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By assaying the aesthetic qualities of psychoanalytic interpretations and the psychoanalytic course (as one would for other aesthetic enterprises, such as drama, fine art, poetry, sculpture), we can evolve criteria for judging psychoanalytic form and content. These criteria shift, I suggest, to some degree just as artistic styles shift to address the existential needs and interests of the cultural era. Despite shifting styles, however, any aesthetic enterprise has enduring criteria that hold across time and even culture in order to judge whether a work is fine, mundane, or trivial.
At one level, criteria are art-form specific: in drama or narrative forms, for instance, we have Aristotle's suggestion of beginning, middle, and end; for visual arts, we have Lomazzo's seven elements of good art. At another level, aesthetic criteria generalize across art forms in at least two ways: first, laypersons judge whether a piece is aesthetically pleasing without necessarily resorting to highly technical, specific criteria; second, we judge whether one art form fits with another: Is there an aesthetic fit between the sound of Beethoven's Eroica and its nominal heroic theme; is there a fit between the music of the Bach Double Violin Concerto and the movement of Balanchine's eponymic ballet?
Aesthetics deal “with such notions as the beautiful, the ugly, the sublime, the comic, etc.,… as applicable to the fine arts, with a view to establishing the meaning and validity of critical judgment.… The study of the mind and emotions in relationship to the sense of beauty” (Random House Dictionary, 1987).
Psychoanalytically, we were set on this aesthetic path by Freud's views that a good interpretation is judged by three criteria: content, timing, and affect (Freud, 1912, 1913a, 1937). These are,