You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I would like to begin the review of Giuseppe Civitarese's book by highlighting its importance. I believe that it is, in fact, a milestone within psychoanalytic publications because, in a consistent way, it contributes to the foundation of a new paradigm within psychoanalysis, which originates in the contributions of Wilfred Bion. This is a paradigm belonging to the intersubjective psychoanalytic model; however, it places the aesthetic experience of the analytic pair at the centre of the psychoanalytic connection, the development of a sense of truth, and mental growth. Furthermore, Civitarese goes beyond simply studying aesthetic experience by placing it in the field of the aesthetic of the sublime, a current of thought established in the eighteenth century. The author of Sublime Subjects, in an erudite way, digs up evidence of the influence of the pre-Romantic and Romantic sublime aesthetic in Bion's concepts throughout his work. For that purpose, he studies fundamental concepts in the work of Bion, identifying their roots’ aesthetic conceptions originating in the eighteenth century, which had a profound influence on poetry, literature, fine arts and philosophy. Bion's basic conceptions – of O, the darkness, the distance and the union, the reverie, the passion and the language of achievement, the genius and the mystic, the aesthetic conflict, the stupor, the transformations, the catastrophic change and becoming infinite – are all traced to their origins in the aesthetic of sublime.
Meltzer (1984), in his book Dream Life, studies the advances in psychoanalytic metapsychology accomplished by Klein and Bion. He states that, in addition to the four classic metapsychological dimensions of psychoanalysis established by Freud – the genetic, the dynamic, the topographic and the economic – Melanie Klein introduced the geographical dimension and Bion the epistemological dimension. According to Meltzer, following the contributions of the two English authors, when analysing a ps