ABSTRACT
One of the fascinations of psychoanalysis has always been its ‘aesthetic’ dimension. By this we mean the sense which Freud first conveyed in ‘The interpretation of dreams’ (1900) of the unconscious as an extraordinary unknown world, a space in which the mind seemed able to think in ways which were free of the everyday constraints of reason, but which nevertheless contained and conveyed deep kinds of meaning. The psychoanalytic process itself often brings its practitioners in contact with experiences of beauty, through the images which emerge in their patients’ dreams or flow of associations, and through moments of unexpected recognition and illumination of emotional truth. In the psychoanalysis of children too, such an aesthetic dimension is added to by the directness and freshness with which children express themselves, and this was vividly present in much of Klein’s presentation of her child cases.
