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“The absence of the vocabulary of aesthetics in the literature of psychoanalysis, at least in its theoretical vocabulary, is nowhere more stunningly illustrated than in Melanie Klein's Narrative of a Child Analysis. The terse and even harsh language of her theories, and their preponderant concern with the phenomenology of the paranoid-schizoid position, stands in astonishing contrast to the emotional, and certainly at times passionate, climate of her relationship to Richard and of his overwhelming preoccupation with the vulnerability of the beauty of the world to Hitler's destructiveness and his own.” (p. 25)
Readers of this Journal will find no difficulty in recognising the area of experience alluded to in this quotation from The Apprehension of Beauty by Donald Meltzer and Meg Harris Williams. Theoretical formulations can often seem to fall painfully short of encompassing the reality of analytic experience, however useful, productive or indeed beautiful the theory in itself may be. This is not in any way to diminish the importance of theory. As the authors point out elsewhere in this book, within the psychoanalytic method dwells the theory by which it is practised, much as the inner world of the mother is felt to be located behind the surface she presents to view: and they suggest that much of the mistrust evoked by theory may indeed be of a similar nature to that evoked by the mother's hidden aspects, and which is a main strand of what they term “Aesthetic Conflict”. Still, from the time when Freud considered the problem of the “choice of neurosis”, the particular humanity of individuals has often been felt to elude theoretical statement. More recently, Bion, in his formulation of O as the essentially unknowable, the noumenon, and his distinction between “knowing” and “knowing about”, has developed the idea of this elusiveness, in regard to the transference relationship in particular. One of the aspects of the present book that seems to me especially important is