Download Free Psychoanalytic Aesthetics Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Psychoanalytic Aesthetics and write the review.

This is a book to which the attention of students of art theory and criticism, and all those interested in the important application of psychoanalysis to other fields of study, should be drawn. Psychoanalytic Aesthetics rethinks the classical account of the relation between art and madness, creativity and psychoneurosis, and the distinction between the primary and secondary processes. It covers a great deal of ground and reviews many psychoanalytic writers (predominantly of the British tradition) on aesthetics, as well as many of the aestheticians using a psychoanalytic background. It is well written and there is an impressive grasp of the many writers covered. More than this, the book is also a work of psychoanalytic scholarship, being a masterly overview of psychoanalytic schools of thought, and an in-depth study of the British object-relations schools. It amply achieves its overriding goal to demonstrate that the work of the British School presents a significant contribution to psychoanalytic aesthetics and criticism, updating Freud, Kris and the classical contributions to the field. It is therefore potentially a very useful source book for future scholars of both psychoanalysis and of aesthetics.
In this provocative, closely argued book, Ellen Handler Spitz explores three principal psychoanalytic approaches to art. The first considers the relations between an artist's life and work; the second focuses on the work of art itself; and the third encompasses the intricate relations between a work of art and its audience or beholders. To illustrate her theoretical discussion, Spitz draws on a variety of art forms, including painting, sculpture, literature, music, and dance. "No one who is concerned with the psychoanalytic study of art can afford to neglect [this book]; no one who cares about the art of psychoanalysis should ignore it."--Aaron H. Esman, M.D., Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association "This book ... should prove fascinating to all who are concerned with works of art as expressions of the human mind and heart."--Shehira Davezac, Hospital and Community Psychiatry "This book is highly recommended to all who enjoy the multiple applications of analytic thought to extend our senses."--Jay Lefer, Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis Ellen Handler Spitz holds degrees in art history, aesthetics, and education from Barnard College, Harvard University, and Columbia University. She was trained as a special candidate at the Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, Columbia University.
"George Hagman looks anew at psychoanalytic ideas about art and beauty through the lens of current developmental psychology that recognizes the importance of attachment and affiliative motivational systems. In dialogue with theorists such as Freud, Ehrenzweig, Kris, Rank, Winnicott, Kohut, and many others, Hagman brings the psychoanalytic understanding of aesthetic experience into the 21st century. He amends and extends old concepts and offers a wealth of stimulating new ideas regarding the creative process, the ideal, beauty, ugliness, and -perhaps his most original contribution-the sublime. Especially welcome is his grounding of aesthetic experience in intersubjectivity and health rather than individualism and pathology. His emphasis on form rather than the content of an individual's aesthetic experience is a stimulating new direction for psychoanalytic theory of art. With this work Hagman stands in the company of his predecessors with this deeply-learned, sensitively conceived, and provocative general theory of human aesthetic experience."Ellen Dissanayake, author of "Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began" and "Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why."
This book examines how contemporary psychoanalytic theory provides insight into understanding the psychological sources of modern art.
In the three essays that make up this stimulating and often startling book, Jacques Derrida argues against the notion that the basic ideas of psychoanalysis have been thoroughly worked through, argued, and assimilated. The continuing interest in psychoanalysis is here examined in the various "resistances" to analysis—conceived not only as a phenomenon theorized at the heart of psychoanalysis, but as psychoanalysis's resistance to itself, an insusceptibility to analysis that has to do with the structure of analysis itself. Derrida not only shows how the interest of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic writing can be renewed today, but these essays afford him the opportunity to revisit and reassess a subject he first confronted (in an essay on Freud) in 1966. They also serve to clarify Derrida's thinking about the subjects of the essays—Freud, Lacan, and Foucault—a thinking that, especially with regard to the last two, has been greatly distorted and misunderstood. The first essay, on Freud, is a tour de force of close reading of Freud's texts as philosophical reflection. By means of the fine distinctions Derrida makes in this analytical reading, particularly of The Interpretation of Dreams, he opens up the realm of analysis into new and unpredictable forms—such as meeting with an interdiction (when taking an analysis further is "forbidden" by a structural limit). Following the essay that might be dubbed Derrida's "return to Freud," the next is devoted to Lacan, the figure for whom that phrase was something of a slogan. In this essay and the next, on Foucault, Derrida reencounters two thinkers to whom he had earlier devoted important essays, which precipitated stormy discussions and numerous divisions within the intellectual milieus influenced by their writings. In this essay, which skillfully integrates the concept of resistance into larger questions, Derrida asks in effect: What is the origin and nature of the text that constitutes Lacanian psychoanalysis, considering its existence as an archive, as teachings, as seminars, transcripts, quotations, etc.? Derrida's third essay may be called not simply a criticism but an appreciation of Foucault's work: an appreciation not only in the psychological and rhetorical sense, but also in the sense that it elevates Foucault's thought by giving back to it ranges and nuances lost through its reduction by his readers, his own texts, and its formulaic packaging.
