“George Hagman looks anew at psychoanalytic ideas about art and beauty through the lens of current developmental psychology that recognizes the importance of attachment and affiliative motivational systems. In dialogue with theorists such as Freud, Ehrenzweig, Kris, Rank, Winnicott, Kohut, and many others, Hagman brings the psychoanalytic understanding of aesthetic experience into the 21st century. He amends and extends old concepts and offers a wealth of stimulating new ideas regarding the creative process, the ideal, beauty, ugliness, and –perhaps his most original contribution–the sublime. Especially welcome is his grounding of aesthetic experience in intersubjectivity and health rather than individualism and pathology. His emphasis on form rather than the content of an individual's aesthetic experience is a stimulating new direction for psychoanalytic theory of art. With this work Hagman stands in the company of his predecessors with this deeply-learned,! sensitively conceived, and provocative general theory of human aesthetic experience.” Ellen Dissanayake, author of Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began and Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why.

About the Author
George Hagman, LCSW is a psychoanalytic social worker in private and public practice in New York City and Connecticut. He is on the faculty of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis and the Training and Research Institute for Psychoanalysis. A former artist and poet, he has written many articles and conducted numerous workshops about psychoanalysis, art and creativity throughout the United States.