Epilogue

George Hagman has Beautifully Summarized the Breadth and scope of our issue in his introductory remarks. No repetition of that is needed here. We have both collaborated and shared ideas about aesthetic experience, the nature of that experience, and its relevance for psychoanalytic treatment over a number of years. We share a belief that guiding values, intentions, and initiatives are shaped by aesthetic experience. We do not envision that esthetic experience is the domain of a special motivational system. Rather we feel that all experiences might have associated aesthetic properties to choreograph them, much as every organ in the human body is supplied and supported by a system of blood supply that coursed through all its organs.

In spirit, I describe two clinical experiences that illustrate how psychic reality and aesthetic values intermingle. Neither of these examples is at all unusual, but they do illustrate how clinical material is mixed with aesthetic properties.

The first example is that of a fifty-five-year-old woman who is nearing termination of her analytic treatment. Originally she sought treatment for paralyzing anxiety, dissociative symptoms, and an associated depression. She brought the following dream.

I was in bed and a hairy man was lying on top of me. We were very close, and his head was on my breast. It felt very intimate. Then I noticed he was asleep, but that felt okay to me. I was not hurt, or deeply affected by his being asleep. Then I see myself walking. I am on the West Side of New York, looks like Sixth Avenue, and I am wearing a purple sweater. I am looking for my house, and I see it. It is very different from the others architecturally. Whereas the other houses seem rectangular, my house has a distinctive curved, sculpted shape to its roofline, and the architecture of the house itself is different in many ways.