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The psychoanalytic literature on aesthetic matters is vast and wide-ranging—from inquiry into the psychodynamics of the artist to analysis of the creative process, to reflection on individual works of art. Rarely, however, has psychoanalytic reflection been directed to aesthetic experience as such and to the way the aesthetic dimension pervades human life. George Hagman's book does this.
Hagman's book is short, comprised of what were originally different essays on related themes in this area. The essays form a coherent whole, however, in large part because Hagman uses a theoretical lens that is fairly narrowly focused. He draws, of course, on Winnicott's idea that transitional space is the foundation of cultural experience, but he elaborates from a relational and especially from a self-psychological perspective, while providing a review of contributions from other psychoanalytic traditions. Each psychoanalytic theory has something to contribute to our understanding of aesthetic experience. Elaborating the contribution that self-psychology can make in this area is a second important contribution to Hagman's book. A third is to have brought philosophical aesthetics into the arena of psychoanalytic theorizing. Classical, 18th century, and modern philosophical aesthetics have created an extensive literature on key concepts in aesthetics, such as beauty, and also reflected on certain aesthetic experiences that have been largely ignored in the psychoanalytic literature—the ugly and the sublime being cases in point.
Hagman defines aesthetic experience as an ‘emergent phenomenon that arises in the transitional psychological zone in which our creative engagement with the world is lived’ (p. 1). From this perspective, aesthetic experience is not restricted to art and artists—it is a dimension of subjective experience, and (non-pathological) idealization is central to it. In brief, for Hagman the mutual idealization of mother and baby is the archaic foundation of aesthetic exper