Art and self: a new psychoanalytic perspective on creativity and aesthetic experience

The following article presents a contemporary self-psychological perspective on aesthetic experience, art, and creativity. The author argues that aesthetics is as important to human life as sex, hunger, aggression, love, and hate. Although we may rarely be conscious of it, aesthetic experience gives form, meaning, and, most importantly, value to everything we are, all we experience, and everything we do. Theoretically without it, life would be a shapeless, meaningless, and colorless series of sensations, events, and reactions. Aesthetic experience achieves its most refined form in the fine arts. However, we can also see its most archaic manifestation in the curve of the mother's shoulder during nursing, her heartbeat and breath, the melody of her voice, the balance of her eyes and smile--all embedded in the warmth, nourishment, and security of the mother-infant interaction. This article reviews recent analytic writings on psychoanalytic aesthetics that emphasize the central role of early childhood relational experiences in the emergence and structuralization of the sense of aesthetic form. The author argues that as a result of developmentally based processes of idealization, the child's aesthetic sense takes on a profound and lifelong concern with form and quality. The author extends this model and proposes a new definition of creativity and the nature of art. He argues that the creative artist is concerned not just with articulation of subjective states of feeling but also with the most refined and perfect expression possible of his or her internal vision. Although a major application of this model is to art and creativity, it is argued that aesthetic experience is a pervasive human trait that impacts on our entire experience of life, self, and relationships.