetic conflicts. The ensuing reciprocity of the patient’s and analyst’s unconscious is revealed as the aesthetical and ethical basis of psychoanalysis. In that sense the psychoanalytical process parallels that of poetic and artistic inspiration. They are all generated by creative internal objects. Harris Williams’ intellectual tour de force demonstrates convincingly the human capacity for symbolic thinking that underlies literary, artistic and psychoanalytic creativity. Her encyclopaedic understanding of literature, art and psychoanalysis contributes to this book’s virtuosity.

Irene Freeden

Senior Member of the British Association of Psychotherapists, a training analyst and supervisor of the British Psychoanalytic Association and a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association.

This book points ahead into the future of psychoanalysis.  Meg Harris Williams has done what few in our field are qualified to do.  Her intimate knowledge of the thinking of Donald Meltzer, combined with her deep understanding of the arts, enables her to use Bion’s three great vertices – of art, of science and of religion – as the basis for a work of extraordinary integration.  Beyond the many insights we are given into the aesthetic dimension of our science, we continually glimpse the ‘O’ - the truth that cannot be spoken, but whose beauty can be known.  There are whole realms of understanding ahead of us yet to be entered, and no one who reads this book can remain unaware of them.

Dorothy Hamilton

Training therapist and supervisor, Association for Group and Individual Psychotherapy

CONTENTS

Introduction

1. Psychoanalysis – an art or a science?

The limitations of Promethean science. Artistic openings. The new idea.

2. Aesthetic Concepts of Bion and Meltzer

Aesthetic conflict. Catastrophic change.

3. The Domain of the Aesthetic Object

The symbol. The caesura. Poetic inspiration. Psychoanalytic faith.

4. Sleeping Beauty

Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale”. “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. Moneta’s mourn.

5. Moving Beauty

Beneficence in space: on life-drawing.

6. Psychoanalysis as an Art Form

The stuff of dreams. Symbolic congruence. Objects in common. A note on terminology.

Afterword - My Kleinian Ancestors