Chapter Three. The Domain of the Aesthetic Object

Bion first speaks of “the domain of Aesthetic” in Transformations, where it appears as the new Idea on the expanding horizon of psychoanalytic thinking, accompanied, like all preconceptions about to find their “realization”, by a sense of puzzlement, yet, at the same time, inevitability (1965, p. 38). It is the place where the “real psychoanalytic experience” with its “depth-stirring qualities” lies buried, like the Sleeping Beauty, among the myriad turbulences of the oceanic unconscious. It is the “void and formless infinite” where, as Bion often quotes, Milton made his difficult descent and discovered his insight, “up led” by the heavenly Muse. Bion said that he, like Milton, “visited the bottom of this monstrous world beyond the stormy Hebrides” (1985, p. 17)—a reference to the “whelming tide” in Lycidas—and discovered he knew even less than Palinurus about the “stormy seas of sex”: a metaphor for the generative, yet overwhelming, idea of the combined object from which all the Platonic forms emanate. In Marvell's terms:

The domain of the aesthetic is the unconscious transformed. It is transformed through strangeness, then surfaces for conscious recognition. Here, it is somehow possible for the “multitudinous seas” (Macbeth, II.ii.: 59) to undulate into significant forms, provided negativity does not incarnadine the contents. Here, if we can align ourselves with the “fishy origins” of primordial mind (Bion, 1997, p. 38), can take place the sea-change that Shakespeare described in The Tempest: “those are pearls that were his eyes” (I.ii.: 399). Sensuous apprehension, as Bion is always saying, can point to a “reality beyond”, to the domain of the aesthetic object where, by means of inspiration, the symbol of the emotional experience is for