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The Aesthetic Development: The Poetic Spirit of Psychoanalysis: Essays on Bion, Meltzer, Keats
Author(s) : Meg Harris Williams
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'Few people would be better qualified than Meg Harris Williams to write this innovative and eagerly anticipated post-Kleinian book. Deeply versed in the opus of Bion and Meltzer, Harris Williams enhances the concept of "catastrophic change". The analyst who "eschews memory and desire" observes the subtle interplay of transference and countertransference (Meltzer's "counter dreaming") as it works through aesthetic conflicts. The ensuing reciprocity of the patients and analysts unconscious is revealed as the aesthetical and ethical basis of psychoanalysis. In that sense the psychoanalytical process parallels that of poetic and artistic inspiration. They are all generated by creative internal objects. Harris Williams' intellectual tour de force demonstrates convincingly the human capacity for symbolic thinking that underlies literary, artistic and psychoanalytic creativity. Her encyclopaedic understanding of literature, art and psychoanalysis contributes to this book's virtuosity.'
- Irene Freeden, Senior Member of the British Association of Psychotherapists
Reviews and Endorsements
'This book points ahead into the future of psychoanalysis. Meg Harris Williams has done what few in our field are qualified to do. Her intimate knowledge of the thinking of Donald Meltzer, combined with her deep understanding of the arts, enables her to use Bion's three great vertices - of art, of science and of religion - as the basis for a work of extraordinary integration. Beyond the many insights we are given into the aesthetic dimension of our science, we continually glimpse the "O" - the truth that cannot be spoken, but whose beauty can be known. There are whole realms of understanding ahead of us yet to be entered, and no one who reads this book can remain unaware of them.'
- Dorothy Hamilton, Training therapist and supervisor, Association for Group and Individual Psychotherapy
Meg Harris Williams, a writer and artist, studied English at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford and art at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, and has had a lifelong psychoanalytic education, working closely with Donald Meltzer. She has written and lectured extensively in the UK and abroad on psychoanalysis and literature. She is a visiting lecturer for AGIP and at the Tavistock Centre in London, and an Honorary Member of the Psychoanalytic Center of California. She is married with four children and lives in Farnham, Surrey.
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