“Being Careful in Only a Perverse Way”: The Use of Aesthetic Experience in Psychoanalytic Work

The author describes some of his interest in the painting of Richard Diebenkorn, the poetry of Bob Dylan, and a lifelong enjoyment of entomology and fly fishing as it comes into “play” with his analytic work. Diebenkorn’s “Notes to Myself Upon Beginning a Painting,” which were discovered after his death in 1995, are remarkably overlapping with elements of the ontological analysis of both Winnicott and Bion. The author elaborates a few elements of analytic listening from inside his personal “aesthetic matrix,” a concept so helpfully introduced in Palmer’s paper, “The Aesthetic Matrix: A Conversation Between a Painter and a Psychoanalyst.” There is special attention to a few varieties of visual and verbal imagery linked to auxiliary containing functions for the analyst.