Prologue: The Aesthetic Matrix in Art and Psychoanalysis—Dialogues with Jonathan Palmer’s Paper “A Conversation between a Painter and a Psychoanalyst”

Non-representational art can profoundly move us without words. We seek these experiences to refresh our perceptions and open parts of ourselves locked down by habit, familiar narratives, and anxiety. We seek art to help us contain sorrow, loss, and fear. Non-representational art goes directly into our minds and bodies, unmediated by conscious thought and reason. When art successfully does this, it expands our experience of ourselves and the world. These vital moments make for what John Dewey (1934) called “aesthetic experience”: an intense passage of living that we undergo and are changed by.

Aesthetic experience can also happen in psychoanalysis, transforming both patient and analyst, also in the non-symbolic embodied register. We might ask also what is similar in the analyst’s creative participation to an artist’s creative process.

There is now a growing analytic interest in meaningful clinical phenomena that take place in the non-symbolic and non-represented register, occurring without words or representational meaning. Analysts have found they can participate in non-verbalized embodied communication to share psychic states in ways that the patient feels known and recognized. Shared emotional experience is meaningful in itself.

Being attentive to the flow of shared emotional communication, analysts have noted they are affected and changed as their patients change. Part of the analyst’s emotional work then is to contain the emotional intensity of what is happening to gain greater inner freedom and openness, leading to a more spontaneously enlivened and creative way of participating in the relationship. The analyst’s very way of being and being-with in shared lived experience is an important communication and action in the intersubjective space and can be therapeutic in its own right. This goes to the heart of what we do.

Analytic clinicians are looking for new language to capture this non-verbal narrative between patient and analyst, the moments of transformation that