Behind the lines: Toward an aesthetic framework for psychoanalytic psychotherapy

This article describes the author's development of an aesthetic approach to psychoanalytic psychotherapy of patients suffering from traumatic levels of grief by describing her experiences as a patient, a therapist, and a consultant to the design firm that partnered with the National September 11 Memorial and Museum. Using Aristotle's On Poetics as an inspiration, this article explores the ways dialogical storytelling creates a therapeutic "action-plot" that transforms reversals of fortune. Attending to patients' first-person phenomenological experience (without attributing cause), therapists help them transform their losses by listening to their stories. Therapists dwell with them in uncertainties while marking time in regularly scheduled meetings; they accompany their patients on a journey while also orienting to their modes of travel. They simultaneously co-construct tales of the journey, attentive to the poetic dimensions of sight, sound, and space that they encounter. In so doing, therapists serve not just guides and judges, but artists, bringing meanings to the trail.