ABSTRACT
This chapter relates a series of clinical stories about beauty as encountered by three patients who entered the healing process of depth psychotherapy. It illustrates how encounters with the elemental beauty of the world can break through a traumatic childhood and sustain a child's hope, even in the face of unspeakable violence perpetrated by the people on whom the child depends. The chapter explores how the capacity for apprehending beauty in the world may have its beginnings in our earliest attachment relationships and specifically in certain experiences of mutuality and love between infant and caretaker. It illustrates the sometimes astonishing beauty of the analytic process itself, as it emerges from the combination of interpersonal intimacy on the one hand and the symbolic intrapsychic process of the mythopoetic imagination on the other. The chapter suggests that the beauty of the psychoanalytic process itself is an underappreciated aspect of the work we do as depth psychotherapists.
