title: The creative aspect of dynamic psychotherapy: parallels between the construction of experienced reality in the literary and the psychotherapeutic process.
abstract: Aesthetic experience and psychotherapeutic practice are compared. Beginning with the assumption that memories, imaginings and feelings are aesthetic categories, it is shown that aesthetic experience is elementary in the shaping and structuring of the experiences of human beings, both in psychotherapeutic communication and in the process of production and reception in literature. The aesthetic shaping of events into integrated experiences in the course of the therapeutic encounter might have a healing effect in its own right. To this extent, the therapeutic process should be regarded both as a joint process of creation and as a process of interpretation. As in writing and reading a literary work of art, the therapeutic process consists of special functions of productivity/poiesis, receptivity/aesthesis, and communicative interaction/catharsis. The psychic mechanism of projective identification may help us understand this emotional and cognitive interchange psychodynamically. Further graphic associations and visual imaginings that arise in the patient and in the therapist are considered, like literary works of art, to function as "transitional objects." These creations of patient and therapist, artist and recipient serve to consolidate formerly nonintegrated and therefore pathogenic experiences. A fruitful psychodynamic work is always situated in the tense relationship between the aesthetic shaping of emotions and the scientific interpretation of inner and outer facts.
authors.affiliation: Psychotherapeutic Counseling Service, University of Heidelberg.
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Holm-Hadulla
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003405:Creativity; D004954:Esthetics; D005201:Fantasy; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D011613:Psychotherapy