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The aim of this chapter is to make more distinct the sense in which psychoanalysis may be considered an art form, as Bion and Meltzer always hoped. They believed that identifying analogies with existing art forms would benefit the practice of its own relatively new method: “a new method as old as religion and art … but more poorly implemented than the arts which have developed their craft for several millennia” (Meltzer, 1994b, p. 474). The future of psychoanalysis, said Meltzer, rests on “the method and the process it engenders” (1986, p. 210), and our improved understanding of the process as an “aesthetic object” (p. 209) leads to a new conception of the psychoanalytic method as an art form in which two minds together read this aesthetic object, and each gain in self-knowledge.
An aesthetic model of psychoanalysis, which is in line with artistic and poetic ideas of creativity, presupposes a more complex and dramatic field of operation than the models of single-vertex science or softhumanism (subjective relativism). The domain of