ABSTRACT
The aesthetic conflict is found in the phase of analysis, when aesthetic feelings arise together with live passions and "negative capability" is also manifested, "which renders possible the toleration of doubt and uncertainty without irritable reaching after fact and reason". Wilfred Bion's theories were elaborated in the 1960s and 1970s and have allowed the description of several different areas of clinical experience, which come together in the theory of the aesthetic conflict. Anna Freud had besides to confront the problem of explaining the highest conquests of man. Freud resolved it by introducing the concept of sublimation, which is perhaps a sort of expedient, of deception. The causal theory of development has been replaced by the concept of development as the field of experience, in which even in the womb the baby has a field within which he operates and from within which he selects experiences and objects, about which he thinks.
