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Hagman's book presents a scholarly investigation and overview of philosophical and psychoanalytic thinking with respect to aesthetics and creativity. While the narrative style of the book is informative, with many references, it is not literary. This is not to disparage the book, but to describe it. From such a detailed background, he creates an integrated model of his own. There are a few clinical examples to illustrate the relevance of the aesthetic to clinical practice.
The introduction presents a useful overview of the book, with a chapter dedicated to each of his main concepts. These are 1) the developmental matrix of aesthetic experience, 2) idealization, 3) the creative process, 4) the sense of beauty, 5) ugliness, 6) the sublime, and 7) festival, in which he points out that art and creativity serve different functions when you approach them from the vantage point of culture, relationships, and individual subjective life. He writes, “The social function of art in the preservation and enhancement of group relations within a particular society is quite different from the psychological function of art in the affirmation and enhancement of the self-experience of the individual working artist” (p. 9).
He states that his developmental-relational perspective is a fundamentally different model from that of the philosophers he discusses as well as from those of the schools of classical psychoanalysis. He adds that his model answers several important questions that classical psychoanalysis despairs of answering.
Hagman starts the heart of his book telling us that aesthetic experience is a basic way in which we organize and experience ourselves and our world. What makes an aesthetic experience different from other psychological phenomena is the centrality of form and quality/value, not its content. He writes, “This is an area of human psychological life