Book
The Apprehension of Beauty: The Role of Aesthetic Conflict in Development, Art and Violence
Written with Meg Harris Williams, the book proposes that mental development begins not in persecution but in the infant's overwhelming response to the beauty of the mother. This aesthetic conflict lies between her outward beauty, open to the senses, and her interior, which is enigmatic and can only be imagined. Withdrawal from the conflict underlies many later disturbances, while the capacity to bear it underlies thinking, art and the analytic relationship. Williams's chapters read the conflict in poetry and literature. Its publisher describes the book as a family project of Martha Harris, her daughters Meg and Morag, and Meltzer.
Main ideas
- Mental development begins in the infant's overwhelming response to the beauty of the mother, not in persecution.
- The aesthetic conflict lies between the mother's outward beauty, available to the senses, and her enigmatic interior, which can only be imagined.
- Withdrawal from the aesthetic conflict underlies many later disturbances.
- The capacity to bear the conflict underlies thinking, art and the analytic relationship.
- Poetry and literature give form to the same conflict.
What it shows
- 1988
Donald Meltzer introduced Aesthetic conflict
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.
Aesthetic conflict 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.