Reflections on the Aesthetic Experience

"""In this illuminating book, the highly esteemed British psychoanalyst Gregorio Kohon shares with the reader an internal dialogue between his own artistic intuition and his psychoanalytic insights. As we follow him through the text, we not only learn about the nature and function of the inherent inevitability of uncertainty, but we are challenged to embrace its creative potential."" - Donald Campbell, Former President, British Psychoanalytic Society ""Through his narrative, Kohon evokes in the reader the very experience of uncanny that he describes in his deep engagement with the work of a number of artists and writers. The author reflects on how creativity may be expressed through negativity and incompleteness, a process that points to the ""commonality of experience"" between the aesthetics and psychoanalysis. This beautifully written book will be a marker in our understanding of the aesthetic experience.""- Rosine Jozef Perelberg, PhD, Training Analyst and Fellow of the British Psychoanalytic Society and Visiting Professor, University College London ""This is a truly remarkable book. As Kohon delves more and more deeply into the aesthetic moment, what he encounters is not answers, but ever-expanding mystery, for mystery in all of its capacity to elicit fear and awe and confusion and the impulse to flee, and its ultimate resistance to representation, is what lies at the heart of human experience. It is a pleasure to accompany Kohon in his efforts to get to the core of what it is that makes a particular work of art, including moments in the art of psychoanalysis, the vibrant, compelling, disturbing events that they are."" - Thomas H. Ogden, author most recently of Creative Readings: Essays on Seminal Analytic Works ""In this illuminating book, the highly esteemed British psychoanalyst Gregorio Kohon shares with the reader an internal dialogue between his own artistic intuition and his psychoanalytic insights. As we follow him through the text, we not only learn about the nature and function of the inherent inevitability of uncertainty, but we are challenged to embrace its creative potential."" - Donald Campbell, Former President, British Psychoanalytic Society ""Through his narrative, Kohon evokes in the reader the very experience of uncanny that he describes in his deep engagement with the work of a number of artists and writers. The author reflects on how creativity may be expressed through negativity and incompleteness, a process that points to the ""commonality of experience"" between the aesthetics and psychoanalysis. This beautifully written book will be a marker in our understanding of the aesthetic experience.""- Rosine Jozef Perelberg, PhD, Training Analyst and Fellow of the British Psychoanalytic Society and Visiting Professor, University College London ""This is a truly remarkable book. As Kohon delves more and more deeply into the aesthetic moment, what he encounters is not answers, but ever-expanding mystery, for mystery in all of its capacity to elicit fear and awe and confusion and the impulse to flee, and its ultimate resistance to representation, is what lies at the heart of human experience. It is a pleasure to accompany Kohon in his efforts to get to the core of what it is that makes a particular work of art, including moments in the art of psychoanalysis, the vibrant, compelling, disturbing events that they are."" - Thomas H. Ogden, author most recently of Creative Readings: Essays on Seminal Analytic Works ""In this new book the psychoanalyst Gregorio Kohon makes a very personal contribution to the literature on art and psychoanalysis...This is a rich book – well researched and personally and culturally eloquent. The links between art and psychoanalysis are woven through the text. There could have been other artists included but this is Kohon’s selection; it is his story and because of that it is deeply meaningful. This book will be of interest to a very wide readership and I recommend it to anyone interested in the dual fields of art and psychoanalysis."" - Joy Schaverien, author of Boarding School Syndrome for the Journal of Analytical Psychology."