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In The Power of Form, Gilbert Rose has made a rare attempt at a psychoanalytic approach to aesthetics. For Rose, form, like Winnecott's transitional object, occupies an intermediate area of experience. By allowing an intermixture of opposing elements, Rose believes that aesthetic form dynamically resolves a duality inherent in mental functioning. Rose characterizes this duality as a “dialectic between separation and fusion, control and ambiguity, tension and release, thought and feeling or action, change and constancy, present and past” (p. 211). Thus he sees art as part of an ongoing transitional process conceptualized in economic terms as an interaction between primary and secondary processes, in structural terms as a movement between ego core and ego boundaries, in genetic terms as an interplay between “primary narcissistic fusion states and separation-individuation,” and over all, as a movement between “confusion undifferentiated and clarity defined.” Aesthetic form, he argues, is the result of autonomous ego functioning, not regression in the service of the ego. It satisfies a human need for orientation in a fluid reality.
The breadth of these formulations is related to the courageously wide scope of Rose's inquiry. In discussing the aesthetic form of music, literature, and art, he is attempting a general psychoanalytic conceptualization for forms utilizing varying channels of expression and reception. However, Rose's desire to treat aesthetic form as an autonomous entity causes him to formulate psychoanalytic concepts in a way which I believe leads to a loss of complexity and subtlety. The issue of theoretical formulation is no mere matter of choice of theoretical model; rather, there is in Rose a deeper tendency toward reification which can be observed at the level of style as well as at the level of theory. At the level of style, static images replace images which include motion. Thus, where Rose will first describe the plasticity of art in terms, say, of mus