ABSTRACT
This chapter looks more closely at the hermeneutic game in counselling and psychotherapy and the way it encourages an enhanced aesthetic experience. Memories, ideas, and fantasies surfacing in counselling and psychotherapy can be regarded as aesthetic experiences. There is a frequent tendency to ignore an insight that aesthetic theories from A. G. Baumgarten, I. Kant, and G. F. W. Hegel to J. Dewey, S. Langer, and Th. W. Adorno consider to be axiomatic: central psychological concepts like sensation, imagination, and subjective experience are aesthetic categories. The chapter discusses the role of aesthetic experience in counselling and psychotherapy in greater depth. For some counsellors and psychotherapists, placing the emphasis on the aesthetic factor may appear too “hands-off”, despite the links have indicated between aesthetics and practical activity guided by the senses. The significance of the several basic aesthetic functions for counselling and psychotherapy can be specified more accurately with reference to the psychoanalytic concept of projective identification.
