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Few psychoanalytic writers have concerned themselves with the subject of beauty, still less with beauty in the field of psychoanalysis itself. In this book, Dorothy Hamilton sets out to address this gap in the psychoanalytic literature. In her introduction, she tells the reader that her ‘understanding of beauty in the psychoanalytic context belongs in that dimension of human experience that we call the spiritual’ (p. xvi) and speculates that this association may account for its former neglect: historically, psychoanalysis has tended to equate spirituality with religious belief and only recently has it emerged as a subject of interest to psychoanalysts. Hamilton makes a valuable contribution to the psychoanalytic literature by exploring the nature of beauty, its links with spirituality and its importance for the profession of psychotherapy. She is well qualified to take on this task, having gained an MA in the psychology of religion, mapping the language of religion onto that of psychoanalysis, before embarking on her career as a psychotherapist. Nevertheless, it is a challenging assignment. As she acknowledges, beauty is an elusive concept, resisting any attempt to tie it down to a clear definition.
Hamilton begins by pointing out that the neglect of beauty within psychoanalysis began with Freud himself who, whilst recognizing the importance of beauty to civilization, concludes that psychoanalysis has scarcely anything to say about it. She turns then to philosophers, theologians and poets, quoting Plato, Keats, Schiller, St Augustine and many others on the nature of beauty and its relationship to truth, love, goodness and freedom. From this rich background, she goes on to consider the ways in which psychoanalytic writers have approached the subject of beauty and the related area of aesthetics. For Hamilton, the work of Bion is pivotal in that he introduced the concept of the aesthetic vertex, equal in importance with the vertices of science and religion, all of which