Concept
Aesthetic conflict
Meltzer's term, worked out with Meg Harris Williams in The Apprehension of Beauty (1988), for the conflict the infant meets at the start of life between the beauty of the mother as the senses grasp it, her face, breast and voice, and the uncertainty about her inside, her thoughts and intentions, which can only be imagined. The emotional impact of this beauty is as painful as it is wonderful, and the infant may retreat from it into splitting, idealization and denial, which Meltzer saw as the origin of the paranoid-schizoid position. The capacity to bear the conflict underlies thinking, the love of truth, art and the analytic encounter.
- Introduced by
- Donald Meltzer
- Key works
- 1
- Related
- Paranoid-schizoid position
introduced by
- Donald Meltzer 1988 In The Apprehension of Beauty, written with Meg Harris Williams, Meltzer argues that the infant is first overwhelmed by the beauty of the mother's outside while being unsure of her inside, and that this aesthetic conflict comes at the very start of mental life.
diverges from
- Paranoid-schizoid position Meltzer reverses Klein's order of development: the infant's first experience is an aesthetic, depressive-like response to the mother's beauty, and the splitting of the paranoid-schizoid position is a defensive retreat from the pain of that conflict.