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AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE: BEAUTY, CREATIVITY, AND THE SEARCH FOR THE IDEAL. By George Hagman. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005, 168 pp.
For George Hagman, the sense of beauty is experiential and grounded in the intersubjective field of the early, mother-child relationship. He overtakes Freud's notion of art as sublimation of forbidden, sexual impulses, gone past Kris who viewed art as regression in the service of the ego, in order to achieve mastery; furthermore, he goes beyond those analysts who view art primarily from an intrapsychic viewpoint. Hagman's view is that aesthetic experience encompasses a developmental and relational basis. While grounded in the objective qualities of the object, aesthetic experience is primarily subjective, that is, an emergent phenomenon arising in transitional space. Aesthetic experience may include numerous affects, such as joy, sorrow, awe, or wonder; the individual thereby feels more whole, alive and engaged with the world. Essentially, the artist is seeking to create an early, idealized relationship, whether in reality or fantasy, including an externalized part of the self, concretized in an art object that is refined and perfected.
Hagman states that all aesthetic experience has a common source He refers to "the human drive to give form and value to the experiences of self and self-in-relation" (p.1). In emphasizing relatedness and intersubjectivity, Hagman describes the artist as interacting with both the artwork and the audience. This eventuates in the emergence of an ideal state, associated with an early bond with the mother. The artist has thus internalized the rhythms and gestures of the early parent-child dyad. The idealization and formal organization of the latter relationship are the bedrock of aesthetic forms.
Hagman believes that the psychological foundation of the sense of beauty is often the experience of a playful infant in interaction with the mother's responsive face. However, and this is one of Hagman's most original suggestions, it is not the mother's face that is beauty but our sense of the experience's perfection. The artist is thus trying to recreate a self-object experience that combines the experience of being in the presence of an idealized other and having its perfection mirrored.
The above is a maternal aesthetic, where the artist's original sense of beauty grows out of the early mother-infant dyad, forging a wish to create...