Why are psychoanalysts fascinated with literature and other arts? And why do so many novels, plays, films, and television series feature therapy sessions? Transferences investigates the interdisciplinary attraction between psychoanalysis and the arts by exploring the therapeutic relationship as a recurring figure in psychoanalytic discourse, literature, theater, and television. In addition to close readings of psychoanalytic and critical texts, the book presents a new approach to examining psychoanalytic themes and formal devices in texts like Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, J. M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K, Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, Peter Shaffer's Equus, and the HBO series In Treatment. Transferences argues that psychoanalysts as well as writers and other artists are fascinated by the therapeutic relationship because it provides a unique site to negotiate the narrative and artistic underpinnings of psychoanalysis and reflect and reinvent the aesthetic and poetic potentiality of art.
In The Aesthetic Clinic, Fernanda Negrete brings together contemporary women writers and artists well known for their formal experimentation—Louise Bourgeois, Sophie Calle, Lygia Clark, Marguerite Duras, Roni Horn, and Clarice Lispector—to argue that the aesthetic experiences afforded by their work are underwritten by a tenacious and uniquely feminine ethics of desire. To elaborate this ethics, Negrete looks to notions of sublimation and feminine sexuality developed by Freud, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Nietzsche, and their reinvention with and after Jacques Lacan, including in the schizoanalysis of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. But she also highlights how psychoanalytic theory draws on writing and other creative practices to conceive of unconscious processes and the transformation sought through analysis. Thus, the "aesthetic clinic" of the book's title (a term Negrete adopts from Deleuze) is not an applied psychoanalysis or schizoanalysis. Rather, The Aesthetic Clinic privileges the call and constraints issued by each woman's individual work. Engaging an artwork here is less about retrieving a hidden meaning through interpretation than about receiving a precise transmission of sensation, a jouissance irreducible to meaning. Not only do art and literature serve an urgent clinical function in Negrete's reading but sublimation itself requires an embrace of femininity.
Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy have, in one way or another, focused on the amelioration of the negative. This has only done half the job; the other half being to actively bring Positive Experience into patients’ lives. Positive Psychoanalysis moves away from this traditional focus on negative experience and problems, and instead looks at what makes for a positive life experience, bringing a new clinical piece to what psychoanalysts do: Positive Psychoanalysis and the interdisciplinary theory and research behind it. The envelope of functions entailed in Positive Psychoanalysis is an area of Being described as Subjective Well-Being. This book identifies three particular areas of function encompassed by SWB: Personal Meaning, Aesthetics, and Desire. Mark Leffert looks at the importance of these factors in our positive experiences in everyday life, and how they are manifested in clinical psychoanalytic work. These domains of Being form the basis of chapters, each comprising an interdisciplinary discussion integrating many strands of research and argument. Leffert discusses how the areas interact with each other and how they come to bear on the care, healing, and cure that are the usual subjects of psychoanalytic treatment. He also explores how they can be represented in contemporary psychoanalytic theory. This novel work discusses and integrates research findings, phenomenology, and psychoanalytic thought that have not yet been considered together. It seeks to inform readers about these subjects and demonstrates, with clinical examples, how to incorporate them into their clinical work with the negative, helping patients not just to heal the negative but also move into essential positive aspects of living: a sense of personal meaning, aesthetic competence, and becoming a desiring being that experiences Subjective Well-Being. Drawing on ideas from across neuroscience, philosophy, and social and culture studies, this book sets out a new agenda for covering the positive in psychoanalysis. Positive Psychoanalysis will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, neuroscientists and philosophers, as well as academics across these fields and in psychiatry, comparative literature, and literature and the mind.
Interest in the relationship between psychoanalysis and art - and other disciplines - is growing. In his new book Reflections on the Aesthetic: Psychoanalysis and the uncanny, Gregorio Kohon examines and reflects upon psychoanalytic understandings of estrangement, the Freudian notions of the uncanny and Nachträglichkeit, exploring how these are evoked in works of literature and art, and are present in our response to such works. Kohon provides close readings of and insights into the works of Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Louise Bourgeois, Juan Muñoz, Anish Kapoor, Richard Serra, Edvard Munch, Kurt Schwitters, amongst others; the book also includes a chapter on the Warsaw Ghetto Monument and the counter-monument aesthetic movement in post-war Germany. Kohon shows how some works of art and literature represent something that otherwise eludes representation, and how psychoanalysis and the aesthetic share the task of making a representation of the unrepresentable. Reflections on the Aesthetic is not an exercise in "applied" psychoanalysis; psychoanalysis and art are considered by the author in their own terms, allowing a new understanding of the aesthetic to emerge. Kohon’s book makes compelling reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, art therapists, literary and art critics, academics, students and all those interested in the matter of the aesthetic.
This volume has grown over the years as a family project of Martha Harris, her two daughters Meg and Morag and her husband, Donald Meltzer. It therefore has its roots in English literature and its branches waving wildly about in psychoanalysis. It is earnestly hoped that it will reveal more problems than it will solve.