ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author likes to keep in mind the idea of psychoanalytical psychotherapy as enabling an individual to return to the state of a loving passionate involvement with a world from which he has much earlier fled in apprehension. It is this idea of the aesthetic experience and the aesthetic conflict as qualities of the self which can, the author believes, make a difference to the way in which psychotherapists think about their patients. A patient who was addicted to chocolate would say to the psychotherapists, as he grew larger and larger, "Psychotherapy is crap but it's all I can ever have". He was tragically stuck in a world of his own poisonous projections. Patients like these can declare bloody war on the therapist and on the idea that there can be a loving situation which can be emotionally nourishing.
