ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses the concept of the ‘sublime’, both in the field of aesthetics – beginning with the eponymous treatise of the Pseudo-Longinus, and moving all the way to Kant and Lyotard – and in psychoanalysis. It presents the search for figures and metaphors that may be effective in helping to represent the paradoxes of psychic birth. Psychoanalysis obtains its idea of therapeutic action from models that describe the birth and development of the psyche. In constructing his theory Bion drew on a number of symbolic matrices: psychoanalysis, philosophy, mathematics, literature and aesthetics. The essential rhythm of masochism, which is that of a dramatic alteration of a healthy rhythm of the object’s absence/presence, is the same intrinsically masochistic but normal rhythm of symbolization, representation and aesthetic experience.
