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While he was held in detention by the Nazis, the great cultural historian Johan Huizinga wrote Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1955). Huizinga's project was to show how every dimension of civilized organization contained a dimension of playing, which is beyond the sphere of morality and only limited by the evocation of ethical consciousness. Like play, aesthetic experience reaches down to what Winnicott called the ruthless levels of archaic consciousness and, as Nazism showed, aesthetic aims can sponsor violence beyond moral limits. Yet aesthetic experience is also at the root of our sense of personal integrity and continuity, and like play, it permeates every realm of civilized life. George Hagman's Aesthetic Experience lacks Huizinga's scope of learning and density of reference (and any reference to Huizinga's work), but his aim is to be as comprehensive with respect to aesthetic experience as Huizinga's was with respect to the play element of culture in general. His book succeeds in outlining as far reaching a theory of aesthetic experience as contemporary relational psychoanalysis has yet produced.
Hagman builds his theory on the fertile ground that Winnicott and Kohut ploughed, and his views are appreciatively responsive to the history of psychoanalytic writings about art, from Freud through Kris, Loewald and Ehrenzweig to the more contemporary writings of Gilbert Rose, H.B. Lee, and many others. He is firmly at home in the contemporary relational and intersubjective thinking of Stephen Mitchell and the studies of mother-infant interaction exemplified by Beebe and Lachman and Daniel Stern. His conceptualizations of aesthetic form and the experience of beauty derive from the vastly expanded understanding of early infancy that has emerged in recent decades. What we now call the “procedural memory” of the earliest interactions is the deepest source of Hagman's thinking about the place of the aesthetic throughout life.
As Hagman theorizes it, aes