Art and Psychoanalysis: Between the Dialectics of the Other and Poetic Estrangement
Part of IPA - Current Challenges in Psychoanalysis series - more in this series
Book Details
- Publisher : Routledge
- Published : November 2025
- Cover : Paperback
- Pages : 138
- Category :
Psychoanalysis - Category 2 :
Forthcoming - Catalogue No : 98298
- ISBN 13 : 9781032969763
- ISBN 10 : 1032969768
Also by Gabriela Goldstein
Art in Psychoanalysis: A Contemporary Approach to...
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This book explores the concept of estrangement from a psychoanalytic perspective, intertwining art and aesthetics to offer a paradigm of the aesthetic experience.
Gabriela Goldstein suggests that an unexpected encounter with a work of art may lead to a state of poetic estrangement, promoting a possible reorganization of its subject’s psychic economy. The conceptual work is illuminated with vignettes exploring the experience of this state of estrangement, reflecting on the encounter between the subject and the other/Other, between analyst and patient and in the framework provided by the analytical situation. Finally, Goldstein considers how the metapsychology of aesthetic experience and its research contribute to clinical understanding of processes of deficient symbolization.
Estrangement in Psychoanalysis will be key reading for psychoanalysts, artists, researchers, and teachers of art and psychoanalysis. It will also be of great interest to art therapists, students of art and the humanities, as well as other readers interested in an in-depth understanding of the aesthetic experience and creative processes.
Reviews and Endorsements
Art and Psychoanalysis is a brilliant and deeply reflective work by Dr. Gabriela Goldstein, where creativity and the unconscious engage in a powerful and illuminating dialogue. Drawing on her unique experience as a psychoanalyst, architect, and artist, Goldstein offers an original and sensitive exploration of aesthetic experience as a transformative event.
The book presents an articulate and rigorous exploration of the aesthetic encounter, weaving together theoretical concepts and clinical experience. Goldstein interlaces Freud’s ideas on the unconscious and the uncanny, Winnicott’s theories on transitional space and creativity, and Lacan’s reflections on aesthetics, within a rich interdisciplinary framework.
One of the most compelling threads in the book is the development of poetic estrangement—understood as a new form of sensibility and thought—which reveals the transfiguring power of both aesthetic experience and psychoanalysis. This concept is tightly linked to the dialectic of the Other, which permeates both the creative process and the encounter with the artwork, opening a space where the aesthetic becomes inherently ethical.
For Goldstein, the aesthetic experience is not passive contemplation, but an affective, mobilizing, and potentially transformative event that calls the subject to a reconfiguration of their internal reality and their bond with others—and with Otherness.
This is a key book for psychoanalysts, scholars in the humanities, educators, and all those interested in the intersection of psychoanalysis and art. It invites readers into a transformative encounter-with art, with the unconscious, and with the eros of the psyche.
Reading it is a journey—one that reveals, page after page, surprise, pleasure, and a profound encounter with the deepest layers of oneself.
Dr Carlos Weisse, Trainnig analyst, Asociacion Psicoanalítica Argentina (International Psychoanalytical Association, FEPAL), Writer, and Faculty in (AEAPG)
With a brilliant, innovative, and invaluable analytic move, Gabriela Goldstein restores to natural creativity the meaning of estrangement in the artistic experience, convincingly removing it from the realm of pathology and reconnecting it instead to the fertile recovery of an early phase of encounter, surprise, and discovery.
This book opens up a world: it guides us to understand and value those passages of the mind that artists have always inhabited and used—and that others have sometimes feared, and at other times, thanks to them, have unexpectedly been able to co-experience and delight in.'
Stefano Bolognini, Past-President, International Psychoanalytical Association
Table of Contents
1. The Concept of Estrangement, Art and Aesthetics
2. The Aesthetic Experience at the Beginning of the Psyche
3. The Other in Art and the Dynamics of Estrangement
4. Destinies and Estrangements: Hysteria, Narcissism, and Melancholia
5. Estrangement and Creativity, the Cure at Stake
About the Author(s)
Gabriela Goldstein is a practicing psychoanalyst, a full member and training analyst of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association and representative on the Board, and a past member of the Publications Committee. She is also a member of the Psychoanalysis and Culture Committee of the IPA, and the author of The Aesthetic Experience: Writings on Art and Psychoanalysis, as well as various articles and book chapters on the subjects of art, love and sexuality. She received the Baranger-Mom award in 2003, and the Storni award in 2004. She is also an architect and a painter.
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