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

The variety and richness of the contributors’ engagement with Palmer’s paper shows the inspiration they draw from his work.

All contributions, including Palmer, make aesthetic experience central to analytic change in patient and in analyst. The aesthetic experience is “co-created” or in “partnership.” Though the concept is used in different ways, all emphasize that in an aesthetic experience, one undoes the emotional-psychological status quo. This undoing of habitual ways of being in the world and with oneself widens one’s self-experience and relationship to others, offering new approaches to living. This experience also allows one to face painful loss and traumatic experience, and possibly mourn. Nonetheless, as some writers note, the experience can be resisted by the analyst as well as patient. The analyst can block the flow of emotional communication or reach for intellectual mastery. As I’ll note below, art and psychoanalysis brings us into an especially intense perceptual-sensate-emotional world.

Understanding the analyst’s intensions and engagement in aesthetic experiences takes us to the heart of what we do. The writers here give us different ways of thinking about this and different concepts of analytic involvement. Here are some of them: “attempting the uncertain,” “analytic eroticism,” “induction-framing,” the work of “the aesthetic” and “presence,” “active contemplative receptivity,” the clinical usefulness of “non-linear systems theory.” These concepts are meant to open the analyst to co-creation with patients in the area of aesthetic experience. They are original and fundamental, helpful to clinical analysts in their day-to-day work.

The contributors emphasize different aspects of the analyst’s engagement concerning the weight of responsibility for the analyst to induce and foster aesthetic experience. One view is that creative participation is a necessary provision on the analyst’s part to establish an aesthetic matrix, a space for aesthetic experience. T