Psychoanalysis And The Aesthetic Dimension: Commentary On Lisa Cataldo’s “Where God Is Between Us”

Abstract

In inviting this contemplation on spirituality and psychoanalysis, Cataldo highlights two interrelated questions: how we face the unknown and how, in spite of that fear, we sustain respect for the otherness of the other. Cataldo’s language is couched in the terms of relational psychoanalysis, whereas my own perspective is drawn from object relations theories, with salient metaphors from Bion and Lacan. Bion suggested that bi-nocular vision, seeing through more than one lens, was an important tool for learning. I hope that adding my own lenses will further illuminate the field she has so richly developed.

Keywords:

• aesthetic experience
• catastrophic change
• chora
• metaphor
• transformation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marilyn Charles

Marilyn Charles, PhD, ABPP, is a psychologist and psychoanalyst affiliated with Harvard University, the Austen Riggs Center, University of Monterrey, the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis, and the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis. Her interests include creativity, psychosis, resilience, and intergenerational trauma. Charles is the author of numerous books, including Patterns: Building Blocks of Experience; Constructing Realities: Transformations Through Myth and Metaphor; Learning from Experience: Guidebook for Clinicians; Working with Trauma: Lessons from Bion and Lacan; Psychoanalysis and Literature: The Stories We Live; Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis; and Fragments of Trauma and the Social Production of Suffering (with Michael O’Loughlin). Her forthcoming publications include Women & Psychosis and Women and the Psychosocial Construction of Madness (with Marie Brown), and Play in Early Childhood Education (with Jill Bellinson).