A Place for Beauty in the Therapeutic Encounter

By (author) Dorothy Hamilton

Book cover: A Place for Beauty in the Therapeutic Encounter

Extent: 142 pages

Publisher: The Harris Meltzer Trust

Subjects: Psychology, Psychoanalysis, & Psychotherapy

Language: English

Paperback (Published)

(January 2021)

ISBN: 9781912567782

5.94 x 9.02 inches

Price: $28.00

In stock

PDF (Published)

(January 2021)

ISBN: 9781912567805

Price: $28.00

A Place for Beauty in the Therapeutic Encounter is written for all psychotherapists, counsellors, and psychologists who practise under the broad banner of psychoanalytic thinking. It is also for anyone who loves beauty and wants to think more about its place in the mind.

FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE – Elusive Beauty
CHAPTER TWO – Beauty Recognised
CHAPTER THREE – The Rise of the Aesthetic Perspective: Before Bion
CHAPTER FOUR – The Rise of the Aesthetic Perspective: Bion and Beyond (1)
CHAPTER FIVE – The Rise of the Aesthetic Perspective: Bion and Beyond (2)
CHAPTER SIX – David: Aesthetic Conflict
CHAPTER SEVEN – Beauty and Knowing (1)
CHAPTER EIGHT – Beauty and Knowing (2)
CHAPTER NINE – Mary: The Beauty of the Method
EPILOGUE
REFERENCES

Dorothy Hamilton is a Professional Member of the Association for Group and Individual Psychotherapy (AGIP), formerly its chair; a member of the College of Psychoanalysts; and Honorary Fellow of the UK Council for Psychotherapy.
In a former career she taught emotionally and behaviourally disturbed children; she was co-founder of PACT (Parents, Children and Teachers), the home learning initiative, co-writing Methuen’s Parent, Teacher, Child and Learning at Home. She took an MA in the Psychology of Religion at Heythrop College, gaining a distinction for her work on mapping the language of psychoanalysis to that of religious experience. She has taught, given papers and published on a wide range of psychotherapeutic subjects, often with a bias toward metapsychology, and in a variety of settings. Amongst these, she ran a series of conferences on ‘Psychoanalysis and the Nature of Consciousness’, of which many of the papers were published in the British Journal of Psychotherapy. Groups she has run include a clinical support group at the Nordoff Robbins Music Therapy Centre and a staff group at Holloway Prison.

  • By (author) Dorothy Hamilton

This is a small book that tackles a huge subject. On the face of it, beauty in the context of psycho analysis should not be so monumental, particularly since, as the author’s survey of its place in the main canon of that subject (Freud, Klein et al.) reveals, it is rarely mentioned, and is only featured in the work of less well-known authorities such as Melzer, Likierman and Milner. For Hamilton, however, beauty is an intriguing iceberg of a topic, and exploration takes her well below the waterline. […] explores a theme of depth and complexity with admirable clarity.

— Isabel Clarke, Paradigm Explorer 2021/3

Hamilton’s book is wide ranging and fascinating, bringing in a plethora of quotations from an extraordinary variety of sources. She makes a strong case for beauty to be more widely recognized within the practice of psychoanalysis and lends her voice to those of Bion, Meltzer and Harris Williams in calling for psychoanalysis to be seen as an art form.

— Patricia Townsend, British Journal of Psychotherapy 38, 1 (2022) 176–200