Sublime Subjects: Aesthetic Experience and Intersubjectivity in Psychoanalysis [Paperback]

Introduction 1 Bion and the sublime: the origins of an aesthetic paradigm 2 On sublimation 3 Masochism and its rhythm 4 Whirlpools, rhythms, ideas: aesthetic experience and intersubjective constitution of the individual 5 Hypochondria and the politics of narcissism 6 Dora: The postscripts 7 Where does the reality principle begin?(The work of margins in Freuds Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning 8 Truth as immediacy and unison: a new common ground in psychoanalysis? Commentaries on essays addressing Is truth relevant?

Sublime Subjects explores two fundamental questions: what is the start of humanity? When and how does a newborn child become a subject? These are relevant to psychoanalysis not only theoretically, but also in clinical practice, where the issue at stake is how to help the analysands mind to grow or, better, to increase the ability to give a meaning to experience.

Giuseppe Civitarese here argues that the psychoanalytic theory of sublimation and the aesthetic theory of the sublime are theories of subjectivation that can illuminate each other and give us a better understanding of the birth of the psyche. The aesthetic experience in art and in psychoanalytic practice are concerned with the social constitution of the individual, understood at its pre-reflective, non-verbal or inter-corporeal level. It is at this level that, thanks to the encounter with a receptive other, the turbulences of sensations and proto-emotions become soothing rhythms, proto-ideas or sensible ideas at first and, once words are added, concepts.

In Bionian terms, the at-one-ment between mother and baby is a form of primordial abstraction and occurs first in the dimension of the purely sensory and indistinct, and then in the affective space, which nonetheless is always a symbolic spacl´