ABSTRACT
According to Donald Meltzer, from the beginning of life, the presence of the loving mother, the impact of her external beauty stimulate the infant's aesthetic senses. The aesthetic conflict reappears at the threshold of the depressive position, when the individual must again face the loss of the good idealized object and integrate the persecutory aspects of the self and object. Integration is achieved not only through integration of love and hate but also includes the impulse to know the inside of our objects and ourselves. From a developmental clinical point of view, the concept of aesthetic conflict revolutionizes the Kleinian theory of development, situating depressive anxieties prior to the paranoid-schizoid position. Meltzer's conception of the aesthetic conflict offers a new contribution to the theory of creativity. The Kleinian school has interpreted art and literature as a sublimation of the depressive position—that is, as the search to re-create a lost object.
