Seeing with New Eyes: On Jonathan Palmer’s “Aesthetic Matrix”

ABSTRACT

Jonathan Palmer’s account of his artmaking practice illuminates the distinct role of intuition and the centrality of aesthetic experience in the creative process. The paper throws light on the work of creating a setting and framework that lends itself to an intuitive engagement, both in art-making and in analysis, an engagement that allows the painter and analyst to remain open to new formations of not-yet represented elements of experience. This paper shows what is entailed in keeping the possibly of fresh experience alive, by careful attention to the framing of things, the properties of the chosen medium, and the experimental posture of the practitioner.

KEYWORDS:

• Shared perception
• intuition
• sensory commons
• framing

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Notes

¹ Winnicott’s high valuation of the enduring vitality of subjective-objects seems alive in this way of thinking.

² In its more ontological orientation, contemporary portrayals of aesthetic experience (cf Huang, 2023; Markman, 2021) differ from Meltzer’s significant conception of aesthetic conflict in “The Apprehension of Beauty” (Meltzer & Waddell, 1987/2008).

³ In Bion terms this would entail something like a beta function that operates without relying on the primacy of alpha function (Goldberg, 2012).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter Goldberg

Peter Goldberg, Ph.D., is a Personal and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, is Chair of Faculty at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, and on the faculty of the Wright Institute in Berkeley. He is a co-author of Here I’m Alive: The Spirit of Music in Psychoanalysis, and has written and presented widely on a range of clinical and theoretical topics including the evolution of clinical theory in psychoanalysis; embodiment sensory experience in analysis and cultural life; transitional mechanisms and the function of the analytic frame; the theory and treatment of dissociative states; non-representational states; and the impact of social trauma on individual psychology.