Beauty, ugliness and the sublime

Jung and Freud had very different ideas about the nature of analysis. This paper begins by exploring how Jung's gnostic approach, with its goal of individuation, is deeply informed by Buddhist and Taoist principles. His pluralistic, relational model regards truth as subjective and co-constructed with the patient. In contrast, Freud's secular methodology has objective truth as its goal. His classical psychoanalysis is a form of reality testing where the analyst claims to know the painful, singular, objective reality which the patient tries to evade. The theory of aesthetic development (see Piaget 1951, Baldwin 1975, Parsons 1980, Housen 1992, Harris Williams 2010) proposes that artistic appreciation is linked to human development. The paper looks at how the apperception of beauty, related to both truth and meaning, acts as an indicator and facilitator of individuation in the clinical encounter. This is illustrated by a clinical case study. Through empirical research, support is given to the argument (Bollas 1978, Meltzer 1988) that our early experience of the feminine/maternal plays a central role in developing an aesthetic capacity. The experience of the sublime in analysis is examined and portrayed as a means by which aesthetic development may be reignited and narcissistic isolation shattered.