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The beauty of psychoanalysis. Some considerations about beauty as a process. The author proposes that there is a structural difference between the concepts of Beautiful and Beauty. Therefore, the position of beauty does not relate to the specific and descriptive characteristics of an object or a relationship, but rather to the constant and oscillating movement that takes place in the intersubjective field. The beautiful describes, instead, the suspension of the process of beauty which represents a continuous tension in the analytic process. In some brief clinical vignettes two levels of the beauty process are described. On the first level there is the discovery of lively elements within libidinally disinvested or never invested objects. At a subsequent level the continuous fluctuation of the field allows for the creation of new relational configurations, which never existed before. These configurations acknowledge beauty in features that are extraneous to the Self because they were felt unpresentable by the patient. The process of beauty, when suspended, describes a specific pathology in narcissistic personality disorder.
KEYWORDS: Beautiful, beauty, dissociative process, dysmorphophobia, narcissistic disorder, process, relational field.