The Hour of Birth: Psychoanalysis of the Sublime and Contemporary Art [Hardcover]

1. The Imminence of the Object? 2. A Success Story? 3. The Sublime Now? 4. The Snake in the Maze? 5. A Space Full of Darkness 6. The River-God of Blood? 7. Savage Beauty? 8. Heavenly Palaces? 9. Can't Help Myself? 10. Sublimation Reinvented? 11. The Matter of Time? ?12. The Abject Body 13. Oh Life, Begun in a Bloody Flow

To explore the impact of psychoanalytic ideas and contemporary visual artists upon each other, this volume examines the aesthetics of the sublime as an allegory for psychic birth. This book will appeal to all psychoanalysts and psychotherapists interested in art and questions of psychic development.

Giuseppe Civitarese, MD, PhD, is a psychiatrist and training and supervising analyst of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI), and a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA) and of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA). He lives and is in private practice, in Pavia, Italy.

To explore the impact of psychoanalytic ideas and contemporary visual artists upon each other, this volume examines the aesthetics of the sublime as an allegory for psychic birth.

Through the lens of a radically intersubjective psychoanalytic theory, Civitarese reinvents the Freudian notion of sublimation. He theorises that the aesthetic of the sublime reflects the internal process of establishing a space of thought through the gradual differentiation of subject and object. Supported by numerous artworks by contemporary artists  from Serra to Kapoor, and Wei to Kiefer  the volume attends to questions such as: How does the psyche come into being? Why can beauty be considered necessary for life? How does what we experience as simply beautiful differ from the aesthetic experience of what is called sublime ? In this way, Civitarese forges a conceptual tool that enables readers to weave together psychoanalytic theory and aesthetics.

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